Daniel Borunda, El Paso Times   Sunday, January 22, 2006

Four-foot-tall spray-painted graffiti mark gang turf a block from the Dyer Street center where Daniel Lugo strives to keep teens out of trouble.

Lugo, like other Northeast El Paso residents, expressed concerns about gang activity last week in the wake of a shooting that wounded three young men mistaken for rival gang members.

"My concern is we need to find a solution to it before it gets worse," said Lugo, the youth group leader at the World Victory Center, 6230 Dyer in the Logan Heights neighborhood.

In recent months, gang activity has increased in the Northeast after a long lull, residents, school officials and gang-prevention activists say. But police said the increase is minimal, is under control and pales in comparison with the violence of the early 1990s.

Tuesday, three Andress High School students were shot when alleged gang members mistook them for rivals. Three 18-year-old men and a 15-year-old boy were arrested. The violence increased tensions and resulted in more security at high schools in the Northeast.

Andress student Sergio Ramirez, 16, said the shooting was the topic of rumors the entire week, but he felt his school was still safe. "It doesn't have any effect on me because I know I'll be safe at school," he said.

In October, Canyon Hills Middle School student Jose Lozano, 15, died after a fistfight in the Angel's Triangle area. The case was not considered gang-related, but it came at a time when the triangle-shaped neighborhood was seeing the growth of a new gang.

"It's been my experience that gang activity has its peaks and valleys. And what you are seeing right now is a peak," Irvin High School Principal Mark Rupcich said.

Rupcich has been principal at Irvin for nearly five years and was an assistant principal at Andress for six. El Paso schools are trying to be proactive to prevent problems, he said. "We are seeing more gang activity. You see more kids trying to wear colors, more kids hanging out in groups. Last year, we weren't experiencing these types of problems whatsoever."

The problems are due to the emergence of a new, younger generation of gangsters, said Rob Gallardo, a gang prevention counselor with  Operation No Gangs. The new gang members are attempting to fill a void left by older gangsters now imprisoned or retired, he said.

Gallardo said another source of tension is that some Northeast gangs now claim links to nortenos, or northern California gangs, while El Paso gangs have traditionally had ties to surenos, or Southern California gangs. Nortenos use the number 14 (N is the 14th letter) while surenos use 13.

Last October, Gallardo predicted 2006 would see an rise in gang activity. "It will be a violent year. ... The Northeast will be one of the hot spots to watch out for this summer," he warned.

Sgt. Reginald Moton of the El Paso Police Gang Unit said law enforcement is working to curb gang activity. After the death of Lozano, for example, police went after the new gang in the Triangle.

"We started targeting them," Moton said. "We prioritized those cases, made arrests when necessary. We went after every little thing. Before you knew it, we weren't hearing much from them."

The gang is one of 472 active gangs, party crews and other groups in El Paso, police statistics show. "We are constantly identifying groups," Moton said. "We have guys that will sometimes will branch off from their gang and form little subsets."

Local street gangs often serve as farm teams for the large El Paso-based Barrio Azteca prison gang, investigators have said.

Barrio Azteca was the target of civil court injunction that expired last summer in the Segundo Barrio. The injunction was intended to curb drug dealing, extortion and other crimes in the gang's home base. The injunction barred a host of usually legal activities; for example, it prohibited identified members to associate with each other.

El Paso County Attorney Jose Rodriguez said he is considering filing for a new injunction in the coming months against 25 members of the gang in South El Paso.

In recent months, the FBI office in El Paso has also "re-energized" the multi-agency Safe Streets Gang Task Force, spokeswoman Special Agent Andrea Simmons said.

"The FBI is looking at them (gangs) as a criminal enterprise. We are talking of the bigger gangs like the Barrio Azteca," Simmons said. "We are trying to look at dismantling the whole organization, likening it to how the FBI went after the Mafia."

But ultimately, gangs are a community problem, not just a law enforcement problem, police and educators said.

Parents must get involved in their children's lives to keep them from joining gangs, Officer Efrain Griego said at a "gang intervention" presentation for parents Thursday night at Irvin High School. About 15 people attended the meeting, which was scheduled before Tuesday's shooting.

"Parents are always the last to know their kid's in a gang," Griego said. "Sometimes they are in denial."