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The mayor of Los Angeles, James Hahn, recently unveiled a plan to deal with the resurgence of gang violence. He plans to offer hundreds of at risk young people city jobs. The initiative would give $1.3 million to anti-gang programs and reassign a hundred officers from desk jobs to street patrol. The plan is needed in LA where the number of gang related murders has tripled in the past two years. Latino USA's Mandalit del Barco visited some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

Recently, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a U.S. grand jury had indicted 6 members of Colombia's main rebel group, commonly known as the FARC. The six were implicated in the 1999 kidnap and murder of three American environmental and indigenous rights activists. Ashcroft called the indictment a blow against narco-terror, and said the war on terrorism was now moving to the western hemisphere. The U.S. government has long attacked the FARC for profiting from the illegal drug trade that makes its way north to the U.S. drug market. Joining us now on Latino USA are Jason [Hoggins], senior policy analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, and Nina Alvarez, an independent journalist currently living in Bogotá.

What does music sound like when it's created by activists' It sounds like this. The music group known as Quetzal was created in Los Angeles in the 1990s. The Rodney King police beating trial and the subsequent riots had shaken the city. And as people came together to heal there was a Chicano arts renaissance. That's when the group was created by Quetzal Flores, a Chicano who was raised by two activist parents from the sixties and seventies. After the Zapatista uprising in Mexico in 1994, the LA Chicano arts scene became even more politicized and Quetzal became the premier group to play for political fund raisers. But politics has given way to a focus to creating music. Quetzal's second release entitled 'Sing the Real' is a mix of social conscious with Mexican traditional, rock, folk, and Afro-Caribbean influences. With us on Latino USA today is Martha Gonzalez, lead vocalist and conga player, Gabriel Gonzalez, also lead vocalist, and Quetzal Flores, the founder of the group.