Ethnic Cleansing in L.A.

By Brentin Mock, Intelligence Report. Posted January 20, 2007.

Los Angeles, Calif. -- Ascending the steep steps that lead from the street to the scene of her son's murder, 47-year-old Louisa Prudhomme is charged by a Doberman Pinscher. Prudhomme reaches over a gate and gives the guard dog a rough pat on the head.

"Sam doesn't seem to remember me," she says.

What Prudhomme will never forget is that just past the snarling Doberman is the apartment on a hill where six years ago her 21-year-old son Anthony was shot in the face with a .25-caliber semi-automatic while lying on a futon she had purchased for him from IKEA. He died wearing a shirt that read, "Keep the Peace."

Anthony Prudhomme was slain by members of the Avenues, a Latino street gang. But he was not a rival gang member, or a police informant, or a drug dealer. The Avenues did not target him for the content of his character, or even the contents of his apartment.

They targeted him for the color of his skin.

Prudhomme was murdered because he identified himself as black (he was in fact mixed-race) in a neighborhood occupied by one of the many Latino street gangs in Los Angeles County. Incredibly, even though these gangs are fundamentally criminal enterprises interested mainly in money, gang experts inside and outside the government say that they are now engaged in a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" -- racial terror that is directed solely at African Americans.

"The way I hear these knuckleheads tell it, they don't want their neighborhoods infested with blacks, as if it's an infestation," says respected Los Angeles gang expert Tony Rafael, who interviewed several Latino street gang leaders for an upcoming book on the Mexican Mafia, the dominant Latino gang in Southern California. "It's pure racial animosity that manifests itself in a policy of a major criminal organization."

"There's absolutely no motive absent the color of their skin," adds former Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Michael Camacho. Before he became a judge, in 2003, Camacho successfully prosecuted a Latino gang member for the random shootings of three black men in Pomona, Calif.

"They generally don't like African Americans," Pomona gang unit officer Marcus Perez testified in that case. "If an African American enters their neighborhood, they're likely to be injured or killed."

A comprehensive study of hate crimes in Los Angeles County released by the University of Hawaii in 2000 concluded that while the vast majority of hate crimes nationwide are not committed by members of organized groups, Los Angeles County is a different story. Researchers found that in areas with high concentrations, or "clusters," of hate crimes, the perpetrators were typically members of Latino street gangs who were purposely targeting blacks.

Furthermore, the study found, "There is strong evidence of race-bias hate crimes among gangs in which the major motive is not the defense of territorial boundaries against other gangs, but hatred toward a group defined by racial identification, regardless of any gang-related territorial threat."

Six years later, the racist terror campaign continues.

A pervasive attitude

Anthony Prudhomme presented no threat to the Avenues. Even so, he was murdered two months after he moved into Highland Park, a neighborhood in northeastern Los Angeles that is home to many gang members. "He didn't have anything [to steal]," his mother says. "He had nothing when they broke in. So to shoot him, I'm sure it was a stripe. They get stripes for killing black people."

"Stripes" are a gang-soldier's badges of honor. Latino gang members in Southern California earn them by doing the bidding of their godfathers in the Mexican Mafia, a powerful criminal syndicate based in the California state prison system that controls most Latino street gangs south of Bakersfield.

According to gang experts and law enforcement agents, a longstanding race war between the Mexican Mafia and the Black Guerilla family, a rival African-American prison gang, has generated such intense racial hatred among Mexican Mafia leaders, or shot callers, that they have issued a "green light" on all blacks. A sort of gang-life fatwah, this amounts to a standing authorization for Latino gang members to prove their mettle by terrorizing or even murdering any blacks sighted in a neighborhood claimed by a gang loyal to the Mexican Mafia.

"This attitude is pretty pervasive throughout all the [Latino] gangs," says Tim Brown, a Los Angeles County probation supervisor. "As long as [street] gangs are heavily influenced by the prison gangs, particularly the Mexican Mafia, racism is just part and parcel of why they come into being and why they continue to exist."

Last fall, four members of the Avenues were convicted of federal charges for conspiring to deprive blacks of their civil rights in Highland Park. Three of them were sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole, in late November; a fourth was to be sentenced the following month.

See more stories tagged with: los angeles, latino gangs

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »