“If you were born on the streets you die on the streets. That’s what life is like here. You’re ready to die on the streets. We got a long history, man, going back to the war. We were born of the war. We lived the war, and it was the people of the war that made these gangs. We started over there in ’90, ’93, we started to band together in groups, but these groups weren’t the gangs of today. I’m turning twenty-eight years old today. Back then we started out real young. Young people got into groups that stood as lookouts over the neighborhoods. I was MG: Mara Gauchos Locos 13. The guy who started the gauchos came from the United States. We occupied the toll booths, the highways, the edge of town, the downtown, and the park where all the busses parked, that’s where we were in control. And any little new thing you had, we’d take it from you, we’d put a knife to your throat and we’d take whatever you had, we’d even take your shoes if you had shoes newer than ours. We were fifty kids, all out on the street. Those of us who had a record would hide from the cops. Keep out of town. We had farm tools and hand cannons [home-made firearms]. It was rare to see someone with a real gun, it was hard to get hold of that sort of thing.”
Miguel Ángel, sitting outside his shack, is remembering the old days. It’s January 4, 2012.
Miguel Ángel’s shack is rugged: dry dirt ground, exposed brick, and a tile roof. And yet you can’t say it’s dirty. Inside the little room there’s two old bed frames with thin mattresses on top. Three bundles of folded clothes lie on top of one of the cots: one is a man’s clothes, another is a woman’s, and the third is fit for a little girl. All the clothes are threadbare. Miguel Ángel’s are way too big for him. Ill-fitting hand-me-downs.
The ground outside is drenched. It rained last night. The heat is relentless in this town. A constant force. But the smell of humidity and burnt coffee manage, at least, to wake up the mind a little bit.
Like always, the police officer that guards the lot is watching TV in the main house. Two buildings frame the lot. A big one, where the family who owns the property lives, and, about five yards away, the shack where Miguel Ángel lives. In between are two cement washbasins, where one can wash dishes, or clothes, or children. Miguel Ángel’s mujer—that’s what he calls sixteen-year-old Lorena, mi mujer, my wife—uses one of those basins to bathe Marbelly, who’s now two years old.
Miguel Ángel looks emaciated. He’s been confined to his little shack for almost two years, going to and coming from trials. Putting a mask over his face to confront his homies in court and feeling ridiculous every time. No matter how much they call him the Hare or Yogui in the case files, everyone knows he’s really the Hollywood Kid. The court tries to protect his identity by distorting his voice to make him sound like a mouse or a zombie, by having him wear a mask, hide behind a screen, use an alias. None of it works.
“Other little groups sprang up: Los Meli 33, Los Valerios 13, and Los Uvas, then Los Chancletas in San Lorenzo, and that’s how it went, man, a whole bunch of groups banded together. The deal was that in the dance halls you represented your barrio, man, and the others represented theirs, and all hell would break loose, and, shit, in those fights there were police and maras all mixed up in there. Then all of a sudden this dude shows up, Moncho Garrapata, who’s Chepe Furia’s first cousin. That son of a bitch shows up and brings this Eighteen from up north. He’s come from Mexico and he starts calling out his people, the son of a bitch, all his people in the sectors that he controls, in the areas of Chalchuapita, La Periquera, La Línea. He starts grabbing hold of all these triggers, you know how these dudes will jump you for no reason, with no warning, and then he picks up the little girl, the Eighteen, the son of a bitch picks her up. And when he had them all up and ready, in walks Chepe Furia.”
Miguel Ángel is skinny. Protruding ribs. A clavicle that’s a showy necklace of bones. And yet he’s also solid. Compact. The muscles he built working the coffee plantations, the cornfields and bean farms since he was a boy, still cling to his skeleton like a vine to a tree. Today, he tells stories while crouched down on the ground. There’s something animal about him, about his essence. You feel that this underfed man could pounce on you, tear you apart like a wildcat. He could charge at you like a wild boar. And he could definitely, as if he were still a gang member, hack you to pieces with a machete.
