The war between the MS-13 cliques of Atiquizaya and Ahuachapán and the Barrio 18 cliques of Chalchuapa and Santa Ana is the Salvadoran equivalent of the family feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys of West Virginia and Kentucky in the second half of the nineteenth century.
El Salvador is a very small country, spanning barely more than 8,000 square miles, and the boundary lines between the different departments are nebulous. Borders are demarcated by a conocaste tree, a curve in the road, an old piece of property or a historical marker. At least the Hatfields and the McCoys had a river to separate them. Here only the fear of the others keeps people on their side of the line. But the patriarchs of both gangs, the ringleaders of each clique, felt their people were unjustly cramped. They started to send their youth out to expand their territory, to try to drive out the other side, those who were actually just a mirror image of themselves.
Atiquizaya is about five miles from Chalchuapa. All that hatred stirred up by deported gang members, for years, was only five miles away. Not even half of a half-marathon separated these children of no one from each other.
Chepe Furia was an expert at starting new gangs. He had an eager group of hitmen, ready to prove themselves. The younger and weaker had succumbed, almost all of them at the hands of their own comrades in that purge called Mission Hollywood. Chepe Furia only needed the right tools to light up his vision of hell.
“Shit, we had a double-barrel .357, some bombs that had never been seen around here, a nine-millimeter with three clips, and a police-issued CZ, a real one,” Miguel Ángel said from his shack, when the second part of Mission Hollywood was little but a distant memory of a few dozen murders.
Chepe Furia outfitted the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha with a small arsenal for a bunch of kids who’d been used to rusted guns and machetes. The ex-national policeman went to Guatemala at times without telling his lost boys. He didn’t have to explain himself to anyone in Atiquizaya. The arsenal was wondrous to those boys used to knifing and kicking their way to the top. A world of opportunity fanned out before them. Beyond the small-time pistols, Chepe Furia had a G3 automatic rifle. Equivalent, in historical value, to America’s Remington shotgun. It’s a heavy rifle with a lot of ammunition, able to fire 600 bullets a minute and dismember a person with only one. It was used by Salvadoran security forces in the ’70s and continues to be a symbol of authoritarian power and cruelty.
Chepe Furia had a G3. A war rifle transplanted to a new war. He also had a 12-gauge shotgun, a .30-30 carbine, and plenty of ammo to feed them both.
Members of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha had the equipment to start the war, but above all they had the will to do it. The Eighteens, led by Moncho Garrapata, knew this. They’d already lost plenty of members at the hands of Chepe Furia’s young hitmen. One of them was the alleged sorcerer whom Miguel Ángel had decapitated in order to earn his gang name. Sooner or later it was going to be their turn to bleed.
Los Palmas were three members of the Barrio 18. Unusual for the area, the brothers lived with their dad, Óscar Palma. The older man was unable to quell the terrible anxiety he felt for his three boys who he knew were desperate to gain the respect of the Barrio 18. To prove their bravery, they’d murdered a member of Chepe Furia’s clique. But in doing so they also acquired some powerful new enemies.
Chepe Furia was a skillful leader. He couldn’t continue to watch from afar as his kids died out in the field. He had to show them by doing.
“Chepe ambushed the eldest Palma,” Miguel Ángel said. “He smashed him on the head with the butt of a rifle.”
The two remaining Palma boys, just like the McCoys, sought revenge. They ambushed the Killer Whale of Hollywood. They trapped him as he was crossing Barrio 18 territory on his way to buy crack. They knifed him across the neck and jaw and left him lying in a dirt road, bleeding out. But Killer Whale didn’t die. In a sort of irreverent gesture toward death and in honor of the Beast, weeks later, Killer Whale got a tattoo over his scar. It read: Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha.
The Hollywood boys were ready for this challenge. They held a mirin and decided that the Palma family had to suffer.
The clique’s strongest men were El Stranger, Two Faces, El Delinquent, Fly, Francis Tamarind, Víctor Maraca, Troublemaker, Lethal, Killer Whale, El Hollywood, and of course, the Clown. They only had to decide which of them would carry out the revenge.
Killer Whale volunteered. He was eager to go further than a neck tattoo to prove his loyalty.
They stalked the second Palma boy and, just as he was opening his front door, Killer Whale shot him in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun. Chepe Furia watched from his pickup.
