Chepe Furia turned up again in late 2005, but he didn’t stay for long. Seeing him depended on whether he wanted to be seen, not whether you wanted to see him. Chepe Furia had become increasingly inaccessible to his followers. He’d changed. The gang war was no longer his main focus, and he seemed to have delegated the Kid and other veteran gang members to conduct the gang rituals, to “walk” rivals, to make sure Atiquizaya remained a bastion of the MS-13.
President Francisco Flores’s iron-fist tactics had borne fruit. Rotten fruit. The murder rate shot up after the first national security operation against the gangs. The homicide rate for every 100,000 inhabitants was 36.6 in 2003, the second lowest in the century; in 2004 it was 48.7; in 2005 it was 63. This latest dose of medication only aggravated the symptoms of the deadly Salvadoran epidemic. And yet, the same medication was prescribed again and again: the iron fist was followed by an even heavier iron fist. The strategy continued from 2003 to 2009. Six years of senselessness that turned El Salvador into the most murderous country on the planet: 71 homicides for every 100,000 inhabitants.
The prisons had been handed over to the prisoners. Gang members who were jailed at the turn of the century finally stopped being battered victims of the system, stopped being the vulnerable ones. Little by little, as the police turned their attention to those recently deported from the United States, and as those same deportees were pushed to the most impoverished neighborhoods of El Salvador, the jails became flooded with people whose bodies showcased tribal markings: 18; MS.
Between the year 2000—when Operation Hollywood was rolled out throughout western El Salvador—and 2006, the inmate population almost doubled. According to the Institute of Public Opinion at the Jesuit University of El Salvador, it shot up from 7,800 to 14,682.
Most gang members lived a nomadic life, in constant migration from jail to jail. They were sent to new jails in an effort to save their lives. Clobbered, stabbed, sometimes hardly alive, they were transferred from a prison controlled by La Raza to another where La Raza’s tentacles strangled all the same. X, that gang member who had clung to the bars of a Mariona prison cell in 2000 as he begged the guards to let him out, would remember, seventeen years later, that the MS’s exasperation finally boiled over on February 19, 2002.
Several gang members who’d been locked up for years were transferred to Apanteos. El Diablito of Hollywood arrived sometime after his arm had completely recovered from the beating he’d suffered in Mariona. Then came El Crook of Hollywood, a bearlike hulk addicted to exercise and better known as the Thief or the Bitch, who, years later, in 2015, would be added to the US Treasury’s blacklist. At that time, he was serving a sixteen-year sentence for kidnapping a shopkeeper on the western coast. Then came Skinny de Stoner, Western Tail, and Skinny of Francis. La Raza was losing its influence in Apanteos. They no longer controlled all the sectors of the prison, and the veteran gang members sought to take over even more. There were 150 MS members throughout the prison, and around 400 members and supporters of La Raza. X remembers that a wila circulated among the MS, a message encrypted in gang language: “Break the criminal.”
The plan was to take advantage of a sporting event organized by the prison director, Óscar Rivas, who had had the absurd idea of organizing a soccer match between the MS and the common criminals. Those who’d been raped, extorted, and beaten for years would play against their rapists, extortionists, and assailants. The warden had picked a ludicrous moment to implement his idea of healthy recreation.
The MS would honor the wila. They trained for the soccer match by preparing “magic machetes,” hiding machete blades inside table legs, and collecting knives they’d smuggled from outside the jail. Proud of his innovative methods, the warden invited the head of the Santa Ana Police Department, Commissioner Pablo Escobar Baños, representatives of the Office of the Ombudsman of Human Rights, and even the inmates’ families to come see their beloved sport play out in Apanteos prison.
The game only lasted a few seconds.
It made headlines in the daily newspaper, El Diario de Hoy: “According to reports from the National Civil Police, the inmates were invited to participate in a soccer game at 10:30 in the morning … In a matter of seconds, the MS took out chains, knives, daggers, iron rods, and sharpened sticks, which they had made themselves to attack their opponents. On seeing the danger, some of the common criminals ran the other way; others brandished handmade weapons and wounded several gang members. Inmates punched and stabbed one another with their sharpened knives and rods, leaving the grounds covered in blood.”