“The first time Chepe Furia came around was in ’94. Fuck, Chepe Furia rolling up, and all the maras just watching the trucks go by, and this guy with his tricked-out car. The fucker came rolling in, with his lowrider and his brand names. He was like twenty years old back then. The crazy fuck had been deported, but he already had his people here, and real quick he’d started getting things fucking organized,” says Miguel Ángel, still on the damp dirt.
Over the course of January and February, we visited Miguel Ángel’s shack on an almost weekly basis. Our access, which at first required persistent calls to try to convince the detective, became rote. We even started coming without notice.
Miguel Ángel never lost his animal, predatory essence. It only takes a few minutes of conversation for blood to appear in his stories—it always does—and then the look in his eyes, along with his whole demeanor, changes. When he remembers, he gesticulates as if he were back in in the scene he’s describing.
He’s seeming more and more like a caged and desperate animal. He’s going nowhere, and he knows it. A man used to quick results—I fire, you die; I demand, you fork over—doesn’t understand the concept of justice. What’s justice? How do you shoot it? He understands himself as a prisoner of history, of his country, of his time. Pursued by his own gang, targeted by the other gang, harassed by the police, he’d had to turn himself in. There’s nothing in his life but guns, with the Kid in the crosshairs. Giving him this little shack, this mound of earth, seemed a good idea in the beginning of 2010, but after spending almost two years locked up, going and coming from spilling the secrets of the Mara Salvatrucha in court, getting threatened, threatened, and threatened again, interviewed by prosecutors in suits who don’t understand his language or his world, testifying before a judge under his new, plea-bargain witness name, Yogui—which he hates—with a stifling mask over his face and the voice-over of a mouse, the animal in him sometimes doesn’t feel like a predator. It feels like prey. And he hates that feeling. It’s not in his nature.
He, whom others hid from.
He, the stalker.
He, the hunter.
He, pop, pop.
He, the Hollywood Kid.
A predator, even if taken out of the jungle, won’t forget his essence.
Chepe Furia and the Lost Children
They say the hamlet of Las Pozas is a good hideout. Through the hills, you can run all the way to Guatemala. The authorities can’t make it here without being seen.
To get to Las Pozas by car you need to drive through Atiquizaya, an hour and a half beyond the capital, cross the center of that dusty town, skirt its central park dotted by small restaurants and food stands, drive another few blocks, pass tile-roofed houses, take a right past the church, take a street that’s usually closed for the village’s patron saint festivals where greasy fried food is gobbled down, keep driving down a two-lane asphalt street, leave behind fields and more fields, pass a bicycle repair shop, a one-lane bridge, Mara Salvatrucha graffiti tags, a white Barrio 18 tag on a tree trunk, several narrow roads that snake up toward the hillsides and, in the distance, the Chingo Volcano, then take the exit for San Lorenzo, a place where everyone stares at you as if you hadn’t come from the capital but from Mars in a spaceship, drive down a few cobblestone blocks and cross the dirt road where rickety signposts read, “Las Pozas,” and keep on driving, another twenty minutes and you see the enormous ceiba tree towering over a school at the entrance of town.
Yeah, the hamlet of Las Pozas is a good hideout.
And every stranger that takes the exit to San Lorenzo will get eyed with suspicion. And once they enter Las Pozas their presence will only stand out more. The town is on high alert whenever an unknown car enters. It’s as if everyone—people and dogs alike—are put on pause, all of them frozen for just a second. The town is made up of a large tract of land with five roads fanning out from the school like a star, some leading to the mountains bordering Guatemala. Rows of makeshift houses line each street. They are tattered improvisations of shelter, a few bricks, sheets of laminate, tile, plastic, and stone. The roads are very narrow. Only one car can fit. And it’s impossible to make a U-turn. You have to drive into the forest to find a little bit of room to make your turn. Three stores sell knick-knacks and Coca-Colas. There’s a cantina and a soccer field. That’s it.
