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The End: The Death and Burial
of Miguel Ángel Tobar

The Burial

Miguel Ángel Tobar knows no peace, not even in death.

It’s noon on Sunday, November 23, 2014. Seven men struggle to get the body into the ground in the cemetery of Atiquizaya, in western El Salvador. The sun beats down on their backs.

Miguel Ángel Tobar’s mother, a small woman with gray hair, seemed calm when the boy’s father-in-law and brothers were digging the grave. Now that her son is being lowered inside his teak coffin, she kneels down on the ground beside him and cries out: “Why so young? Why again? Why another son? Why another murder?”

The coffin, a donation from the local government, has no glass window. Windowless coffins are often used out of respect for a family that prefers not to be left with the memory of a disfigured body. With Miguel Ángel Tobar, that’s not the issue. His murderers didn’t have the skillful aim he had, and they had to empty both their magazines to hit him six times in the back as he ran away. Three bullets pierced his head discreetly, as it were, behind his ear. The bullets were kind to him.

Miguel Ángel Tobar’s burial lasts only five minutes.

But hours were spent digging, judging the size of the hole in the ground, and digging some more. The preparations weren’t very solemn. You might have mistaken the scene for a group of family members coming together to dig a well. The men, dripping with sweat, like laborers erecting a house, bickering about the depth and width. The women shushing their children’s cries and watching the men work.

But once the men had roped the coffin and started to lower it, this everyday scene suddenly became the burial of someone they’d loved.

The mother screams for five whole minutes. She sways as if she’s about to faint. Miguel Ángel Tobar’s wife, Lorena, a shy eighteen-year-old hardened by life, allows herself to cry. Over the squeals and whimpers of their children, women sing evangelical songs as loudly as they can. They belt out words that describe celestial enclosures, an infernal lake.

The men, dry-eyed, lower their gazes to the ground.

Five graves away, four gangsters are playing dice.

Everybody knows that this cemetery is controlled by the Mara Salvatrucha 13. The gravedigger—who looked on as others did the grunt work of burying Miguel Ángel Tobar—knows it. The cemetery’s security officer knows it, too. When someone asks, “Who are they?” he nonchalantly responds, “They’re the guys in charge.”

The burial of a gang member, no matter which gang, is governed by rules that can’t be found in any manual. Whoever it is, he’s allowed to be dead in peace. But today, that shaky rule has been left in the dust.

Two more gang members come out of the row of shacks flanking the cemetery and approach the four dice players. The players halt their game. Another youngster emerges and approaches the mourners. He’s a thin, pale kid who’s put on gangster attire fit for a gala: a round black Charlie Chaplin hat, a loose white t-shirt tucked into baggy black pants cinched by a belt, white knock-off Domba sneakers. The kid spits at the feet of the mourners and looks to catch someone’s eye, ready for a challenge. No one meets his gaze.

Another gang member—materializing from a nearby ravine, and at first hovering at the edge of the scene—begins to inch closer, towards the other side of Miguel Ángel Tobar’s grave. The site is surrounded, the mourners about to be trapped between the circling gang members and the ravine.

The father-in-law mumbles: “This is getting ugly.” The last shovelfuls of dirt fill the tomb. One of the mourners, machete in hand, whacks off a head of izote, El Salvador’s national flower, and sticks it into the mound of dirt covering Miguel Ángel Tobar’s coffin.

Mourners sing evangelical hymns under candlelight in the Kid’s mother’s house. The songs have to be shouted to compete the reggaeton music from a nearby party. On the left is Doña Rosa, Miguel’s mother.

There’s no time to pack the dirt, which is left with no tombstone, no cross, no epitaph.

The small, sorry-looking procession then quickly exits the cemetery. As they pass, other gang members come out of the shacks and tell the mourners to stay put. Instead, everyone just scrams.

Miguel Ángel Tobar, the sicario who betrayed the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, a “clique” (clicas in Spanish) of the Mara Salvatrucha, had departed the gang in the only way possible for someone who had lived his life.

In this country there can be no peace for someone like Miguel Ángel Tobar, El Niño de Hollywood.

Miguel Ángel Tobar was a member of the Mara Salvatrucha 13.

He belonged to one of the largest and most feared street gangs in the world, the only one whose leaders made the US Treasury’s blacklist of transnational criminal organizations, on a par with the Mexican Zetas and the Japanese Yakuza. It’s a gang that, for two straight years—2015 and 2016—made El Salvador the most murderous country in the world. To put this in perspective: In 2015, in cartel-occupied Mexico, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and the Zetas helped drive the homicide rate up to eighteen for every 100,000 inhabitants; El Salvador, meanwhile, had a rate of 103. In the United States, the rate is around five. More than eight murders for every 100,000 inhabitants is, according to the United Nations, an epidemic.