The warden was fired a few days later.
That day, it took a platoon of the Public Order Maintenance Unit to lock the prisoners back up. Fifty of the wounded were returned to their cells, and two others, identified as MS members, were discharged from the prison as deceased. They were José Alfredo González, twenty-two, known as El Devil, who was inside for possession of a weapon of war; and Jimmy Alexánder Sáenz Mojica, twenty-three, convicted of counterfeiting money. José Rosario Cruz, a prison guard, was also seriously injured, with multiple stab wounds to the abdomen.
The ferocity of the MS, after years of humiliation, as well as the advantage they gained after their premeditated attack, forced the other inmates to retreat. By offering up the lives of two of their members, they obtained what the juveniles of the gang had achieved years ago: to have a space for themselves, away from the other prisoners.
The idea to separate inmates from rival gangs had been suggested a year earlier, on February 28, 2001, after twenty-five MS members attacked eight Barrio 18 members. After the incident, most MS were gathered into two prison sectors free of Eighteens, but they were still held with the common criminals—that far-reaching tentacle of La Raza. After the attack of 2001 and the bloody soccer match of 2002, the state decided to completely cordon off the MS, to isolate the beasts.
The gang members were reunited in sectors four and six of Apanteos Prison. Only them. No one else. “It was the first time we were all together again,” remembered X.
These kinds of attacks would not stop until the gangs were transferred to entire prisons exclusively reserved for their members. No longer just sectors, but entire prisons. “Gang universities,” as X described them.
The older gang members, who would later become infamous throughout the country, first met each other in those prisons, where they were free from the attacks of the other mafias. They soon created a new group that initially bore several different names: El Pichirilo, El Carro, La Ranfla. The last of these names is still used today in reports about the MS-13, including FBI reports.
X claims that the purpose of this new ranfla was to create a plan of control for the new prisons. “There were too many homeboys wanting to do what the civilians did.” MS members stealing drugs from fellow members, raping their homeboys’ visitors, extorting the weakest or poorest members as if they were mere indigents devoid of homeboy honor. “There were trashy people, walking around like beggars, without cutting their hair or nails and stinking all the time,” explained X in 2017, as he was waiting to hear a decision about his immigration case in the United States.
At first, the ranfla only intended to regulate two sectors of Apanteos. In doing so it established three ground rules: keep clean, respect each other’s drugs, and respect each other’s visitors. It was necessary to punish some rebels. To make an example of them, El Rambito de Teclas Locos, El Zarco de San Cocos Locos, and El Sharky de Quezalte Locos were all given beatings.
This remained the ranfla’s strategy throughout 2002: keep running the gang from inside the prison and raise it to the level of the other prison groups. But the creation of the ranfla meant, for the first time, the creation of an organized party leadership. Leaders of cliques steering the leaders of other cliques. Little by little, leaders making decisions on the outside started consulting those in the prisons. Gang leaders, accustomed to living under ranfla rule in Apanteos, started to defer to them even after being released. X was a member of the ranfla in early 2002, when the Fulton Locos in Sonsonate were a rising clique. Deportees from California were streaming into Sonsonate, and they asked the leader of the Fulton Locos in El Salvador, El Chory (the same guy who, years later, would beat up Chepe Furia in the Gotera prison) if they could keep their name. Chory consulted the ranfla in Apanteos, and the ranfla asked the new Fulton Locos a favor in return for their blessing on the use of the name. There was a prison guard, Officer Laínez, who had been abusing gang members in sectors four and six. To officially get permission from El Chory and the ranfla to establish their clique in Sonsonate, the aspiring Fulton Locos had to kill Laínez. They fulfiled their end of the bargain a few days later, X recalled, and the Fulton Locos of Sonsonate became a clique under El Chory’s leadership.
