When the twins turned thirteen, Ernesto announced that he would no longer be dressing like his brother. “We’re our own people,” he declared. “It’s stupid to dress the same.”
Raúl remembers it differently: they’d come to the decision together. “We just wanted to be our own people.”
Whoever made it, the decision stemmed in large part from the bullying. Being twins already made them stand out, and dressing the same made it worse. Going to school that first day wearing his own outfit somehow made Ernesto feel more powerful.
They also decided that they needed a bicycle. A bike would give them bragging rights: their friends, they were sure, would circle around them, clamoring to use it. It would also mean freedom. They imagined huffing up the peak just beyond their house, mounting the bike together, and flying hands free into town, matching kings of the road.
They couldn’t afford to buy a bike with a few dollars from working the coffee harvests, so they hatched a plan. Along with a cousin from their mother’s side, they made a deal with the local repair shop: they would get a bicycle in exchange for a sack and a half of corn. One afternoon when their father was out in the fields and no one else was home, the twins loaded an entire sack from the main room of the house—about four feet long and weighing over fifty pounds—onto their shoulders, then trudged a half mile into town to the bike shop. Their cousin met them there, with half a stolen sack of his own. They dropped the booty in the corner of the shop, and the owner handed over the bike with a laugh.
It was red and sleek, shimmering with newness. The boys fought over who could ride it on his own, who would pedal standing up as the other two balanced above the wheels, one on the handlebars and the other on the seat, legs splayed away from the pedals, behind the driver—Devil Style, the arrangement was called. They had to keep the bike a secret from their parents, but they wanted to show it off, wanted the other boys to see them whizzing past and taking tight turns, nearly airborne, their wheels whirring like music.
For an entire week they hid the bike in the bushes by their house, hopping on each evening to ride it to the barn. But Wilber Sr. soon discovered it.
He took the twins into their bedroom, the walls still caked with soot from the room’s many years as a kitchen. “Stealing from your own family?” he shouted. That bike cost food that they needed. He took out a rope; soon the twins were muffling their grunts and screams.
Ernesto couldn’t sit down for a week. Wilber’s improvised whip left cuts on his ass and red welts that seeped, over the coming days, into a purple brown. It wasn’t infrequent for Wilber Sr. to punish them with force. Most of the time the whacks were quick, but sometimes, if he got angry enough, like with the bike—or with an escaped cow, or for getting in the way of an argument with Esperanza, or defending her, or defending one another for doing something wrong—he’d wallop them so hard they’d be afraid of where the beating might end.
They regretted the lying and stealing, and they still had scars as souvenirs. But they cherished the memory of the bike, the thrill of careening into the distance, the ground quickening beneath them like a slick ribbon.
People left La Colonia all the time—adults, kids, sometimes whole families. More kids like Wilber and Edgar were starting to leave—for opportunity, as always, but also out of fear. After Edgar left, the twins daydreamed about it more often. They imagined the places where people they knew had ended up—Arizona, Texas, California. Ernesto idealized El Norte just as his older brother had: a place with jobs, more stuff, opportunity. In El Norte, the way he figured it, he could have a bike in a matter of weeks. Wilber wrote home every now and again about how hard it was to make money, but Ernesto never quite believed it. He imagined his brother with nice clothes, a fancy car, flashy Nikes.
Raúl dreamed of the North too, but differently. He conjured it in his mind, especially the buildings: skyscrapers with gleaming windows and shining floors as tall as his town was long. He was interested in seeing it but not in living there. He didn’t want to be a farmer like his father, but he took Wilber Jr. at his word about life being harder up there than they’d been led to believe. Raúl had chosen his high school career track: banking. He was getting grades good enough to consider it; his friends sometimes even copied his homework. He imagined moving to San Salvador or maybe just a medium-size city like Santa Ana or Ilobasco, where he could count money behind a computer in an air-conditioned room. The good life he imagined for himself was in El Salvador.
Ernesto wasn’t so sure.
