6
Tiny Wars
Gangs already existed in El Salvador in the 1980s. They occupied neighborhoods throughout Central America’s northern triangle. But the gangs were eclipsed by the region’s political-military conflicts. Adult problems overshadowing adolescent dramas. The passions of the present postponing thoughts of the future. Researchers who were in the region, major figures such as Jon Lee Anderson and Alma Guillermo Prieto, or the anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, didn’t document the existence of these troubled youths taking refuge from the war by forging cryptic and obscure personas. They weren’t the priority, which was understandable. Gangs weren’t killing people in those days, or causing too much trouble. They didn’t control large territories, barely holding a street corner, and their violence was negligible relative to the violence of war.
The first researchers who paid attention to these neighborhood groups—already technically gangs according to the 1920s sociologist Frederic Thrasher—were Wim Savenije, the former director of Flacso El Salvador, a Latin American social sciences institute; Miguel Cruz, a sociologist at the University of Florida; and Ellen Moodie, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They had woken up to the new type of identity being formed among youth in northern Central America.
These researchers noticed that the early gang members were young: adolescents averaging fifteen years old. They were forming small groups of very poor and troubled kids who were basically playing at war among themselves. These kids put meaning into their lives by forging rivalries. They lived to mess with each other and not get messed with back. They formed alliances. To define themselves they needed an Other, a hated competitor. There were hundreds of such disorganized, atomized mini-armies. Youths armed with bicycle chains, pipes, and machetes, whose names illustrated their rebel proclivities: La Mara AC/DC and their enemies La Mara No Se Dice (Can’t Be Said); in central San Salvador there were the Mara Morazán and Mara Chancleta (Sandal); in the Mejicanos neighborhood, the Mara Gallo (Rooster); and in the La Rábida neighborhood there was Dark Justice. There was also a long list of minor gangs that petered out. Small-time thieves and pickpockets, but mostly kids with little meaning in their lives beyond the antagonisms whipped up against other kids like themselves. I hate, therefore I am. Since the 1980s, El Salvador has been full of small dissident groups whose voices were drowned out by the political cacophony. It was like playing the bongos in the middle of a heavy metal concert.
These small gangs, overlooked by the majority of academics and researchers, were the soil in which the mighty MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs took root.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Salvadoran gang landscape was complex. To local tribes like Mara Gallo and Mara Morazán were added the student gangs that fought to control the center of San Salvador, lobbing rocks and staging knife fights in the name of the school emblems sewn onto their shirts. Students from the Technical Industrial Institute, for example, fought with students from the General Francisco Menéndez National Institute. Gaggles of teenagers dropped out of school to get revenge on other dropouts—spreading mayhem through the heart of the capital.
In the coffee-growing west, the end of the internal war left a lot of young people unemployed. Youth that grew up in the war were robbed of the chance to study or learn a trade. They had doctorates in violence, and they decided to keep on studying on their own. Many resisted laying down their weapons, and instead formed small collectives. The goal of these groups wasn’t to bring socialism to the country or to defend the homeland. They didn’t want to fight over ideas, but simply to fight for themselves. They robbed corner stores, held up trains, stole cattle, and kidnapped people. War had left them awash in weapons. Some of the guns came from Vietnam, passing through Cuba and Nicaragua. Others came directly from US manufacturers. Rifles, grenades, and machine guns originally streamed into the smallest country in Central America to defend political and economic ideas, and, failing to do so, fell into the hands of bandits who were fed up with fighting for others and hoping to win for themselves what the country had failed to give them: prosperity.
By 1992, Mara Salvatrucha 13 had become a feared gang in California. Though they were constantly under assault, they had seized a territory of their own. Almost two dozen cliques had organized themselves, in their own way, in Los Angeles—the mecca of Hispanic gangs. The media and the authorities hadn’t yet given MS-13 the notoriety they would in the twenty-first century, and if Twitter had been around, they wouldn’t have elicited a single presidential tweet.
And yet, in the underworld, they’d already made a name for themselves. Researcher Carlos García, who’s been studying the origins of MS-13 for close to a decade, explains that when the violence erupted in April of 1992, after the not-guilty verdict was announced for four of the five LAPD officers who beat up Rodney King, MS-13 members took advantage of the situation in an unexpected way. They waded into the chaos on the streets to join in with the attacks: MS-13 took up the fight against African Americans.
The Rodney King protests began close to MS territory, between Florence and Normandie. The latter of the two streets would give one of the most notorious cliques in all of the Americas its name. García explains that while the uprising began in the predominantly black, South Side neighborhoods, they quickly moved toward Koreatown, where MS-13 was based. The flame of indignation didn’t randomly wander there, but was fanned by the tension between Korean and African Americans, especially as it would play out in corner-store conflicts and the competition for jobs and housing. Black residents complained of discriminatory treatment and price gouging, and the Koreans complained of stick-ups and thefts.
A year before the uprising, a clerk in a Korean American–run convenience store shot Latasha Harlins, a fifteen-year-old black girl, in the back, for allegedly attempting to steal a bottle of orange juice. All that can be seen in the surveillance video is the clerk and Harlins arguing. Harlins throws a few punches. And then the clerk shoots her in the back. Along with the Rodney King verdict, the Harlins killing fueled the fires of racial tension.
The easy explanation is that the disturbance was between the offended black communities and the California justice system. But that’s too simple. It was an explosion, a pressure release, a carnival of ethnic violence. Various groups embittered with the state took to the streets. It was a free-for-all.
The fury of the black community was also directed toward Latinos. Some saw the Mexicans and Central Americans as invading their neighborhoods. MS-13 exploited the ethnic jockeying in an attempt to cozy up to Chicano gangs. As García explains: “MS took advantage of the situation by working against the blacks to gain points with the Mexican Mafia and definitively join the Sur system.” It was an interesting move for a gang that, even if it had carried the 13 on the end of its name for years, was still considered countrified—a pariah. MS-13 mobilized an ancient logic: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the Mexican Mafia bought it. The transformation of MS-13—from a group of stoners to an embrace of cholo culture under the Sureño umbrella—was formalized during the uprising. A year later, in 1993, in a Los Angeles park, MS-13 made an offering of money and arms. Ernest Chuco Castro, a member of the Varrio Nuevo Estrada gang, accepted the offering in the name of the Mexican Mafia. It was official: MS-13 was part of the Sur system. They had formally entered the big league of the gang world.