“He popped his coconut. Totally unrecognizable,” remembered Miguel Ángel.
It’s hard to stop a stampede of horses. Especially if something keeps chasing them. Hatred was spinning into a frenzy in this country. Death filled life with meaning.
The third Palma boy, mourning the loss of his brothers at the hands of the Hollywood Locos, decided to lie low. He stopped hanging out with the Eighteens, and kept close to his dad. But MS-13 was unstoppable. The last Palma brother also died at the hands of Chepe Furia and his foot soldiers, and the old man was left completely alone.
Fallen warriors from both camps. Funerals on one side, funerals on the other.
Víctor Maraca was walking down the street when he saw another one of Moncho Garrapata’s underlings, another child of the Barrio 18, whom they called Matata. Víctor had nothing against murder. He’d killed before, and prior to joining the MS-13, when he was in another, smaller street gang, he’d committed assaults and hold-ups alongside his brother. With rusty .38 calibers, they’d robbed laborers on payday and delivery trucks on the road. But his murderous instincts and impulses were usually channeled into making money, rather than earning respect. Víctor Maraca let the Clown lead the mission.
“It was Víctor Maraca’s idea,” Miguel Ángel said, sitting outside his shack. “‘Get ready,’ Víctor told me, ‘he’s coming this way. He’s just dropped off a load [of drugs] and he’s strapped [with money].’ Bam! On a bike. And it was just me on a street corner when the guy comes around. Money in his hand. And bam! The sucker comes up,pop, pop, pop … And, see, he’s from here to the cot [about two yards away], gave it to him right in the coconut, I even got splashed with his juice, and the son of a bitch, the money still in his hand, he was done for.”
The Hollywood Locos wanted to wipe the area clean. Chalchuapa and Chalchuapita were both claimed by the Eighteens, Comanche territory for the MS, and they had to wipe them out of there. This was Mission Hollywood, killing under the name of their own gang. Chepe Furia was good at creating a sense of gravity. He infused meaning into their lives: hating and killing someone who, without even knowing you, hates and kills you.
At the height of Mission Hollywood, the Clown was sent to steal a taxi in Santa Ana, the closest and third wealthiest Salvadoran city. War needs a steady stream of resources. Santa Ana was important during the coffee craze, and even today it’s one of the few department capitals that can be called, with an almost straight face, a genuine city.
Killing in hamlets and rural barrios such as Las Pozas, San Antonio or La Línea is relatively simple. There are few police and they have few resources. The landscape is rugged, covered with rocks and vicious, thorny underbrush. It’s also sparsely populated, which means it’s less likely that there’ll be witnesses. And there’s always a quick escape from the crime scene into the nearby hills or woods.
Santa Ana is different. There are street lights, a couple of malls, restaurants, paved roads, sidewalks, public telephones, a theater, a cathedral. It was, by the end of the 1990s, a small city, though with many desolate zones and, even then, multiple paths into the hillsides. Still, the city had a defined downtown. Practically a metropolis, less than a half-hour away from Las Pozas.
In Santa Ana—a sign of its urbanity—there were taxis.
“The idea was, we’d steal a taxi and kidnap the driver.”
The Clown cased a taxi parking lot. A young man passed him and caught a glimpse of the crude tattoos the Clown had on his hand, though he wasn’t close enough to read them. The Clown, though, was able to make out one of his tattoos: Eighteen, right across the neck. An enemy.
The man walked off. But as the Clown staked out the taxis, the same man, accompanied by two others, came back.
“Hey bicho, son of a bitch, lift up your shirt,” the Clown ordered.
The other responded in kind: “Lift your shirt, you bicha.”
“So you want to see my papers? You’ll be surprised if I lift my shirt, because I am what you are.”
“You’re numbered as well?”
“Nope,” the Clown responded as he took out the 9mm they’d lent him for his special mission. Pop. Pop.
He put two shots into the first guy.
Pop. Pop.
And two shots into the second guy’s back as he fled.
Pop. Pop.
The third got away.
“See, no, we’re not the same,” the Clown said scornfully to the Eighteen bleeding out on the pavement before him. He then got into the taxi he’d been stalking and, at gunpoint—with the extra determination of one who’s just committed murder—told the driver to step on it. He’d hijacked a taxi and killed in the name of MS-13. The Clown was winning s. He was up for anything. In those days, he had only one thing to lose: his gang’s respect.
