10

Threats from Prison

February 2012. Everything in this tropical heat is damp. The police officers of El Refugio in their dark blue, long-sleeved uniforms are a pitiful sight. Nobody would fault them if they suddenly tipped over in a faint. Inside the tiny detectives’ office, a fan lazily spins the hot air as Detective Pineda reviews documents on his ancient computer.

“This was a big week,” he says enthusiastically.

Chepe Furia remains a free man because the judge believed—did he believe him?—that he would not go into hiding for a second time if he was released. And yet, the secrets that Miguel Ángel spilled didn’t come to nothing. Forty-two gang members from the Hollywood, Parvis, and Ángeles cliques are facing charges of homicide, extortion, and illicit gang affiliation. All thanks to information delivered by Miguel Ángel.

In El Salvador, criminal investigations overwhelmingly depend on witness statements. A corpse, and a witness who tells what she saw about how a person became a corpse, is enough for prosecution. If there’s no witness, a lot of prosecutors simply chuck their cases onto the trash heap, what they call the “overspill,” a chasm of archived cases from which very few files ever reemerge. Cases rot, just like the bodies. “Without a witness, all there is is a body. Period,” a homicide prosecutor told us in February of 2016. “Without a witness, we don’t even open a file,” another prosecutor said. The first prosecutor was in charge of 500 homicide cases, disappearances, and attempted homicides. The second prosecutor couldn’t even remember how many active cases he had open. He only knew that, so far that year, still in February, he had received seventy-eight new cases, eighteen of which were homicides. Homicide cases don’t officially go cold for fifteen years. They pile up on top of the prosecutors, bringing them to their knees. With luck, they can close a couple of cases a year.

El Salvador is a good place to commit a murder, or a whole string of murders.

A statistical aside: the probability that you’d be indicted by a judge after murdering someone—not convicted, merely charged—is less than one in ten. In 2015, less than one out of ten murder cases ended in a conviction. This means that if you’re a corpse, there is less than a 10 percent chance that the person who turned you into a corpse will be brought to justice. This is according to the statistics from El Salvador’s most violent year of the century, which racked up numbers worthy of a war zone: 103 homicides for every 100,000 inhabitants. Remember, in the United States there are typically about five murders for every 100,000 inhabitants.

Pineda tells us that he “captured a gangster set on killing the Kid.”

Inside the shack, the days seem to have come to a standstill. Miguel Ángel is smoking pot, sitting on one of the tumbledown chairs on his small covered patio. Lorena is tending to Marbelly. A mountain of dishes sits in the cement sink.

Miguel Ángel seems to enjoy our visits more and more.

“Hey, what’s up,” he says as we settle in. “Hell yeah, we’re gonna talk today. I’ve been thinking about a fucking ton of hits I’m gonna tell you about.”

Not a word about the recent attempted hit on himself. It seems to be just another day in his shack: hot and slow.

Miguel Ángel starts explaining how it’s a good time to kill if you smell horses. But if you smell a goat, “you better split, because that’s a sign that the Beast is tracking you down.” It’s not just that you’ll smell the goat, he continues, but the hair on your arms will stand on end. He’s a gangster, but a rural one. His points of reference aren’t hip-hop, rap, or Nike Cortez. His imagery concerns animals, the smell of cattle, and rubber boots.

Just days after they tried to kill him, he’s willing to rattle on about almost anything. We interrupt Miguel Ángel’s spiel about the goats and the horses: “Hey, so did they try to kill you this week?”

“Oh, yeah. A crazy guy with tattoos on his face.”

We have to drag it out of him, a few words at a time. “Wow, and what happened?”

“Nothing, they nabbed the homeboy when he stopped to smoke a joint in the woods, right over here at the turnoff.”

Some stories aren’t worth dressing up. They’re better told dry. Dry like a hammer against wood. Mara Salvatrucha assassins tried to kill Miguel Ángel earlier this week, and Miguel Ángel—no big deal—just chatting away about the smell of goats.

“So I already know these locos are looking to off me. It’s not the first time they’ve thrown shit my way. I know they’re coming. And they’re only coming to throw down.”

Miguel Ángel is sure that the whole gang knows that the witness they call Yogui, who shows up in court to spill secrets with the voice of a mouse, is Miguel Ángel Tobar, the Kid, previously known as the Clown, from the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha of Atiquizaya.

Death hovers all around him. To the Kid, the sicario was just another sicario—one of so many—who want to see him dead.

Death has always trailed the Kid. In his own mythological terms: you need to be strong and steady when you get a whiff of the goat. The scent of the Beast.

Detective Pineda supplies details of the arrest: “We received information that a strange man was prowling about the area. We sent out patrols. An officer finally spotted this man in the brush. It was late, getting dark, and he only saw him when the asshole’s tattooed face popped up to take a hit of the joint he was smoking.”