“Want to get drunk?” one of the pack of six friends asked one day when they were fourteen. They’d never been drunk before, but Ernesto was in, and Raúl by extension was too. They pooled cash with their friends and bought a bottle at the cantina, which sold to kids like them as long as they had the money. They didn’t know what kind of alcohol it was, just that it was clear and nearly made them vomit. At the banks of the river, Ernesto grabbed the bottle for a second round and slugged it back theatrically, to the cheers of the other boys.
Raúl, the quiet, timid giggler, was still the same old teasable Flores boy. But Ernesto had warrior potential.
Maricela, the eldest girl stuck between a bunch of brothers, was shy. At school she did her work and laughed at other kids’ antics, batting her eyelashes in an alloy of flirtation and self-erasure. She didn’t dare publicly stand up for her younger brothers—they were boys, after all, and could stick up for themselves. It hurt when people said things about her father, but she kept quiet. She, like the twins, was aware of her status as a poorer person from La Colonia. But she also dreamed of going north, of making something unexpected of herself.
When she was eighteen and the twins were sixteen her older brother Ricardo brought a friend over: Sebastian, a handsome eighteen-year-old. He stayed for lunch, and Maricela giggled when he spoke, averting her gaze while helping her mother serve the tamales. A few days later Maricela’s friends told Sebastian that she had a crush on him. She feigned fury but nearly liquefied when he came up to her in the town square one afternoon.
“What’s up?” he said. She shrugged and straightened, attempting to be beautiful.
She knew he was a lady-killer, that she should be wary, but the fact that he wanted to talk to her made her feel like a star.
“The dead and pieces of the dead turn up in El Salvador everywhere,” wrote Joan Didion in her book Salvador, a dispatch from the heart of the civil war. “A knot of children on the street suggests the presence of a body. Bodies turn up in the brush of vacant lots, in the garbage thrown down ravines in the richest districts, in public restrooms, in bus stations. Some are dropped in Lake Ilopango, a few miles east of the city.” She was describing El Salvador in 1982, but she could just as easily have been describing El Salvador nearly three decades later in 2011, the year gang violence came to a head and things started to go bad for the Flores boys.
A couple of older kids approached sixteen-year-old Ernesto in the hall one day, out of sight of the other students.
“Silvio is always picking on you,” one said.
He nodded.
“Your friends, too,” another said.
“They won’t mess with you if you come with us.” They showed him their shoes, new and nice, and flashed their touchscreen phones. “You should join,” they told him, meaning MS-13.
Ernesto shook his head. “Nah,” he said.
“You really should,” the first guy replied.
He said he’d think about it and went back to class. He didn’t tell Raúl.
We measure water in gallons or liters, distance in miles or kilometers, height in feet or meters. Murders are measured in units of 100,000. In 2011, when the twins were fifteen—prime gang recruiting age—the murder rate was 71 out of 100,000 people—compared to 64.4 the year before. That meant 4,354 murders out of a population of 6 million people, amounting to an average of twelve people murdered a day. By comparison, in 2015 there were 16,121 homicides in the United States, a country of some 320 million and home to more guns, the Washington Post reported, than people. The United States, a country that is fifty times the size of El Salvador, had only four times the number of homicides.
One morning in the small town down the hill where Esperanza sometimes sold tomatoes, more than forty men were arrested. The tattooed guys were linked to a local clica thought to be responsible for eight recent murders in the area. As they were driven off to jail, they tried to hide their faces from the newspaper cameramen. Meanwhile the boys who’d tried to recruit Ernesto claimed the sidewalks in the town center. Just a little stealing here, they had explained to Ernesto, a little rent-collecting there. No big thing.
A friend invited Ernesto to a funeral in the next town over. The deceased, someone he’d met only a couple of times, had been twenty years old. Inside the house the family members and friends wailed around the open casket. Ernesto said a prayer and felt queasy. The boy’s face was bloated and unnatural looking, and he could see where the bullet had punctured his skull.
“Did you think about what we talked about?” the boys asked Ernesto at school.
“Yeah,” he said. “But I can’t.”
“You sure?”
He couldn’t tell if it was a threat or not. “I’m sure.”
He told Raúl on the way home from school. “I won’t join,” he said. “I would never.”
But Raúl wasn’t convinced.
After that, Ernesto started to spend more time in town after school, more time away from the family and his twin. “Just hanging out,” he told Raúl. “Just playing soccer.”
