It’s a Monday, July 27, 2015, early morning, and commuters wait along the road for their rides. The cars and trucks and brightly painted buses hurtle down Avenida San Martín in Santa Tecla, a thriving town in San Salvador’s ragged fringe. A bus stops on the corner, and as the passengers board, a muscular military official with a balaclava over his face and a lustrous semiautomatic in hand looks each one of them in the eye.

Over the weekend, country-wide murmurings began: there was going to be a paro, halt—a forced bus strike. The Revolucionarios branch of the Barrio 18 gang has worked its networks to convey that any bus driver who goes to work on Monday risks being shot and killed. The government has mobilized police and army officials to guard the buses that do run.

Many bus drivers stay home. The news reports filter in through the radio and television and streetside buzz: by day’s end, five bus drivers and one transit worker are dead.

There are even fewer buses in the evening commute. The traffic thickens and slows into a coagulated mass. People scramble and push to get on board, and others cram into taxis, onto truck beds, and into the backseats and trunks of cars. Thousands of commuters who’d made it to work that morning have no way to get home to their families.

The gangs have targeted the transit system for years, extorting money out of drivers and killing those who don’t pay. But this is the first country-wide action of this kind. They want the government to ease up on its antigang crackdown. The Barrio 18 splinter group is sending a message: We own you. We can rip out the roots of commerce in an instant.

“They do these things so everyone can see how powerful they are,” proclaims a stone-faced twelve-year-old boy.

It continues like this on Tuesday, Wednesday. Businesses close since people can’t come to work. And the people whose family economy relies on hawking to the bus commuters—bags of fruit, bottles of water, tortillas, chips, packages of fried plantains—have no one to sell to. Some schools and universities suspend classes. The Salvadoran newspaper El Diario de Hoy reported that $12 million in commerce was lost each day of the strike, from roadside pupusa vendors all the way up to the country’s largest companies. The newspaper industry is one of the hardest hit.

Tuesday evening: President Salvador Sánchez Cerén makes a public address, promising more security forces to bolster the transportation workers and civil society against the gangs’ threats. They won’t negotiate anymore, Sánchez Cerén insists. “The criminals want to hold talks, but we can’t talk with those who live by killing and extortion,” he says.

Wednesday morning: President Sánchez Cerén leaves on a preplanned trip to get medical care in Cuba and is not scheduled to return for nearly two weeks. He does not change his plans.

Early that morning traffic is particularly bad coming into the city limits from the east. There’s been an accident, it seems: a bus has hit a tree, perhaps, rolled onto its side. The area is roped off by caution tape, blocking most of the inbound lanes. Later it’s announced on the news that the bus accident was, in fact, a crime scene. A Barrio 18 gangster had boarded the bus at a popular stop and fired a round of bullets at the twenty-one-year-old driver, killing him on the spot.

Rumors tremble through the streets, everyone grasping for some kind of explanation. Are the rival gangs in fact working together on this strike? Is ARENA, the conservative party and rival to the president’s FMLN, actually behind the strike? Might ARENA be encouraging the army to boycott going to work, thus upending the government order? In a cryptic moment of Tuesday’s speech, the president asked ARENA to stop destabilizing the government; to what was he referring, or was he just trying to deflect criticism on his handling of the strike onto the opposition? Is the president in fact dying and in need of urgent medical care, hence his trip to Cuba during this crisis? Everyone—from taxi drivers to NGO workers to government officials—has some conspiracy that helps explain the paro. None of these is confirmed fact, much of it baseless, but there are suspicions nonetheless. Conspiracy is the stuff of unrest.

Thursday, Friday, the same. By the following Wednesday, it seems the stoppage has come to a close, but then again the news reports trickle in: another bus driver has been shot and killed. That makes eight in total, along with some wounded. The country has lost well over over $60 million in commerce. And the gangs? Everyone can see how powerful they are.