“Did you hear?”
Miguel Ángel is on his cell. It’s 9 p.m. on March 10, 2012.
“I heard. The bicha is down,” Miguel Ángel responds.
He says this while waiting for a police officer from El Refugio to give him more details, staying out of his little room, and keeping his eyes peeled on the barren stretch of his front yard. He has his grenade in hand, as well as a machete, and plans to stand guard all night. Lorena and Marbelly are sleeping.
“Shit’s about to hit the fan. There’s about to be a whole fuckload of murderers coming for the Kid,” Miguel Ángel says. There’s one more police officer standing guard, he says. Two now, instead of one, in charge of his protection.
“What do you think is going to happen?” we ask him.
“There’s only two ways this can go. Either he gets the judge to let him off again, or all shit breaks loose in the court and the Kid has to come deal with it all. Because dropping the charge for Rambito’s murder would be epic, even with all the connections the motherfucker has.”
Today, José Antonio Terán has been captured for the second time.
He’s Down
Chepe Furia’s captures were never as spectacular as his escapes. Indeed, in terms of drama they fell flat.
On December 24, 2010, when they first captured him, it was a group of soldiers on their routine patrol through the neighborhood of San Antonio who happened to see him outside his storefront with his dad. The second time, two public security police officers just got lucky. Neither Detective Pineda’s bloodhounds nor any specialized intelligence unit seemed able to locate him. Even though there was ample intelligence placing him exactly where he was captured, no search was ever conducted.
On March 10, 2012, exactly one year after Detective Pineda received the court order to recapture Chepe Furia, overruling Judge Salinas’s baffling decision, a pair of police officers saw something strange. They were making their rounds when a man spotted them and then bolted. If the man hadn’t run, the agents would later tell their unit, they wouldn’t have noticed him. After all, he was just a nondescript guy with graying hair, a graying beard, and zero attributes pegging him as a gang member.
The police gave chase and stopped him before he was able to enter the house where he’d been staying. It was in Bella Santa Ana, a middle-class suburb less than thirty minutes from Atiquizaya.
The man, looking momentarily confused, said it was just a misunderstanding, he was only in a hurry. He spoke in a friendly manner, with a smile on his face. The police searched his wallet for identification. That’s when they discovered that they were holding Chepe Furia, nervous, dazed, but smiling. The most wanted man in western El Salvador.
The officers handcuffed him and called for backup. Having captured him flagrantly avoiding arrest, they had the right to search the house as well. Inside they found a 30-30 carbine with seventeen cartridges, two 12-caliber rifles and ammunition for a .25 pistol.
The house wasn’t in his name, or in the name of any gang member or known associate. It was under the name of a businessman who owned a floating restaurant on Lake Coatepeque, a two-story barge with elegant tables and waiters who dish out shrimp cocktails, barbecued meat, and beer.
Chepe Furia was taken to a windowless cell in the Santa Ana police post.
When he found out about the arrest, the chief of police of all of western El Salvador, Douglas Omar García Funes, visited his cell. He wanted to meet the mythic boss in person.
“It’s incredible how smart he is,” García Funes would say, months later. “When you hear him talk, he almost convinces you he’s just a businessman. He’s polite and courteous. He draws you out. He told me we were colleagues, reminding me that he’d been an officer in the national police force.”
Chepe Furia was sent to San Francisco Gotera Prison, in the department of Morazán, on the opposite side of the country. An officer from the Central Investigative Division assigned to prisons told us, anonymously, that Chepe Furia was being brutalized by the leader of that prison, Walter Antonio Carrillo, a forty-year-old known as El Chory (El Shorty) of the Fulton Locos Salvatrucha. According to the public prosecutor’s office, El Chory’s connections reach as far as Maryland, where he’s also coordinated criminal activities. El Chory was a national gang leader, and one of the most powerful men in western El Salvador. His clique boasted more than forty members, carried automatic rifles, and maintained relationships with drug trafficking organizations dealing their product into Guatemala through what is known as “The Little Path,” a well-trodden shortcut for traffickers who want to avoid moving through Honduras. The most important area for the Fulton Locos was Nueva Concepción, a municipality some fifteen miles from Atiquizaya.
Detective Pineda defined Chepe Furia’s new situation like this: “Apparently, every time Chory sees him he beats the shit out of him.”
Pineda and two of his investigative officers affirmed that the gang’s problem with Chepe Furia was that he’d led the Hollywood Locos as if they were just a bunch of hitmen. “He didn’t report any earnings to the gang, let alone to the greater network of western cliques,” said an agent of the Center of Investigative Policing. “It was a bitch going after him while he was on the streets, because Atiquizaya and all its surrounding areas were his turf, but everything changed once he was in jail,” an official of the police’s Elite Division against Organized Crime told us.
