Miguel Ángel is no longer frustrated; he’s desperate. An incident in August 2013 makes his new situation perfectly clear.
Without explanation, three months ago, the basket of provisions sent by the state stopped coming. Just stopped. Miguel Ángel remains a protected witness, he meets his obligations, and he attends whatever court dates the prosecutors demand. The state, however, only partially meets its obligations: though it’s not bringing charges against Miguel Ángel for his multiple crimes, it has forgotten the other commitment, to provide him with scanty but regular supplies.
A few days before, hungry and worried about feeding Lorena and Marbelly, Miguel Ángel slipped outside the fence around his shack. He walked about 200 yards away from the police outpost, over the main street of the tiny village of El Refugio. Near the few little stores, the onetime MS-13 member took off his shirt in the middle of a plaza dominated by Eighteens and waited for a soda or snack delivery truck to pull up, so he could bother the driver for a dollar.
In El Salvador, gang extortion, known as renta, is so pervasive that some multinational and transport companies have contracted ex-military and ex-police officers to work as gang liasons. They don’t even try to avoid paying up. They just want to pay a reasonable renta. Some companies, with the misfortune of being based in between MS and 18 territory, have to pay both gangs. The monthly fees range from the ten dollars expected from someone who sells vegetables on the street, to the 5,000 that a company with delivery trucks, such as Coca-Cola, might have to pay.
As part of the 2017 investigation, Operación Jaque (Check Mate), state prosecutors intercepted communication between incarcerated gang leaders who asked their forty-nine MS-13 “programs”—federations of cliques brought together under a common leadership—to hand in all the money they’d made in the past seven days. The total came to $600,552. If you take this as the weekly average, that would mean that the gang pulls in—mostly through extortion—a total of $31.2 million dollars a year. The sum is surprisingly low: if the gang distributed all its funds equally among its estimated 40,000 members, each member would receive only $64 a month. MS-13 is a mafia, but it’s a mafia of the poor. The bulk of that money goes to lawyers, funerals, weapons, and unofficial pensions for the widows of dead or imprisoned homeboys. The MS-13 economy is barely a subsistence economy.
In 2013 a desperate Miguel Ángel was standing shirtless at a crossroads in El Refugio, waiting for a truck to pass by. He knew that the sloppy tattoos on his body—the small “MS” on the back of his left hand, the scrawled “mi vida loca” on his forearm—would make any truck driver take his request for charity a lot more seriously.
But not one delivery truck passed. Instead, a pickup rolled by with a couple of prosecutors on their way to the police station. They recognized him, and, concerned, asked what he was doing in the street. Miguel Ángel, furious and glaring, responded: “Standing here shirtless looking to make a buck so I can get something to eat!”
The prosecutors threw him a frightened glance and drove off. After a while, Miguel Ángel gave up and went back to his shack.
Today, Miguel Ángel is ranting against the prosecutor’s office, against the UTE, against the police, against the whole world. He’s at the end of his tether. He’s thinking of leaving the shack, dropping the whole legal process, escaping, turning into an outlaw.
“I’m not scared of anybody. All I need is my papaya orchard in some quiet spot, my family, and whoever comes around to fuck with me is gonna taste almonds, ‘cause I’ll have my beans all lined up and ready for them.”
Metaphors and onomatopoeias for bullets: beans, nuts, seeds, explosions, pop, pop, pop.
Nearby, the Turin well is completely flooded. The criminologist Israel Ticas has called off the excavation. The heavy machinery arrived after the start of the Central American winter, too late to do any digging or make any progress toward recovering the bodies. And yet, Ticas, literally swimming in a stew of death—the muddy pool at the bottom of the well—was able to pull up a few femurs, craniums, and foot bones that belonged to four different murder victims, including a woman. The authorities have come to believe that there are more than twenty bodies in the well. Ticas had estimated, two years previously, at the beginning of the excavation, that there were at least fifteen bodies. But other, anonymous sources have told us that they couldn’t be sure there weren’t even more bodies. Tícas and his assistants excavated what they could, but had to stop due to the danger of a collapse. They used different colored ropes when descending so that in the event of a collapse, rescuers would know what bodies they were digging out. Ticas always used the red rope.
