Article: Gang violence 2

Gang Violence Blamed for Head Left on Guatemala Bus

Guatemala City (Reuters) - Guatemalan police blamed notorious street gangs on Monday for the murder of a woman whose head was found on a bus and whose severed limbs were thrown in the street.

The crime bore the hallmarks of the "maras," gangs of mostly tattooed youths who have terrorized Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in recent years.

A conductor found the woman's head on a public bus on Saturday. Her legs and arms were discovered on a public footpath in the Carolingia shanty town in the edge of the capital on Sunday morning.

"One of the victim's arms has a (gang related) tattoo of three dots and ... Carolingia is a red zone for the Mara 18," police spokesman Carlos Calju said.

Guatemala suffers from one of the world's highest levels of violent crime, with a homicide rate of around 36 per 100,000.

Police and the media frequently blame the deaths on retaliatory killings between the "Mara 18" and "Mara Salvatrucha" youth gangs, although under-funded and corrupt prosecutors rarely investigate cases in depth.

The woman's torso has not been located, he said.

The head was found on a bus running between the El Milagro shanty town and the city center after bus drivers on that route stopped work last week in fear of threats by mara members demanding increased protection money.

Analysts say the rampant violence is the legacy of a 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996, combined with widespread poverty, freely available firearms and corrupt authorities.

The maras have their roots in Hispanic gangs in Los Angeles. They established a strong presence in Central America when illegal immigrant convicts in the United States were sent back to their home countries in the 1990s.

They are now seen as a major security threat across Central America. Last month, gunmen murdered 28 people on a public bus in Honduras in an attack attributed to the maras.