Marbelly wobbles around the shack, and Miguel Ángel finishes tending to his small marijuana garden before sitting down to talk. It’s August of 2013. Miguel Ángel has been living in the shack for almost three years as a protected, plea-bargain witness. Following our usual pattern, we talk over multiple cups of coffee. Very weak coffee. Café Listo, it’s called, instant coffee that comes in cheap little packets. It’s the worst of the crop—stuff you could never export. The best beans head out in ships from Acajutla and Unión, and the worst beans, or rather the bean chips, stay in El Salvador. It’s what the poor campesinos drink, those who dedicate their lives, entire generations, to cultivating coffee. Drinking a few sips of this awful brew in western El Salvador, the world’s coffee cradle, is enough to understand the curse that has ravaged this land since the arrival of the white man: you have to surrender all that’s good and get used to garbage. It’s as if grape growers in California only knew the sourness of the worst boxed wine.
Miguel Ángel drinks the stuff every day, along with Lorena, and even Marbelly.
Something big has happened since we last talked. Something of critical importance in the history of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha. But Miguel Ángel only responds to our pressing questions with two words: “Don’t know.”
Chepe Furia, José Antonio Terán, the former National Police officer, the former migrant, the maestro of Miguel Ángel, the man who appears and disappears, has been sentenced to twenty years for the murder of Samuel Menjívar Trejo, the twenty-three-year old vegetable vendor who worked in the Atiquizaya market and was found 120 miles away from where officers Tejada and Hernández had taken him in to the station on November 24, 2009. El Stranger and Liro Jocker were the other two passengers in the truck, along with Samuel, familiarly known as Rambito.
The charges were brought on December 6, 2012. Detective Pineda’s strategy, along with the prosecutors specializing in organized crime, was to prosecute the case away from the west of the country, far from the jurisdiction of Judge Salinas, the judge who’d liberated Chepe Furia twice before. Weeks before the final verdict, Miguel Ángel testified that he saw the three gang leaders get in the car with Rambito on the same day his body was discovered. The trial took place in a specialized court for organized crime in the eastern part of the country, eight months after Chepe Furia had been recaptured. On the day of his sentencing, the mythic gangster was wearing a white t-shirt with gray details. He had a three-day stubble (though he was usually clean-shaven), and short hair (slightly longer than he wore it when people referred to him as Don Chepe, the garbage magnate of Atiquizaya).
The judge believed the prosecutors that the gang members had tricked the police informant, Rambito, by pretending that they were going to the funeral of a murdered MS member. The prosecutor’s office explained in a press release: “The victim’s cell phone confirmed the information that the victim had relayed to the authorities. The information pointed to the imputed‘Chepe Furia’ as the subject who planned criminal actions and received money from extortions.” The five-paragraph press release also, without compunction, spread two lies. The first: “The accused (Chepe Furia) is the head of the Fulton and Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha cliques.” Chepe Furia did business with the Fulton, but he never headed it. The head of that clique was El Chory, who would be the bane of Chepe Furia’s life in Gotera prison. The second lie: “The detention and trial of the gang leader and various other members has reduced the incidence of crime in the region.”
Gangs don’t wither when a leader goes to prison. The violence they plant puts down roots. Decades of bad decisions made by politicians were glossed over in this trial. Chepe Furia had long stopped instigating his own murders, or dealing with the gang war head-on. Spilling blood cost him too much money. Though he acted like the village capo, there was nothing he could do to stop the bloodshed he’d helped unleash throughout the region.
But the authorities would learn this in the years to come. According to police statistics, in 2012, the year they captured and sentenced Chepe Furia, there were ninety-eight homicides in the department of Ahuachapán, including the towns of Atiquizaya, El Refugio, and Turín—centers controlled by the Hollywood Locos. The following year, 2013, there were ninety-five. In 2014, there were 130. In 2015, there were 199. In 2016, there were 201. In 2017, there were 219. More and more murders. More than double the number in 2012.