Because of the lack of machinery, they’ve only recovered a handful of bones after two years of work. Since October 2012, the six gang members arrested and accused of dumping their murder victims into the well have walked free, released because they couldn’t legally be held any longer without charge. One of their few conditions was to periodically report to the court. But they weren’t stupid. They never showed up.
Miguel Ángel still hasn’t testified for the case, and when he does, it’ll be in a courtroom with no defendants present. Justice in the most murderous country in the world is bad theater, with pathetic, vulgar, and sometimes absent actors.
All Miguel Ángel and his family have left to eat is a few vegetables, some tortillas, and a couple packets of dried soup. Eventually, some police officer will donate something. They’re living like beggars, waiting for justice from a kangaroo court. And Miguel Ángel has a tense relationship with the prosecutors, who have gone as far as threatening to accuse him of the same murders he denounced. He’s convinced that some police officers have tried to walk him. Something is going to blow. He’s exasperated with the Salvadoran state, which has condemned him to a life so miserable it’s intolerable.
He keeps talking about his plans to escape.
“I’m thinking of arming up and just taking care of myself. I gotta have cat-eyes. Go into hiding. Because where I’m going, there are Eighteens.”
Miguel Ángel has reached such a boiling point that, at the prosecutor’s office a few weeks ago, he pretended to have forgotten everything he’d told them, refusing to recognize a member of his former clique who was being charged with racketeering.
“I showed the prosecutors I didn’t give a fuck. I let some bicho from Atiquizaya go free, so that the prosecutors could see just how few fucks I gave. They lost their shit. But I don’t give a fuck. I’m getting out of here. I’m gonna split.”
Sometimes Miguel Ángel goes months without seeing the prosecutors, who are bogged down with dozens of cases and barely have time to prepare their witnesses. They usually talk to the witnesses on the eve, or the very morning, of a trial. Sometimes prosecutors who don’t know Miguel Ángel and don’t understand the case show up at the shack. He’s had to explain everything from the beginning to multiple prosecutors.
Miguel Ángel squats down on one of the half-buried tires in the yard of his shack. There’s weak coffee and sweet bread. We broach a topic we’ve never talked about till now.
“When it’s all over, Miguel Ángel, then what?”
“As far as I know, soon as the process is all over, they’re going to leave me with nothing. The prosecutors say they’ll give me some money from their own salaries to go work somewhere else, plus a bit of money for my woman to come and visit me once a month. No house, no food, so I got to just figure it out.”
“Do you feel used?”
“In this whole thing, the one who’s gotten least out of it is me. All the honchos in high society, they got what they wanted. How much was Rambito’s murder worth? Chepe paid eleven thousand dollars to walk Rambito. I got nothing out of it.”
“Is there any guarantee that you won’t become a hitman again when the state lets you out?”
“There aren’t any other options. There should be some job program. I should get a chance to make a clean sweep of things in the courtroom. I haven’t gotten rid of my tattoos because they haven’t offered me a thing, and the tattoos at least protect me on the street. The information I’ve given them is worth something. I told them what I did, who I shot, and everything that the others did. That should be worth something.”
“Can you rule out that you won’t go back to doing the same?”
“No, I can’t. If they offered me other opportunities …”
“Do you feel that the people of this country owe you something?”
“I risked my life. I quit the streets and I brought a fuckload of sicarios off the streets with me. I mean, that’s why there’s a fuck-load of people who want to kill me now. Cops, gangsters. I don’t know who works for who here. It’s a thing they call organized crime. I don’t want to be in danger, I got my little girl. Society doesn’t care that she’s threatened, they only care that the witness made his statement.”
He raises his voice. He opens his hands and shakes them as if he’s waiting for something to fall from the sky. He stands stock-still and lowers his gaze. And when he looks up again, there’s fury in his widened eyes. He throws his head back and stares down without blinking. Like he must have stared at El Horse before ripping the heart out of his chest. But he only says: “If they stopped and thought about it, they’d probably say, ‘Hey, things could go badly for this bicho. He’s got a daughter, he’s got a wife, we could at least give him a job.’”
A phrase that Miguel Ángel has used and that seems to sum up not only his life, but the life of so many other children of war in this country: “They didn’t give me no other choice.”