Unlike most people in the town, who dressed in worn farming clothes, Uncle Agustín always had on a collared shirt and sunglasses. While most people suffered amid the violence, Agustín had figured out how to make the gang wars, and the new exodus, work for him.
Agustín began to lend money at high interest rates, which gave him capital for a bigger enterprise: a coyote ring, or human smuggling outfit that helped people, for a fee, navigate the tricky and dangerous routes north to the United States. Providing routes north had become a growth industry, and Agustín had some guys who would take people through Guatemala and into Mexico, and get them across to the United States. The price was steep—$7,000 or so—but the real cost, and profit, was in the interest on the loan. When would-be migrants wanted to go north but couldn’t pay the full fee, Agustín was said to lend them money at 10, 15, or 20 percent interest and take their property as collateral.
It was the kids who were driving the boom in Agustín’s new enterprise. Families knew they were going into debt just to line a predatory lender’s pockets, but people like Wilber and Esperanza, and like Edgar’s parents, didn’t want their children to make the journey without a guide.
The richer Agustín grew, the higher the stakes. Hence his hiring of the gangs as a security force. Protection deals like this one were becoming commonplace. They didn’t always mean direct involvement with gang business, but Agustín’s proximity to the gangs meant that Juan and Javier, and by extension many of the boys in the twins’ circle, were spending more time around MS-13.
In 2012 the Salvadoran government, then led by the leftist FMLN party (a vestige of the guerrilla movement during the civil war), made a controversial decision: it would sit at the table with key gang leaders and broker a truce. Led by an ex–guerrilla member and a well-known Catholic faith leader, the leadership of MS-13 and Barrio 18, the two most powerful gangs—all of whom were imprisoned at the time—met at one of the country’s highest-security penitentiaries and negotiated a deal. Allegedly in exchange for lighter prison sentences and more privileges for the top brass in the country’s maximum-security prisons, the gangs agreed to a cease-fire.
And for a while, they seemed to be keeping their word. In 2012 homicides fell almost in half, from the record 4,354 in 2011 to 2,576.
On the other hand, gangs had been given a seat at the bargaining table. They were now legitimate actors with officially recognized power. Countrywide, though the body count dropped, the menace remained. In 2012 the region where the Flores family lived registered more than 200 disappeared; the next year it surpassed 300, and the following year nearly reached 600. Sometimes the disappeared would turn up dead, sometimes alive, and sometimes they wouldn’t turn up at all. La Colonia started reporting people vanished. The extortion rate skyrocketed; people knew what the gangs were made of. The threat of death, it turned out, was just as powerful as death itself.
Meanwhile, by 2012 Wilber Jr. had fallen out of contact. The Flores family hardly heard from him anymore, and although he had never sent money often, he wasn’t sending any at all. When he did call, often to a neighbor’s phone because the Flores family couldn’t always afford to maintain an active cellphone (loading it with credit every now and then when they had the cash), Esperanza answered the phone with a hungry smile, cooing at the sound of her faraway son’s voice.
“We’re fine, we’re fine!” she said, surrounded by her eight other children, all hungry. The harvest was bad that year; the family worried that they might run out of food; the portions got smaller every night. Ernesto and Raúl watched her lie cheerily.
“He has enough to worry about, up there all on his own,” she said after hanging up.
As things got worse in their country, the older Flores siblings spent more and more time imagining what it was like in the United States—where Wilber was, and what he was up to, and what was so bad, or causing him to be so selfish, that he was no longer sending money back.
Maricela, in part to slip out of her family’s dire situation for moments at a time, was hanging around with Sebastian. She dropped him coy smiles when they passed on the road and texted him via her friends. It soon became more: she lost her virginity to him gladly—she was ready and felt that he was the one.
By the time she found out she was pregnant, he’d lost interest not only in sleeping with her but even in talking to her. She told him anyway and asked him not to tell anyone, terrified of her parents finding out. They should have used protection, she knew, but she hadn’t wanted to force the issue.
Maricela decided she’d have to hide for a while, to buy herself some time to figure things out. She had a friend who lived a few towns over; the friend’s family said it was okay for her to stay there for a bit. So one day, four months pregnant, she left school at midday, grabbed one of her family’s two suitcases, and started packing.
