15

Blood in the Turín Well

In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Harari explores what defines us as a species. Our clearest advantage over other early hominids, he argues, was our ability to create fictional figures, to invent lies and believe them collectively. A group, for example, is a fictional entity. It has nothing to do with its members—these can always change—or with a place, which can always be destroyed. Harari claims that our success as a species was rooted in our ability to generate ideas, complex ideas that gave rise to states, religions, warfare. This is how we came to rule the world. This is the advantage that allowed our ancestors to survive the blows of history. Ideas of this kind allow an individual to align himself with a cause and, therefore, with other people he doesn’t know and will never meet.

Neither the Mara nor the Beast actually exist, of course. They are complex ideas that encourage some people to harm other people. They are creations. History is plagued with such creations. Pushing individuals to attack each other mindlessly, motivated by a belief in something that simply does not exist, that has no material nature. They attack, and they attack in very disturbing ways.

Miguel Ángel is one of those rare individuals who does reflect, who bravely asks himself why, why, why? Or at least he’s asking himself questions now, now that he’s confined to this shack. And, in mid 2012, he has ample time to think. He’s been locked up here for close to three years. Miguel Ángel sits outside smoking pot at night, studying the stars and the darkness, sometimes crouched like a cat atop the outer fence surrounding his shack, feeling a fresh breeze that smells of burning sugarcane. Inside the tiny hut sleep his wife and little girl. Miguel Ángel reflects, he asks himself why, as he looks up at the stars. Why so many had to die by his hand. He hardly knew any of them. Not enough to truly hate them. He wonders whether what he did to El Horse was justified, why he shot an unknown taxi driver in the head, why he shot that prostitute in Atiquizaya. His mind takes off and ties itself in knots. He smokes. He knows that that fictional construct, the MS-13, now seeks to kill him, and, despite being merely an idea, its impact on reality, its ability to murder and torture, is all too real.

“The Barrio has a thorn in its foot, and I’m the thorn,” he once said to gang members who were threatening him from Ciudad Barrios prison.

Without having read Harari, Miguel Ángel knows he’s as much the owner of that fictional idea as the hitmen who threaten him. And that’s why he sometimes convinces himself that, despite everything, he’s still a member of the MS-13 and eternal enemy of the “diecihoyo” (a portmanteau that turns “eighteen” into “eight-hole” to avoid naming them explicitly).

The questions, after thinking around and around the dizzying circles of his life, sometimes turn into answers and offer some explanatory key: the Beast, the Mara, the frantic war with Barrio 18. “The fuckers,” as he calls them, “the eightshits, the faggots, the eightholes.”

“The neighborhood’s fate,” he says, with the conviction of a Tibetan monk who, after much meditation, has found the path to Truth, “is a bitch. The Mara was the beginning, we brought with us the name of the Devil, Satan, all of us marked by the MS-13 are marked by the Devil. We’re souls delivering over other souls, all of us tangled up in the same knot.” Pursuing the eightholes is an end without end. That’s gang warfare. It’ll never end.

He expounds all this in the certainty that he’s understood his life and that he can explain it clearly. He speaks with open eyes, head tilted up toward the sky, gaze lowered to the ground. His sentences are halting, filled with dramatic pauses. He utters them as one would utter a sacred truth.

Stripped of their dark mysticism, the conclusions he reaches reveal a cycle, the cycle of violence, something that will never end because it has no way out. It’s taken decades for academics studying gang violence to understand this. Miguel Ángel the assassin, however, understands it intimately.

It’s winter 2004 (Central American winter is approximately May until September). In other words, it’s raining. After a long string of hellishly hot days, it’s finally raining. The Hollywood Kid moves through his world as an aimless gang member. His clique grew after both phases of Mission Hollywood. In the first phase, they eliminated those they saw as lukewarm and cowardly, kids who didn’t want to get on the MS-13 bandwagon of death. In the second phase, they stormed the strongholds of Moncho Garrapata in the center of Chalchuapa, Chalchuapita, and Periquera. This phase caught the attention of the police.