By 1992, the concept of large gangs had made its way to El Salvador. Academics who claim that gang structures arrived in Central America with the deportees are correct, without a doubt, but within that truth lies a whole spectrum of subtlety. To understand the rise of the mega-gangs in Central America, you need to look hard at the microhistories trapped in villages, hamlets, and barrios throughout the country. In some places, the arrival of the deportees was a kidney shot to the social structure. So many people were being returned that they often attracted the interest of whole cohorts of Salvadoran youth in the capital.
El Burro
In a bar in downtown San Salvador, twenty-two years after the arrival of the MS, gang veteran El Burro (the Donkey) has already put back ten beers. The jukebox blares out bachatas, reggaeton, and old romantic ballads. The racket clashes with the mariachi bands trying to earn a few dollars nearby. El Burro is spewing stories; the scruples he expressed at the beginning of the night have vanished along with the froth washing down his throat. He tells us that when he came back to the country, having been deported in 1991, he didn’t know that the United States was planning on deporting others just like him. Much less did he foresee that, sooner or later, he would run into old enemies from Barrio 18. One afternoon, as he walked alone and disoriented on the downtown streets, headed nowhere in particular, he saw a kid wearing Ben Davis overalls and a pair of Nike Cortez—both of which were unavailable in El Salvador at the time. They looked at each other for a few seconds. And then the other kid broke the silence.
“Hey, what’s up, dog? Who you roll with?”
“The Mara Salvatrucha 13, homie. You got a problem?”
“I’m Eighteen. What’s up?” And then the kid asked, in all sincerity: “So do we fight?”
Neither of them knew what to do—but they decided, at least for now, that what happened in California stayed in California. This is how a lot of the deportees came, unsure whether even their most intense hatreds should be relevant in the birth country that they hardly knew.
El Burro relates how, about a year later, he ran into another homie, an MS. They said hey to each other, hugged. El Burro asked if there were any more like him, and the other guy stared, surprised. He said there were a ton of them, and more were coming every day. El Burro stopped feeling so alone, and, little by little, his sense of belonging came back. Not of belonging to a country, but to a gang. Soon after hooking back up with other MS deportees, most of them old friends, he was inspired to start a little clique of his own. They baptized it with a name that he prefers not to make public, and soon started recruiting local youth. “It was the easiest thing in the world. In two months I worked up an entire clique in the hood,” he remembers. After jumping them in for thirteen seconds, as he’d learned to do in California, El Burro tattooed them on their necks, chests, and arms with the two letters, followed by the number 13.
X
On the other side of the country, in the same years that El Burro had returned to El Salvador, a young man was trying to get through public high school in Sonsonate, a town close to Atiquizaya. That young man, now forty-six, is one of the oldest members of the Mara Salvatrucha. He was part of the first generation of recruits, those who were jumped in by the first wave of deportees, those who heard stories of Los Angeles straight from its protagonists. Now he is on the run from his own gang. After years of leadership, even standing as the national leader in El Salvador, he’s now beleagered by death threats after his fellow leaders started suspecting, without good reason, that he was about to squeal. All because he wanted to step away from criminal activity after fifteen years in a maximum-security prison. He wanted to be with his family, whom he was only able to see during prison visits for all those years. It’s 2017, and the man is speaking from inside a detention facility in Texas, Men’s Unit Three. This is where noncitizens go after serving their time and before getting deported. His only condition for talking with us was that we didn’t use his name. We’ll refer to him as X.
X saw the arrival of the deportees from a different perspective than El Burro. He didn’t have to wander the streets aimlessly, looking to find his way. He just witnessed the arrival of a new style, something that had never been seen in his town.
“I studied in the Haití school. I had a friend, Francisco, we called him Minister, and one day he just split for California. Back then I wanted to be a doctor. The next year, when school would let out I would always see this guy with a shaved head and rumpled clothes, Ben Davis clothes, Cortez shoes, tattoos on one of his arms. He’d been deported. ‘What’s up?’ he said to me one day. ‘What’s up, Minister?’ I said back to him. ‘That’s not me anymore. Now I’m Shy Boy de Fulton.’”
And with that, Shy Boy shook the spray can he was holding and started tagging the school. It was the first graffito the city ever saw and took the shape of two square blocks. One with a Y shape in the middle to turn it into an M, and the other with two vertical lines, to turn it into an S. MS-13 Shy Boy FLS N (Fulton Locos Salvatrucha, and N for the north side of LA). Immediately afterward, as X remembers, Shy Boy hit play on a handheld recorder and “danced hip-hop.” In reality, however, Shy Boy was playing a song from the group Tavares, a quintet of Cape Verdean-American brothers with a penchant for sequins. They played disco music, landed a couple hits in the ’70s, and scored the Charlie’s Angels film. Ralph, Pooch, Chubby, Butch, and Tiny performed slow, choreographed dance numbers. And yet, for some reason, Shy Boy found the music cool almost two decades after it had peaked and danced to it in the suffocating heat of Sonsonate. Shy Boy danced as well as he could. Watching him shake and slide in his bright white Nike Cortez, X and his classmates thought it was awesome.
From that moment on X divided his days into three parts. In the mornings, it was school; after classes it was dancing with Shy Boy and listening to stories about LA; and then it was off to work in the brick factory.
“In the afternoons, a bunch of us would be at Shy Boy’s learning to dance. Girls came around. I liked one of them, La Bambi, they called her.”
X thinks back to what drew him to those meetings at a time when there were no criminals or violence. It was just dancing, girls, and clothes. The biggest and most violent gang in the world didn’t show up in El Salvador armed and menacing. It arrived in the form of young men dancing to what they thought was hip-hop on sidewalks hot enough to cook an egg.
The early gestation of the gang was the result of a bad decision by US authorities, who thought they could solve a problem by expelling it. They thought they were spitting out the window, but they were spitting straight up into the sky. Years later their policies would come back and splatter on them when the deported gang members returned and took over neighborhoods in New York, Virginia, Maryland, and Houston. But before this, when they had just arrived in El Salvador, the gangs swelled up with all the quickness and fury of a puffer fish, and for the same reason—so as not to be swallowed. Chewed up by poverty, by abandonment, by violence. They puffed themselves up to survive. Increased their numbers to fight back. It wasn’t hard. The authorities didn’t pay much attention. This war was just getting started as another twelve-year war was ending.
A year went by, and Shy Boy found company in deported young men like himself, who’d barely gotten to know the United States before they were sent back to their battered country. El Chino de Hollywood showed up, El Vago de Hollywood, El Horse de Fulton. The little group was expanding like a balloon.
