March 24, 1980, 6 p.m.: a young man, tall and bearded, drove a red Volkswagen coupe to the chapel of a cancer hospital in the middle-class neighborhood of Miramonte, in the capital of El Salvador. Beside him was a sniper rifle loaded with an explosive .22-caliber bullet that would change Salvadoran history.
There were combatants in the country before 1980. The guerrilla forces had grown and were training both inside and outside of the country by the late 1970s. But, apart from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) led by Commander Cayetano Carpio, which at the time was the most powerful guerrilla group on the continent, they weren’t well organized. The other guerrilla groups were made up of university students, poets, intellectuals, and unaffiliated but enthusiastic and romantic revolutionary youth. They lacked both determination and maturity.
The government wasn’t a homogeneous bloc, either. The large landowners and the industrial elite felt vulnerable before the masses and their revolutionary ideas, which halted production every other week with strikes and street blockades. They’d stopped trusting the military, and the international policing of the US president, Jimmy Carter, appeared to this privileged minority little better than a communist force.
Only one figure had gained the unanimous respect of the military, the plantation owners, the industrialists, and the politicians: General José Alberto “Chele” Medrano. He was an old-school military man, a coarse and violent bully. Everything that was expected of a Salvadoran man. As chief of the National Guard, Medrano had won great prestige commanding the 1969 invasion of Honduras, part of a series of border skirmishes between the two countries that lasted barely 100 hours, which was later dubbed the Soccer War by journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. The incident that set off the war between neighbors whose relations had long been tense, with the mass expulsion of Salvadorans from Honduras, was the series of qualifying matches for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. El Salvador won two out of three against Honduras and entered the World Cup for the first time in history (failing to score a single goal).
The National Guard in those years was not unlike the gestapo in Nazi Germany. The institution was created in 1912 to pool the state forces and, from that moment on, they were feared throughout the country. They were a full-fledged military police force and, though the government soon formed the National Police, as well as the even more formidable Plantation Police, the National Guard continued to be a symbol of unchecked power across El Salvador. When the tensions between Honduras and El Salvador climaxed in 1969, it was General Chele Medrano who took charge. Financed by gold secretly collected by coffee growers, he traveled incognito to Europe to buy anti-aircraft batteries, modern rifles, and grenades for use against the Honduran army. The clashes, however, were inconclusive. The Salvadoran army killed more cows than people, and the troops devoted themselves to looting and destroying Honduran plantations throughout the operation. It was a war of the wretched. Like two malnourished boxers trying to hurt each other, but too weak to score a KO.
No one cared. The pyrrhic nature of the invasion didn’t temper the pomp and circumstance with which General Chele Medrano and his national guardsmen were received in San Salvador after the Organization of American States, like a mother scolding her children, put an end to the offensive with the stroke of a pen. The general led the parade, armed, uniformed, and riding atop a black mule. In honor of him and his men, the street they marched on—one of the most important thoroughfares in the capital—was rechristened with the name it still bears: Boulevard of the Heroes.
From that day on, Medrano was known as the strong face of the military and the great protector of the coffee plantations. It was he who modernized the state’s rule book of repression, becoming the primary shield against the counterinsurgency. The National Guard and police already knew how to torture. They’d employed torture for decades to subdue the masses who’d been pushed by poverty to commit petty crime. They were experts in squeezing outlaws, murderers, and thieves. Their methods of choice were hard kicks, hoods dipped in calcium oxide pressed against the face and, of course, the fearsome pail of water hung from the testicles.
But these methods would be inadequate against the insurgent groups of the 1970s. General Medrano knew it. He’d studied military tactics, and had learned a few tricks in the United States and Asia.
He can be credited with founding El Salvador’s first serious military intelligence service, the National Security Agency of El Salvador (ANSESAL), as well as with building a network of informant campesinos, known as the ears of the military—the Democratic Nationalist Organization (ORDEN). To head ANSESAL he enlisted his right-hand man, a young officer who had traveled and fought with him in the inglorious war against the Hondurans, and whose intelligence and outsized capacity for violence set him apart from his peers. His name was Lieutenant Roberto d’Aubuisson.
Together they went to war on the incipient guerrilla fighters. Through the information gathered by ANSESAL, they located hundreds of organized campesinos, trade unionists, leftist thinkers, and community preachers—propagators of the liberation theology gaining ground all over Latin America. Leftists, union members, or church congregationists, as well as their leaders, would soon turn up dead, murdered in the street, beheaded, raped, sometimes with their throats clogged with the shit and piss they’d drowned in. Chele Medrano’s mission was, in the words of one guerrilla fighter: “To kill the baby in his cradle.” The baby symbolized the revolutionary process, and the killing was what it was. But that baby grew up, grabbed a rifle and headed for the mountains.
