The Government Yanks a Rattlesnake from Its Hole

If there is one certainty in this world, crime should not pay. And if you were to ask Joel Vargas-Escobar, a high-standing miscreant in the ranks of MS-13, he might agree, provided he is in a mood for honest reflection, which seems doubtful.

The FBI has plucked him from his den and set him on the well-worn path to justice, where he will find the accommodations somewhat less grand.

Vargas-Escobar, a man of such ill repute that even his own shadow might hesitate to follow him, has been accused of orchestrating a symphony of murder—eleven, to be precise—across the desert wastes of Nevada and California.

A federal indictment, first drawn up in 2021, lays out a grim ledger of crimes in which victims, by all accounts, were kidnapped, hauled off to lonesome stretches of wilderness, and dispatched with the kind of brutality that would make even an outlaw blush. Mind you, this is a man sent packing once before. In 2018, the federal government took the trouble to deport him to El Salvador, but like a bad penny—or perhaps more fittingly, a case of smallpox—he found his way back.

Not content to stay a mere foot soldier in the criminal enterprise, Vargas-Escobar allegedly co-led MS-13’s operations in the Las Vegas Valley, giving orders with all the gravity of a monarch whose kingdom consisted of stolen goods, narcotics, and bloodshed. The law, however, has a way of catching up, particularly when aided by the long arm of the FBI.

Federal agents nabbed him on Tuesday in Long Island, a place where he may have thought himself safe but where fate had other notions. Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly declared victory, promising that MS-13 would get dismantled like a cheap piece of machinery, bolt by bolt.

FBI officials, not ones to mince words, urged the public to come forth with information, reassuring families that they should not live in fear of such villainy. Whether Vargas-Escobar himself will oblige the law with a few choice revelations remains unknown.

For now, Vargas-Escobar’s returning to Nevada, where a federal judge awaits him with all the patience of a cat before a mouse hole. One can only hope that justice proves swift and unrelenting since this rattlesnake’s bite is the worst.