In response, the police launched Operation Hollywood. The idea was to rein in a burgeoning clique that was moving beyond small skirmishes and the occasional murder. The operation captured some of the clique’s heavyweights. One of them was Guillermo Solito Escobar, once part of the Meli Meli 33. His gang name was El Stranger, and he was Chepe Furia’s right-hand man. For all practical purposes, he was the leader of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha of Atiquizaya whenever Chepe Furia was away. Dozens of others were also captured in the police sweep.

The Kid pushed those who remained into the Beast’s line of vision. He brought back the rule of law. To the police, it was more important to stop the MS-13 than Barrio 18. Their boys were more bloodthirsty. Their leader knew how to stir them up. There were also more of them. And, after so many police operations and arrests, the clique’s control had finally been diluted. The ex-soldier and ex-Clown, Miguel Ángel Tobar, had become the Hollywood Kid, and the laxness he saw astonished him.

An Eighteen from Chalchuapa, for example, a warrior during the last war, came, on horseback, to buy his pot in Atiquizaya.

“Thinks he’s so cool,” thought the Kid, indignant, hardly believing his eyes.

He summoned the other youngsters, and together they waited for the rider to pass them. When the Eighteen appeared, the Kid shot him. He fell off his horse and the boys swarmed him, hacking with the machetes the Kid had bought them to win their support. Little by little, the rules reestablished themselves. This was MS-13 turf. That over there was Barrio 18 turf. Whoever trespassed on enemy territory had to abide by the rules of the game: kill or be killed. The lost boys had a new mentor.

Unlike the other cliques, members of the Parvis Locos of Ahuachapán had remained strong even after the Barrio 18 and police strikes, but they were still a clique of inexperienced boys, most of them recently jumped in. This was no longer the booming heyday. The Kid, by far, the most experienced killer in the area, would do with these boys what Chepe Furia did with him and the generation of lost boys in the early 1990s.

More cycles in the life of the Kid.

His years in the MS-13 taught him that all pacts with the Beast are made with blood.

Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, as we’ve seen, explained how rituals allow people to transition from one state of social being to another. And yet, rituals also serve to strengthen sociocultural values and prevent undesirable behaviors. Through symbolically meaningful participation, people forge the arc of their lives. These actions are also channels of communication.

In the world of Salvadoran gangs, death is a form of group communication. The gangs leave messages, complex messages, when they kill. A lightning mission that leaves a body riddled with holes says something. It’s like when a boy kicks a ball over to another boy. He’s saying: Want to play? If a head is left in a public plaza, the message is for the state—and it also communicates certain ideas to the public at large. If the eyes are gouged out and the tongue and ears cut off, the gang is saying: ver, oír, y callar, see, hear, and keep quiet. If they go at an enemy body for hours, penetrating its anus with knives and bats, and then leave the remains in enemy territory, the message is directed at the enemy: We’re winning. A symbol of humiliation in the gang world.

An enemy’s body is a blank canvas.

That’s why, when the Kid, in full murderous rage, chose his next target, he didn’t merely want to kill him. He wanted to write a message on his body. He wanted his disciples to read it.

His name was Ronald Landaverde, and he was the brother of a youngster who’d briefly been an Eighteen before he became an evangelist and left the gang for good.

The Kid spoke to whoever was left in the regional cliques: Hollywood Locos, Parvis Locos, and Ángeles Locos. He told them that they were going to hit a chavala in order to sign a pact over his body.

The Kid knew of a dry well in the municipality of Turín, on land that had been abandoned after the railroad used for coffee exports fell into disrepair. The site of Ronal Landaverde’s murder is riddled with metal spikes crusted over with dirt and intermittently poking out from the overgrown brush. Beyond the abandoned tracks is a neglected cornfield. Then, a widening expanse, a yawning, open plain. In the middle of that expanse a concrete structure stands a meter high. The well.

This is where the Kid took Ronal Landaverde. He told him they were going to get high with some other potheads. Years before, perhaps, Ronal would have declined, but the Kid had always been simpatico, an entertaining talker, and the Kid had been out of the area for a couple years, and besides, the war between gangs had loosened its grip over western El Salvador. Smoking a joint with the Kid seemed like a fine idea.

