(The Center Square) – The U.S. Department of Justice is taking action against La Mara Salvatrucha, MS-13, an international criminal organization whose members authorities say are involved in committing murder and other violent crimes in at least 10 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Under the Trump administration, MS-13 was designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
The DOJ is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest of MS-13’s highest-ranking member in Honduras, Honduran national Yulan Andony Archaga Carías. He was previously charged in 2021 in a superseding indictment in the Southern District of New York with racketeering, narcotics trafficking, and firearms offenses.
Archaga Carías oversees MS-13’s cocaine trafficking operations from Honduras to the U.S., “ordering and coordinating acts of violence, including numerous murders, and the laundering of drug proceeds,” among other violent crimes, according to the charges.
He and other MS-13 members also provided protection to drug trafficking organizations, including contracting “Sicarios” (hit men), by ordering numerous murders for hire, according to the indictment. Archaga Carías and MS-13 members also allegedly supplied DTOs with firearms, including machine guns, in El Salvador, Nicaragua and elsewhere.
Archaga Carías is on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives List, the DEA’s Most Wanted Fugitives List, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigation’s Most Wanted Fugitives List. He remains at large.
Anyone with information is encouraged to contact the FBI at archaga-carias_tips@fbi.gov, or via WhatsApp at +1-832-267-1688.
In another case, a high-ranking member of MS-13 was arraigned on a four-count indictment charging him and 12 other high-ranking MS-13 leaders with directing its activities in the U.S., El Salvador, Mexico and elsewhere over the last 20 years.
Francisco Javier Roman-Bardales, 47, of Ahuachapán, El Salvador, and Veracruz, Mexico, a fugitive for nearly three years, was added to the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives List under the Trump administration. He was arrested last month at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in San Diego, California.
Those charged “have engaged in a litany of violent terrorist activities aimed at influencing the policies of the government of El Salvador,” including targeting Salvadoran law enforcement and military officials; employing terrorist tactics like using Improvised Explosive Devices and grenades; operating military-style training camps for firearms and explosives; public acts of violence in order to intimidate civilians, control territory and manipulate the electoral process in El Salvador, according to the charges.
MS-13 members have engaged in a reign of terror in New York, with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York prosecuting hundreds of MS-13 leaders, members and associates for more than 80 murders, the DOJ says.
In another case, an MS-13 leader, Joel Vargas-Escobar, was arrested in New York for his alleged role in a racketeering conspiracy that involved at least 11 murders in Nevada and California. He was also charged with two counts of murder-in-aid of racketeering and associated firearms charges. After previously being deported to El Salvador in 2018, he illegally re-entered the U.S. and became a fugitive from the law for nearly four years.
Vargas-Escobar and his co-defendants are part of MS-13’s command and control structure in Las Vegas and California, authorities allege. Many of their victims were kidnapped and taken to remote locations in the mountains and desert, where they were tortured and killed, according to the charges.
In another case, MS-13 member and Honduran national Bayron Wuifredo Santos-Recarte, 27, who was illegally in the U.S., was sentenced to 147 months in prison for kidnapping, retaliating against a federal witness, and unlawful possession of a firearm.
He and his associates were found guilty of kidnapping a former federal witness at gunpoint in the parking lot of a laundromat in Nashville, Tenn. The witness testified during a federal racketeering trial against MS-13 members that they twice tried to shoot and murder him. While kidnapped, he was held in a truck for hours and assaulted and tortured with a firearm, hammer and machete.
MS-13’s more than 10,000 members are operating in at least 10 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, with thousands more operating in Central America and Mexico, the DOJ says. MS-13 members are being prosecuted for racketeering, murder, kidnapping, narcotics distribution, extortion, robberies, obstruction of justice, and other violent crimes.
