January 2, 2012. As he taps away with two fingers on his old computer, Detective Gil Pineda tries not to melt inside his office in the small Salvadoran town of El Refugio.
In El Salvador, it’s a pure formality to call winter winter and summer summer. The only two actual seasons are heat with rain and heat.
The detective has more than fifteen years’ experience. He’s around forty-five years old and has that mature firmness you acquire as the years tick by, before old age withers it all away again. A man like that throws a punch delicately, moving his fist lightly, without even clenching his fingers, though it’s easy to imagine everything shattering to pieces with the force of that punch. A man like that laughs softly, never guffaws. “I don’t understand what the hype is with getting a guarantee. I see other officers desperately searching for a judge that’ll give them an arrest order. Every morning I tie my arrest orders to my feet,” he once told us, lifting his right leg up to show a perfectly laced boot.
He’s not tall. He’s not short. He has a full mustache. He likes to carry a comb in his back pocket and his hair is always combed to one side. The first two buttons of his shirt are undone. He was chief of the homicide unit in one of the most conflicted departments—La Libertad—where there’s a heavy MS-13 presence. He was also one of the police officers in charge of prison intelligence—the prisons that function as headquarters for gangsters. He wears a gold bracelet on his wrist and a gold chain around his neck. He smells of cologne. In a small holster he carries his 9mm Pietro Beretta.
The detective goes above and beyond in his work. He doesn’t just carry out orders and make arrests. He enjoys his job. It excites him to get someone to snitch on their own gang and spill their secrets. He gives his own money to those snitches when the state forgets or simply refuses, and he does so even after he’s literally beaten snitches into collaborating. One time the detective was talking about the Criminal, a face-tattooed member of the MS who he’d turned into an informant for the organized crime unit. How’d he get him to cooperate? “I only had to give it to him for a half hour,” the detective responded easily, drinking a beer and eating fish cooked in lime and salt at El Camarón Cervecero, a restaurant on the pier of La Libertad.
He’s a hardened man who, like almost everyone in his organization, skirts around the law from time to time in order to achieve his primary objective: destroying the gangs.
He’s obsessed with how gangs are able to reconfigure a teenager’s mind; that’s why he takes pictures of their eyes when they start working together, and later when he suspects they’ve already killed. He’s convinced that the expression in their eyes changes. “Look, look,” he says when he shows off his photograph collection. “Look at that gaze, see how they eye each other up and down? As if the other guy were an animal to be hunted down; see how each eyes the other, sizing him up.”
“I’ve detained some hundred assassins in my life,” the detective said later. This time we were in his dining room and he was eating fried chicken. “The majority were gangsters. I can tell whether a kid has killed or not. You can see it in him when he’s making his extortion rounds. At first he has a look that’s … I don’t know how to describe it, his eyebrows are in place, set straight across the face, and he has a normal look in his eyes, like a normal person, not like someone who’s trying to achieve a goal. With time, they get that darkened look with their eyebrows constantly arched, and that expression stays there, locked into place. I took pictures of the bichitos collecting extortion fees, and I took pictures later, too, once they’d already killed. See?” He used the term bichito, derived from bicho, bug, a common term to refer to gang members, but also sometimes to civilians. “Their gaze changes,” Pineda concluded. “The Kid never had a normal look. Ever since I met him, he had the eyes of a killer.”
Now it’s 2012, and Detective Pineda is overburdened, doing what he least enjoys: paperwork. Writing reports and drafting PowerPoint presentations so that his higher-ups or the prosecutors—mere office drudges, in his estimation—can understand the MS structure that he’s been researching over the last two and a half years.
The office he works out of doesn’t deserve to be called an office. It’s a dilapidated shack with a tile roof and brick walls that are thinly whitewashed or bare. In that shack there are three desks that look as if they’ve been salvaged from the street. One of them supports a desktop computer, with a huge noisy monitor and a half-broken keyboard. In the back there are rickety toilets that only flush by filling a white plastic bucket with water and emptying it in a toilet bowl scabbed over with dark splotches.
There’s one computer activity the detective enjoys: he likes to graph the gang structures. He collects pictures of the gang members and organizes them according to their rank within each clique. He shows off his results enthusiastically, the way a teenager might show off his World Cup or baseball cards.