Gathered around the well were kids from all three of the cliques. Ronal Landaverde tensed up when he saw all the human piranhas that had been summoned by the Kid. But it was too late.

“See, you son of a bitch, you’re the brother of that bicha, El Gringo,” the Kid said to him, not at all simpatico anymore, hissing his brother’s gang name like it was a threat.

“Yeah but, look, my brother’s out of it now. He’s retired. You can talk to him if you want,” begged Ronal Landaverde.

“Nah, our beef isn’t with him. It’s with you,” said the Kid, tying a rope around his neck and pulling it tight.

The Kid ordered another teen to grab the victim’s arms. He looped the rope around and gave the two ends to two kids on either side. He ordered them to pull in opposite directions. This time he wasn’t there to kill, but to watch others kill.

He made everyone join in. Over Ronal Landaverde’s body they sealed their new pact, their new foundation. His body was written on and then locked in a safe: the Turín well.

They didn’t want any blood on the outside of the well, and so they used rope and not machetes. The Kid had decided that they’d let him down little by little. With the same rope they’d used to asphyxiate him, they started lowering him into the well. But Ronal Landaverde performed one last act of rebellion.

The rope had bitten into Landaverde’s body. The nylon sawed into his neck and instead of going down smoothly into the water, his body spun uncontrollably, spraying blood all over until he finally fell on top of a pile of other bodies.

According to the Kid and other plea-bargain witnesses, other bodies would be thrown in turn on top of the body of Ronal Landaverde, chucked into the Turín Well in the following years. Eventually, the well’s excavation would become a gruesome national spectacle.

With just that one act, the Kid had reanimated the cliques, kick-started the game, and riled up the players.

April 3, 2012. Miguel Ángel is sitting in his shack. Once again, he’s circled back to his killing of the prostitute. Every so often, he comes back to this crime. It affected him. He never understood why he killed her. He knows why he killed the others. For most of them, it was simply that they were Eighteens. But he has no idea why, in 2004, he fired three bullets into a woman’s chest as she was sitting quietly in an Atiquizaya brothel.

“That day, I swore I’d never kill a woman again.”

After a short pause, he continues: “Unless she did something to taint the honor of the barrio, unless she owed something, but just like that, for no reason, that’s fucked. I mean women are tasty, and then just like that there’s one less to go around.”

He says this without a hint of humor.

It’s how he reasons. He likes women. He reckons that if he kills them, there will be fewer left for him to enjoy.

Then he starts ruminating about what’s really bugging him, this feeling he can’t shake: that he was deceived.

“I have no fucking idea why Chepe wanted her dead. Some private business he had. Must be. Maybe he rented out that brothel himself. Maybe she had some dirt on the fucker.”

Throughout the evening Miguel Ángel keeps mulling it over, tormented by doubt. When he speaks of these murders, he does so naturally, without lowering his voice, just a few yards away from Lorena, who pretends not to hear. Sometimes, if we turn quickly enough, we can catch her looking our way. But when we look straight at her, she lowers her gaze, settling it on whatever she’s pretending to do.

It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and Lorena serves us coffee so weak it tastes like a coffee-flavored tea.

Less than two miles away, a man is celebrating because he’s finally gotten the go-ahead to exhume the bodies of the Turín Well.

This man is Israel Ticas, and he’s standing next to the well, talking on the phone to an official of the Ministry of National Security who has promised to help him exhume the bodies.

Israel Ticas has a grim job. But he enjoys it as much as if he were manager of Disneyland.

This man, familiarly called “Ticas” by every student of Salvadoran crime, calls himself the dead man’s attorney.

