The authors have produced an unfocused, surface treatment of an important issue. The piece adds nothing to the discussion beyond what is already found in existing articles such as Are the Maras Overwhelming Governments in Central America? (Nov-Dec 06 Military Review) and The Maras: A Menace to the Americas (Jul-Aug 07 Military Review).

The first four paragraphs, where they are supposedly setting the stage for their presentation of the Mara issue, wastes space discussing our other security efforts world-wide in an attempt to provide substance to the false premise that the Mara issue is overlooked by our government. There are a couple of federal agencies in particular, not to mention certain elements within the IC, that may take issue with that premise. And a recent surge in legislation focused on the issue – as delineated in a recent CRS Report, also clearly demonstrate that the situation has got the attention of the government in general. The failure of the authors to take these existing and planned measures into consideration and to put them in critical context, demonstrating their shortcomings and/or failure to address certain aspects of the problem, shows that they have not done their homework. (or purposefully ignored such information so as not to disturb a pre-determined premise for the paper)

In the section titled Background, their elaboration on the origins and background of the Maras is much weaker than that presented in the above two articles. In a piddling quibble, I didn’t care for the use of the term “mara” in the statement, In the United States maras can be viewed as the result of….. Here, they are supposedly looking at the gang issue in general, and they should just use the term “gang” – to me, “maras” connotes Hispanic gangs specifically. By using maras in that manner at the outset, they forego an opportunity to effectively put the Hispanic gangs in the context of broader US gang culture.

The authors spend quite a bit of space discussing economic disparities, but never get into specific context for the three countries most under threat: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Getting to my charge of “unfocused” – they also discuss the economic aspect in both Background and Factors Contributing to the Mara Problem, without really providing any substantive context specific to either section. The ’06 USAID gang assessment, which does a very good job of putting the economic part of the problem in context, isn’t even cited by the authors. Surprising, since this is one doc that pops up in any simple google search on Central American gangs.

General statements and dated statistics are overly used throughout the piece – more current stats are readily available open-source; yet another indicator of the authors' failure to do their homework.

In The Emerging Mara-Terrorism Nexus and Political Solution the article veers all over the place in this section's few short paragraphs without making a cogent point, and talks more about communist insurgencies in South America than substantive links between the Maras and terrorism. And at the end, the final paragraph is vague and fuzzy, not providing a focused conclusion nor offering even the outline of a political solution as in the section title. The closest the authors come to recommending a COA is in the last paragraph on page 6 of the 10 page paper, in the section on Factors Contributing to the Mara Problem. That section is also where they've put all their conjecture and assumption about the Mara-terrorism nexus.

Poorly researched, poorly written, poorly structured.