SAN SALVADOR – El Salvador’s National Civilian Police, or PNC, arrested nine suspected Nicaraguan gang members on extortion charges, the press reported.

The Nicaraguans, all suspected members of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang, were arrested last week at a house in San Miguel, a city located 138 kilometers (about 86 miles) east of San Salvador, the Diario de Hoy newspaper reported.

The suspects belonged to a cell of the gang that specialized in running extortion rackets in downtown San Miguel, the PNC said.

El Salvador’s two largest violent youth gangs, known as “maras,” are Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha, which carry out killings, run extortion rackets and are engaged in other criminal activities.

Mara Salvatrucha is a criminal organization that evolved on the streets of Los Angeles during the 1980s, with most of its members young Salvadorans whose parents fled their nation’s erstwhile civil war for the United States.

Because many of the gang members were born in El Salvador, they were subject to deportation when rounded up during immigration crackdowns in California in the 1990s.

Sent “home” to a land they barely knew, they formed gangs that spread throughout El Salvador and to neighboring countries in Central America, where membership is now counted in the tens, or even hundreds of thousands, and gang members are engaged in murder, drug dealing, kidnapping and people smuggling.

In addition to those activities, gang members are blamed throughout Central America for a spike in rapes and robberies, and for running protection rackets to extort “taxes” from bus companies and owners of small businesses.

In November 2008, Nicaraguan authorities turned a Mara Salvatrucha leader, Saul Turcios Angel, over to judicial officials in El Salvador.

Turcios Angel had been on the run from the law for almost a year.