As the ranfla started taking control of outside operations, one gang member saw the potential in the new structure. El Diablito of Hollywood made two moves that would define him as the face of the ranfla, and the person with the most important contacts. First, he got a gang member known as La Súper Abuela de Arce, or the Super Grandma of Arce, to bring in a cell phone in December of 2002. A small Siemens which was smuggled into the prison, in pieces, hidden in Súper Abuela’s anus during a visit. X remembers the exact date—December 31, 2002—because that day, after three years inside, he was allowed to talk to his wife for one minute. El Diablito kept hold of the phone. The second move he made was even bolder. Earlier that year, El Diablito had asked for a transfer to the Quezaltepeque facility, where other street-famous MS leaders were serving time, including El Fool of San Cocos Locos, El Tangle of Stoner, El Crime of Adams, and El Negro of Harvard.
Who knows what tricks he’d had to pull, but somehow El Diablito managed to get himself transferred.
A few months later, in early 2003, according to X, El Diablito returned from Quezaltepeque to Apanteos. And he returned with a new right-hand man—El Crook of Hollywood. They explained, as if it were already official, that in Quezaltepeque there was a ranfla as well, and that the two of them, along with all the homies in Apanteos, were part of that ranfla.
El Diablito, still armed with the Siemens that rode inside Súper Abuela’s anus, was able to connect the two ranflas. And he was their connection.
Then came El Diablito’s last move. The gang member jumped in by the Hollywood Locos of Los Angeles asked for two deported gangsters on the outside to be included in the ranflas of Apanteos and Quezaltepeque. The two were Ricardo Adalberto Díaz, El Rat of Leward, and Rubén Rosa Loco, El Goat of Centrales, who, together, controlled the city center of San Salvador: managing clandestine brothels, drug sales, extortions, and robberies. They both happened to be close friends of El Diablito. Gradually, without anybody questioning the transformation, El Diablito was turning the ranfla (originally created to control homies in two wards of a single prison) into MS’s national leadership committee. He had learned the technique from the Mexican Mafia, the Eme, in California: if you control the prisons, you control the streets. The message to the gang members on the streets was clear: one day you’re going to be on the inside, and it will be better for you if you’re on good terms with the leaders behind bars.
The ranfla had become La Ranfla.
The Mara Salvatrucha 13 took over two sectors of the Apanteos prison between 2001 and 2002. Imprisoned members were enrolling in the gang university and graduating as gangsters. MS-13 was thoroughly organized: it had both laws and leaders, an established hierarchy, and a standardized system of punishment and execution.
By 2005, when Chepe Furia (who had never yet set foot inside a Salvadoran prison) returned to Atiquizaya, the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha clique he had founded was filling out with recently released, or graduated, gang members. They included El Stranger, who would become second-in-command, and El Whisper, who, years later, after getting sent back to prison, would threaten the Kid with being left smelling of pine.
It suited Chepe Furia that other MS generals were taking charge of the fight against Barrio 18. His interests lay elsewhere.
Chepe Furia, the Kid recalls, was spending a lot of time in Guatemala, but he never told anyone where he was. He came and went as he pleased. Chepe Furia wasn’t even leading any mirins anymore, nor ordering hits against Eighteens. It seemed, to the Kid at least, that the war wasn’t that important to him. Chepe Furia was only coming to the Kid to order the occasional hit, which often had nothing to do with the gang war.
The first of these was against the prostitute. Though the police weren’t yet seriously investigating the clique, they’d opened a dossier and drawn up a list of murders tied to MS-13. The police thus had photographs of the crime scene, in which she appears lying on her back on the floor. The pictures show a large, dark-skinned woman. Her arms are folded over her head, hiding her face. She’s wearing a tight white shirt, with blue sequins and the word “Ángel” on the front, soaked in blood and revealing folds of her flesh. Her sandals are also bloodstained. The photos were taken minutes after the Kid shot her three times in the chest.