The gang, once grown to maturity, doesn’t wither just because you cut off one of its roots.
The police didn’t say a word to Yogui while they toasted the number of years Chepe would be locked away. Yogui just kept rotting away in his shack, surrounded by wasteland, with hardly enough to eat, drinking horrible coffee, and haunted by the memory of having killed that woman.
Miguel Ángel is only kept on in his shack because he’s useful. Or more necessary than useful, at least as the prosecutor explains it to him. There’s still the Turín well. And the cops who handed Rambito over.
When asked what he thought about Chepe Furia’s conviction on that hot August day, Miguel Ángel replied, “Don’t know.” A more honest response might have been, “I don’t give a shit.” Chepe Furia was old news. A well full of bodies, a whole clique turned against him, years of being confined to a shack, hunger, assassination attempts, death threats from gang members, threats from prosecutors. Chepe Furia’s sentencing would have been a life event for any normal person. Or even for any less than normal person. But the life of Miguel Ángel is much worse. It’s something degraded. Death, its constant presence, that grenade that rests above his head, the memories that eat away at him every night—they don’t let go, don’t let him rest. What happened, happened. In order to survive, only what is happening now can matter.
Chepe Furia is in jail. For Miguel Ángel, death doesn’t stop with Chepe Furia. Life goes on. And yet, death hovers. The Beast prowls.
Lorena pours more coffee. It’s so weak you can see the bits of sugar dissolving at the bottom of the cup.
Lorena is young. In other circumstances, she would be considered a child. But living her life with Miguel Ángel, no way can she be considered a child. She’s a woman, and a tough one. She’s seventeen years old. They’ve been together since she got pregnant at fourteen.
There’s a complicity between them, one that doesn’t play out in direct conversation. Miguel Ángel talks and, though it seems she’s not paying attention, she’s ready to corroborate with a date or confirm some anecdote with a monosyllable uttered toward her partner. She’s bright, with eyes, like Miguel Ángel’s, always on the alert, always flitting around the shack. Miguel Ángel has taught her to recognize the sound of a pistol’s safety being clicked off and to identify the distinctive gait of a gang member. He talks to her in back-to-front gang code, and she understands.
“Rramo, otra torra nepo feca rapa trosono y tocipan,” he says. If you’re not familiar with gang slang, his request is incomprehensible. There are only two words in the sentence that would appear in any Spanish dictionary: “another” and “and.” But Lorena understands and brings him another cup of that wretched coffee and some sweet bread.
Miguel Ángel doesn’t put his arms around Lorena, he doesn’t give her kisses, or hold her hand. And she doesn’t seem to miss these signs of affection. She’s never known them. In the campesino way of life, they’re not expected.
When asked if he sometimes tells his wife and child that he loves them, Miguel Ángel responds: “No, I mean, since I was little that wasn’t really in my vocabulary, you know. The thing is that they know I’m strong for them, that if anyone touches them the Beast’ll come out.”
This declaration, pronounced in the presence of strangers in a small shack in Barrio 18 territory, is probably the sweetest thing Lorena will hear from Miguel Ángel. It is, without a doubt, a declaration of love in the midst of death.
At some point in our conversation, we ask Miguel Ángel a question he may not have heard before. “Can we talk to Lorena alone for a bit?” He doesn’t answer. He widens his eyes and stares. He seems disconcerted, tense. He doesn’t say yes, but he doesn’t say no.
“Do you feel in danger?” we quietly ask Lorena. Miguel Ángel is only about ten feet away, watching us.
Not kissing is as common among campesinos in this part of El Salvador as is assuming that a woman would never speak about anything personal with any man besides her husband.
“Well,” Lorena murmurs, “a little while ago they went and shot at my dad’s house. At like four in the morning. The dog started barking. A man was standing outside for like ten minutes. In the morning we found a nine-millimeter shell.” As she talks, her gaze flits between the floor and Miguel Ángel.