In 1993, Shy Boy decided to start a clique. That was how things used to work. In between dances, a deportee just rolled up with an idea. Shy Boy, El Chino, El Vago, and El Horse started jumping in other kids. Today, there’s a whole system of permission and loyalty checks you need to go through. Today, in order to join up, you need to kill someone and be jumped in for thirteen seconds. After initiation, you become part of the most murderous gang on the planet. Back then it was just the thirteen-second ritual of courage, and what you were joining seemed like a social club for disaffected youth.
“After you got jumped in, you could show up whenever you wanted to dance and hang out at Shy Boy’s,” X explains. “If you weren’t jumped in, you could only come on Tuesdays. I even remember we won a contest dancing ‘El Sapito’ on Variedades del Seis. We won three hundred bolas,” or about thirty-five dollars.
“El Baile del Sapito,” the Toad Dance, was a popular song by the 1990s Salvadoran band, Bongo. The video, recorded at the site of various monuments throughout the country, shows four men and four women jumping and holding their hands up like someone who has a pistol pointed at them. The dance with its toddler-like simplicity was all the rage among working-class teenagers at the time. Variedades del Seis was a dance show that aired on Saturdays. Hardly anyone these days remembers the relationship between “El Baile del Sapito” and one of the foundational cliques of the Mara Salvatrucha 13.
In 1994 the clique was rechristened the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, for a simple reason: little by little El Chino was taking over the leadership, and in California El Chino had belonged to the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha. At the time, the clique had been operating out of the central park in Sonsonate. That was where they met up, and the shadow of anyone from Barrio 18 was already something to watch out for. X says that back then, people who’d never been to the United States didn’t understand the rivalry. They only knew they needed to defend the park, not let the other side in, even if they looked almost identical. That was how it was. And it was fun.
One day, a few members of the original Hollywood clique, recently deported from California, showed up at the park. They took El Chino aside and told him the name would have to change, because most of the members hadn’t been jumped in California, and it was disrespectful to the deportees. They could keep the clique, but they had to call it something else.
El Chino called a mirin—a phonetically derived word for meeting. Mirin has become part of standard gang vocabulary throughout El Salvador; it’s a space where strategy is discussed, people are punished for mistakes, hits are assigned, and extortions planned. In 1994 Hollywood members in Sonsonate held a mirin to pick a new name for the clique. Brainstorming, someone mentioned that the bus fee collectors from the capital to Sonsonate call out, “San Cocos! Let’s go! San Cocos, vamos!” San Cocos was a sort of nickname for the city. They voted, and the clique became San Cocos Locos Salvatrucha.
More than two decades after Shy Boy’s first graffito, after “El Baile del Sapito” and the renaming of the clique, the San Cocos stand accused of murder, extortion, drug trafficking, and illicit association. They became famous in February of 2012 when they left five sacks in four locations of Sonsonate. Inside were the bodies of four men and one girl. The sacks were left in front of a courthouse, a police station, a military installation, and a jail. All the bodies bore signs of torture and asphyxiation. The unidentified girl was between thirteen and fifteen years old.
Some of the founders, like El Burro or Shy Boy, arrived already branded by gang life. And yet had they just been luckier, or been deported to another country, things would have turned out differently. Instead they found themselves in a country full of kids desperate for a less miserable life, kids like X, whose family story is classic. Two of X’s brothers are in gangs, as well as two nephews and various cousins. Deportees and working-class youth seemed destined for each other. The United States was sending out a key to a door in El Salvador. The door opened onto a war that, twenty-five years later, is still raging.
El Smurf
Some youngsters didn’t need to meet a deportee in person. It’s a small country, and rumors run quick as a fuse.
In San Miguel, historically the most violent region of the country, there were hardly any deported gang members. El Smurf, an ex-MS gang member, remembers that when he was barely in his teens, around the end of the civil war, the kids in San Miguel were talking up these big gangs. But it was all hearsay. They didn’t have a Shy Boy or a Burro. All they had was talk.
These kids hadn’t seen the gangs yet. They hadn’t seen the dances or the Ben Davis gear. And still, what they heard was enough to dazzle them.
A few deportees were returned to the region, but they kept their heads down. Eventually, El Smurf and his friends, students at one of the few private high schools in the region, decided to found their own clique. They wanted action and had no time to wait for deportees to come and set them up. About ten boys got together one day on an empty plot of land where, to the beat of early hip-hop and the scent of marijuana smoke, they decided that they were a cell of what would become the largest gang in the Americas.
It was that easy. El Smurf simply decided it was the right moment to found a clique. Spontaneity, of which little remains in today’s gang structure, was an elemental ingredient in the early days.
Now that they’d decided on establishing a clique, they just needed a name, something modern, something cool. They held their own mirin. One of the kids had a rap magazine from LA, which somewhat increased his status. With the wisdom gleaned from flipping through the magazine, he proposed: “Let’s call it Sailors. Imagine, we’re marineros, the boat is MS and we’re the marineros. ‘Cause that’s what Sailors means in English.”
A few of them liked the idea. Others not so much, but the next line of argument was convincing.
“Think of it, the word marineros begins with an M and ends with an S, you know, it’s like a code name.”
And so one of the most powerful cliques of the Mara Salvatrucha 13 was born in eastern El Salvador, the Sailors Locos Salvatrucha, with a number of important cells on the US East Coast. The FBI has listed it as one of its top targets for the last five consecutive years. Thanks to a number of high-profile killings in New York and Virginia, its notoriety has grown since 2017.
El Smurf himself seems a friendly, happy man. His family was always middle class, and after a few years astray with his MS-13 homeboys, he went with his father to live in the United States. He’s now a US citizen and teaches in a middle school.
Unlike most adolescents from the lowest rung of society who were taken in by the gangs, El Smurf always ate three times a day and always had shoes on his feet. But in those days the country offered very little, even to the middle class. If MS-13 was able to seduce kids with decent roofs over their heads, it’s because it didn’t seem like they were necessarily being drawn into criminality. It was a game at first, dangerous and childish, but just a game. Until, very quickly, it lost all its fun.
Twenty-three years after that day in the abandoned lot, as the bartenders of Bombshell—a swanky Houston bar—served beer and food to well-off Latinos, El Smurf admits that he misses the pace and chaos of those days. He says he came close to dying more than once, but, back then, giving your life for the gang and the clique made sense to him. It all seems very distant now.
“I never dreamed that the clique would become so huge and would spread so far. How could I? It started off with just a few of us. Just, well, to goof around, nothing more.”