Chepe Furia showed up earlier that day in the San Antonio neighborhood. As usual, he took a seat in his little store, ready to play cards with a group of old men. When the Kid, whom he’d sent for, came around, they walked together toward the soccer field. He told him he had a mission for him, which he should complete at sundown. He gave him a .357 pistol with three explosive bullets. He wanted to be sure his target would die.
The Kid was to kill a woman who worked in a brothel off a main street in Atiquizaya. The Kid knew this was a dangerous mission. The street ran through the center of town, not far from the restaurants of the central plaza. This wouldn’t be like walking another gang member, or making a hit in rural pastures or near the Turín well. He was being asked to make a hit in the heart of the city, and early in the day, too, not under the cover of night.
Above all else, one question clouded the assassin’s mind. After almost ten years of being an MS-13 faithful, after almost ten years of blindly following the orders of his leader, the Kid, for the first time, asked himself: “Why?”
Why kill this woman?
Why did Chepe Furia want her dead so badly, so immediately?
Why couldn’t he wait until it got dark and then walk her?
Why did it need to be that very day, right around sunset?
Why her?
What was this all about?
The Kid, who had been in the clique from the very beginning, rising through the ranks, could count all the times Barrio 18 had crossed the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha. He knew, even better than Chepe Furia, the names of all his enemies, and the names of the dead homies that needed avenging. This prostitute wasn’t on any of those lists.
So why?
He asked himself that question the rest of the afternoon. But his loyalty to and admiration for Chepe Furia vanquished his doubts, and he never said anything. He took the gun his leader gave him. He said, “Hell yeah,” and he went off to set up the murder with four other gang members, who would be his scouts making sure there were no police in sight when the time came.
“Shit, I don’t want to kill her,” the Kid remembers thinking as he left San Antonio.
“I don’t want to kill her,” he told himself again as he got ready to head out.
“Shit, if I kill this lady I don’t know what I’m doing it for, what she did wrong,” he thought as he walked toward the center of Atiquizaya.
“Maybe one day she’d even lend her snatch to me,” he said to himself, before calling the lookouts to start the mission.
He was hunting, for the first time, for some excuse to not do the only thing in life that he knew how to do, and do well, better than anyone else in his clique: kill.
For a moment, he thought he’d found the perfect get-out. He was casing the brothel, a shabby little house with a red lightbulb outside and a garbage bin in front, when he saw some policemen walking by. He hid behind a fig tree, called one scout and told him, “Hey, there’s a couple cops walking by, up by the salons, I’m not going to execute the mission.” The scout responded, “No, man, they’re just some rural cops, and they’re already gone. They turned down the road to San Lorenzo.” He had no more choice. Either he had to admit that he wasn’t going to do it because of his conscience, or he had to do it. The Kid took a long slug from a small bottle of Cuatro Ases, sucked on a joint and went to do his job.
He ran, ran past two of his scouts, and crossed the alleyway. He stepped through the door. Three women sat at the bar. He knew which one he had to kill. “Hey,” he said. All three of them turned to look, quickly raising their arms in defense. The Kid extended his right arm, dropped his cheek to his shoulder to get a sight line along his extended limb. The visor of his cap was pulled down, covering his forehead, leaving just a sliver of vision for him to aim and fire three shots into the woman’s chest.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
And then he ran. He ran a long way. He scrambled up a hill, jumped a few fences, and came to a creek. Using a piece of plastic, he scooped up the water and poured it over his face and into his mouth. He drank and drank. He went into a field and hid. He slipped back into the world he belonged to: the outskirts, the edges, the margins. He hid in the scrub to finish his guaro and his joint. He thought his heart was going to burst. He felt like he’d never felt before, like he was about to die of asphyxiation. He was used to killing, but not to this feeling.
