Bordering on Insecurity

After years of trying to help control El Salvador’s violent gangs, the danger became too great for the former detective and his family.

Only about 800 of the estimated 20,000 gang members in the Houston area belong to the MS-13, but police consider them a top-level threat to public safety in Texas.

Jorge Beltran, a newspaper editor in the murder capital of the world, had to move his own family to keep them safe from gang violence.

The bodies are found in abandoned fields, along river banks and in hastily dug graves. They end up in the central morgue’s Department of Forensic Anthropology, a wrenching testament to the human toll of decades of violence.

Bloody gang conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives and sparked a years-long exodus from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala to the United States.

Meet some of the Central Americans who are fleeing violence and abject poverty at home, only to endure shakedowns and abuse on their way to an uncertain future in the United States. This mini-documentary is part of our Bordering on Insecurity project.