“This is el Stranger,” he says, pointing to a picture of a dark-skinned, obese man.
José Guillermo Solito Escobar, el Stranger. In his thirties, second-in-command of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, recently got out of prison for aggravated assault.
“This is Liro Jocker,” he says, pointing to a picture of a bald and burly white man, the stereotype of a gangster.
Jorge Alberto González Navarrete, Liro Jocker. The nickname comes from a phonetic play, from Little to Liro. He’s a thirty-year-old man with skulls and crossbones tattooed all over his body, third-in-command of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha. He was deported from the United States after serving time for aggravated assault in June 2009 and, according to his deportation record, he used to be part of another MS clique in Maryland and was then known as Baby Yorker. The Kid would describe him as “a hard-ass bastard, a murderer.”
“This is the Maniac,” Pineda says, pointing to the picture of a skinny, hawk-nosed man wearing a button-up shirt. A man with a forgettable face; not someone you would cross the street to avoid.
Fredy Crespín Morán, the Maniac. Thirty-eight, an electrician by trade and treasurer of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha. He now works in public relations in the mayor’s office of Atiquizaya, which is controlled by the Arena party.
“And the king of clubs. This is Chepe Furia,” says the detective, pointing to the face of a dark-skinned man with prominent indigenous features, features he shares with those who were massacred in 1932.
José Antonio Terán, now nicknamed Chepe Furia. Forty-six years old, leader and founder of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha of the Mara Salvatrucha of Atiquizaya; ex-member of the Fulton Locos Salvatrucha of the San Fernando Valley, in California, where he was known as El Veneno, the Poison. And before that, a member of the fearsome National Police, the military police force, during the first years of the Salvadoran war. He migrated to escape the war he’d been fighting. Years later he returned to his homeland, branded with the letters he used to identify himself in the north: MS.
All of them were caught by Detective Pineda, and now face a jury trial for conspiracy and murder of a twenty-three-year-old informer named Samuel Menjívar Trejo—nickname Rambito—a vegetable vendor in the Atiquizaya market. Rambito was a lookout and aspiring member of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, but since 2008 he’d been collaborating with Pineda and the police. He helped complete Pineda’s deck of gangsters by telling him who was who in the lowest rungs of the gang.
One day at noon in 2009, two investigative officers of the subdelegation of Atiquizaya asked emergency service agents to go down to the market, pick up Rambito, and bring him back to the station. The agents followed orders. They went to the market and, in plain view of all the other vendors, transported Rambito back to the station. The officers, José Wilfredo Tejada Castaneda, homicide detective, and Walter Misael Hernández Hernández, detective of extortions and head of the antidrugs unit of Ahuachapán, arrived at the station and took Rambito away with them. But they didn’t sign the office log, not wanting to leave a sign of anything unusual.
The officers never returned Rambito, not to the market nor to the subdelegation office. But he was spotted that same afternoon, on his way back from buying two ropes, one blue and one green, and getting into the passenger side of a pickup truck. Chepe Furia was driving. In the back were Liro Jocker and el Stranger.
That night, in the western hamlet of Talpetate, some 120 miles from Atiquizaya, a passerby discovered Rambito’s body in a ditch by the side of the road. It bore marks of torture and the head and torso were riddled with bullet wounds. The autopsy found traces of gunpowder on the left cheek. He’d been shot from less than two feet away. His feet and hands were bound with one blue and one green rope.
Rambito’s death convinced Detective Pineda that to investigate the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha it was necessary to leave Atiquizaya, the “city”—though it’s more of a large town—where the subdelegation is located. The detective decided to relocate his entire team to a rural outpost in the municipality of El Refugio, a few miles away, a hamlet almost completely lost among coffee plantations.
The detective’s PowerPoint, which he runs for us on his prehistoric computer, shows photographs of more than forty gangsters from the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha. Rambito, a mere aspiring member of the clique, could never have given so many names. It’s not possible for a mere pawn in the game to tell all the king’s secrets. Rambito was an informant who divulged what little he knew, that’s why the police never granted him protected witness status. On the totem pole of snitches, he ranked very, very low.
“We have a witness,” the detective says, jerking his eyes and head toward the other side of the street. One of the clique’s heavy lifters, he says. A former trusted hitman for Chepe Furia.