By March 1980, there was tenuous hope of a political truce. A group of young soldiers had carried out a coup the year before, bringing in a revolutionary junta made up of economists, doctors, politicians, and military officials. The archbishop of San Salvador, Monseñor Óscar Arnulfo Romero, told the masses to remain calm. The people had put their trust in this beloved archbishop, the man who accompanied them through their small villages and hamlets, and denounced state abuse from the pulpit of the Metropolitan Cathedral.
But El Salvador is a country of sharp turns. If it were a highway, it’d be full of switchbacks and rim-wrecking potholes. One of these unexpected swerves was made by General Medrano himself. He fell for a flower child—a rich and beautiful girl who, marijuana joint in hand, took leisurely drives around San Salvador in her convertible Mercedes. She was the daughter of a famous bandit of the 1930s, murdered by the regime of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the same triggerman who’d killed many of the indigenous rebels of the west. Her name was Miriam Interiano. The general delivered himself up to Miriam and her bohemian lifestyle, until he was killed by a guerrilla ambush in front of his house in San Salvador. And so the winding path of the fearsome general came to an end, even as his legacy lived on.
The responsibility of organizing a counterinsurgency fell on General Medrano’s gifted apprentice, Roberto d’Aubuisson. He gave up his military career when he was still a major, and, after the coup d’état and the establishment of the civic-military junta in 1979, became convinced that all this was part of a communist takeover plot. In fact, Major d’Aubuisson thought that almost everything, including some of the policies imposed by the United States, stank of communism. In his fevered mind, one figure in particular seemed to be nothing but a vile communist pawn: Archbishop Romero.
On March 24, 1980, the assassin’s bullet foreclosed all hope for a negotiated end to the sociopolitical conflict. Romero was shot as he raised the communion wafer over his head and proclaimed: “May this spilled blood and sacrificed body be the seeds of liberty.”
Afterwards, as a final seal to the declaration of war, in the middle of Romero’s funeral, state soldiers, without an ounce of mercy, attacked the thousands of mourners who had congregated in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral. Tensions peaked, war had begun. Salvadorans found themselves on the battlefield.
Just as the 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand sparked the First World War, the assassination of Monseñor Romero, ordered by the arch-conservative Roberto d’Aubuisson, sparked disaster in El Salvador. The guerrilla fighters left their differences behind and formed a new coalition: the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Meanwhile, the state, with the backing of the Reagan administration, imported more weapons and created five new elite battalions trained by US military experts. These were killing machines. Men that would make Rambo look like a wind-up toy.
The National Guard and the two police units would remain in control of intelligence work and political repression, but actual combat decisions would be made, for the first time, by the Salvadoran army.
The northern tip of the tiny country became a rear guard for the guerrillas. The central zones were disputed. Only the west, the troubled and bloody west, would be able to keep to the margins of the conflict. The social trauma of the indigenous massacre of the 1930s had left its mark on following generations. By 1980, El Salvador, left without a Monseñor Romero to attenuate the conflict and stem the killing, launched itself into total war—a vortex of violence that would take twelve years to escape.
In the early 1980s, the Mara Salvatrucha 13 was relying on its godfathers. Two hard-as-nails godfathers. From the perspective of thirty years later, it all seems strange and unlikely. The godfathers didn’t realize what they were creating, and they would be shocked to see the monster their child became. The first godfather was Ronald Reagan. The second, the 18th Street Gang, or Barrio 18.
In 1981, after a year of full-fledged war in El Salvador, Ronald Reagan became president of the United States. He was a hunk who had been famous in his youth for breaking hearts and manhandling cowboys in Warner Bros films of the 1930s and 40s. A Los Angeles native, he later became governor of rich and bountiful California. He brought the image of hard power back to the presidency. His predecessor, the Democrat Jimmy Carter, had been accused of being soft on the expansion of communism in Latin America. And so Reagan took the position of one of his characters, George Custer from Santa Fe Trail, and swept away the scum that was threatening the American lifestyle—both inside and outside of US borders. Central America was a special case. The US government lavished arms and military training on General Efraín Ríos Montt, the Guatemalan dictator accused of dozens of indigenous massacres. Despite Romero’s magnicide, the United States supported the Salvadoran military regime by sending arms and financing the creation, as already mentioned, of five elite battalions to combat the guerrilla. It was like flicking a cigarette into a field of dry grass. The war reached such an intensity that it sent thousands fleeing for safety, the majority heading to Los Angeles, increasing the large population of Salvadorans that had already escaped to the city by the end of the 1970s. New blood to fill out the ranks of the Mara Salvatrucha, new blood to feed the Beast.