People who live in the surrounding areas say that many of the men who hide here were once members of car-thieving gangs or are plea-bargain witnesses. Many make a living by trafficking marijuana to Guatemalan border towns. They trudge through the hillsides hefting large sacks of herb to sell to men waiting for them in pickups.
When people talk about the “authorities” of Las Pozas, they’re not talking about the police. As if it were still at war, this corner of El Salvador is not patrolled by the organizations created after the peace accords; the government sent in soldiers instead.
Las Pozas is a place of nomads. People who lost their jobs, people on the run, people expelled from the coffee plantations by unjust landowners. Mostly dysfunctional families, made up of the pieces of other families. The children of these families understood only one verb: survive. Many of them dulled life’s disappointments the same way their parents did, with the help of cane liquor.
The town cantina is owned by a forty-something campesino whom everyone knows as Cockroach. He’s a friendly, good-natured old man, vulgar like nobody’s business. Cockroach packs obscenities into every sentence.
“Those fucking little bichos were legless, the faggots. They were fucking flying through the last hour of work in the milpas, the fags, so they could come running with their dollars to piss it all away here, the sons of bitches.”
Cockroach was talking about the lost children, the descendants of those nomads, of those stray bits and pieces of other families. The children of war.
One of those kids was Miguel Ángel Tobar, a regular at Cockroach’s bar since the age of ten.
It took a while for Cockroach to understand how such a ragged brat could so often afford to buy a liter of Cuatro Ases. Las Pozas was full of poor folks and, though a bottle of rotgut only cost some ten colones (a little more than a dollar), that was big money in that forgotten corner of the world. A man wouldn’t get paid much more for a full morning’s work harvesting coffee.
Cockroach remembers Miguel Ángel as a kid who was “happy, who didn’t seem like he would kill a fly, but with a shitty, weird family … Who’d have imagined?”
Miguel Ángel would show up to the bar at all hours. Sometimes at noon. Sometimes early in the morning. Sometimes when Cockroach was trying to sleep. A village cantina is allergic to formalities. It sets its schedule according to the needs of the drinkers. Cockroach remembers Miguel Ángel running into the bar and asking for his bottle of guaro and, with hardly a word, bolting back out the door.
Used to seeing machete fights inside his cantina, Cockroach noticed the kid’s hurry, but that was all that stuck out to him.
And then, other kids he didn’t know started showing up. They would do the same: storm in all excited, ask for a liter or two of Cuatro Ases, and then dash off as if somebody were chasing them.
Cockroach started to get curious.
The cantina was on the far side of the village, about 300 yards beyond the school and the big ceiba tree.
One night, Miguel Ángel came in and asked for his usual. Then, like always, he dashed out with the bottle. Cockroach followed him with a flashlight. Miguel Ángel rushed over to the ceiba tree where Cockroach saw a black, double-cab pickup truck. He walked closer. Beyond the pickup, sitting on the roots of the ceiba, was a man in his thirties surrounded by about five kids with plastic cups into which the man was splashing some of the clear guaro. The man noticed Cockroach, who waved. The man waved back.
A couple of nights later the man himself stopped by the cantina. Cockroach remembers him as being friendly, and that he was with another, bald guy, with tattoos on his neck and peeking out from under his unbuttoned shirt. They ordered drinks and then the first man stood up and approached the black counters separating the barkeep and the bottles from the drunks. He thanked Cockroach, asking for his name. “Everybody calls me Cockroach.”
“And me, Chepe Furia,” the man said. “Nice to meet you.”
Chepe Furia and his sidekick left the cantina. Cockroach had seen the face of a legend. But Chepe Furia wasn’t like the white dog or the creaky cart of the tall tales told around these parts. He was a man of flesh and blood, a man who had a big nose and drank Cuatro Ases with the neighborhood kids.