At the end of our conversation El Smurf offers a curious fact. The very day the Sailors were born, they ran into a problem: their initials, SLS, already corresponded to another clique, the San Juanes Locos Salvatrucha (SLS). To get around this, Melqui, another one of the kids from the private high school, decided to add an extra letter. A W. Why? Because it was cool. Plus, in the magazine, he’d seen some rappers making a W symbol with their fingers and it seemed cool to be able to do the same thing to represent their clique. “SLSW” would soon be appearing on walls throughout the city, asserting the clique’s dominion.
Researchers and journalists insist that the W has to do with West Side, or the letter M flipped upside down, but they’re wrong. It was the brainwave of a group of kids flipping through a rap magazine, wanting to belong to something cool.
And so MS-13 entered El Salvador, clearing pathways through a thicket of violence, recruiting disaffected youth by promising them they could become part of the historical war against Barrio 18. MS landed in the country through deportees like El Burro, but its subsequent rise was owed to an idea that spread like wildfire from mouth to mouth.
In western El Salvador, too, there were already small gangs, more rural than their eastern counterparts. In the early 1990s, Atiquizaya had the Mara Gauchos Locos, the Meli Meli 33, and the first transnational gang in the region: UVAS (Unión de Vagos Asociados, or the Union of Associated Loafers). The UVAS established a presence in the capitals of Guatemala and Honduras with small cells which, over the years, eventually disappeared. It’s still possible, however, to find former UVAS members who tell their stories, digging up vague fragments, squeezing their memories.
In this part of the country, MS didn’t breeze in like a rumor, like dust blown on the wind. It arrived with a man of indigenous descent who was well versed in violence, a former soldier in the National Guard and an ex-member of the Fulton Locos Salvatrucha of the San Fernando Valley. In Atiquizaya and its environs, MS arrived in the shape of José Antonio Terán, also known as Chepe Furia.
Women
When you talk about gangs, you talk about men. This book is no exception. Our history of the Mara Salvatrucha 13 is mainly protagonized by men because more of them tell the stories and explain how the gangs function. And yet, when the Stoner cells were digging skulls out of graves and invoking the Beast, there were girls and women digging right alongside them. Later, women as well as men arrived in El Salvador in handcuffs and chains, stepping off the deportation flights into the unknown ordeals that awaited them.
When MS-13 conquered the South Side, the women changed their style, too. Their rock-and-roll–inspired clothes were ditched for overalls and American football jerseys. Their voluminous hairdos concealed blades to attack their enemies, and their pockets were stuffed with bags of pot and wads of cash. Maybe the young women didn’t jump into brawls as eagerly as the young men, but they played important roles in the development of the gang.
As the gangs took on elements of masculine Chicano and cholo culture, they also borrowed the idea of the ruca or jaina (terms for a Chicana girl or girlfriend). The sassy, aggressive woman who was comfortable in the clique and willing to stick a knife into an enemy was also seen as a protector and comforter, a mother, a self-sacrificing and neglected lover. In the gang’s formative years, its female members assumed the double role of warrior and comforter.
In the 1980s, a few female members in LA stood out, more than their male counterparts, as capable gang administrators. Their success came from the fact that they were not only willing to resort to violence, but also understood restraint. They knew when a gentle threat was more effective than grabbing somebody by the balls. And, even if they never acquired the same status as men, they rose up in the ranks. Some more than others.
And then the gangs arrived in El Salvador. They melded with other groups, smaller gangs and crews, and returned to a mindset that relegated women to the status of a thing or an animal. The image of the beautiful chola with a teased hairdo and lips painted dark red, a .38 revolver hidden between her breasts, was a California image. For the Salvadoran gang member it was a legend, like the story of the Amazons.
Though there are more women than men in the wider gang structures of El Salvador, over at least the last ten years women have lost the ability to found new cliques. The only accepted roles for women are those without a voice and without a vote, without even the ability to participate in the mirins.
Apart from the idealized figure of the mother, male gang members see women as an adulteration of the purity of the gang. In their worldview, mothers alone merit the dignity of devotion. Otherwise, women only get in the way of a gangster’s total devotion to the mara.
Medea (not her real name), one of the first women to join the MS-13 in El Salvador, benefitted from the Angelino ethic that still prevailed in the 1990s. She was one of many new gang members in Quezaltepeque, a rare metropolitan area in this mostly rural country. But Medea also saw that ethic change. As the gang’s culture became more Salvadoran, female roles within the clique went up in smoke. Medea went from being someone to being someone’s property.
A few years ago, Medea was violently raped by members of her own clique. Homies from another clique were also invited to rape her. Recently, while eating at a Pollo Campero (a popular Salvadoran fried chicken joint) in a mall in San Salvador, we told her that one of the men who raped her had been gunned down by police in what the authorities had tried to pass off as a two-sided confrontation on a coffee farm. When she learned of the murder, Medea said, “Listen, I hate them. I’m not in it because I want to be. At first, sure, but now it’s only because I have to. I hate them.”
We reminded her that, at one point, they were her homies.
“Yep. But after all they did to me, not anymore. I like it when they get killed. I give thanks to God when they kill each other.”
Within the gang, women are rejected as probable traitors who you’re not only allowed, but encouraged, to avoid.
One young male explained why cliques kill so many of their own women: “Look, there’s no gangster who hasn’t been betrayed by a woman at least once.”
He continued: “The thing is, women are treacherous, they’re destructive.” And he was talking from the perspective of a gang with members such as the Hollywood Kid—traitors working with the police to put fellow gang members behind bars.
Chepe Furia was a powerful man in both Atiquizaya and the surrounding areas. The gangster who would turn Miguel Ángel Tobar into the Hollywood Kid slowly gained control over many of the institutions of western El Salvador: the mayor’s office, garbage collection, three MS-13 cliques, some policemen and judges and even, as we’ll see, the power grid.
Two stories testify to the man’s power. The first involves a cowardly congressman.
The congressman accepted to be interviewed in early 2012, but he laid down some ground rules first. Too many rules, perhaps, for a man who moves through life with two bodyguards, who is an elected representative of the Ahuachapán department, endowed with the awesome power to write new laws for the department’s 350,000 inhabitants. These were his rules: don’t reveal my name, don’t reveal the exact location of the interview (not even the city), and don’t reveal my political party. Only then did the congressman agree to talk about Chepe Furia.