The sicario is known as the Crime. He’s a gang member, about thirty years old, and the tattoos all over his face set him apart from a rank-and-file MS-13. When the police searched his bag they found an M-16 rifle, four rifle cartridges, and a 9mm pistol with eight cartridges. The careless sicario—as if he were carrying any old thing in his bag—stopped to get high before his kill. Later, he’d confess that two other sicarios were on backup, but that they must’ve split when they saw the cops. He said that the other two were war veterans. “Cobras,” he called them. Former killers who found work doing what they knew best: killing. A lot of people in El Salvador had graduated in weaponry during the war, and when so-called peace came about, they couldn’t forget their training.

Detective Pineda says that they’re still trying to get more information out of the Crime, who is currently being held in police headquarters.

Back at the shack, Miguel Ángel keeps wandering through his memories, occasionally losing himself in a haze of marijuana. When he’s really high, he takes long pauses as he talks, filling his sentences with onomatopoetic clatter: “I was walking with a rifle, and crack, I heard this noise,” he says, posing as if holding a rifle in his arms. He freezes, eyes darting all around.

Today, however, it’s hard for us to hear stories from this murderer without worrying about the murderer getting murdered.

“That’s how it is, those dogs aren’t going to rest until they have me counting stars,” Miguel Ángel says. “That’s all they’re thinking about in prison.”

The Smell of Pine

“Don’t send sheep to hunt a wolf, because the wolf has claws and teeth, assholes, and they’re sharp, so stop fucking around,” The Hollywood Kid told the prisoners on the other end of the line. The call came in from a Salvadoran prison. It was early 2012, just after the Crime’s arrest. It was the first time his homeboys had told him directly that they were after him.

The prisoners on the other end of the line were trying to get a word in, but the Kid wouldn’t let them. To every threat he had a retort at the ready, as if he’d been waiting for this call his whole life.

“We know about you,” the prisoners snarled, “and soon you’ll be smelling pine trees.”

They were referring to the wood of coffins, but Miguel Ángel knew more about coffins than they did. “Sons of bitches, they don’t even make pine boxes here. They make them out of caro-caro or mango wood. You don’t even know what kind of wood they use, and you don’t even know what pine smells like. You all going to be smelling like smoke, because there’s an M-16 waiting for you here motherfuckers.”

Miguel Ángel was bluffing about the machine gun.

“Bicho ass-wipe! The Beast is gonna …”

The Kid interrupted again: “The Beast don’t control me! I control the Beast!”

Who knows if the Kid really believes he controls the Beast. Sometimes he says he does, and sometimes he says nobody controls the Beast. What’s certain is that the Beast is stalking him. In 2010, long before the Crime’s arrest, Detective Pineda received a confidential memo about a plan to attack the detectives and their protégé. Prison informants said the plan was to shoot up both the police station and the Kid’s shack with an M-16.

At this point, there’s something we should highlight: the gang knew that the Hollywood Kid was a traitor. Which means that the state failed to protect their informant’s identity. And the gang knew where the Hollywood Kid was hiding. Which means that the state failed to appropriately hide him.

After the Kid dropped that line about controlling the Beast, all he could hear on the other end of the line was breathing.

“You already tried sending someone to take me out. That didn’t get me shaking. There’s thirty-five bullets waiting for you,” he told them, reminding them again of his imaginary M-16.

The Kid didn’t want to end his diatribe without making perfectly clear that he’d once served them well, that he’d been an exemplary messenger for the Beast, that he was who he was.

“If the barrio’s got thorns,” he told them, “I’m the barrio’s thorn. If the barrio’s been poisoned, I’m the barrio’s poison. You sons of bitches. The hurt is waiting for you. If you want it, just try to fuck with me.”

What Miguel Ángel Says about the Beast:

• If The Beast takes you away, you’ll know why.

• Those taken by the Beast are adored by the Beast, spoiled by the Beast.

• He’s dead now, the Beast took him.

• The Beast’s horns are made of gold.

• You die the death the Beast wants you to die.

• I saw the whole Beast, with all her seven horns.

• I could feel the Beast breathing down my back.

• The Beast’s still in control here.

• They know I’ve got their back, that if anyone lays a finger on them, the Beast will come out.

• I’ve lost everything to the Beast.

• The Beast is following me, waiting for me to mess up.

• I turned and told him: It’s for the Beast, you fucking son of a bitch, then pop, pop.

• He’s part of her now, already part of the Beast.

The Shack

Miguel Ángel is nervous. He feels cornered. The Beast, once again, has her claws around his neck. After the Crime’s failed attempt, there have been more, always with a new strategy. These gang members are from the Hollywood Locos, but they’re not high-ups. Sometimes they’re not even members, but aspiring members, who come like nineteenth-century bounty hunters seeking glory in exchange for trophies. If killing is a meritorious act in the MS-13, killing a traitor who has embarrassed none other than Chepe Furia will, in western El Salvador, be like cashing in on a Most Wanted flyer.

