Miguel Ángel has run out of minutes on his phone. He sends a text instead. It’s noon, December 14, 2013. The text (corrected for multiple spelling mistakes) reads: “What’s up, bro? Just wanted to say my old man is dead. The Beast scored one on me. The Kid.”
The Kid’s father had hanged himself the night before.
At sixty-seven years old, Jorge García, in his umpteenth suicide attempt, succeeded in hanging himself from a beam of his house.
After drinking enough Cuatro Ases to get himself good and soused, Jorge García went back to the house he shared with Rosa Tobar, the mother of Miguel Ángel. He tied one end of a rope around his neck and the other to one of the patio beams. He climbed onto a chair and then knocked it over. The beam he was hanging from broke. His wife, found him on the ground, humiliated, with the rope still around his neck.
The insults resounded through the darkness, the back alleyway filling up with curses.
“You old, useless, godamned son of a bitch! You old shitbag! You can’t even kill yourself!”
The neighbors woke up. Héctor, Lorena’s father and next-door neighbor, quickly realized what was going on. It was García’s fifth suicide attempt in the last two years. There may have been more. It always happened at night, always when drunk, and always with a rope around his neck looking for a beam to hang himself from. And Rosa Tobar always reacted by hurling insults at him. You old piece of shit. You stupid idiot. Old son of a bitch. But, until that December night of 2013, Jorge Garcáa had always failed.
After hearing the first beam crack, Héctor told his oldest son to poke his head through the wall—which is made of tin cans—separating the two homes to see what was going on with the old man. After her fill of insults, Rosa Tobar locked herself back in her room. The neighbors heard the door slam and the shouting stop, but somebody was dragging something across the ground. Héctor’s son saw the old man, a few yards away, trying to hang himself again. He set up the chair, he tied the rope back around his neck, and he looked for another beam. This time he found one made of iron. The central beam over a metal-roofed patio littered with old junk. He tied the knot, climbed up on the chair, and stepped off.
“Papá, I think the old man killed himself,” the boy said to Héctor.
Father and son went and pounded on Rosa Tobar’s door.
“Doña Rosa! It’s your husband! He’s hanged himself. Open up! Doña Rosa.”
“Let the old shit hang himself. Let him get it over with.”
But Héctor and his son insisted, and Rosa Tobar in her faded robe finally opened the door. Disheveled, pale and tiny, her deeply wrinkled face betrayed a long, sad life. She opened the door and shuffled back into her room.
Héctor and his son walked out to the patio where they found Jorge García’s body hanging from the iron beam.
Héctor thought the body looked like a piñata. A small swinging bag of dark flesh.
Jorge García, the miquero with the disfigured arm, swung from the iron beam.
The father who had loaned out his daughter’s body swung from the iron beam.
The father who drank while his daughter was raped swung from the iron beam.
The father of the Hollywood Kid swung like a piñata from the iron beam.
Miguel Ángel answers the phone. He says he won’t go to the wake or the funeral. The police don’t want him to be so visible. He’ll deliver some plastic seats that El Refugio’s mayor’s office loaned to him and his family, and then he’ll go back to his shack to wait out the trials of the Turín well.
Jorge García was a condemned man. His hopeless life had condemned him since he was a child. But there were a few particular moments that hurt him so bad, he lost the will to live. Years before he finally took his own life, the Beast had sunk her fangs into Jorge García. And now the Beast had swallowed her meal.
As Miguel Ángel explains, the Beast, his father’s personal Beast, has taken what was hers.
The Beast’s Massacre in Horeb
A common story in El Salvador: a family relocates to start a new life, away from the gangs.
On February 25, 2012, this family arrived in what they thought was going to be their new life. Fleeing Atiquizaya and the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha clique, they were moving fifteen miles away into the department of Santa Ana, to rent a humble house in the middle of a dusty lot with overgrown weeds. Six of them arrived that day to see the new house and arrange the rental contract. Although the neighborhood, Horeb, was in the municipal district of San Sebastián Salitrillo, which was controlled by the Mara Salvatrucha 13, family friends had assured them that there wasn’t a heavy gang presence, so that they would live in poverty, but in relative peace. The family wasn’t worried about the future, but about the gang they were fleeing.
One of the six, the youngest woman, about twenty years old, had told her boyfriend in Atiquizaya that she was breaking up with him. The boyfriend didn’t take the news well. It all might have ended normally, maybe with a brief public scene, some yelling, and a drunken night listening to ranchera music—except that the dumped boyfriend was David Antonio Morán Rivas, El Lunático, of the Atiquizaya Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha clique.
In those days, even the youngest members of the clique had already racked up their kills. The Kid had been Yogui, the protected witness, for two years now, and he didn’t know all of the new gang members.
A Mara Salvatrucha 13 commando crew was waiting for the family outside of Horeb. Two fifteen-year-olds, one twenty-year-old, one thirty-five-year-old, and the jealous ex-boyfriend, El Lunático.
As the family was leaving their new house, the gang members blocked their way and, without a word, started shooting. The shells collected at the scene by police belonged to 30-30 carbines. Three of the family were killed: María Galán, Jorge Galán, and Juana Elena Flores. The other three survived, including the former girlfriend, but in critical condition.
According to police statistics, it was the fifth massacre of 2012, only two months into the year. Throughout the country there would be twenty-two massacres that year, claiming seventy-two victims. That made it, according to the police, a relatively good year. The year before saw forty-one massacres in this tiny country, resulting in 137 fatalities.
Juana Elena Flores, one of the victims of the Horeb tragedy, was the Kid’s aunt. His father’s sister. María Galán was the Kid’s cousin, the daughter of Juana Elena. And the last victim, Jorge Galán, was María’s husband.
Two years later, in February of 2014, Salvadoran prosecutors would put out a press release celebrating the conviction of two of the attackers in the Horeb massacre. Melvin Antonio Linares Mencus, El Danger, and William Ernesto Castillo Delgado, El Blue, were sentenced to 138 years in prison for three murders and three attempted murders.
The police explained that they caught El Danger attempting to flee the scene of the crime. But they never included El Lunático or either of the fifteen-year-olds in their inquiry. Meanwhile, the remainder of the traumatized family had fled again, dispersing across the country. The Kid, from his shack, did a little investigating of his own and was able to reconstruct the crime better than the police. He pinpointed the motive, and he knew who the perpetrators were before they were brought to trial. The Kid informed the detectives in El Refugio, but the case didn’t interest them—there were already two men captured and sentenced, and, in El Salvador, that counts as success.
Jorge García, the Kid’s father, never even heard about that massacre. The ex-miquero had sunk into the most profound alcoholism. He tried to wash away his memories in guaro, but some memories wouldn’t wash away. Jorge García started trying to kill himself, and kept on trying until that December night in 2013 when he found a strong enough beam to escape his rotten world.
A year and ten months after El Lunático and his crew committed the massacre in Horeb, the massacre would take its fourth victim, an ex-miquero swinging like a piñata fifteen miles from where the rifles spat out their shells.