But Chepe Furia had a hope of escaping this new situation when Judge Salinas, once again, tried to release the man who’d already slipped from the authorities twice. On August 20, 2012, four months after his recapture in Bella Santa Ana, Judge Salinas ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that Chepe Furia was a leader of the Mara Salvatrucha, and acquitted him of all conspiracy charges.
And yet, this time, the judge’s suspect decision did not lead to Chepe Furia’s release. Detective Pineda had convinced the specialized prosecutor’s office to investigate Rambito’s case. After all, the facts of the murder of Rambito—who was a police informant—incriminated two police investigators. The public prosecutor’s organized crime unit took up the case and charged Chepe Furia, El Stranger, and Liro Jocker with Rambito’s murder. But because the body had been found 118 miles from Atiquizaya, the charges were filed on the other side of the country, in the Specialized Court on Organized Crime of San Miguel.
But that’s not all. Judge Salinas’s ruling seemed so bizarre that the Specialized Court on Organized Crime reversed it yet again. And this time emphatically. The court reminded Salinas that, according to the witness at the heart of the case, Miguel Ángel Tobar, Chepe Furia “distributes weapons, is the brains of the organization, has many ties to the police, [and] constantly travels to Guatemala to make more contacts for weapons and drugs.” The court also reminded Salinas that the witness “had been part of that organization, which implies that he has first-hand knowledge of the events [about which he’s testifying].” The court ordered Judge Salinas to rescind his ruling in favor of Chepe Furia.
Chepe Furia remained in prison, facing charges of conspiracy and aggravated homicide.
Miguel Ángel Tobar’s role became more important than ever.
In 1917, in the heart of western El Salvador, Ernesto Interiano, the Legend, was born. As with all good Salvadorans, we know a lot about his mother, but about his father we only have street-corner gossip. Some stories make him a Guatemalan pharmacist, others, a military man. No one knows for sure. When Milagro Interiano, Ernesto’s mother, could no longer hide her growing belly from the needling eyes of the small, bourgeois plantation elite of Santa Ana, her father decided to lock her up in the back of his mansion, among the servants and stable boys.
And so the young Milagro lived out the rest of her pregnancy, like a princess in a medieval story: cast out like a family ghost to the darkest depths of that great house. That’s where she gave birth to her son, her only son. Ernesto Interiano was held in the callused, arthritic hands of the servants and celebrated with shots of guaro.
And there he grew up, until his grandfather, finally moved to compassion, let them both move into the main quarters of the house, returning to the arms of the Interiano family. Due to the years of punishment, however, the family’s honor had dwindled.
Back in the house, Milagro was able, once again, to wear French fashions and eat dainty food at mahogany and cedar tables. But Ernesto couldn’t let go of what he’d seen and absorbed in the servants’ quarters. His whole life he was drawn to pungent language, to streets and brothels. As a teenager, he’d hand out meals to the panhandlers and widows in the central plaza. They say his first words were taught to him by his indigenous nana, Teresa Pushagua. Nahuatl words. Forbidden words in those years.
Beggars Loved Me was the title of a biography of Ernesto by Carlos Consalvi.
From early youth, Ernesto was always in trouble with the law. The National Guard poisoned his dog, Satanás, which affected him for life. Days later, he gathered the bodies of dead dogs and laid them in front of the National Guard’s offices, shouting: “Let’s see if the dogs will eat dogs!”
He’d have problems one day and worse problems the next. They accused him of many crimes. He made enemies of those he defeated. He was a good shot with a pistol. But his last skirmish was against an enemy that was too big for him.
In 1943 Ernesto was driving when he cut off his longtime enemy, Samuel Álvarez, a scion of one of the most powerful and moneyed families of El Salvador. Riding with Álvarez were two personal guards of the coup dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who’d ordered the extermination of El Salvador’s indigenous people in 1932.
A shootout. Ernesto killed one of the guards and fled into the mountains. The government turned him into a Salvadoran John Dillinger, designating him “public enemy number one.”
In several standoffs in the coffee plantations of Santa Ana, he outsmarted the National Guard. Before going into hiding he picked up his two great loves: his mistress, Clara Tobar (unrelated to Miguel Ángel), and his daughter, Miriam Interiano. With his woman beside him and his little girl in his arms, he vanished among the coffee trees on the outskirts of Atiquizaya.
Despite all the checkpoints and raids, they could not capture him. The dictator turned to the same hunter he’d used to exterminate indigenous people in 1932: General Calderón, his attack dog. The general was able to find Interiano’s weak spot. It was his mother. His solitary and remorseful mother. General Calderón surrounded Milagro’s house and didn’t let any food or supplies in. If Ernesto didn’t appear, his mother would starve to death.