In western El Salvador you occasionally hear the whispered names of famous bandits and stick-up men—men whose names you don’t dare speak aloud in the cantinas. One of those names was Chepe Furia’s. These weren’t the names of gangsters: gangs were hardly a concern when people started hearing about Chepe Furia. From that first day Chepe Furia and his companion walked into the cantina, they started hanging around. Sometimes, Cockroach recalls, they’d show up without any money.
“They liked to show up whenever they wanted, sometimes real late at night. ‘Open up, Cockroach, you son-of-a-damn-bitch.’ And they’d bang on the door until I got up to serve them. But they would always end up paying. They’d send Miguel Ángel to pay the next day, or a couple days later.”
Chepe Furia always was a man with a plan. He wasn’t getting drunk with the kids because he liked their company. He saw his future in them, his muscle. He was training them to fight in his name.
Miguel Ángel remembers that Chepe Furia would show up in Las Pozas, back in 1995 and 1996, with kids and teenagers from the nascent gangs in Atiquizaya, Ahuachapán, Turín, and El Refugio. To recruit more, Chepe Furia made an alliance with a sixteen-year-old everybody knew as El Farmacia. He was, like Miguel Ángel, a member of the Gauchos Locos 13. For years in El Salvador, you could find everything in pharmacies: medicine, soft drinks, knick-knacks, candy, magazines, newspapers, even cigarettes and beer. El Farmacia was the same—you could meet all your expectations with just one kid. “That motherfucker,” Miguel Ángel remembers, “he’d get you anything you wanted. If you told him, get me that thing, by that afternoon, he’d bring it to you. Ten bucks, five bucks he’d charge you so he could buy his pot. The bato was in the know.”
Chepe Furia understood that El Farmacia, thanks to his skill, was an important needle with which he could sew together various groups of local youth. If the rural gangs had their differences and resolved them with clubs and knives at parties, their hate still wasn’t irremediable. It wasn’t even close to the hate that MS-13 and Barrio 18 would develop for each other. They only hated each other for something to do, or to be able to distinguish themselves from each other. They hated to be a part of something, to feel a little less deprived. Chepe Furia understood that he could use this adolescent hate and turn it into another kind of hate. A transcendental hate. A hate that would last a lifetime.
In El Salvador, we know about hate.
The lost boys were encountering something new. Chepe Furia was able to bring them together because he was different. Bedraggled and hungry, the local kids all had something in common. But Chepe, with his pickup, a 9mm in his waistband, buying Cuatro Ases like a lord, was different. He was what they aspired to be.
In the next town over, Atiquizaya, Moncho Garrapata had the same agenda, but under the banner of Barrio 18. Chepe Furia knew that a confrontation over territory was on its way, and so he started preparing himself. Uniting the lost boys wasn’t hard. But now he needed to steer their aggression, take all those miserable lives and give them a unifying purpose: to kill the Eighteens. Meanwhile, he would turn himself into their chief.
He explained to the kids what a meeting was, the kind the Californian gang members called in order to make decisions, but he Salvadoranized the word, spelling it like they pronounced it: mirin, with a hard-rolled R. Chepe Furia held his mirins at the soccer field in Atiquizaya’s San Antonio neighborhood, close to where his parents lived, and where, years later, he’d humiliate 500 police officers by switching off the public grid as they chased after him.
Language is important in war. It unites. It differentiates. Chepe Furia taught all the kids to despise the Eighteens even in common speech. He taught them to call them las bichonas, los uno caca, los cagados, las chavalas (roughly: bitches, shits, shitheads, little girls). Miguel Ángel remembers that Chepe Furia implemented two rules at one of the mirins. The first: “Respect for me, I got the latest word from the Mara Salvatrucha, and I’m the founder of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha.” For these kids, MS-13, “the big one,” as they called it, was this man who’d been deported from el norte. The second rule: “We’re going to jump you all in again.” A lot of the boys, like Miguel Ángel himself, had gone through thirteen seconds of blows and kicks, without being able to fight back, in order to officially join the neighborhood gang. The deportees that had founded those small, now extinct, gangs had brought some of the Sureño rituals with them.