He’s the only forensic scientist employed by the attorney general’s office. A forensic criminologist, he often has to correct people, though he isn’t even a forensic scientist by trade. He studied civil engineering, and, after many zigzags in life, learned how to exhume bodies. He’s been working for the public prosecutor’s office for twelve years now. Joining the force in 1989, Ticas was a police officer throughout the last years of the war. After the peace accords of 1992, he joined the Scientific and Technical Police Division of the newly formed National Civilian Police, which was, in reality, neither very scientific nor very technical. Everyone contributed whatever they could as international experts strove to retrain these veteran soldiers and ex-guerrilla members. Ticas was bright and stood out. In 2000, he was put in charge of opening clandestine graves for the prosecutor’s office. He went on to attend specialized courses and workshops to further progress in his peculiar interest.

In sum: Ticas is the single person authorized in El Salvador to take bodies out of the earth. The one and only authorized forensic scientist in the office devoted to prosecuting murders in the most murderous country on the planet. It’s worth emphasizing “authorized,” because many other people do dig up bodies in this unhappy country. There are prosecutors who, to advance their cases, grab a shovel and dig wherever a witness has told them they’ll find a corpse. “Sometimes,” a prosecutor from western El Salvador told us, “we damage the bodies, but at least we come up with something, a bone or a skull with which we can prosecute these crimes. Remember, in this country if there’s no body there’s no case.”

Ticas is dark and wiry. He tends to twitch his mouth, roll his eyes, click his jaw, and he blinks often and quickly. The dead have left their mark on him. Ticas claims to have lifted 703 corpses from the earth, twenty-seven of them from wells, like the one in Turín, where he’s working now.

Fifteen months ago, Ticas descended into the well for the first time. He went down in a harness, an orange rope, an oxygen tank on his back and a mask over his face. The Turín well is deep, the deepest Ticas has ever scavenged. That first time, in December 2010, he descended fifty-five yards. At the bottom he lit his lamp and saw scraps of clothing, many bone fragments, and several torsos. He came up with proof to back what two witnesses, including Miguel Ángel, had said: that there are bodies down there.

In January 2011, they had decided on a strategy to reach these bodies. Descending and then digging was not an option. The well is narrow and far too deep, and the structure could easily collapse. To get to the bodies Ticas would have to dig a tunnel about 100 yards from the well. The tunnel would slope down until it reached the base of the well, where they would cut an access door leading to the bones. By January 2011, Ticas had everything he needed: an electric shovel for digging the tunnel, two trucks, and a tractor for hauling the dirt. Ticas was pleased. But by the end of that January, two cold fronts had swept over El Salvador. The Ministry of Public Works, which owned the machinery, demanded its return. They promised to lend it out again, only needing the machinery to finish up some unnamed projects before the weather got any colder. Ticas had only excavated about ten yards by that point. For the next fourteen months, nothing happened. Summer passed, then winter, then summer returned. Ticas posted a call on Facebook for someone to lend him machinery so he could proceed with the excavation. It’s now April 2012, winter is soon coming, and Ticas is happy for the first time in a very long time. The armed forces and the Ministry of Public Works have given him back his electric shovel, three dump trucks, a loader, and even a tractor with which to smooth out his tunnel.

“We’ll get there, before they take it all away from us, before October,” says Ticas excitedly.

He means that if, by October 2012, he doesn’t manage to remove the bodies, the six alleged gang members who’ve been arrested thanks to the testimony of Miguel Ángel and one other witness will be released. In October, the two-year maximum time that a person can be jailed without a conviction will be up. The prosecutor’s office believes that there are more bodies in Turin, as Miguel Ángel and the second plea-bargain witness have talked about other victims of the Hollywood Locos and allied cliques. What is more, in line with information given by other informants, the prosecutor’s office believes the well was used by many western cliques: the Fulton Locos, the Prindin Gangsters, and the Acajutlas Locos. And by a now disbanded group of kidnappers, as well. Prosecutors say that a former member of that group told them that when they reach the bottom of the well, “[they]’ll be surprised.”

Ticas giddily gets off the phone, ready to get back to the labor of excavating.

Miguel Ángel is sitting in his shack on April 3, 2012, as Ticas begins to excavate what he once threw into that well. Meanwhile, Miguel Ángel keeps asking himself why he killed that woman.