Lorena’s father’s house is in Las Pozas, one house away from where Miguel Ángel grew up, and where his mother and his sister still live. That’s where Miguel Ángel did his courting. Lorena has three brothers and three sisters. She studied until fourth grade and can barely read or write. When she reads aloud, it’s hard to understand her. Her parents are both campesinos: her father working in the bean fields, and her mother pounding corn into masa. Since she was a kid, Lorena always preferred to go out to the fields with her father, because her mom would make her pound corn, make tortillas, and take care of her little sisters. She found the bean fields were less demanding.
“Do you know what he’s mixed up in?” we ask.
“Yeah. Yeah, I don’t even want him to leave here at all, but they’re not going to keep him here forever … mjijijijiji.” She laughs that peasant laugh that seems to be asking for forgiveness, expressing shame at what was just said. She covers her mouth and giggles quietly. Mjijijijiji.
“Are you going to follow him wherever he goes?”
“Yes. How could I stay here?”
“How do you imagine the future, Lorena?”
“I don’t know. See my girl grow up. Mjijijijiji.”
It’s hard to be optimistic about the future of their daughter, Marbelly. The present clouds any vision of the future. It’s like trying to see where you’re going while walking under an umbrella in a torrential downpour. At two years old, Marbelly Lisbet knows how to say bottle, mama, come here, pigeon (there are a lot of pigeons roosting in the trees surrounding the shack), and she also knows how to say gunshot. Lorena says that Miguel Ángel taught his daughter to recognize the sound of a gunshot. Which is why when they shot at Lorena’s father’s house at four in the morning—where they were staying the night—Lorena only realized because her toddler woke her up and pronounced two of the five words she knows:
“Gunshot, mamá.”
Wendy
The Hollywood Kid never liked killing women.
It wasn’t an ideological position toward gender, or even an ethical one. He just didn’t like it. He thought such murders were pointless. Killing Eighteens made sense—part of the system of reciprocal aggression, a sort of potlatch, to borrow a concept from Marcel Mauss: an interchange of violent gifts. Even killing an MS member made sense in the Kid’s logic, as long as they were traitors, or had committed a serious fault against another homeboy. The clique and the mara are spaces of constant competition, vying with each other to fatten the Beast with young flesh, with homeboy meat. But killing women didn’t fit into either logic. It was like dirtying his hands or debasing his weapons. It went against his purpose of being.
Wendy was a sixteen-year-old girl who didn’t know anything about this savage world of codes, machetes, hidden graves, wells full of cadavers, traitors, and beasts. She didn’t understand, and the savage world swallowed her. The Beast engulfed her. Spellbound by the gang members, Wendy slept with an Eighteen, a kid without rank or status in his clique, a “puppy.” At the same time she was hanging out with the Hollywood Locos.
Wendy hadn’t a clue. She had no idea these weren’t times for playing around, not when the Beast had been growing in El Salvador for almost two decades.
It’s interesting that the deaths of tough gangster grunts belongs to a lady, the Beast.
Wendy didn’t take precautions or use prudence—two traits not typically associated with sixteen-year-olds, but absolutely necessary for anyone who approaches the Mara Salvatrucha 13. One time she told the Kid that he should tattoo his chest with an “18,” because “MS-13” was too long. Those words in the mouth of any man would have been enough, with luck, with a lot of luck, to get him hacked to death by machete. But to the Kid, Wendy didn’t deserve his machete or his gun. She didn’t merit his barbarity. She was a chick, a babe. He didn’t pay her much mind.
But cliques contain multiple interests and attitudes, and MS-13 isn’t exactly known for letting offenses slide or for respecting the lives of women. Wendy kept on letting her tongue loose, dropping foolish insults at the feet of the gang members. Until a few of them got fed up.
