L.A. Truce Has Little Effect on Local Latino Gangs : Crime: Violence continues unabated in the San Fernando Valley. Experts say the rivalries are deeply rooted and sometimes span several generations.

As a fragile truce among longtime rival gangs in South Los Angeles moves into its sixth week, bullets continue to fly almost nightly and gang animosities remain as strong as ever in the San Fernando Valley, where the peace is a long way from taking hold, police and gang experts say.

“It’s red-hot out there,” Los Angeles Police Detective Al Ferrand said of the northeast Valley. “Since the so-called peace, there has been no slowing in violence.”

There have been four gang slayings and more than a dozen shootings in the northeast Valley since the black Crips and Bloods gangs in South Los Angeles announced their truce after the riots last month to a fanfare of publicity. But the mostly Latino gang members in the Valley have continued fighting without interruption.

“There have been many shootings--it’s picking up with warmer weather,” said Detective Gordon Bolling, a Los Angeles Police Department gang investigator. “It’s the status quo out there.”

Police estimate there are 13,000 gang members in the Valley, nearly 90% of them Latinos. Gang experts said violence persists in the Valley while an unusual calm is in place to the south for reasons that cut along cultural lines as well as because of a difference in the basic structures of gangs from the two areas.

Experts say the Valley gangs and their rivalries are deeply rooted and in some cases multi-generational. To many gang members here, South Los Angeles is a world away and they will not lay down weapons simply because a truce seems to be working there.

“I think they’re dumb,” a Pacoima gang member named Jose said of the Crips and Bloods last week. “They are giving up their neighborhood.”

The view of the 14-year-old, who said he has been a gang member since he was 9, is consistent with the conclusion reached by police that peace among Latino gangs in the Valley is unlikely because they are more turf-oriented than the black gangs. Investigators believe the black gang members’ rivalry, on the other hand, stems more from competition for the profits from drug sales than from fighting to hold sway over their neighborhoods.

“The Hispanic and black gangs are two totally separate entities,” said Detective Bill Humphry, the Police Department’s coordinator of a multi-agency task force that includes 11 FBI agents and focuses on Valley gangs.

Some Latino gangs have been operating in the Valley since the 1940s, he said.

“You have grandfathers, parents, relatives involved,” he said. “It’s very entrenched in that style--protecting their turf. There is no real reason for these guys, as far as their mentality goes, to have a truce. They don’t have any desire to do it--there is too much hatred.”

Jaime Leyva, a Valley-based counselor with Community Youth Gang Services, a county program that tries to steer youths out of gangs, said he has heard little talk of a cease-fire on recent rounds of the Valley.

“We haven’t seen anything yet like a truce in the Valley,” Leyva said. “We have heard talk from some of these kids, but the Latino gang members see it as a truce between blacks in the south. With the Latinos . . . it’s business as usual.”

On a recent evening at Pacoima Park, a handful of gang members said there could be no truce.

“I’ve seen too many friends get shot up,” said Julio, 17. “There is too much anger out here. It’s a different story from the blacks. It’s been going on so long it will never stop.”

Julio and others said they would like to no longer have to watch over their shoulders or worry about crossing into a rival’s turf. But they also said they see the goodwill pact in South Los Angeles as a political deal to bring more jobs and attention to the area--a deal that won’t come through.

“It’s politics,” Julio said. “Nobody will change anything. It won’t last.”

Gang members on Blythe Street in Panorama City also gave the truce little chance of becoming permanent.

“They are doing the truce now, but later on they’ll be shooting again,” said one gang member who declined to be named. “That’s gang life.”

Another Blythe Street gang member, who said he was known as Li’l Sniper, said hatred between Latino gangs is so strong that crossing the gulf between rivals to even discuss a peace treaty is impossible.

“Why should we even try?” he said. “We hate each other. We would get shot at before we could get close. We know we are killing our own race, but that’s the way it is.”

Li’l Sniper, 19, said there were three drive-by shootings on Blythe Street last week. No one was struck by bullets. While he was talking to a reporter, he jumped back inside an apartment hallway when a station wagon began speeding down the street.

“I thought it could be a drive-by,” he explained. “We’re always watching out for that.”

Police and gang counselors said they have suggested to Valley gang members that they put down their guns. But they said it will only happen if the truce is initiated by the gang members themselves.

“The first step must be made by the shot-callers,” Humphry said. “I would love to see . . . meaningful meetings between these people . . . just to slow the rate of shootings and killings down.

“But first you have to get both sides to even look at each other without shooting each other. That’s not happening.”

Humphry said the Valley’s gang leadership is fluid and he believes it would be difficult for a gang to take a unified position on something as volatile as a truce.

One gang member interviewed at Pacoima Park said he believes that some gang members, including himself, are tired of the endless cycle of retribution and violence and would back an attempt at conciliation. But voicing that desire could in itself be dangerous, he said. He did not even want his first name used in this report.

“They probably think other homeboys would think bad of them if they said anything, but I am pretty sure others think it would be good,” he said.

Ruben, a 21-year-old Pacoima resident who said he dropped out of a gang this year and is working on community improvement projects, said he is disappointed that there has been no move toward a truce in the Valley.

“It’s depressing because there are blacks out there doing the truce and Hispanics here that can’t get along,” he said.

Leyva said that he has heard similar comments from some gang members who are still active.

“Some of them are talking about wanting to have something” like a truce, he said. “We are trying to calm things and encourage it. A few have said, ‘Why don’t we get together?’ But it hasn’t gone any further.”

It is unclear whether the few Bloods and Crips in the Valley are abiding by the treaty. Police said one of the four unsolved killings that occurred in May is believed to have involved a black gang. But that death, which resulted from a May 2 drive-by shooting in Pacoima, happened before the truce was in place in South Los Angeles.

Though police said they have few other reports of violence involving black gangs in the Valley since then, a group of teen-agers who said they were local members of a Bloods gang indicated at a gathering last week that they were observing no halt to hostilities in the Valley.

“Somebody tries to smoke me, I’ll smoke them,” Li’l Bullet told a reporter at the Pacoima Community Center.

Ironically, the self-proclaimed Blood was at the center of a rally in support of four suspects, three of whom police say are Crips, who have been charged with the televised beating of trucker Reginald Denny at one of the flashpoints of the riot in South Los Angeles.

“There is no truce here,” added Li’l JayDogg, another Blood at the rally. “That’s in South-Central. This is the Valley, and we’re going to do it our way.”

A third gang member, Cheko, said there have been no unification meetings between Bloods and Crips as seen in South Los Angeles.

“Until they come to us, I ain’t talking to them,” he said. “I got no use for them nasty Crips. I don’t want them around here.”

The other three gang killings being investigated by police occurred in Pacoima during the weekend of May 15--well after the truce was called. Three members of the same Pacoima-based Latino gang were victims.

No arrests have been made in the killings. Police said there have been other shootings in which rivals of the gang the victims belonged to were wounded. Investigators speculated that the shootings were part of a cycle of attacks and retribution that has its own momentum.

“Unfortunately,” Humphry said, “nothing has changed in the Valley.”

Times staff writer Jim Herron Zamora contributed to this report.