Next, Chepe Furia gave them a creed.
In a country as tiny as El Salvador, there is a lot of copying and repetition. And violence seems to have a memory of its own. Chepe Furia (stealing a phrase from Roberto d’Aubuisson, the murderer of archbishop Óscar Romero) substituted barrio for El Salvador: “Barrio first, barrio second, and barrio third.”
The gang grew. The lost boys shed their precarious identities and gained a new, collective identity. Soon they would even have new names, their nicknames taking over to the point that if somebody called out to them with their birth names, they might not even turn around.
“In those days,” Miguel Ángel remembers, “we had some .22 pistols and a 9mm that belonged to that asshole. Sometimes he’d lend them out. He’d send us to go rob and … sometimes things got hairy. If somebody took a stand, you’d have to waste them. We’d go robbing the Formos milk trucks … Three hundred pesos [about thirty-five dollars] … We’re going to grind somebody, they’d say. This is for the clique, they’d say. Everything for the clique, they’d say. Clique first, clique second, clique third, they’d say. That is, for the barrio. Barrio first, second, and third, they’d say.”
The lost boys started to integrate into the MS-13. And they expressed their loyalty to the man who founded their clique. They also started moving closer to where he lived in the San Antonio barrio. They squatted abandoned houses—they called them destroyer houses—and converted them according to their needs. Chepe Furia provided them with ample pot, and they stole electricity from nearby public utility wires to make them a little more habitable.
The life of gang soldiers didn’t change much after they earned their letters. It was, and is, a mafia, but a mafia of the poor. The secret is that their dream was not to be somebody rich, but just to be somebody. A different person from who they were. Because some of them, like Miguel Ángel, had not only always been poor, but had always been humiliated. They were the brothers of raped sisters and the sons of alcoholic fathers. They were nomads. They were trash. They were lost children.
Nobody would want to be Miguel Ángel Tobar.
El Ozzy de Coronados. El Diablito de Hollywood. El Flaco de Francis. El Shy Boy de Hollywood. El Camerón de Normandie. El Gato de Fulton. El Smookey de Western. El Zombie de Adams. El Negro de Orphan. El Shorty de Fulton. El Crook de Hollywood. El Chiche de Fulton. El Tigre de Parvis. El Oso de Coronado. El Comando de Normandie. El Greñas de Coronados. El Laky de Parvis. El Risas de Fulton. El Tiny de Western. El Spider de Fulton. El Popeye de Western. El Indio de Hollywood. El Burro de Witmer. El Zarco de Western. El Extraño de Adams. El Tortuga de Coronado. El Vampiro de Fulton. El Negro de Normandie. El Cola de Western. El Psycho de Adams. El Cachi de Leeward. El Cuchumbo de Novena. El Rebel de Normandie. El Flipper de Parvis. El Trigger de Fulton. El Snoopy de Western. El Garrobo de Normandie. El Viejo Pavas de Seven Eleven. El Rata de Leeward. El Triste de Coronados. El Maya de Western. El Crimen de Adams. El Chino de Western. El Chivo de Centrales. El Revuelo de Parvis. El Santos de Normandie. El Monkey de Novena. El Negro de Harvard. El Vago de Hollywood. El Morro de Normandie. El Skinny de Stoner, El Caimán de Hollywood …
El Veneno de Fulton.
José Antonio Terán.
Rechristened as Chepe Furia de Hollywood.
It wasn’t just one. Dozens poured in during the 1990s.
The United States rejecting them.
The United States deporting them.
The United States vomiting them.
The United States not knowing what it was doing.
Migration is a cycle.
They were being recruited from all over El Salvador.
The lost children of El Salvador.
The gang leaders of El Salvador.
A country under construction.
A country in ruins.
A country without a thought for its lost children.
War deported from the streets of California to the streets of El Salvador.
One war ending. Another beginning.
El Salvador’s hardest lesson: the end of war is not necessarily the beginning of peace.