But before becoming the Kid of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, Miguel Ángel Tobar was a semi-orphaned youth crushed under the heel of a war that had just finishing razing everything around him. In the mid 1990s, when Miguel Ángel Tobar first picked up a gun to join a gang-led war, the remains of the 75,000 victims of the other conflict were still smoldering. This twelve-year hell had begun in the 1970s, when El Salvador was a pressure cooker

An all-out civil war was raging then. The clandestine leftist groups had matured and begun to seriously organize themselves.

This wasn’t a unified movement, but a collection of factions with diverse political ideologies. The middle-class youth, with mostly Catholic backgrounds and influenced by Asian communist movements, fell in behind the idea of a popular armed struggle. They formed the Revolutionary Army of the People, or ERP. Another group, which broke off from the Salvadoran Communist Party, linked up with a mass of industrial and agricultural workers to create one of the largest guerrilla organizations in Latin America: the Popular Liberation Forces (FPL). Insurgent groups sprouted from all sides, and the idea of armed struggle became more and more entrenched among the people.

At the other extreme, the pseudo-democratic government was composed of ultra-rightist military officers who’d led the previous coup d’état in 1979 and then defended their grip on power with all the notorious sadism of a Latin American army. Its right arm was the National Guard, whose name still sends chills down many Salvadoran spines. Manned by thugs, it functioned as a hit squad for the state and the small coffee-cultivating elite. In the 70s, the National Guard’s information-gathering methods consisted of hanging buckets of water from a suspect’s testicles or paddling a prisoner until he confessed where he’d hidden a stolen cow or a purloined necklace. Such methods were effective for terrorizing bandits or unarmed union organizers, but not so much for standing off guerrilla fighters galvanized by the spirit of revolution. The latter were much more agile in their combat strategies than the old and blundering state forces.

By 1975, bullets were flying in all directions. Guerrilla fighters bolstered their arsenals by kidnapping wealthy business owners and buying arms with the ransom fees. Contrary to the standard Marxist manual, they also developed a rear guard in remote agricultural communities, where the first camps and bases were established, and where the guerrillas filled out their ranks with campesinos tired of military oppression.

In 1979, everything changed in Central America. The three guerrilla groups in Nicaragua banded together and took down the Anastasio Somoza Debayle administration, the third generation of the Somoza dynasty still clinging to power. This was a ray of light for the Salvadoran guerrillas: the realistic possibility of installing a socialist government by way of the bullet. Fighting intensified. The campesino rear guard consolidated. And the US government, fearing it would lose control of its backyard, amped up its support of the Salvadoran army with both money and expertise. By the end of the year, an intelligence unit was formed, as well as an infiltration unit known as ORDEN. And, ultimately, the United States funneled something like $4.5 billion in aid to the Salvadoran government and military over a dozen years, coordinating with its leaders via the US Embassy in San Salvador and helping to cover up its crimes. It’s been estimated that the United States sent military weaponry worth $1 billion to the country in that decade. On the other side, Cuba and the newly installed Nicaraguan socialist government were quick to support the Salvadoran insurgency with resources and training.

All these guns, however, needed arms to carry them. In a country whose population was 60 percent children, the result was inevitable. Thousands of kids younger than fifteen were recruited to both sides of the conflict.

El Salvador, a tiny country that would fit inside of California twenty times, threw itself and its armies of children into an abyss from which it would not emerge until 1992, with 75,000 people dead and countless more displaced.

Even before the war, Salvadorans had been coming to Southern California. But it was no longer a gradual migration—one by one, family by family. It was droves after droves. And the Salvadorans were fleeing, not migrating. They were fleeing with little more than they could pack in a night, and without even really knowing where they were going. It wasn’t so important to get somewhere as it was to stop being where they were.

Almost none of the thousands of Salvadorans who came to California in the second half of the 1970s spoke English. Few had family there. Most congregated in the Angelino neighborhood of Pico Union, where they could find cheap apartments: up to four families squeezing into a matchbox.

Many were young kids who’d already known war. The recruiting process in El Salvador didn’t entail getting a letter on your eighteenth birthday, as American kids experienced during Vietnam. No. In El Salvador it was military trucks pulling into poor barrios where packs of soldiers with lassos trapped kids and teenagers. The soldiers then shaved the rookies’ heads, gave them a little training, and sent them to kill and die in the mountains.