“Where are you going?” Her youngest brother, Luis, age seven, had peeked into the room where the girls slept.
“Nowhere,” she said. “To theater practice.” A play was to be performed in town in the coming weeks.
He shrugged and left her alone. Within minutes, she was a runaway.
Later that same afternoon the school health promoter, who had given Maricela the pregnancy test that confirmed her fears, showed up at the Flores family door to deliver the news. Wilber Sr. was furious. Who was the father, and didn’t his daughter know this was a sin? he raged. Esperanza sat in front of the altar and prayed.
They didn’t hear from Maricela for days and didn’t know where to track her down. She eventually sent a message that she was safe but wasn’t ready to come home yet. She was too scared. But as the weeks passed, her parents imagined her belly growing and started to think of the baby less as a sin than as their first grandchild. What could they do now anyway? They hoped they could at least persuade her to marry the guy.
But that wasn’t an option. Not only did Sebastian not call her or see her or send money, he was courting several other girls—three of whom saw fit to inform Maricela that there was no way Sebastian would acknowledge this bastard baby as his own. Maricela ignored their threatening texts, though her heart billowed and heaved—just a few months ago she’d been an innocent girl, and now? She’d made a mess of her life. She did what she could to earn her keep around her friend’s house, but after a month she was ready to listen to Wilber.
“You’re our daughter. We want you to come back. We want to support you,” he said. “Nothing will happen to you,” he promised.
She went back home.
The day Maricela went into labor, Esperanza took her in a friend’s car to the hospital where the twins had been born. Maricela sweated and panted and pushed, then was taken to the operating room for a cesarean. There was the baby, a little girl whom she named Guadalupe, or Lupita for short. At the hospital, when they asked for the last names, she hesitated. In the end, she gave Sebastian’s name as well as her own, so that her daughter would have both a mother’s name and a father’s name, as was customary. No child of hers would be seen as illegitimate.
Back at home, her siblings were eager to hold the baby. Like the rest of the family, Ernesto and Raúl had been angry with her at first, but they’d softened. The only exception was Ricardo, the eldest. He didn’t make eye contact with her and spoke to her only when necessary. He did everything he could, she felt, to make her feel unwelcome and ashamed.
Fifteen days after Lupita was born, Maricela still hadn’t heard from Sebastian. She’d give him time—eventually he’d want to meet his daughter. When at last there was a knock at the door, instead of Sebastian it was his parents. Maricela handed Lupita to her paternal grandmother.
“Sebastian left,” his mother said, as she took her granddaughter into her arms.
“Left?” asked Maricela.
“Al Norte,” she said. To the North. Exactly fifteen days ago he’d climbed into a car with his coyote and left for the United States—just a few hours before Lupita was born.
Ernesto could go north, he thought in secret. He didn’t want to, but he could. The family was still struggling, and now there was a new baby in the house, another person to care for. Ernesto was a hard worker, and tough—if Wilber had survived the journey, and so had that asshole who’d knocked up his sister, he could, too. If he made it there, he knew he could make something of himself and support his family back home.
“You’re crazy,” Raúl told Ernesto when he waxed lyrical about the North one day as they lay in the fields, guarding the tomatoes. His twin had been spending more time either inside the house or up in the mountains with Raúl, tending the animals and guarding the corn—which meant, to Raúl, that he was at least dodging the gangs’ entreaties to join. Mornings and afternoons on the farm gave them time to dream, and the more Ernesto turned the notion of the mythic North Country over in his mind, the more real it became.
Juan and Javier were now fully clicked into MS-13, along with Miguel’s dad, and so, perhaps, was Miguel. Meanwhile the gang boys at school kept pressuring Ernesto to do the same. He remembered the boy at the funeral with the gunshot through his head. The gang kids talked about the perks of the life with cool ease, but what about the dead kid, or the guys in the truck?
The North offered everything he wanted—success, belonging, respect, something better. He didn’t want to leave, he thought in the quiet dark after Raúl nodded off, but at the same time he wanted to go.