When we ask whether we can talk to this witness, the detective wavers for a couple of seconds and frowns. He loses himself in his ancient computer, saying that he needs to check something over. Then he yells over to the other sergeant, Pozo.
“Sergeant, go get the Kid.”
In one of the shabbier neighborhoods on the outskirts of Atiquizaya, in the last months of 2009, a young man of twenty-seven was smoking his fifth crack rock of the day inside his house. The door to the house, really a shack, closes with a metal latch, but this time he’s left it ajar. The Kid is stressed. It’s not a good time in his life. Too many problems rolling around in his head. The Kid inhales a large mouthful of smoke. He hears the door clap open. He holds the smoke in his lungs, and then hears the clack of a gun. The Kid curls five fingers over the .40 he has strapped to one thigh and another five fingers around the .357 strapped to his other thigh.
“Hey, take it easy, I can see you’re armed,” the intruder says, holding his 9mm with both hands.
The Kid recognizes the calm voice. It’s Sergeant Pozo, from the investigative office of El Refugio.
“I’m completely stoned,” the Kid says.
“I just want to talk.”
“I’m totally blazed off this rock.”
“Fuck. So do you think we can talk?”
The sergeant holds his breath and decides to take his chances. He doesn’t move a muscle as he watches the Kid get up from his seat and turn towards him with the two guns drawn. The Kid, his gaze locked on the sergeant, walks out of the house. Without letting go of the weapons he climbs into the bed of the pickup and says: “Let’s roll.” The sergeant puts his gun away and, with his heart in his throat, drives down the lonely streets toward the investigative office of El Refugio—an armed hitman of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha at his back.
Sergeant Pozo has finally succeeded in getting the Kid, a big shot in Chepe Furia’s clique but besieged by some of the members of his own gang, to talk to the police about becoming a protected witness.
Like the majority of the officers and sergeants in the force, and especially the lower ranks, Sergeant Pozo lives in a neighborhood run by gangs. He may be a boss during the day, but at night he submits to the authority of the Mara Salvatrucha. This is one segment of the fine line between the state and the gangs in this minuscule country. In fact, the gangs are the state in some neighborhoods, counties, and villages.
Sergeant Pozo was assigned by Detective Pineda to flip the Kid. For a job like this, walking the dusty streets trying to convince an MS assassin into coming over to the other side, Sergeant Pozo earns $604.96 a month (the currency in El Salvador is the US dollar). The detective deployed other sergeants and officers to flip ranking gang members of the clique, but none of them were in the same kind of corner that the Kid found himself. This assassin had problems with other assassins. He’d seen a lot of blood spilled inside his own gang.
The Kid wasn’t scared of a confrontation with a cop. He’d come through them before. If he hadn’t found himself cornered, in a dead-end alleyway with his gang, the Kid would have spun around and Sergeant Pozo wouldn’t be with us anymore.
As Pineda would later put it, digging into a surf-and-turf in La Ola Beto’s in San Salvador: “The Kid’s a good shot. When he fires he hits the victim in the head.”
It’s not the first time that detectives have tried to get the Kid to collaborate. Pineda is expert at sowing discord in the adversary’s ranks and harvesting protected witnesses. More than once he’s threatened to leave suspected gang members in enemy territory, to test their claim that they’re not in a gang. He has video on his phone of a young kid denying that he was part of MS, and then later weeping during the interrogation. The detective threatened to send the video to other gang members. It’s a trick to extract information, names, and ranks. Thanks to his unorthodox methods he’s been able to piece together his puzzle. Since the end of 2009, he’s tried to get members to flip one by one. It wasn’t until he started suspecting that the Kid had been involved in the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl named Wendy, that he established a contact with someone close to the veteran Chepe Furia. He told Sergeant Pozo to do whatever he needed to get the Kid to talk. The sergeant’s offer was simple: you’re going to talk or we’re pinning the murder on you. Pozo had been harassing the Kid for a while at that point—finding him on the streets of Atiquizaya and pretending to arrest him, so they could talk.
Once, Sergeant Pozo had a patrol of seven soldiers and two police officers detain the Kid.
“You going to book me or not? Because I’m not carrying today,” the Kid said defiantly.