On the agreed day, we marched behind the congressman into his party’s office. Inside were seven other people, suffocating in the heat and pretending to be busy. One of them, on seeing the congressman, hunched with furrowed brow over a sheet of paper on the table in front of him. The paper was blank. The congressman told them to leave the room, that he didn’t want any of them there. In little more than a minute, the room was empty. The congressman closed the large metal doors to the street, then locked them. He opened a small window-grate, and one of his bodyguards poked his head in, ready to heed his boss’s order: “Stay at the door until further notice.”
Finally, the congressman sat down and said:
“Alright, what do you want to know about Chepe Furia?”
Hesitantly, he outlined a rough sketch. He said the gang leader had friends in customs, the prosecutor’s office, the mayor’s office, the courtrooms, and the police force. He said things that even the courtroom janitors knew by then. In fact, the most revealing statement had come before the congressman said anything at all. The room vacated, the heavy doors locked, the bodyguard patrolling the street outside: a national representative who thought it necessary to hide his own name just to whisper the name of Chepe Furia.
“I mean, we’re not talking about just any delinquent, this is a mobster with eyes and ears planted all over the state. And, you know, I won’t always be a public servant,” he said, trying to justify himself.
The second story that showcases Chepe Furia’s power concerns his first battle with Detective Pineda. Once again, it’s necessary to start by skipping ahead: Chepe Furia won that battle.
It had been seven months since the detective had reeled in his first star traitor, the Hollywood Kid. Over several long interviews, the Kid had told the detective and his investigators the secrets behind his clique and the man who’d created it.
This was a complicated exchange. The detective knew he couldn’t leave the Kid locked away in the police outpost of Atiquizaya. It had only been a year since the two sergeants, from that same office, had detained Rambito shortly before he turned up tortured and dead in a ditch. The sergeants accused of delivering Rambito to his enemies had not yet been charged, but the detective, thanks to information given to him by the Kid, already knew who they were. Pineda didn’t even want to think about how easy it would be for Chepe Furia to have the Kid assassinated. Who would stand guard at the outpost of Atiquizaya? Chepe Furia’s little rats? And keeping the Kid in the dingy outpost of El Refugio wasn’t an option, either. There was simply no space. The Kid would have had to sleep outside like a dog, next to the perpetually clogged toilets. Adding to the complication, the Kid had demanded two things in exchange for his cooperation. First, permission to smoke pot. If they wanted his secrets, they had to let him roll his joints. Obviously, this would have been hard to manage if he was living in the police outpost. The second demand was even more challenging. At twenty-seven years old, the Kid had hooked up with a girl of fourteen. He wanted her with him, no matter what the law said. The Kid’s demands were impossible to fulfill in a state-run safe house typically shared by gang members, ex-gang members, petty delinquents, innocent witnesses, and victims. It’s a microcosm of the country, where no one feels at ease. One can stay alive, sure; but feel comfortable or secure, no. The Salvadoran police say that many of their witnesses renege on the deal after going to one of these houses and realizing that the state’s offer means living there for months on end, perhaps years, as long as the process lasts. One investigative police officer said that some gang members prefer to face a criminal trial over staying in these houses.
On one side, the detective faced the corrupt police force of Atiquizaya; on the other, the demands of an MS-13 hitman.
But the detective, who double-knots his boots every morning, could deal with the Kid’s legally dubious demands. And he felt confident enough to outsmart corrupt officers. He did both things. He convinced the relevant authorities to give the Kid the title of plea-bargain witness, a delinquent whose crimes are pardoned on condition he testifies about the crimes of others. Pineda convinced his superiors that this wasn’t merely another low-rung gang member who could make their case for one, or two, or even five homicides. The Kid was the key to dismantling a clique of more than forty-five members who had infiltrated the highest state institutions. The detective’s maneuverings got results. Results that are to be expected in a country such as this: fifty dollars and a monthly basket of basic necessities. Four pounds of beans, two of rice, some packets of tomato sauce, salt, sugar, oil, packaged noodles, four rolls of toilet paper, two bars of soap, two toothbrushes, and one tube of toothpaste. That was it. One basket, once a month, for two people.
El Salvador’s National Victim and Witness Assistance Program, responsible for evaluating the situation of plea-bargain witnesses, also delivers their monthly rations. The police put in fifty dollars to cover rent for a single room on a plot measuring five square meters. The little shack stood right in front of the police outpost of El Refugio. In fact, the detective, if he looks away from his ancient computer, can see the tiny box of gray cement.
The detective had found an answer to his riddle. The Kid would remain in his sight. So long as he was in his own little hut, it was easy to ignore the fact that a girl lived with him and that he spent his evenings smoking the marijuana he grew on the same plot.
In that little room, on that barren lot, the Kid would live less than seven months before the detective decided that his case was ready, his deck of gang members was complete, and it was time to trap the king and all his subjects.
More than 500 police officers from several units around the country assembled at the Cavalry Regiment headquarters of San Juan Opico, more than an hour away from Atiquizaya, one October evening in 2010. Their orders were to conduct raids on seventy homes of the members of Chepe Furia’s clique. The task forces were bussed to the central park of Atiquizaya and dispersed. The city was under siege. The detective led over fifty agents to the San Antonio neighborhood. Among the operatives was Sergeant Tejada, one of the men who’d later stand accused of having handed over Rambito. They were after six separate targets, but the detective was focused on one, the capture of his king of spades, Chepe Furia.
Atiquizaya has little more than 30,000 inhabitants, many of its streets are paved with stones or left unpaved. Chepe Furia’s web of foot soldiers ran from the police force to the garbage collectors and extended far beyond the city. It was an enormous operation and many details slipped past the detective. At this juncture, they were unlikely to find the mobster in his house, asleep and unaware.
Almost as soon as the officers entered San Antonio, the electricity went out across the whole neighborhood, turning it into what seemed an abandoned ghost town. Maybe as a sort of cruel joke, the only gang member left in the area was of the lowest level, El Cuto, son of a tortilla vendor and one of the lookouts posted close to where Chepe Furia lived. The chief prosecutor of western El Salvador, Mario Martínez Jacobo, remembers that one of the few locals who hadn’t also fled told him that a car had come not ten minutes before and whisked away Chepe Furia.
A majority of the clique was soon captured in the surrounding neighborhoods—both low- and mid-level gang members. More than twenty-five were tried for eleven homicides, and more than thirty were accused of conspiracy, including, in absentia, Chepe Furia.
Having won this round, the boss disappeared from Atiquizaya for the next two months.
And yet he had such confidence in his network that at the end of that time, on December 24, 2010, a squad of soldiers doing a routine patrol in San Antonio spotted him along with his father, looking relaxed as ever. The two were greeting visitors outside Chepe Furia’s corner store, in front of the soccer field he’d had built.
