gang violence

Despite the many unknowns about its true size or sophistication in the United States, Tren de Aragua has emerged as a real source of concern for law enforcement in the last couple of years.

Now that Doctors Without Borders teams are back in Haiti and can again treat the burgeoning number of gang sexual violence victims, the nonprofit has launched a media campaign to raise global awareness of that horrific plague.

A new report has found that nearly 6,000 people in Haiti are starving, with nearly half the country’s population of more than 11 million people experiencing crisis levels of hunger or worse, as gang violence smothers life in the capital of Port-au-Prince and beyond.

Law enforcement authorities across the U.S. are increasingly focused on a Venezuelan gang behind a spate of violent crimes. The Tren de Aragua traces its origin more than a decade ago to an infamously lawless prison.

Children are more than half of the nearly 580,000 people who have become homeless in the last four months, the U.N.'s children agency said.

Police and a religious group say that a U.S. missionary couple was shot and killed by criminal gang members in Haiti’s capital who ambushed them as they left a youth group activity held at a local church.

The kidnapping of six Roman Catholic nuns in Haiti comes amid a new surge of gang violence that may get worse as angry calls mount for the Prime Minister to step down.

Miami-Dade Councilman Christian Cevallos tells The South Florida Roundup the gang violence in Ecuador that suddenly grabbed headlines had been building up for several years. A lack of democratic institutions and the demand in the U.S. and Europe for cocaine are key factors.

COMMENTARY The gang poison plaguing Ecuador and Latin America is largely a result of what many say is its antidote: the trashing of democratic institutions by la mano dura.

The U.N. says gangs are invading Haiti’s rural central region and suffocating a once peaceful area that served as the country’s food basket but that is now plagued by kidnappings, killings and rapes.

The president of the Dominican Republic says he has suspended issuing visas to Haitians, and he is threatening to shut down land, air and sea traffic between the two neighbors over their latest dispute.

COMMENTARY As long as Latin America's left and right wings keep eroding democratic institutions, the gang wing will keep gaining power in countries like Ecuador.