The mass of refugees and deserters ran slap into the second pillar of Reagan’s domestic politics. “Drugs are enemy number one,” he repeatedly declared in his speeches. And the Drug War would zero in on California.
By 1982, the small Latino gangs selling drugs had become a government priority. To make matters worse, the 1984 Olympics held in Los Angeles were a means to, yet again, symbolically showcase the dispute between the world’s two great Cold War superpowers and to cleanse the streets of riffraff.
Hundreds of gang leaders and members were jailed. Entire gangs were dismantled. The complex ecosystem of gangs was upturned by the new antidrug strategy, and the Mara Salvatrucha Stoner—the rockers turned gangsters—took advantage of the power vacuum. Reagan gave them everything they needed to grow. He ensured a constant flow of new members from Central America and at the same time weakened their biggest enemies in California. With such a giving godfather, it was only a matter of time before the Beast matured.
From the beginning the MS were a lawless army. They crossed into enemy territory and took what they wanted, trusting in their machetes and the hatchets they hid in their baggy pants. They challenged everybody they crossed paths with. And day after day, more young deserters—either from the army or the guerrillas—would come running north to be received with open arms. They taught the LA kids new ways of lying in wait for enemies and ambushing them. They had battle experience and, unlike the other Chicano gangsters of the time, were as tough as they come. The counterinsurgency training that Reagan provided to the military ended up training future MS members as well.
But they didn’t understand the city. The complex war waged between Chicanos and Mexican Americans was a mystery to the newly arrived Salvadoran gangsters. The fight that did make sense was against the black gangs—the prodigious confederations of the Bloods and Crips. They understood that the Chicanos were fighting against the black gangs because they were different, and that was pretext enough for a festival of violence. And they understood why they, Central Americans arriving on already conquered territory, were attacked by the Chicanos. What they didn’t understand was why the Chicanos had been fighting among themselves, and then decided on a truce, and then fought again, and then made up—a frenzy of alliances and enmities that seemed chaotic from the outside. Like baseball and four corners, the struggle on the street was a secret that the city refused to spill to them. The Salvadorans remained in a category all their own—something between an actual California gang and a haphazard group of violent friends.
Anthropologist Abner Cohen cites an Arab proverb that neatly explains the gangs’ system of alliances and aggressions: “Me against my brother, my brother and me against our cousin, my cousin, my brother and me against the stranger.”
That’s how it was, and still is—the Chicano gangs violently fighting among themselves. And yet, when they were thrust into a penal system teeming with established black, white, and Asian gangs, they established a unified front that came to be known as Sur. But they needed guidance, and the guidance came from the Mexican Mafia. This group was formed by hand-picked gangsters from all the Chicano gangs of Southern California. It was a central committee, a gang of gangs inside the prisons. Hundreds of gangsters made up El Sur, but only a select crew of them became the Mexican Mafia, or La Eme (The M), as they’re known in the street by those who dare utter the name.
La Eme is structured as a prison gang, and its laws are promulgated in the prisons. Codes of conduct and rules, such as: Do not kill from inside a vehicle; do not attack a gangster while he’s with family; never turn down a fistfight; always wear blue, never red. Above all, obey La Eme. Do whatever it asks.
If a gangster doesn’t comply, La Eme makes the whole gang pay. If the offense is serious, it can even set off a “green light”—the street’s death penalty. From the moment a green light is given, all other gangs in the Sur system can go on the attack. Multiple gangs have been crushed by Sur’s molars after committing cardinal infringements of the laws.
Richard, an ex-gang member of Barrio 18, thinks back on his experience during the 1980s as he drinks a fresh-squeezed juice in the Trashcan, a popular eating hall in Dina, one of San Salvador’s most violent neighborhoods.
“When I got to Los Angeles, the first gang I ran into was MS, right around Lafayette Park,” Richard, now in his fifties, recalls. “But I didn’t like it. I don’t know … They were dirty drunks with shaved heads. They all had Black Sabbath and Metallica shirts on, and I just didn’t like it. ‘Hey, come with us, join up. We got your back here,’ they were telling me, but I didn’t like it. They were always high, smoking crack.”
Richard arrived in LA in the early ’80s, aged seventeen. He had been part of the Urban Commandos guerrilla unit, but the assassination of Romero, the intensification of the war, and the five battalions created by the Reagan administration scared him. He followed in the steps of his uncles and cousins and left for El Norte. Once in LA, he sought a new community, but was turned off by the MS gangsters. And then, soon, he found his new community. In the Shatto Park neighborhood, under a large oak tree that would cast a shadow over his life for more than twenty years, he found the homeboys of Barrio 18.