As soon as he heard of the sighting, the detective got the interim judge of the specialized trial court of Santa Ana, some thirty minutes from Atiquizaya, to sign an arrest warrant, and drove to San Antonio to deliver it to the soldiers himself.
It was fortunate for the detective that this particular interim judge was in session. The presiding judge, Tomás Salinas, was on vacation and had already rejected evidence against Chepe Furia presented by the prosecutor’s office after the failed operation in San Antonio. Salinas had refused to order Chepe Furia’s arrest in his absence—even though, on November 24, his supervising organization, the Specialized Unit against Organized Crime, had urged him to do so, because there was sufficient proof to identify Chepe Furia as the leader of the gang.
Pineda recalls that Chepe Furia’s attorney “was pulling out her hair in rage,” and demanded to know why the order had been signed by the interim judge and not by Judge Tomás Salinas. Meanwhile, the wanted man himself peacefully watched the scene play out, casually perched on one of his store benches.
No doubt he knew that, though he had finally been caught by the man who’d been chasing him for years, he still had one more card to play.
But to play that card, he first had to go to prison. Chepe Furia, formerly known as El Veneno of the Fulton Locos Salvatrucha of the San Fernando Valley, asked to go to the Apanteos Prison. According to Salvadoran prison jargon—categorized by type of inmate—Apanteos prison is only for “civilians.” That is, any criminal not associated with either of the two major gangs—MS-13 and Barrio 18—including petty delinquents, robbers, murderers, kidnappers, rapists, and fraudsters.
One of the greatest failures of the Salvadoran government was handing the prisons over to the gangs. They gave up a space in which, by its very nature, the state is supposed to ensure that aggressors are both punished and rehabilitated. But politicians feared that the homies would end up slaughtering each other if they were all mixed together. Since 1999, when members of the Barrio 18 launched a grenade at members of the MS in a juvenile detention center, various local Salvadoran governments started carving prisons into jigsaw puzzles. These puzzles had a handful of pieces. The MS, the Barrio 18, La Raza (the largest “civilian” prison gang), los pesetas (men who were traitors to their own gangs), and Los Trasladados (another civilian prison gang). And then, around 2005, the Barrio 18 split in two, the Revolutionaries and the Sureños. Each side demanding their own space inside the jails.
These turf wars were fueled by dead bodies and government ignorance. Before the split, it was thanks to a massacre that the Barrio 18 secured a home of its own within the prison system. On August 18, 2004, in the Mariona prison, more than 400 gang members and thousands of civilians drew blood however they could: with machetes, sharpened scrap metal, knives, and Molotov cocktails. By the end, eight members of the Barrio 18 and twenty-four civilians had died. Three days later, the Eighteens were moved to their own prison.
In contrast, the MS very gradually acquired more turf. At first, during the ’90s, they were helpless against groups of civilians who ruled the jails like feudal lords. The MS were treated like lepers—beaten, humiliated, and raped. They were carted from one prison to another, from solitary confinement to high-security wings, all blocked off just for them. Their homeland never cared whether or not they returned from the United States, but the prisons had been waiting for them with open arms, and with the ugliest of intentions. Some of the national leaders of the MS got to know each other, frightened in their new, designated rooms, with their bones broken and their open wounds still fresh. Month after month, as more deportees became inmates, the MS prison population grew, gathered steam, and finally decided to rise up. During the ’90s they were isolated for their own protection, but, as of 2002, they were isolated to protect the rest of the prison population.
In early 2001, adult MS members were able to secure two sectors in the Apanteos prison. There were 150 MS scattered throughout the eight areas of the facility. The ones who’d been there longest started to throw wilas—messages written in code—to the MS members housed in the other areas. These messages were written in lime juice, which the recipient would read by holding a lighter underneath to make the words appear. The coded writing was perfected over the years. A gang member learned to read the third letter of a word, and then the second letter of the following three words, and then again the third letter, until a complete word or sentence was formed. These were usually orders.
X, the MS member who kicked off his gang career by dancing to Tavares under the Sonsonate sun, lived through those years. He became a pariah, isolated from the civilians. Terrified, he used to beg the guards to open a door for him, to let him out, because the guys from La Raza were after him with their paring knives.
He remembers the celebrities who passed through the prison—gang heroes. Their gang names are famous, while their “surnames” pay tribute to the places they were deported from: Colocho and Cola de Western, Diablito and Crook de Hollywood, Morro de Normandie, Skiny de Stoner, Flaco de Francis, Chory de Fulton.
“We’d throw each other wilas. We were scattered throughout the prison. We were sick of being raped, robbed, beaten down. The prison exploded. We were like one hundred fifty against four hundred civilians. When three civilians turned up dead, that’s when they brought us together into two sectors, sector three and sector six. For the first time we were all together. And so we started to organize,” X said from his hideout in Texas in 2017.
A gang that infiltrated a country, an international mafia that President Trump tweets about, a terrorist organization as defined by Salvadoran law, developed largely behind bars and thanks to thoughtless officials who reckoned it was a good idea to lock gang members up with their own.
There was no going back. There’s still no going back. Each gang has its prison, or at least its sector within a prison. In time Apanteos was left with only one sector for women linked to MS, while the rest of the sectors went on to house civilians.
In December 2010, when Chepe Furia refused to link up with his own in Apanteos Prison, it was ruled by Los Trasladados. These were a group of civilians who’d organized to defend against La Raza, and then went on to set their own fires.
Chepe Furia tried to be discreet, to go unnoticed, to pass for just another common prisoner in the civilian sector nine of Apanteos Prison. He failed.
The warden of Apanteos remembers how the day after the top boss arrived, three inmates asked to meet with him. They all had one question: “Do you know who you’ve just put in with the civilians?” One of the inmates answered: “Don Chepe, the greatest mobster in all the west.” Another described him as “leader of the clique of Atiquizaya, the leader of all organized crime.” The warden, realizing that someone would try to kill him, decided to move Chepe Furia to a sector known as La Isla, the Island, reserved for inmates whose lives are at risk.
Better to isolate him than have another lifeless body in a prison that had already rioted multiple times. In the common areas there weren’t eight, or three, or even two gangster leaders. There was one. And he was Miguel Ángel Navarro, thirty-five, known as the Animal. He was a rural thief from the coastal department of Sonsonate in western El Salvador. He’d been locked up for more than a decade and had racked up many more crimes while in prison. He’d earned his gang name because of his body, buffed by field-work, and his skill in hand-to-hand combat. One inmate, a fink who got his information by shining the shoes of members of Los Trasladados, said he once saw him rough up five inmates at once. Single-handed. That was the Animal.