In the mountains were the guerrillas. Hard-bitten guerrilla fighters who were also in the business of training kids and teenagers. A good number of those fighters, young and old, after seeing death up close, escaped to California where a network of the recently arrived was quickly forming. The more there were, the more they attracted other refugees. They thought California was the promised land.

“We fled the war. We didn’t want more war. But over there we found another bunch of problems,” said a veteran member of Barrio 18 who’d come to California in the ’80s, after more than a year of battling guerrilla fighters in the Salvadoran mountains.

Los Angeles, where most migrated, was anything but a peaceful place where one could calmly put down roots. Another battle was being waged there, one also fought by youth.

The Salvadoran kids, who didn’t speak English, were almost all put into special education classes. But language wasn’t their only problem. These kids could probably assemble an M-16, no sweat, or distinguish the distant sound of a rescue helicopter from that of a combat copter echoing through the mountains. But they had no idea who Abraham Lincoln was, or what had happened at the Alamo in 1836. They knew which roots you could eat and which to avoid if your ration had run out, but they didn’t know anything about square roots.

If classes were a torment for the confused Salvadorans, recess was a nightmare. The locals played baseball, American football, or four square—games they didn’t understand. Others—some, like the Mexican kids, who had migrated earlier—organized themselves into groups that continuously fought and had a complicated system of hand symbols. They were members of something previously unknown to the Salvadorans: gangs. There were gangs of every type. Most were made up of Mexicans, and even so they attacked each other all the time—a trivial yet serious game, where kids occasionally ended up dead. The school bathrooms and hallways were tagged with esoteric symbols that marked the presence of this or that gang. Leaving school at the end of the day was a gamble. The new arrivals had to know where they could walk, or risk crossing a forbidden line that would provoke a beatdown. These gangsters saw the Salvadoran kids as prey. They weren’t organized, they were very poor, and they represented, above all, unwelcome rivals. As the Mexican kids saw it, they already had enough to deal with the black gangs. Now they had to worry about these new savages. The Salvadorans were disrupting the understood meaning of the term “Hispanic.”

“The Mexicans would assault us on our way to school, they’d take our things. They wanted to squash all the bichas (little girls). I mean they saw us as inferior, you know. They wanted to force us into their gangs,” said a veteran gangster sitting in a bar in downtown San Salvador, almost twenty years after the United States retched him out like bad food. He doesn’t say this in the tone of a victim, knowing full well he doesn’t fit that bill anymore.

It was this social rejection and violence that made the new arrivals band together. They didn’t understand LA, and the city didn’t understand them. And yet, the city enclosed a secret that would soon dazzle them.

AC/DC, Slayer, Black Sabbath … heavy metal. Heavy, hard music that couldn’t be more different from the rancheras and ballads crooning out in Salvadoran towns. Those irreverent and frenzied compositions blared through the South Side barrios of LA and, though the Salvadorans couldn’t always understand the lyrics, they understood the euphoria smoking off the well-tuned basses. At last they recognized something within the great chaos around them, something that meant they’d actually reached the United States. They had suddenly come to understand one of the many languages spoken in the city.

Everything else melts away when you’re standing in front of a stage, or even in front of an old radio in an alleyway in Pico Union, and you yield to an inner passion, bursting into a whirlwind of kicks and slaps. The metalhead movement, with its dark, satanic lyrics, was a magnet for Salvadoran kids. Long hair, heavy chains, and black boots became their identifying symbols. And it was one, small, almost imperceptible detail in the history of rock music that became the refugees’ most cherished symbol.

As everyone knows, Black Sabbath and its lead singer, Ozzy Osbourne, were icons of heavy metal. Ozzy’s emblematic symbol, a relic of the hippie era, was a peace sign, the two-fingered V. When, after years of alcohol and drug abuse, Osbourne was forced out of the band, a new star took his place: Italian-born Ronnie James Dio. This vocalist did away with many of the band’s previous quirks, among them Osbourne’s notorious peace and love sign. In its place Dio used an old-country gesture borrowed from his grandmother. The sign of the horns was part of a ritual to cure the “evil eye” or simply to spook away bad luck. You make it by sticking your pointer and pinkie fingers into the air. This sign would soon become the icon of heavy metal.

Among the Salvadoran kids in LA, the sign became known as the “Salvatrucha claw.” Even today, Salvatrucha homies use it around the world.

