The Latest Breaking News from Barrio 18

Guatemala passes anti-gang law, declares gangs terrorist groups

Guatemala has passed a new anti-gang law to combat groups now considered terrorist organizations

The Independent UK · Oct 22, 2025

Guatemala's president accepts resignations of top security officials after gang escape

Guatemala President Bernardo Arévalo has accepted the resignations of three top security officials

The Independent UK · Oct 15, 2025

Barrio 18 gang designated as foreign terrorist organization by Trump administration

Barrio 18, largely based in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, originated in the United States as a street gang in Los Angeles

The Independent UK · Sep 23, 2025

Who is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man the US must retrieve from an El Salvador prison?

Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s story appeared as if it would begin and end in his native El Salvador

The Independent UK · Apr 11, 2025

Who is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man ICE mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison?

President Donald Trump's administration claims Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 gang member who should stay in an El Salvador prison

The Independent UK · Apr 8, 2025

'No Way Out': Grim Conditions In El Salvador's Mega-prison For Gangs

Confined to their cells for all but 30 minutes a day, denied visits, forced to sleep on stainless steel cots without mattresses: this is life in Latin America's biggest prison.

International Business Times · Jan 29, 2025

Thousands of soldiers fence off a Salvadoran neighborhood in pursuit of gang remnants

More than 2,000 soldiers and 500 police officers surrounded a dense neighborhood on the outskirts of El Salvador’s capital in an effort to quash the remnants of gangs the president said were trying to set up shop in the area

The Independent UK · Oct 28, 2024

Gangs'stories: how 15-year-old Jennifer became Honduras’ first female gang leader

For the past five years, the GANGS project, a European Research Council-funded project led by Dennis Rodgers, has been studying global gang dynamics in a comparative perspective. When understood in a nuanced manner that goes beyond the usual stereotypes and Manichean representations, gangs and gangsters constitute fundamental lenses through which…

The Conversation · Sep 5, 2024

How drug violence and migration are reshaping a city in the south of Mexico

Tapachula is now under the control of powerful Mexican drug cartels. A look into the new normal for the city

Latin Times · Jun 29, 2024

Honduras copies El Salvador's playbook in anti-gang crackdown

Observers say that a crackdown in Honduras on gangs in the nation’s prisons is eerily similar to one carried out last year in neighboring El Salvador by President Nayib Bukele

The Independent UK · Jun 27, 2023