The Animal didn’t like gangs. The warden knew this. That’s why the few MS members in Apanteos, or the relatives and collaborators of MS, were secluded in sector eight, shielded from death by walls and fences.
No one questioned the iron grip Los Trasladados had over Apanteos Prison. Not even the Mexican Zetas. In those days there was a Mexican inmate in his thirties, Enrique Jaramillo Aguilar, originally from Apatzingán, Michoacan. He was arrested after a brawl at a Salvadoran nightclub. The police found a surprise in his black, Guatemalan-plated SUV: a secret compartment opened by an electric switch. Inside the compartment was a Galil rifle, two M-16s, one 30.30 carbine, two shotguns, a revolver, a military flash grenade, and eleven cell phones. They originally convicted him of illegal weapons possession. Shortly after, a twenty-nine-year-old Salvadoran was watching the news and recognized the voice of the recently arrested Mexican. When his face flashed across the screen, her mind flooded with painful memories. She didn’t know Jaramillo’s real name, but she knew his alias: Omega, a member of the Zetas drug trafficking gang, which operated out of Reynosa in the northern Mexican border state of Tamaulipas.
That woman became a protected witness under the name “Grecia,” and was forced to leave her country after testifying. She said she had been a migrant. That she’d left El Salvador on April 13, 2009, headed for the United States. She went with a coyote (people smuggler) named Ovidio, who sold her to the Zetas in the state of Tabasco for $500. Grecia was raped for several months in a brothel in Reynosa called La Quebradita, run by a Zetas member named Omega. Grecia managed to escape during a military raid on the brothel and testified in Mexico, before returning to El Salvador. Jaramillo had also managed to escape. When the forensic investigators examined Grecia, they found a tattoo on her right calf: a butterfly perched on two branches. The branches formed the letter Z. She also had a vaginal infection and pelvic inflammatory disease. Grecia’s testimony ultimately lengthened Jaramillo’s sentence in Apanteos prison by landing him an additional trafficking conviction.
Well, not even Jaramillo, a member of los Zetas who walked around El Salvador armed to the teeth, could walk the walk in Apanteos. The prison warden remembers how he smugly called himself a Zeta, and even told some of Los Trasladados that he was planning a “tactical operation.” His insolence landed him in the hospital. Jaramillo never again claimed to be a Zeta, and maintained a low profile from then on.
Chepe Furia, the famous MS leader, had no chance of surviving in the Animal’s kingdom. The Island seemed like his safest bet.
But the Island, that small cell between sector eight and sector nine, was full of other shipwrecked men. Mostly leaders of La Raza who’d been threatened by Los Trasladados, and some leaders of La Mirada Locos 13, a gang that originated in La Mirada Avenue in Los Angeles and later resettled in La Presita, a neighborhood of the eastern town of San Miguel.
No one knows exactly what happened on the Island, but a few days after Chepe Furia’s transfer, he asked to see the warden. He said he had “issues of ego” with the other inmates on the Island, and admitted to being a member of the MS-13. The warden, a suspicious man with a military past, forced any gangsters who wanted to be interned with their fellows in sector eight to sign a document, formally recognizing their taca (gang name) and clique.
In the handwriting of the Hollywood Kid’s mentor, this document states: “Chepe Furia, Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha de Atiquizaya.”
Chepe Furia was transferred to sector eight. There were no heavyweights there; those were all in the Ciudad Barrios and Gotera prisons. Here there were active members mixed in with collaborators, relatives, and various menials working lower gang roles, mostly stakeout and surveillance jobs such as chequeos, paros, paros fijos, and postes. The gang has a vocabulary all its own.
Chepe Furia was, as the warden put it, “out of place” in sector eight. He did his best to keep a low profile. Maybe he knew his stay wouldn’t last long.
In December 2011, Judge Tomás Salinas returned from his vacation. Promptly, only thirty-eight days after the kingpin’s arrest, Judge Salinas held a posthearing review for Chepe Furia to see if he could await trial outside of jail. To succeed, the defense would have to prove that their client posed no flight risk, evidenced by having a good job, a stable family, or some other strong tie to the area. In the saturated Salvadoran prison system, where overcrowding exceeds 400 percent, it’s not a privilege to get bailed only a month into custody on remand, but rather a luxury reserved for select prisoners—presidents, congressional representatives, and millionaires.
Chepe Furia was granted this luxury.
According to the prosecutors and police detectives on the case, Judge Salinas vigorously defended Chepe Furia. After hearing the prosecution and defense, the judge argued that “just because the police and one plea-bargain witness” say so doesn’t make Chepe Furia the leader of a criminal organization. He also deployed a strange logic, one that seemed as improper for a judge as for a leader of a criminal organization. He expressed surprise that they would accuse him of conspiracy and not of homicide, because “to be a [gang] leader … one has to commit several murders.” At times, said a prosecutor, “the judge acted like another defense attorney for Chepe Furia.” In fact, Judge Salinas wrote in his opinion, “We cannot judge a person based on what the media says or what the prosecutors say.” Even Chepe Furia’s garbage disposal exploits were used as a point in his favor: “This person has a contractual agreement with the mayor’s office of Atiquizaya.” The judge, a specialist in organized crime, concluded that there was no reason to think José Antonio Terán would jump bail. He set a $25,000 bond (which Chepe Furia paid that same day with two mortgages) and told him to hand over his passport and visit the Atiquizaya police post every Friday, to sign in and make his presence known.
Chepe Furia, the man who escaped a 500-officer operation, the one who’d signed a document claiming gang membership in Apanteos prison, who’d made the Hollywood Kid a hitman, walked out the front door of the Santa Ana Court. A free man.
The following Friday, February 4, Chepe Furia didn’t check in at the Atiquizaya police post. He didn’t do it the following Friday either, nor any Friday afterward in 2011.
Chepe Furia had slipped the state’s grasp for the second time.
Chepe Furia’s second escape made clear what many already knew. He wasn’t a run-of-the-mill gangster. Hardened by war, educated on the streets of Los Angeles during the boom of the Sureño gangs, Chepe Furia returned to El Salvador as a new type of gang leader. A mobster, a master, a gangster with a brain.
That’s why, when Detective Pineda received a court order in March 2011, instructing him to recapture Chepe Furia, his first, exasperated thought was “Oh, fuck it.”