By 1979, large groups of Salvadorans were being drawn together by heavy metal and satanism. They called themselves stoners.

In order to set themselves apart from other groups once and for all, the Salvadorans landed on a new name: La Mara Salvatrucha Stoner, or MSS.

The name harks back to a mostly forgotten film, The Naked Jungle, starring Charlton Heston. Made in 1954, it only premiered in Central America in the 1970s. It was an adaptation of a 1938 story by the German author Carl Stephenson, about a rich landowner in the Amazon whose property is devoured by millions of ants. The movie was popular across rural El Salvador, where these small windows into the Western experience marked the passage of time. It was so affecting that it inspired a new lexicon. The Salvadoran term majada, which colloquially referred to any group of people, was traded for marabunta, a type of army ant, or simply “mara.” Initially the word had no criminal connotation. The second part, “salvatrucha,” possibly coined by construction workers on the Panama Canal, is simply a reference to Salvadoran people.

The Mara Salvatrucha Stoner, a small cluster of autonomous cells that rarely interacted, wasn’t at all organized. And its members were not as innocent as those of other young stoner groups. They became obsessed with the satanic lyrics of the heavy and black metal bands, and they took their adolescent games seriously. They’d congregate in cemeteries to invoke “the Beast.” By the end of the 1970s, it wasn’t uncommon to find stoner mareros cutting up cats, making blood pacts, and praying to Satan over the slabs in Pico Union’s public cemeteries.

That’s how the idea of the Beast was born. At first it was lifted from heavy metal titles, like Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast, but then it took on new meaning. It became synonymous with the gang itself, as well as with the imaginary dwelling space of gang members killed in battle, those who’d been murdered by other gangs. Like the Valhalla of the ancient Vikings, the Beast was a kind of home for warrior souls. And like Huitzilopoxtli, a sun god of the Mexicas, it thirsted for blood.

It’s hard to get veteran gang members to talk about those transitional years, when they shed the guise of victims and metamorphosed into killers. Their memories are blurry. It happened without anyone paying much attention, a seemingly natural shift. Like growing up.

Even gang historians, like Professor Tom Ward from the University of California or the Mexican academic Carlos García, haven’t come to fully understand this period. The fledgling gangsters were probably never entirely passive. Maybe it took them only a couple of years to realize that they already knew a violence cruder than that of their aggressors.

One thing is abundantly clear: sometime in the late 1970s, members of the Mara Salvatrucha Stoner cast off their victim role forever. The years when the Salvadoran schoolkid refugees suffered at the hands of Mexican or Chicano gangs began to recede. Members of the MSS became killers, waiting anxiously for the next provocation. Their union made them stronger.

“Over there in California they thought they knew what violence was. Fuck no! We taught them the meaning of violence,” an old member of the MSS recalls, sitting with us in a café in downtown San Salvador. Two decades after having been deported from the United States, he still vividly remembers how the homie Salvatruchos swaggered, with large strides, down the Angelino streets. The Salvadorans knew all about war. They’d fled from one, and had come to feel no qualms about joining another.

The Vigil

In the village of Las Pozas, they’re having a wake and a party. It’s Saturday, November 22, 2014, and yesterday Miguel Ángel Tobar was killed. His body lies inside his mother’s home. Many of the neighbors, meanwhile, are celebrating the founding of the village, and the mayor’s office of San Lorenzo has organized a dance. Reggaeton blasts out of a pair of weathered speakers that seem to warp the music. The lights and racket are just blips in the absolute darkness of the surrounding fields and forests. A hard wind blows. By Salvadoran standards, it’s a cold night.

Yesterday they killed Miguel Ángel Tobar. Today, to the sound of evangelical hymns, his family performs a vigil in the house where he was born. The truth is, given the difference in volume, the vigil thrums to the rhythm of reggaeton.

It’s ten at night, and the men at the party are already drunk. They’re eyeing each other, looking to pick fights. They stumble around, one hand on their hats, the other hand on a liter bottle of Cuatro Ases, a brand of Central American cane liquor or guaro.

Four soldiers keep to the shadows on the edges of the plaza. They won’t get involved unless someone pulls out a machete, a pistol, or a shotgun. If the drunks just stick to shouting at each other, they’ll leave them alone.

This is a dirt village. The streets are dirt, the houses are made with dirt, and, when the dirt dries, it turns to dust. And the dust never settles. Instead, it finds the corners of your mouth, the creases of your neck, your hair. It settles onto your sweat. But on this relatively cool and pleasant night, nobody’s sweating.