Sergeant Pozo kept his temper and explained to him that he wanted to help, but in order to do so he needed some help of his own. He told him he was going to charge him with crimes he hadn’t even been involved with, starting with this one that he only witnessed: the murder of sixteen-year-old Wendy. The Kid was able to wriggle out of the threat, but only by showing some of his own cards: he had a lot of secrets.
“Okay, yeah, fine, if you want to help me, help me,” the Kid said. “If not, you can book me now, or do what you want … ‘Cause if you want to know all of Eliú’s bullshit, the murder of that whore, the murder of that cop in the hall, who gave it to Wilman from the second floor of the house, the mototaxi drivers who had their brains oozing out, or the murder of Moncho Garrapata’s wife …”
After that, the Kid disappeared for a few weeks. When the sergeant tracked him down again, he still had only this one card to play. Accuse him of Wendy’s murder, and once he was up to his neck in court hearings, try to pin other murders on him. Threaten him with years in prison. And yet he knew that such a simple strategy wasn’t going to work with an assassin who’d had the kind of experiences the Kid had.
Luckily, a better opportunity arose.
The Kid and the Beast
2005. Fifteen years after the end of the war, western El Salvador: two gang members are shooting the breeze. Boasting of past adventures and their “hits,” as they call their kills.
Both belonged to Mara Salvatrucha 13, but were from separate cliques and families. One was known as El Chato, from the Park View Locos Salvatrucha, a clique formed in the 80s in LA’s MacArthur Park, on Park View Street. The second man was a twenty-one-year-old member of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, the brother clique established a few miles from Park View during the same turbulent decade. This was the Kid.
El Chato wanted to show off. He took out his phone and brought up a photo of a dead man. The Kid looked at it awhile, lifting the phone close to his face, and congratulated Chato.
“Shit, that dude got it fucking bad,” the Kid said.
“See. That’s how the Parvis leave their hits,” Chato said, mangling the name of the Park View clique.
“Who was it?”
“Some bicha,” Chato said, using the derogatory word for girl that they use to refer to their rivals. Bicha or caca, shit.
The two men said goodbye, and each went his own way. Afterward, the Kid knew that the Beast, the gang’s goddess of violence, had turned its back on him. More blood would have to flow.
The dead man in the photograph was his older brother.
Months earlier, the Kid heard that his brother had gone missing. He figured the Barrio 18 had killed him. It wouldn’t be unexpected for the kind of life his brother, a member of the Park View Locos Salvatrucha, had been leading. The Kid had started going almost daily to neighborhoods run by Barrio 18, taking on all the hits his clique was ordering. He killed some enemies, wounded some others—all with the conviction that he was avenging the murder of his brother. That’s why what he saw on Chato’s phone disturbed him so much. His fellow gang members had known. They’d been the ones to kill his brother. And still they let him risk his life confronting a deadly foe. They’d encouraged him, cheered him on, even gone with him. They loved the homicidal drive the death of a sibling had sparked in him. The Kid never imagined that his own gang, his brothers in arms, his homeboys—the Beast—could do this terrible thing.
His brother was known as El Cheje, an old word for woodpecker. He’d worked as a prison guard, ice cream vendor, and carpenter. Unlike the Kid, who was jumped into the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha de Atiquizaya, he joined up with the Park View of Ahuachapán in the capital of the Ahuachapán Department.
But El Cheje made a very grave mistake. He killed another MS member. According to gang rules, his own death was thereby justified. The homeboy that El Cheje killed had robbed and threatened their mother, so El Cheje hunted him down and shot him dead. But he didn’t just kill this homeboy. He also killed the homeboy’s mother. The homeboy had bumped off his mom, so he did the same back, and worse. What the gang never knew was that El Cheje had carried out these killings along with his little brother, the Kid.
As time went by, the pair thought their revenge killing had become a thing of the past. That they had done it right, that nobody had found out, that their murder was lost among the coffee trees, lost in the dust of western El Salvador along with all the other anonymous corpses. But they were wrong.
The gang is like a gossip chain, deeds flying mouth to mouth. Somehow, a few members of the Park View Locos Salvatrucha had found out what El Cheje did.