A group of Hollywood Locos took Wendy to the cemetery one afternoon, telling her they were going to get high. Instead, they killed her. The gang member who practically decapitated her had previously retired from MS-13 but was now courting them again like a prodigal lover. For him it was more important to make his case, to leave clear messages, just like the Kid had done on multiple occasions. The gang member saw the girl as a blank slate he could write his message on.
The Kid didn’t participate in the murder, but he watched. He didn’t like to write on that kind of paper. He preferred the roughened sheets of the bodies of Eighteens, or even other MS members. And so he put himself in a secondary position, as lookout. He hung back as the machete sliced into Wendy’s face.
They didn’t rape or torture her, though that often happens when the cliques decide to kill a girl or woman. Wendy only suffered two machete hacks. The first, probably aiming for her neck, struck her on the chin right below her lower lip. The blade was sharp, and the arm that swung it was strong. The hack broke through the mandible and reached the back of her head, almost lopping it right off. The second blow was vertical, hitting the top of the skull and cracking it lengthwise, splitting it open, cutting off locks of her hair. Wendy died quickly. They then dragged her body to a ravine. It had rained the night before and there were puddles. They pushed her head, which was barely hanging on by a few strings of flesh, into the mud, and left her. They didn’t bury her, or even cover her with sticks.
That was how a group of campesinos found her. Among them was her uncle, Héctor, who happens to be the father of Lorena, the Kid’s wife. Accompanied by the local police, Héctor inspected his niece’s body. He turned it over, careful with the head that was barely attached to the body of a girl who had never understood the savage world of gangs. He was the only relative who had the courage to confront the barbarity written on Wendy’s body.
The Hollywood Kid had been the lookout at the murder of his wife’s cousin.
Family relations at the bottom of an abyss.
Even in the inferno of Salvadoran violence, a murdered sixteen-year-old with her head almost off was likely to cause a scandal in both police stations and newsrooms. In the middle of 2009, Sergeant Pozo, under the direction of Detective Pineda, took on the case and discovered that amid the Hollywood Locos clique there was a piece that didn’t quite fit, a piece that was increasingly likely to become a blank sheet of paper for his homeboys to write on. It was then that Pozo began his hunt for a ruthless and slippery gang member known as the Hollywood Kid.
The Kid learned that he was the police’s primary target. He knew of a detective named Pineda. He also knew, because the police had been planting information among collaborators and low-ranking gang members, that they were accusing him, and him alone, of Wendy’s murder. And for a simple reason.
Detective Pineda had been profiling the members of the Hollywood Locos. Twelve years after the birth of the clique, dozens of murders later, the state began finding out who was who. The Kid’s profile ticked several boxes: he was one of the oldest members, close to Chepe Furia, smoked a lot of dope, and had a young girlfriend named Lorena. Lorena and Wendy were cousins. Simple deduction, based on intuition rather than evidence, pointed to the Kid as the perpetrator of the crime. Perhaps there was something in that family relationship that had become a motive for the murder.
Detective Pineda had another reason to believe he might be able to flip the Kid. At the beginning of the year, he had ducked out for a while. He’d abandoned his homeboys for another group in the area—one that would let him keep the status he’d worked so hard to acquire. The Hollywood Kid, the tough sicario, had turned to evangelism.
During the first months of 2008, the Kid started attending one of those rudimentary evangelical churches that were sprouting up in countless villages and backwood communities. He sang fervent Pentecostal songs and listened to the histrionic predictions of humble men who went to school just long enough to learn to read the Bible. The Kid dressed in buttoned-up long-sleeve shirts, khaki pants, and dress shoes. He began quoting the Bible and acting like a repentant gang member.
But the church wasn’t really a revelation for the Kid. Jesus hadn’t called him. It was just another strategy. Years before, he had hidden under the skirts of the state by joining the army; now he hid behind the word of God. But only for a little while. Later, he would sarcastically say that he became “evangi-loco” in order to hide from the police.