Six years later, already a traitor to his gang, he would tell Detective Pineda about that murder. The police included it in the document they handed over to the prosecutors, but they never actually charged Chepe Furia. Without specifying, the prosecutors said there were “some inconsistencies” in the story. Detective Pineda would remind them that the Kid could describe exactly what the victim was wearing, what position she was left in, and how many times she was shot—all without seeing the police report. Detective Pineda would say that something smelled off about the prosecutors’ decision. The other possibility was that, in a country as murderous as El Salvador, the prosecutors simply saw it as a bygone crime, with a forgettable victim, in a system that typically leaves these bodies for the worms.
The Kid never asked Chepe Furia why he ordered him to make that kill. Chepe Furia rewarded him with treats, as if he were a dog: guaro, marijuana, and a few slaps on the back. The Kid slipped back into the gang’s daily life.
A few months later Chepe Furia came looking for the Kid again. This time, the mission was even stranger than blasting a prostitute who had nothing to do with the MS-13. Chepe Furia asked him to torch a double-cab pickup truck.
He had two lookouts go along with him. They bought the gas, spilled it out in the bed of the truck, splashed it on the windows, doused the interior, and then torched the lot. A brand-new truck.
The Kid, with his assassin’s mind, thought: “Why not kill the owner instead of burning the ride?” It was the second time that dangerous question bounced around in his head. His second bout of: why?
It didn’t take long for the grapevine to broadcast that someone had burned Viejo Oso’s (Old Bear’s) new truck. Viejo Oso was a large, burly man with a reputation for violence.
The Kid’s doubts lingered. Turns out that Viejo Oso was a friend of Chepe Furia. The Kid had often seen them throwing back drinks and betting on cards in San Antonio.
This time, the Kid took his doubts a step further.
He started asking around the petty thieves who worked with Viejo Oso. He questioned some of the local drunks that liked to make bets with Chepe Furia. He found out that two months ago, Chepe Furia and Viejo Oso had planned a robbery together. They robbed Viejo Oso’s own sister. Viejo Oso gave Chepe Furia all the intel: the day, time, place when his sister would have a lot of cash on her. Chepe Furia, with a couple of his bandits, carried out the robbery and gave the money to Viejo Oso to hide.
The Kid kept digging. He found out that a few weeks later Chepe Furia was complaining about Viejo Oso—that he wasn’t answering his calls and was basically avoiding him. Viejo Oso kept his distance but sent Chepe Furia a couple of small installments of the money, which the Kid referred to as piscachitas, little pinches. Meanwhile, here was Viejo Oso suddenly driving around in a new Toyota pickup.
Chepe Furia, the leader of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, the western bandit, ex-member of the National Police, had been swindled by his friend. And so he decided to burn Viejo Oso’s truck. Get him back.
The Kid remembers seeing Viejo Oso actually crying afterward.
“Oh man, Chepito, they burned my new truck,” he griped to Chepe Furia.
“We’ll investigate, don’t worry, we’ll investigate. And when we find out who did it, we’ll set things right,” Chepe Furia said.
A couple of days later, Viejo Oso delivered what was owed to Chepe Furia—close to $7,000.
The Kid was there that day when Viejo Oso had come around whining. And after he left, Chepe Furia laughed at Viejo Oso, and threw the Kid another treat: a few bucks to buy pupusas, stuffed tortillas. Later he’d give him the rest of his wages: twenty dollars.
It was the first time the Kid thought something wasn’t right about his relationship with Chepe Furia.
It was the first time in years that he didn’t feel part of this all-important organization, MS-13, the mega, the Beast that ran the world. He was starting to feel instead like Chepe Furia’s lackey.
He felt bad about himself, just like he used to feel before joining up with the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha.
The Kid had never asked for money before. He never tried to get out of doing a hit. He never complained about being sent on dangerous missions: walking an Eighteen, killing an ex-compañero from the neighborhood, or decapitating a witch. Killing was never a problem for him. Money was never important. As long as it was all in the name of the Beast. But the woman and the burned truck were another matter. They weren’t about the Beast. They were about humans. They were about the world. About a man. About José Antonio Terán.