In the late spring of 2013, someone hacked down Uncle Agustín’s tree. It had been a giant tree, a barillo with a strong, sturdy trunk and smooth branches that spread into a thick canopy of waxy, tear-shaped leaves. Agustín was furious. Its fall, he said, had taken out a large swath of his coffee plantation in the adjacent field, ruining a good part of the crop. The whole town gossiped, wondering who had knocked it down, and how and why.
By that time the family was awaiting the May harvest, stretching their food to their last kernels of corn.
Ernesto officially decided to leave town. One evening while his mother was outside cooking, he went into his parents’ room, a separate structure from the main house, to talk to his father. “Dad,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I should go north.”
His father was quiet for a few moments. “Why do you want to go?” he asked. “And how would you get there?”
Ernesto took this as a no. He didn’t respond, just turned around and walked back into the main house.
The next night, his father came to talk to him. “Okay,” Wilber said. He’d done the caluclations in his mind, and knew they needed more money than was coming in to stay afloat. “You can go.” They’d take out another loan. The family didn’t want to lose another son to the northern vastness, but they knew that it was probably best.
Ernesto promised that he’d pay off the debt quickly and then continue sending money home each month. It wasn’t just his future he was concerned about, he insisted, but that of the whole family. He didn’t tell him that, by leaving, he was also hoping to avoid the gangs’ widening net.
Raúl knew that Ernesto had been thinking about going, but he was stunned into silence when Ernesto announced his plan. He stepped outside for air. He was hurt not because Ernesto was going to the United States, specifically, but because he was embarking on this new life without Raúl. Ernesto hadn’t invited him, hadn’t pleaded with him to come along. Raúl wouldn’t so readily be able to leave Ernesto behind.
“You sure you want to go?” he asked later that night, in their room.
“Positive,” Ernesto replied. They didn’t talk any more about it.
The coyote would cost $7,000. He knew of people who’d gone on their own, with no coyote, no guide, and just enough cash for food and bus fare and the occasional bribe. But Ernesto had barely ever left the quiet radius of towns around La Colonia, and now he’d have to cross through a swath of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. Horror stories riddled accounts of the road like potholes, far more than when Wilber had left seven years before: children raped in the desert, children dying of thirst, children with limbs severed beneath the cruel rims of a train.
He, like Wilber, needed a guide. So they asked the most obvious person for money and for a coyote: Uncle Agustín. Wilber Sr. trudged to his house, took off his bowler hat in deference, and asked for a loan.
“No,” Agustín told his brother-in-law, who was showing his age, his arms just suntanned sinews stretching along his slight frame.
Wilber thanked him and walked back home.
He had a cousin, Erick, who also ran a coyote business, but Erick didn’t loan money. So Wilber went to a loan broker in town, a woman who did business on behalf of an ex–military guy a few towns away. She’d loan them the money for the coyote, plus a few extra hundred in case of emergency. The interest, she said, as far as he remembered when he got back home, would be 20 percent.
When Wilber signed for the loan, he put one of his plots of land up as collateral. The woman handed over the cash, which Wilber then took to Erick. Ernesto’s trip was arranged for two weeks’ time.
In the following days, everything looked different to Ernesto. Every signpost, every view from an outcropping, every friend, was something he would miss. Raúl most, though he wouldn’t let on.
When just a week remained before he was to leave—one week to say his final, real goodbyes—the family heard an ominous rumor. Something, it seemed, had led Agustín to believe that it was Ernesto who had cut down his tree.
Why would Ernesto have done it? And where had Agustín got the idea that he had? That Ernesto could even manage such a thing strained credulity. The twins decided it must have been Miguel, or one of their friends from school, who had started the rumor. They were jealous, perhaps, that Ernesto was going north and were trying to stay on Juan and Javier’s crew and curry favor with big-man Agustín.
The twins soon heard about more stories heading Agustín’s way, that Ernesto and Raúl were gossiping about Agustín’s livelihood and his gang connections and that they claimed to have seen stores of guns at his house. The twins had certainly heard dark things about Agustín; he was rumored to have had people killed who stole from his business. They didn’t know if it was true, and they’d certainly never seen or gossiped about the guns, but the story added to Agustín’s menace. That he might have a store of guns at his house seemed plausible. But Ernesto and Raúl insisted back through the grapevine that they’d never said such things and they never would have.