By the end of 2008, he’d given up being a sheep and turned back into a wolf.
And yet the Kid’s strategy to escape the police became another sign to them that he was someone they could convert into a traitor. Under Sergeant Pozo, the search continued.
A number of times the Kid had to take off running. Once, if it hadn’t been for Pozo being so fat, the Kid would have been caught. He managed to hop over a series of fences and disappear like a fleeing deer.
The Kid came close to firing at his pursuers more than once. He never knew that Officer Pozo had come pretty close as well, but Detective Pineda didn’t send out his men to bring in bodies. He wanted snitches. Once, Pozo got a patrol of soldiers to detain the Kid and let him go after he promised he’d talk. They didn’t want to kill him, they wanted to break him.
After months of hunting, Sergeant Pozo walked into that dilapidated house in Atiquizaya where the Kid had sought refuge. Knowing that he needed to bring him in or he wouldn’t see him again for months, Pozo opened the metal door with extreme caution. He saw the twenty-seven-year-old assassin smoking his fifth rock of the day, and he flipped the safety off of his 9mm. The Kid’s trigger fingers were hooked around a .357 and a .40. Sergeant Pozo took a deep breath. He steadied his nerves, and, still pointing the gun at the Kid’s head, said, “Hey, take it easy. I can see you’re armed.”
They met at the war’s end.
Both of them came from the United States, and after they arrived their destinies would be interlaced forever. They were strangely alike.
The evangelicals came first. Much earlier. The first church was called Mission Central America, and was built in western El Salvador at the end of the turbulent nineteenth century. They didn’t get much of a welcome—the coffee elite was profoundly, aristocratically Catholic. The landowning elite persecuted the intruders as if they were heretics. When they held their services, their histrionic and ululating cults, they were stoned by the Ladino campesinos who had been taught to hate them. The first missions made few converts, though their hallelujahs and visions were accepted by a few indigenous people in the area, and the first local group was formed on the skirts of the Santa Ana volcano. They hunkered down, discreet, like a recessive gene in the Salvadoran DNA just waiting for the right moment to express itself.
The moment came at the end of the 1970s. Many more evangelicals were flocking from the United States. They were founding churches, seeding their Protestant beliefs in every corner of the country, above all in shanty towns and remote hamlets. For, like the first wave of evangelicals, they were only accepted by the poorest of the poor.
Today, when night falls in El Salvador—typically around six in the evening—in the roughest neighborhoods and villages of the most violent country in Latin America, in back alleyways and putrid backwaters, in zones abandoned by the state and abandoned by the world, even in the overcrowded prisons, you will hear the singing, the clapping, the shaking of tamborines. “Hallelujah! Praise Be to God!” Prophesying and speaking in tongues, breaking the silence of the night.
“¡Ay! silabás, silabás, silabastei, silabastei, ando rama silabari, ando bari silabaste.”
When the civil war was over, the others came.
Tattooed all over, hardened by California prisons, the gang members also went into the roughest neighborhoods and villages. They too were welcomed by the poorest of the poor.
It was in those slums and backwoods that the two groups got acquainted. They understood each other. Both felt rejected. They realized that they were brothers. Preachers and gangsters, heroes and villains, but brothers when all’s said and done. The evangelicals were the only ones not to spurn the gang members, and the gang members were the only ones who didn’t hate the evangelicals. Since their first encounters after the war, they’ve stayed close. Since the early ’90s both groups saw themselves as reigning over the margins, as giving direction—though by very different means—to the lives of those neighborhoods and villages where the state represents nothing but a distant threat.
When gang members tired of serving the Beast, they looked for the pastor, who accepted them, who came into their homes, who helped and protected them. The gangs didn’t mess with the evangelicals. Hundreds of men, the Beast tattooed on their bodies and faces, sang out praises in the broken-down temples of God. The dominion of the Beast ended at the threshold of the temple. Her hatred stopped at the door.