In a house down one of the alleyways, almost in front of the village school, lies Miguel Ángel Tobar in his teakwood box. Old women surround him, whispering incantations—the standard prayers for this kind of funeral. At the head of the casket, seated in a plastic chair, the mother of the deceased stares at the dirt floor. She’s a small woman, and the burden of a second murdered son seems to shrink her even more. A few months later she will die of cancer.

The house consists of one big room with three beds. Between each bed hangs a blanket for privacy. One of the beds is for the mother. The father isn’t around. He hanged himself less than a year ago. He couldn’t recover from the massacre of four members of his family by MS-13. There are some things you have to repeat, like commenting on the rain. The son’s gang killed four of his dad’s relatives. Four of his own relatives.

In another bed sleeps Miguel Ángel Tobar’s older sister. Her husband is currently in prison for trafficking marijuana from Guatemala. In the third bed slept Miguel Ángel Tobar, his teenage wife, and his two daughters: three years old and three months old.

A group of men huddle in the backyard, drinking coffee and nibbling on sweet bread that the women hand out. The bread isn’t from a bakery, it’s just bread with sugar sprinkled on top. More than a dozen women sing and clap: “Here is the power of God, here is the power of God.”

It’s a miserable vigil. It lacks the drama of the usual gangster burial, where dozens of kids make offerings to the family and line up to say goodbye to their homeboy amid tears and vows of vengeance. None of that here. Miguel Ángel Tobar’s funeral is a leper’s funeral. None of his old gangster compañeros are here to pay their respects. They’re either murdered or, thanks to him, in prison.

A man pokes his head in the door and asks a dumb question.

“Is this the dearly departed?”

It’s the evangelical pastor. He’s dark-skinned, very short. His funeral clothes are cheap-looking, and his shoes are dusty. He just walked two hours from his village. He’s accompanied by two women in dresses, wearing veils over their faces. The pastor starts to speak about the beyond. He doesn’t provide details of the beyond, he doesn’t know what it’s like, but he claims—with conviction—that it’s better than this life. He takes his Bible and leads a prayer that the women follow, chattering incomprehensibly. Miguel Ángel Tobar’s teenage widow, standing apart from the others, looks nervous. She’s received threatening phone calls. She’s scared the bullets that found her husband will find her next. The pastor finishes his sermon. He collects a few dollars from the relatives. It’s common practice for these kinds of pastors—they don’t receive a salary like a priest would. And yet this pastor doesn’t follow the standard protocol. He finds the teenage widow and gives her everything he’s collected. “Something to help you with, Mother,” he says, and disappears into the darkness of the fields with his two companions.

Outside it’s all reggaeton. Miguel Ángel Tobar’s family had asked the organizers to push back the day of the event, as their house was only about a hundred yards from the dance floor and stage. It was a foolish request. Nobody was going to delay a party for the death of Miguel Ángel Tobar.

Miguel Ángel Tobar, half-naked, lies inside a white plastic bag on a metal tray.

A bead of viscous blood trickles from the bullet hole in the middle of his neck. The body is so fresh, the blood hasn’t dried. After completing the autopsy, the Santa Ana forensic officers left him in his boxers—faded blue, the word elegant written on the elastic waistband. Of his four tattoos, only the deformed yin-yang on his right thigh is spared blood-spatter. The incomprehensible letters on his chest fall between the two bullet holes in his neck and the other bullet hole below his right nipple. On his left forearm, between speckles of fresh blood, you can make out the words: mi vida loca.

On the right side of his face, from his cheek and crawling up his forehead to his hairline are four furrows of dried blood. If you didn’t know he’d died from gunshots, you might think a monster had clawed at his face.

Miguel Ángel Tobar, making a pretty dumb decision for someone who lived his life mere inches away from death, had returned to his family’s house just two months before he was killed. Tired of living as a nomad, he came down from the mountains where he’d been hiding. He missed his teenage wife. He needed to provide for his two daughters. He knew that the imprisoned Mara Salvatrucha bosses he had betrayed had demanded his head. A band of killers was looking to avenge his betrayal. Some of them had founded the gang in the 1980s, in savage Southern California. They wanted to see him die. To suffer. They told him they were going to leave him smelling like pine, referring to the casket that would hold his corpse. They didn’t guess that Miguel Ángel Tobar’s funeral would be cheaper still: teak instead of pine.

Despite knowing all this, Miguel Ángel Tobar came home to the village of Las Pozas.

Las Pozas. Dirt, a school, an enormous ceiba tree, a cantina, a dirt soccer field, hills, heat.