But Ernesto did show up one night, proud as he was, with his leather boots and his revolver on his hip—or so the legend goes. He wanted to jump the fence around his house to get to a dark alleyway, but a bullet from Félix González, El Salvador’s Olympic shooting champion, reached him first. Félix had been hired specifically to kill the infamous bandit. Ernesto, mortally wounded, managed to kill his assassin, leaving the Olympic team without their best marksman, and the police officers and national guards who were there desperately trying to shield themselves from Ernesto’s wrath before he died.
Ernesto’s body was shot to shreds by the dictator’s guards. His face alone bore sixteen bullet wounds. Before the burial, his mother and her faithful servants plugged the holes in his body with rose petals and cedar chips.
The dictator had won. The panhandlers wept. Military order was imposed in the Salvadoran West. But the state hadn’t been counting on the dozens of beggars, thieves, prostitutes, and market vendors who flocked to clean up Ernesto’s blood with their rags, make altars, invoke him in séances, light candles in the middle of the night and ask him for favors in exchange for offerings of drinks and bullets.
In western El Salvador, not even spirituality is detached from the lore of shootings and bandits. This region had been watered in blood, and so it blossomed.
Ernesto’s daughter, Miriam Interiano, the child who’d fled with him, grew up to be a hippie. She turned into a symbol of youthful rebellion, capturing the heart of the most ruthless army officer of the 1970s, General José Alberto “Chele” Medrano—credited with founding the fearsome paramilitary group, ORDEN. After meeting the daughter of Ernesto Interiano, El Chele Medrano left the military and dedicated himself to the bohemian lifestyle. When he was murdered by guerrilla forces in front of his own house, he was raving in the throes of a drug-induced hallucination.
It seemed Ernesto’s spilled blood had cursed the great Salvadoran army and marked the beginning of a tradition that still lives on in our nation’s spirituality.
Today, people still light candles in the middle of stormy nights, invoking and asking impossible favors of the most beloved bandit of the Salvadoran West, Ernesto Interiano.
One day in May 2012, Miguel Ángel asks us: “Do you know what it means to see a black he-goat at midnight?”
“It’s Satan. It can’t be anything but Satan. It’s the Devil. And there’s something he wants,” Miguel Ángel says confidently, pacing and rolling another joint. He’s shirtless. He looks vigorous and strong, despite protruding ribs and some white blotches on his chest, a sign of malnutrition.
Miguel Ángel has delegated ears all over the region. His spies are men who admire the gangster lifestyle and see him as a special figure within the MS world, a heroic traitor, a man who rebelled against the Beast and yet, somehow, has managed to stay alive.
One of those ears is El Topo, a former member of the infamous clique of Victorias Locos Salvatrucha, whose turf is only a few miles from El Refugio. He’s not the brightest bulb. He lacks Miguel Ángel’s uncultivated mental agility. El Topo speaks slowly and rarely. His years in the gang never erased his campesino ingenuousness. He’s around thirty years old, dark-skinned, taller than Miguel Ángel, with a Gothic-style “MS” tattooed on his arm. He retired twelve years ago. The gang seemed to have tolerated his departure, and he claims he hasn’t participated in any recent missions; but there are rumors among the police that he’s become the object of a green light, the gang’s irrevocable death penalty. Because he’s a coward, who sought a quiet life for himself.
El Topo often stops by Miguel Ángel’s shack. They smoke dope, eat tortillas, and talk about the Beast, about how she’s always chasing them. El Topo’s visits leave Miguel Ángel haunted by esoteric gang culture: demonic goats, devils, fog, omens. He doesn’t like these visits, but he doesn’t care enough to stop them. At most, he throws El Topo a couple of contemptuous looks. What would be a scandal in the United States—an ex-gang member visiting a protected witness who’s putting MS-13 leaders behind bars—is unremarkable in El Salvador.
Every year, the National Victim and Witness Assistance Program (UTE, for its Spanish acronym) deals with about a thousand people who’ve been given some type of state protection: “white” witnesses, who saw a crime take place but were not involved; typically angry witnesses who’ve decided to testify in the most homicidal country in the world; and traitors, like Miguel Ángel. This last category is the minority, and accounts for around fifty cases a year, but these witnesses are the most useful to the public prosecutor’s office. These witnesses didn’t just see a crime, don’t only know how it was planned, but also know about the perpetrators who didn’t themselves pull the trigger. The witnesses participated in most of the crimes concerned. The relationship the authorities have with these confessed criminals, as we’ve seen in our visits to Miguel Ángel’s shack, tends to be arm’s length, to say the least. A monthly basket of supplies and little more.