Judge Salinas didn’t only issue an order that its oversight agency, the Supreme Court’s Criminal Division, would later consider “completely wrong” because “the risk of escape was evident”; he also ignored dozens of people who claimed that Chepe Furia was a mobster mastermind and different from all other gang members. When Chepe Furia escaped for the second time, he’d already climbed to the top and established a small empire in western El Salvador. Before his arrest, he would breeze around the region in his gray car with polarized windows. The car wasn’t his, it belonged to Alex Iván Retana, better known as El Diablo. We’re not talking about a simple gangster here but an ex-prosecutor who is also a car thief who ran his own car repair business, which, according to the police investigation, he used as a front to sell cars stolen in Guatemala and El Salvador. The advantages of living on a border.
According to immigration officials, Chepe Furia also often traveled to Guatemala in 2010 in the car of the son of a former congressman named Mauricio Ascencio. The Ascencio family also had a used car business on the border. Ascensio was captured and indicted in 2013 as a member of the Texis Cartel, an organization heading the watch-list of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Chepe Furia was not only on the good side of judges like Salinas, but also rubbed elbows with ex-government and public officials. The mayor of Atiquizaya, of the right-wing Arena party, even sent a letter to the judge when Chepe Furia got out of prison. The letter said Chepe Furia worked in garbage collection and was known as a community leader in San Antonio (the place where the lights had gone out during the police operation to capture him).
Two lawyers familiar with his case aptly described him during that time. “He’s a gang member who defies the gang member prototype,” said a prosecutor named Rodolfo Delgado. “He’s the intellectual of the clique. He’s always been smart, and that’s helped him gain the trust of many people,” said another, René Martínez, the chief prosecutor for the entire department at the time of the operation. “He has complete control of the area,” said the deputy director of police, Commissioner Ramírez Landaverde.
In the words of some who knew him, Chepe Furia was the affable benefactor of his neighborhood, a genial fellow who remembered people’s names. In the words of one plea-bargain witness—the man who deceived him, the Hollywood Kid—he was a ruthless killer who handed out death sentences to rivals and foes, all while enjoying a cut of meat in a roadside restaurant.
But the enmity between the two started many years later. The passion initially sparked from the admiration of a lost kid for a man with big ideas.
The Hollywood Kid’s Prelude
“Once you’ve made the jump and have murdered, you’ve made a pact with the devil, you’re part of the devil, you’ve surrendered your soul, man. And, soon after, you’ll have to give your whole self over, too, because that’s how it is on the streets, when it’s your turn, it’s your turn,” says the Kid in 2013, four years after first turning on his gang, sitting in the sheltered shade of a wall, in the empty lot he was living in.
It’s midday and the furious heat suffocates the backyard plot. There’s a sweet smell in the air, the smell of fallen fruit, and people outside are moving slowly, as they would by the side of a pool. The police officer that guards the Kid, his personal custodian, is a little more alert today. He glances nervously at those who pass by the gate made of sticks and wire.
The guard is jumpy because there was a bit of a problem yesterday with some of the drifters in the area who come around to smoke—yes, the Kid smokes in his little shack—or to buy weed—yes, the Kid grows and sells. The problem was resolved with a couple of swings of a machete, not lethal, but they were painful, and doled out by the Kid. He says he sells marijuana because the pension he receives from the state is so small and he has to support his daughter and young wife, Lorena. This might be a far cry from how one would imagine the life of a protected witness: another city, another identity, and other difficulties. But there’s none of that here; the kid is in his same city, with his same identity, and only a gate made of sticks and wire to separate him from the world. With a simple “good afternoon,” anyone could walk through that gate.
The Kid gets out of his chair and asks Lorena, who’s still a minor, to make coffee. He asks her in gang slang, flipping the syllables in almost every word.
“Rramo, otro torra nepo feca rapa trosono y tocipan.”
She soon emerges with three cups of weak coffee and a plate of toasted sweet rolls. Some life-saving clouds sweep over, and the heat becomes bearable for just a couple of minutes. The Kid is young, twenty-nine years old, but today he seems like an old man—someone with endless yarns to tell. Like an old minstrel, sitting in a battered chair, he remembers his time as a hitman, when he first began to kill.
And so he will remember all the stories. This battered lot will become, for two years, before worse times arrive, a theater of the bloody tales of the Hollywood Kid.
Some twenty years ago, in the early 1990s, on a riverbank on the outskirts of the city of Atiquizaya, a group of boys were huddled in a circle. They watched intently as one of them repeatedly sank a machete blade into the neck of another. The child executioner was Miguel Ángel. He was possessed, he wouldn’t stop until the job was done. He’d been offended by the jokes the other kid kept making about his legs. Girly legs. The Kid decided that killing him was the best way to end the mockery once and for all. The others didn’t get involved, they just waited patiently for it all to be over, distracting themselves by breaking off the branches of a nearby mulato tree, which they would use to cover the young body. The same tree that indigenous people used in their worship of Xipe Totec after the Spanish colonizers had prohibited it. Xipe Totec, “Our Lord the Flayed One.”
The group of kids were members of a small gang—one of so many in western El Salvador—called the Gauchos Locos. Much as they tried, nothing they did could completely hide their rural roots. Their gang names always gave them away: the Goat, Fly, the Cat, the Chicken.
Many of these small, juvenile gangs, and this one in particular, were difficult to define and classify into a single category. One day they killed a boy, leaving his body under mulato branches, and the next they amused themselves by stoning the skinny cows of Don Chepito. They erratically swung from benign mischief to barbarism. The group was made up of mostly kids. Not yet teens, no longer children. They roamed the hills and roads of western El Salvador, stealing chickens and smoking pot. They were the living remnants of the war that had finally sputtered to a close. Their playthings were bullets and blood.
When the machete stopped falling over the boy, and he finally stopped breathing, they all decided to leave the remains where they were, barely hidden under a mound of reddish branches, so that he’d be taken by a current or a hungry mountain animal, as if he were an offering to the bloodthirsty and beneficent gods of their grandparents. Then they went about their tasks, hunting black crabs for lunch. They knew no one would miss the dead child.
They were just that, the children of no one, lost boys.
Miguel Ángel’s life seems to confirm the idea that everything is a cycle, a vital cycle that ends as it began. The body of the child-murderer ended up under a spray of izote blossom, the national Salvadoran flower, laid there by a compassionate campesino. His life, at least his life as a hitman, began under a mulato tree, the tree of blood sacrifice.