“Just the other day this guy came by who was just a baby. He came round here, the son of a bitch, all threatening, hanging with some woman. The next time I go to get tortillas I bump straight into him again. There he goes, walking with the same old hag. ‘Oh yeah, homeboy, what’s up?’ I say to him. He’s all, ‘Easy, easy.’ I whip out my grenade. ‘Tell the homeboys I’ve got this waiting for them,’ I said to that mountain monkey, and he just shit his pants, the asshole.”

Today Miguel Ángel plays the loner with no friends. But there’s also something fierce and furious about his gaze.

Miguel Ángel still has one foot inside the MS. A lifetime of being a hitman in the savage world of gangs left him with a lot of contacts. They’ve confirmed there’s a pricetag on his head. The mara who kills him will gain a lot of respect. He’ll be honored as some mythical, invincible son of the Beast. The hopeful upstart who successfully kills a traitor will be immediately received into the gang, skipping over an initiation process that requires four or five murders to earn the title of homeboy. Chepe Furia knows that the only true incentive for his lost boys is not money, but respect.

“Whoever kills me only has to score one goal. It’ll be like winning the Balon d’Or,” says Miguel Ángel, in a better mood now, landing soccer references.

The MS is after Miguel Ángel. Those who know him, because they want to avoid the long sentences in rotting prisons that his testimony will bring them. Those who don’t know him, because they can’t allow a traitor to go unpunished. But these aren’t the only two groups who want to kill him. In the eyes of the Barrio 18, he’s nothing but a piece of mierda seca. A killer of Eighteens.

Miguel Ángel tells us what happened to him a few months back, in November 2011.

El Refugio had exploded into celebration. Hundreds of people from the village and its environs had congregated on the main road that runs between Miguel Ángel’s little plot of land and the police post. All the towns, hamlets and villages of Mesoamerica celebrate the day of their patron saint. Here, appropriately enough for Miguel Ángel, the patron saint is Our Lady of Refuge for Sinners, one of the most revered invocations of the Virgin Mary in the Catholic world.

But only the elderly and the occasional young believer care about such details. The rest of the town celebrates the blowout pagan style: with a lot of Cuatro Ases and hours of cumbia and reggaeton, along with marijuana and machetes. The mayor’s office supplied the DJ, some large stackable speakers, a tower of metal tubes that spit out a swirl of flashing lights, and a fog machine that pumped multicolored steam through the constant clamor. A ramshackle, dusty version of the US Latino disco clubs of the 1980s.

El Refugio is controlled by Barrio 18. Although Miguel Ángel’s street doesn’t have a heavy gang presence—thanks to the nearby police post—the neighboring suburbs do. And everyone from the surrounding areas comes here for this party. It’s the event of the year. Miguel Ángel knows it, the police know it, and Detective Pineda knows it. But, even so, they thought it was safer to keep Miguel Ángel here than to move him to an MS-controlled area.

On the feast day of Our Lady of Refuge for Sinners, the DJ made a blunder, one that almost cost him his life and spoiled the party for everyone: he played the wrong song. A song by the Colombian cumbia musician, Aniceto Molina, who made his career in El Salvador. His songs were smash hits there. Most of them were full of double entendres. The track the DJ played told the story of a Salvadoran hairdresser (“un peluquero salvatrucha”) who had a two-story salon with a sign out front that read “Services offered upstairs and downstairs.” The problem was that Aniceto used an old word to refer to Salvadorans, one coined in the nineteenth century when Honduran and Salvadoran armies ousted the filibustering American adventurer William Walker (who’d sought to annex the isthmus to the Confederacy and enslave its people).

General Florencio Xatruch was charged with expelling Walker. And so, since 1855, in honor of the general, Hondurans have been known as Catrachos, and because of a consonance between the two nicknames, Salvadorans became known as Salvatruchas. The names were well liked in both countries until, more than a century later, Salvatrucha became associated with the MS.

The song that played in El Refugio that day was “The Salvatrucha Hairdresser.” The refrain goes like this:

We cut hair, upstairs and downstairs
We braid hair, upstairs and downstairs
We paint lips, upstairs and downstairs

When the song started, a group of Eighteens climbed onto the DJ’s platform and forced him to turn off the music at knifepoint. For a few minutes everyone was silent. In their world, salvatrucha means only one thing. The heroism of General Xatruch was too far into the past to matter.

Miguel Ángel saw everything from his little shack and did nothing. He saw the Eighteens triumphantly jump off the DJ platform, almost right in front of his door.

“They say a piece of shit witness lives here, that he was a fucking madman,” one of them said.

“I hope he comes out. I’m not scared of a shriveled little piece of shit,” another Eighteen said, as another cumbia song started up. Miguel Ángel remembers the burn of rage he felt. He opened the door and thrust his grenade in their faces.

“And this turd doesn’t scare you? Fucking monkeys!”

The boys ran off. Away from the cumbias, away from the party. Far from Miguel Ángel.

It didn’t take long for the detective and his men to hear about what had happened. The town is small, the main road only a mile long. Everyone knows everything.

Miguel Ángel tells this story with pride. As if to convince us that he’ll never be easy prey. At least not while he’s got his grenade.