“Sometimes I have to hassle the visiting doctors to donate a little milk,” Mauricio Rodríguez, the UTE director, told us in June 2013 when we asked him about their budget. According to him, they once received training from a member of the United States Marshals Service, in charge of the US protected witness program. The marshal explained that the US program included moving a witness and his family to another state and funding at least a year’s training in a new trade, as well as board and lodging, a monthly stipend, and a full change of identity. Rodríguez imagined having those resources and smiled. In El Salvador, by law, the UTE can’t give money or change anyone’s identity, and only in very rare instances can they continue to offer protection after the court process is over. In most cases, once the court process has stopped, so has the protection, and so has the meager basket of provisions. “Off to the streets to eat shit, to survive any way you can,” summarizes Detective Pineda in his no-bullshit manner.
Dozens of still active plea-bargain witnesses have been executed in El Salvador due to the pathetically inadequate safety measures.
An example. In May 2016, we asked the judge in charge of specialized sentences to remember how many cases he’d had to shelve because the protected witness had disappeared. The court he presides over is high-risk, specializing in organized crime, and is located in the main tribunal of El Salvador, Isidro Menéndez. It’s the mecca of Salvadoran justice, where the most complex cases go, and is protected by elite units attached to the police and public prosecutor’s office. The mecca of Salvadoran injustice, someone with a flair for sarcasm might say. After three days the judge came up with seven case files, including twelve protected witnesses who had disappeared over the last five years. The vagueness with which the disappearances were recorded speaks volumes about the lack of care for those who are promised protection in exchange for betrayal: “impossible to locate,” “unable to locate witnesses,” “no one able to give information on their whereabouts,” “not located,” “his whereabouts are unknown,” “dead,” “did not show up,” “location never found.”
Many rejoice in the fact that Viejo Lin, a national leader of the Barrio 18 Sureños, is behind bars, but few remember Luis Miguel, the witness who gave him away. For many Salvadorans it’s a relief that El Chino Tres Colas, another Barrio 18 leader, is locked up, but few know about Zeus, Apollo, Orion, Aries, and Neptune. The trial against the thirteen gang members known as the Packagers, accused of twenty-two homicides in Sonsonate, made national news when gory details leaked out about how they would pack dismembered victims into black bags. But no one ever thanked Raúl; nor did anyone thank Zafiro and Topazio for resolving the massacre of Las Pilitas; or Daniel, for explaining how the gang of Los Sicarios, with a high police membership, operated in western El Salvador. Who knows how many lives have been saved thanks to the incarceration of most of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, but almost no one, apart from Detective Pineda, worries about the safety of Yogui, Miguel Ángel Tobar. Plea-bargain witnesses live in the dust. They’re used as a trial progresses and are then discarded, resigned to a miserable confinement among the police, many of whom hate them.
“Just hearing them talk gives me diarrhea. Those fuckers. I’m not going to look after a bunch of hobos,” a police detective in charge of obtaining confessions from plea-bargain witnesses told us in 2013.
Miguel Ángel explains how what the detective had foreseen ended up coming true. A few days earlier, El Topo paid Miguel Ángel another visit. He had a shifty look on his face and refused to make eye contact with Miguel Ángel.
Miguel Ángel boasts of his familiarity with the world of the occult. He says he knows something about witchcraft, and that he once saw the “Black Book,” a legendary book in this town, and supposedly the antithesis to the Bible. A mix of indigenous traditions with Catholic culture is common in these parts. Some people invoke the spirits of old bandits, or famous witches of the past, asking them favors in exchange for an offering. These same people go to mass and consider themselves fervent Catholics. But Miguel Ángel dispenses with the Catholic side of the syncretic mix.
“Hey, Topo, I see you have something splitting your soul, something eating at you. Come on, I’m gonna give you a candle test,” said Miguel Ángel to the crestfallen gang member.
He led him into his room, lit several candles, and said a few words while looking fixedly into El Topo’s eyes.
“The candles don’t lie, Topo. You have something going on with me. Speak,” Miguel Ángel told him.
El Topo confessed that the Beast had told him to spill his blood. He said that El Mafioso, an MS member of the Pride Gangster Locos Salvatruchos, one of the few MS cliques left in Chalchuapa, had given him the order.
Miguel Ángel didn’t attack El Topo. He merely told him to be careful. He declared that he could see these things before they happened; he could anticipate them. His advice to El Topo was, keep talking to the MS and tell them everything. In just a few words, he deftly carried out a classic counterespionage tactic.
The gang had failed again.
When Miguel Ángel Tobar has to put on a show, he proves himself to be an astute, ingenious, and determined man. An expert con, a tamer of beasts—capable of getting the truth he needs to survive, of walking seasoned assassins to their deaths. Walking men to their deaths is something that marked the arc of his life. It’s how he betrayed his gang to avenge his brother. And how he landed in his own private prison, in what would be his last home.