Blood Ties: How a Texas Prison Gang Became a Mexican Cartel Proxy

Although MS-13 has become infamous in the US as a dangerous transnational criminal organization, veteran corrections officer Joseph Kolb argues that Barrio Azteca poses an equal threat in cross-border crimes that include drug trafficking, sex trafficking, kidnapping, human smuggling, extortion, and brutal murders. Yet the BA is hardly recognized beyond El Paso and a few other US towns along the Mexican border. In the late 1980s and 1990s street gang members from the impoverished El Segundo ...