But it wasn’t all a victory dance for the Beast and the Clown. In the remaining months of their mission, members of the Hollywood Locos also died, as did members of the Parvis Locos, their sister clique. One of the boys who died at the hands of the Barrio 18 was the one who’d been with Miguel Ángel during the killing of the sorcerer, that first murder that initiated Miguel Ángel into the MS-13 and transformed him into the Clown. The boy had been called El Hollywood, an enviable name, eponymous with the entire clique. Now he was gone.
The MS-13 mourned its deaths. Hate united them, but so did grief. Sharing a mission sealed their pact. The boys mourned with a Salvadoran claw thrust into the air as their brothers’ coffins were lowered into the ground. As the war progressed the gang members redoubled their loyalty, and their hate.
While the Salvadoran state looked the other way, a pact was sealed in the streets that later, countless deaths later, would become much more difficult to dissolve.
Killer Whale, having executed the second Palma brother, was arrested and convicted of homicide. The clique didn’t only lose members by death, but by arrests and in the form of deserters who realized too late that the game wasn’t really a game.
And the conflict boiled on. All of them wanted to keep climbing the ladder. Climbing it together. The war reached a climax when Chepe Furia’s men started going after family members.
César Garrapata, Moncho’s older brother and a Barrio 18 patriarch of Chalchuapa, left his house one day and, noticing something odd, quickened his pace. What he’d seen was the Clown signaling to El Stranger. César never reached his car. El Stranger and the Clown each emptied at least three clips into his body.
“And that’s how the myth was born that gangs will empty at least three clips into a body. It’s a way of saying: See, you sons of bitches, this is so you’ll feel the Beast and learn that war is war,” Miguel Ángel explained, years after unleashing that storm of bullets.
Before Moncho Garrapata had time to react to the attack, Chepe Furia himself went to look for him at his house.
“‘Come out you asshole and let’s kill each other off!’ Chepe screamed. But Moncho, angry as hell and armed, wouldn’t come out,” Miguel Ángel described.
Chepe Furia decided to call off Mission Hollywood after Barrio 18 had been kicked back to Chalchuapa and Chalchuapita, far from the MS home turfs. Sure, Barrio 18 was still around, but, at least for the moment, they were more concerned with staying alive than organizing attacks. They weren’t trying to expand anymore, and only wanted to stop losing territory. It was time to move on. It seemed to Chepe Furia that his ship was armed and packed with provisions, and his crew had proved itself to be loyal and worthy of the Beast. His crew no longer needed him. And wouldn’t for a long time to come. Chepe Furia, without warning or explanation, disappeared without a trace.
March 2012. Miguel Ángel is a caged animal.
He’s furious at the authorities. He’s also scared, though he won’t admit it. The basket of provisions from the National Victim and Witness Assistance Program hasn’t come in a month. In any case, he complains, “Sometimes it comes without the goddam bags of rice or only with a little bit of oil.”
He’s been living in this dump for more than two years, and his desperation is palpable. Being a traitor seemed like a good idea in the heat of the moment. But now the situation has cooled and turned to shit. A life of misery, enclosure, constant boredom, and endless waiting. His whole existence dependent on others, never on himself.
Miguel Ángel thought it would be a speedy process. “One nail drives out another,” he once said. That’s how he thought it’d be, brisk, abrupt, hammer in hand: one nail goes in, another comes out. He rats on a few ex-homies and the detective and the prosecutors forgive his life of crime. But that’s not how it works. The justice system of the most murderous country in the world operates on old machinery, rusted clunkers that are missing screws and in need of oil. Chepe Furia is still free thanks to some of those rusted or missing screws. Judge Salinas believed—or did he?—that Chepe Furia wouldn’t jump bail. The corrupt police and many of the gang members have yet to be charged. And now there are new cases circulating in the court system, like the case of the well in the neighboring municipality of Turín, where Miguel Ángel claims to have dropped a body, in the company of other MS members. The slow and clumsy justice system is always behind. A person can spend two years in jail in El Salvador without a conviction, waiting to know his fate, while the machinery spins its rusting, clanking wheels. Two entire years in a jail overpopulated by 400 percent.
The detective won’t allow Miguel Ángel to leave until he tells the judge all of King Furia’s secrets.