Las Pozas was the retirement plan after his long stint as informant.

He didn’t let any of the young toughs of the village join MS-13, even though he’d been one of the gang’s sicarios. Miguel Ángel Tobar called his crew of young neighbors los ganyeros (from ganja—marijuana). They were eight or so young men stoked about the marijuana Miguel Ángel Tobar brought over from Guatemala. For them, selling pot on the village roadsides seemed like sophisticated criminal activity.

Every month, Miguel Ángel Tobar crossed the border, which was only a few miles from his house. He walked across hills and fields, crossed a river, and would buy two, three, or five ounces of marijuana. He smoked a bit with his ganyeros and then let them sell the rest to divide the meager profits among themselves.

Miguel Ángel Tobar, a faithful soldier of MS-13, understood that you shouldn’t destroy your own home. But he prompted MS-13 to destroy it all the same.

The ganyeros stood guard for him. They watched out for him at night. They took turns as lookouts on the corner of the dirt alleyway that led to his home. They called him if something came up. Once, after a ganyero yelled for him, Miguel Ángel Tobar had to come out of his house with a shotgun to scare away some strangers.

Miguel Ángel Tobar knew that to get to him, his killers would need to get past his faithful ganyeros. And then they would have to confront him directly, confront the man who had earned his name as a killer among killers. Which is why he only ventured out when he needed to: one day he’d do work in the fields and earn five bucks; another day he’d haul some pot over the border; another day he’d hold up a shipping truck.

Friday, November 21, 2014, Miguel Ángel Tobar decided to leave Las Pozas for a very particular reason. Born three months earlier, his second daughter needed a name. Up until that point, he’d simply called her niñita—little girl.

At noon that day Miguel Ángel Tobar rode his bike out of the village, following a series of dirt paths until, a half hour later, he reached San Lorenzo. He came into town from the back way, by Portillo Road—a dusty two-lane road that ends at the Chalchuapa River, the dividing line between El Salvador and Guatemala.

San Lorenzo was the exception in El Salvador. Was. No longer is. In 2013, there was not a single murder in the town. Not one. Up until November 21, 2014, when Miguel Ángel Tobar decided to slip away from Las Pozas to give a name to his daughter, there still hadn’t been a homicide in San Lorenzo. Two years without a violent death.

Miguel Ángel Tobar walked into city hall, right in the central square. An old street sweeper saw him enter. So did an old woman who collects city bus fare at the station. So did a mototaxi driver lounging in his tuk tuk. All three witnesses remember thinking he looked nervous, that he walked quickly, that his eyes darted every whichaway. That’s how they remember the Hollywood Kid walking into city hall.

He left an hour later. It was almost two in the afternoon.

He had given his daughter a name. Jéssica. The same day her father legally recognized her, he would also leave her fatherless.

Miguel Ángel Tobar didn’t stop to talk to anybody. He got on his bike and started heading home. Rode three blocks. Got back on Portillo Road. And saw a mototaxi approach.

Night. Miguel Ángel Tobar was murdered seven hours ago. The blood that spilled out of his head lies thirty steps from his bicycle.

The police report: A mototaxi drove up with two male passengers, both fat, heads shaven, about forty years old. They attacked the victim. He abandoned his bicycle and ran. The first of six shots pierced his back. (The first red drops on the pavement appear one yard from the bicycle.) As the victim continued forward he was hit by two more bullets, one in the back of the head, behind his ear, the other in the ribs. He took another fifteen steps. (The blood drops are more abundant at this point.) He fell face down. He turned over to try to fight. The killers approached to fire three more shots. In the head and the chest. (The shells landed next to the puddle of blood, which was smeared, as if a wounded animal had tried to drag itself to safety.)

He fought.

The killers didn’t take off for the hills but went straight back out through San Lorenzo in their noisy tuk tuk—sounding like a sheet of metal dragged across the road by the wind. The whole scene took place fifty yards from a police post. The police arrived twenty minutes later. They didn’t pursue anyone.

At two in the afternoon, a hot November 21, 2014, in San Lorenzo, the state’s protected witness, known by the authorities as the Hare or Yogui, a thirty-one-year-old gang member responsible for putting forty-six members of the Mara Salvatrucha 13 behind bars, was shot to death.

On the slab, a tattoo—mi vida loca—read between splashes of Miguel Ángel’s blood.

Miguel Ángel Tobar, the Kid of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha clique, had fulfilled his own prophecy by getting murdered.