Agustín, the gyre of rumors reported back, wasn’t satisfied.
Juan and Javier showed up at the Flores house. “Talking shit about my family?” Javier spat. He got close to Ernesto as if he might hit him.
“We didn’t say anything!” Ernesto insisted.
Raúl backed him up. “We wouldn’t talk about your family!”
The cousins looked at them side-eyed, then walked out the door. This kind of bad-mouthing was treated as treason in the gang world. Agustín had always looked down on the twins’ family, and now he had reasons—the tree, the twins’ alleged shit talking—to seek revenge.
Soon afterward Ernesto and Raúl were kicking a ball back and forth along the road outside their house. Juan and Javier, heading toward town in one of Agustín’s trucks, saw the twins and picked up speed. They had to jump to the side of the road and flatten themselves against their house. As they tore by, Juan and Javier stared at Ernesto as if to say, Next time, we’ll mow you down.
If Ernesto had had any doubts that he had to go north, they now vanished.
He went onto Facebook for some solace, posting:
Feel so sad today cuz there’s only a few days with my friends.
Raúl thought he was stupid to blast out his plan like that. Neither of them understood that because his decision to go north was now posted on his public feed, it wasn’t just his few dozen “friends” who now knew of it but anyone who cared to track him down.
Ernesto was to spend his last night in La Colonia in a safe house outside town, where he’d be picked up by his coyota, a woman, the next morning. Raúl had decided to spend the night with his twin—the last time, it was both conceivable and completely inconceivable, that they might ever see each other.
Late that afternoon the woman who ran the safe house got a call from Uncle Erick: Tell them to leave, he told her. She tracked the twins down at a friend’s house. “Go hide up in the hills,” she said.
It turned out that Agustín had found out Ernesto was leaving and was using not just a rival loan broker but, worse, a rival coyote company. Even though he’d refused to give Wilber a loan, Agustín took it as another slight. He was looking for Ernesto.
“We’re changing the trip,” the safe house woman explained to Ernesto. It was too dangerous to leave while Agustín and his boys were all lit up at him—they knew Erick’s routes and might have them followed.
So Raúl and Ernesto slipped out of their friend’s house and spent the night up on a hill, much as they had many times amid the corn, but this time more scared than ever—not of ghosts or spirits, of wailing women or thieves, but of Agustín’s boys. They startled at every rustle and movement in the forest and didn’t sleep at all.
“You have to go,” Raúl acknowledged. It was no longer a choice.
The trip was postponed for over a week, during which both Ernesto and Raúl stayed inside. Ernesto was a bona-fide target now—and Raúl, his identical twin, could easily be mistaken for him. Uncle Erick set a new date, with a new route, to leave town.
Ernesto once again took to Facebook:
Ummm friends the 20th of this month I’m leaving I want you to know that I’m going to miss you.
“Don’t do that!” Raúl said. But Ernesto couldn’t help himself.
It was late July 2013 and seventeen-year-old Ernesto’s backpack was ready to go, packed with a few changes of clothes, a sweatshirt, a bar of soap, and a small cellphone that his father had bought him that, he said, would work in Mexico. “Don’t tell them you have it,” Wilber said. “You can use it to let us know how you are.” He handed his son a plastic rosary, which they tied around his waist under his shirt for protection.
An aunt came over to say goodbye. “It’s good he’s going,” she told Wilber. Earlier that day she’d been over at Agustín’s. “I’d like to crush that boy’s face in with a rock,” she reported Agustín having told her. He’d slammed his fist into his palm by way of demonstration.
That last night Ernesto was restless. Raúl was too, but he eventually nodded off, leaving Ernesto awake and alone. Finally Ernesto slipped into a doze, his vapor-like dreams peopled by his cousins and his family, but set against the backdrop of a new life in the United States.
Just after dawn his mother roused him. He grabbed his backpack and hugged his parents and Maricela, who was up with the baby, goodbye, while fighting back tears and the jitters of departure, fear knocking around against excitement like pebbles in a can. Raúl was still sleeping; Ernesto decided not to wake him. He walked out the door without even looking at his twin.