For years Chepe Furia was the chain binding Miguel Ángel to the Mara Salvatrucha 13. Their fates were intertwined. The life of that one-time national police officer cast a shadow over the life of the son of the alcoholic miquero who regularly gave his daughter to a foreman. A campesino child had stepped into the backwash of the United States. They say one beat of a butterfly’s wings alters the world. But in this story, it’s out of place to talk of butterflies. It’s better to say that the eruption of the Beast left no one unscathed.
Miguel Ángel is so bored that he’s started writing. He has a schoolboy’s spiral notebook. The cover bears little multicolored numbers in front of a black backdrop, and the word ‘Mathematics’ written in red block letters. He awkwardly announces that he’s started to write his life story, but when he opens the notebook and reads aloud, it’s only disconnected phrases.
He reads with the fluency of a six-year-old.
“Wh … whe … when I … got to kn … know … the … mara … it was be … because … of Chepe Furia, an … old … bas … tard… from the … north.”
He reads a few more phrases about El Farmacia, about Gauchos 13. It’s not a story so much as a series of catchphrases. Ever since he was a kid, El Farmacia “had the mind of a psychopath.” Gauchos 13 were founded by deportees who had “nobody on their side.”
Some phrases give you goosebumps. They’re written in big, barely legible, shaky letters, and plagued by spelling errors. One line reads the Spanish equivalent of “The gang nows the vise of kiling or spiling blud ober the earth.”
Miguel Ángel enthusiastically shows us his notebook and tries, despite the stumbles, to read with dramatic flair. He raises his gaze every few syllables to see if we’re impressed. He says he’ll go on writing until the whole story of ‘The Kid and the MS-13’ has been told. On the inside cover of the notebook, Miguel Ángel has drafted various ways of writing MS; some in gothic handwriting, others in block letters with dashes between each letter. There are also several 666s (the number of the Beast) scattered throughout, and a small drawing of what looks to be the head of a demon with several chins. They’re as badly drawn as the tattoos on Miguel Ángel’s arm.
On his left forearm, you can just make out: “Mi vida loca.” The d in vida is hardly legible. The l in loca looks like a b. If the phrase weren’t so predictable, one would think the tattoo read “Mi vida bola,” my drunken life.
He puts his notebook away and asks to talk in a corner beside the shack, behind a dried-up tree. He wants to get as far as possible from the guard watching TV in the house next door.
“These sons of bitches are fucked. Last week a cop came by and offered me a thousand dollars to keep my mouth shut about the police who handed Rambito over to the gang. They want to break me, they want me to disappear,” Miguel Ángel says, huddled on the ground, glancing nervously toward the guard.
Rambito, the vegetable seller from Atiquizaya who ended up tortured to death and left on the side of the road, is the key to Chepe Furia. Since the body appeared in November 2009, 120 miles from Atiquizaya, the public prosecutor’s office has pushed for the trial to take place elsewhere, far from Judge Salinas and his strange inclination to grant bail to a man who always runs. It was two police officers who ordered Rambito’s arrest and who took him from the subdelegation office without signing the log book. It was Miguel Ángel who’d seen Rambito pass by in a car with the two sergeants, Tejada and Hernández. It was Miguel Ángel who, hours later, saw Rambito get into a pickup with two colors of rope in his hand. It was Miguel Ángel who saw Chepe Furia, El Stranger, and Liro Jocker in the car. Miguel Ángel, the clique’s star hitman, against Chepe Furia, the Brain. And two cops who allowed the events to unfold.
The starved and bony Miguel Ángel admits the offer was tempting. That he really considered it.
“I could’ve taken that thousand and gotten the hell outta here, to Guatemala. Disappeared. And none of these fucks would’ve ever heard about me again, and everyone would’ve gone free out here, cops would’ve had to arrest the Hollywoods in the streets, one by one.”
But something didn’t smell right to Miguel Ángel. The promise smelled rotten. He suspected the police had a trick up their sleeve. Because if he left with the money, they’d know. It’d be so easy for them to contact a gang member and blow his cover, tell them that the traitor who was putting the Hollywood Locos behind bars was now freely walking down the streets of Atiquizaya, or perhaps hiding among the rows of coffee trees.
Miguel Ángel, an ace at gaining time, at dodging the charging bull, didn’t give a straight answer.
“I’ll think about it. I’ll let you know,” he said to the sergeant.