When El Chato showed the Kid the photo of his dead brother, he didn’t know they were related. He thought he was impressing a homeboy from another clique. Nothing more. Thanks to the same gossip chain, it didn’t take El Chato long to realize that the photo he’d shown the Kid was his brother. El Chato saw what a blunder he’d made.
In the gangs’ world, these kinds of mistakes have a simple solution—you fix them with death. This could have cost Park View a war with Hollywood. Better to preempt the war and kill the person who was wronged.
A few months after that day in 2005, Chato invited the Kid on a mission. He told him that he’d found an enemy from Barrio 18. He told the Kid not to bother bringing a gun, because they had everything prepared. The Kid accepted.
They were trying to “walk” the Kid. To walk in gang slang means to trick a victim into going somewhere he’ll get murdered. “We’re going up to the mountains.” “We’re gonna get high in a homeboy’s house.” “We’re going to pick up some women.”
The Kid accepted.
Rather than orchestrated by the whole clique, the Kid’s murder was the idea of the same gang members who’d killed El Cheje and were now trying to clean up any evidence of their transgression. There were four of them: El Chato, El Zarco, and El Coco from Park View, plus Fly from Hollywood.
The Kid and El Chato walked toward territory controlled by Barrio 18. Supposedly they were looking for an enemy, supposedly the Kid wasn’t armed. Both suppositions were wrong.
“This is where the bicha Cheje got it,” El Chato said. “If you’re indebted to the Beast you don’t walk out of here.” He was announcing the death of the Kid, maybe even confessing to the death of El Cheje. El Chato wanted to repeat his trick: leave an MS body in Barrio 18 territory. Problem solved.
The Kid responded with his typical enigmatic gang wisdom.
“Nah, if the Beast takes a liking to you, she keeps you tight. And if she doesn’t love you, then nothing. Because when she taps you, it don’t matter if you hide. And when she don’t tap you, it don’t matter what you try.”
“Right on, homeboy,” El Chato said—a form of amen. They kept walking. And then El Chato made a call.
The Kid has euphemisms for everything. If he kills someone and dumps him in a well, he’s sent him to get a drink. If he buries someone, dead or alive, in some field, he’s sent him to count stars. If he shoots someone on a lightning mission, he’s detonated him. While death may be simple for most of us, it has many shades for the Kid. It’s like the Inuit with their many different words for snow. When the Kid tells stories of hits, he makes a shooting sound, plosive and strong, with his lips: Pop. Pop.
“Hey, get the pot ready,” El Chato said into the phone. “I got a chicken for you.”
Pop. Pop.
The Kid shot him twice in the face. One bullet entered right above his brow, at the end swirl of the Gothic “S” that El Chato had tattooed on his face. Pop. Pop. Two more shots to finish him off. And then he ran.
The Kid jumped on a bus.
“Listen, no more stops till I get off,” the Kid told the driver. “And give me five bucks.” He waved the 9mm around, terrifying the driver and the dozen or so passengers.
The Kid reported back that El Chato had been killed by Barrio 18 in an ambush. El Chato’s ruse to trap the Kid actually gave credence to his story. He went back to his clique and, the next day, signed up for another hit on the Eighteens. This one was billed as avenging El Chato. You need to take a cover story all the way.
A couple of days later, it was Fly’s turn. The only member of the Hollywood clique who participated in Cheje’s murder.
Fly had tried to distance himself from the gang. He got a job as a private security guard, joining that army of men with 12-gauge shotguns who stand guard over almost every business in the country. It was five in the morning, and he was boarding a bus after his shift.
“Hey, homeboy,” Fly heard someone call. He turned around.
Pop. Pop.
Just like for El Chato—two shots to the face. Just like they’d done to his brother. This time the Kid used a .45. High caliber for a pistol. Point-blank.
For El Zarco it was the same—waiting for a bus when two shots ripped through his skull.
And so began the Kid’s troubles with the Mara Salvatrucha 13. Although he committed these murders in secret, people put the pieces together. They started whispering.
Things started to change. Suspicion, increased friction. The Beast the Kid had been running after started running after him.
This was the beginning of his battle to the death with his own gang, his fight with the letters that he once would have murdered for. After more than a decade of being its teeth, the Kid had become its prey. But this came at the end of his affiliation with various gangs. At the beginning there were other gangs that are now forgotten, having been overshadowed, finally, by the M and the S.