Michael E. Miller and Justin Jouvenal, Washington Post, May 7, 2018

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{snip} Female victims are nothing new for MS-13, which is infamous in Central America for making young women choose between rape and execution. But in a gang as chauvinistic as it is fearsome, female killers are almost unheard of.

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Unlike their counterparts in Central America, some MS-13 cliques in the United States now allow female members, said Michael Prado, assistant special agent in charge of the Washington office of Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“In that regard they are somewhat progressive,” he said. “The [cliques] here are a little bit more, for lack of a better term, Americanized.”

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“There are female MS-13 members engaged in some extremely heinous and violent activity,” he added.

Some turn to MS-13 to escape poverty, homelessness or sexual abuse, only to be prostituted by the gang, immigration advocates say. Others are attracted to its reputation — often invoked by President Trump — as the most dangerous gang in the world.

“MS-13 is the new bad boy in girls’ lives,” said Carlos Salvado, a defense attorney who has represented young women accused of gang connections. {snip}

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A ban on homegirls

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Brenda Paz had been a “homegirl,” or full female member, of MS-13. But “Smiley,” as she was known, had wanted out and had begun helping federal authorities.

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Her defection, and others like it, convinced gang leaders in El Salvador that women couldn’t be trusted and led to a ban on new female members.

Becoming a homegirl once provided some protection, said Tom Ward, an anthropologist who spent much of the 1990s hanging out with MS-13 in Los Angeles, where the gang was founded, for his book, “Gangsters Without Borders.”

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The ban fell hardest on females in El Salvador, where women are still forced to serve the gang by cooking or cleaning, smuggling contraband into prison or collecting extortion payments, according to Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez.

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Those who resist gang rape or prostitution are often killed. Thousands have fled. Girls make up nearly one-third of the 200,000 Central American unaccompanied minors detained at the U.S.-Mexico border since late 2012.

A small percentage of these girls have joined MS-13 after being placed with relatives in the United States. Their recruitment has boosted the gang here, but has also begun to change it, authorities say.

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{snip} Paul Ebert, commonwealth’s attorney for Prince William County{snip} said, they remain “around the edges of the crime” as getaway drivers or bait to lure men into ambushes.

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Girls in the United States aren’t forced into MS-13 like they are in Central America, but they are often driven toward it by trauma, poverty or loneliness, advocates say. Unaccompanied minors are especially vulnerable, yet girls raised in the United States aren’t immune. Lopez, a legal resident, moved to the U.S. from El Salvador when she was 3 years old.

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The gang’s bad-boy allure can cross cultural lines.

Long before she was known as “Flaca,” or Skinny, Shannon Sanchez was born Shannon Marie Spicer. She befriended MS-13 members at her Northern Virginia high school, learning Spanish, according to her attorney, Tom Walsh. Later, after her husband was sent to prison in 2015 for molesting a child, she reconnected with the gang, which began hanging out at her house in Leesburg.

Sanchez, 36, wasn’t a gang member but occasionally helped them, like the time she drove one to the hospital after his fingers had been chopped off by a machete, Walsh said. But she also convinced two young men to leave MS-13, angering leaders in El Salvador, he said.

In 2016, gang members borrowed her car to drive a suspected rival to a remote quarry, where they killed the teen. Afterward, Sanchez helped burn their bloody clothes in her fireplace and clean the vehicle, according to federal prosecutors. She pleaded guilty to being an accomplice after the fact and was sentenced April 27 to almost six years in prison.

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