treacherous [adj.]: 1. Of one who commits betrayal.
2. Said of an animal: of unpredictable reactions.
3. Something more damaging than expected.
The Kid doesn’t know it yet, and nor do we, but this will be our last interview in the shack.
It’s late afternoon, January 14, 2014. Dusk.
We’ve been visiting the shack for two years. In all that time the Kid only got mixed up once, when he was telling, with much verve, the story of one particular murder. In all that time, he never seemed nervous. Having the temperament of someone who has committed multiple murders and would willingly have committed many more, nervousness doesn’t seem to be part of his makeup. We’ve seen him fed up, tired, dejected, furious, but never nervous.
Today, though, he seems nervous.
He keeps darting glances at the door. He responds to our questions hurriedly, in short bursts, and has stopped following the thread of the conversation. He won’t hold a gaze more than a split second before glancing again at the door.
Tomorrow he’s going to testify against officers Hernandez and Tejada, the alleged accomplices of Chepe Furia in the murder of Rambito. A group of police will pick him up from here and he’ll ride with them across the country, to accuse two of their colleagues of aggravated homicide and organized crime. The Kid has already said that he saw them in a patrol truck with Rambito on the day of his murder. He’s already explained that hours later he saw Rambito get into Chepe Furia’s car with two lengths of rope. But this was at the pretrial hearing. Tomorrow, he must repeat it in the sentencing hearing, in which the two officers may be sent to prison for twenty years or more.
The Kid is listening to our questions about what’s going to happen tomorrow, when suddenly his eyes widen and his body tenses. A police officer from El Refugio walks into the shack with his right hand on his holstered gun. There’s a whole new group of detectives working the case since Gil Pineda was transferred a few months ago. He’s gone to another of the violent departments of El Salvador, as the new chief of homicide.
The police officer who has just walked in pauses to survey the scene. It’s the first time an officer has interrupted one of our interviews with the Kid. He seems irritated, asks to see our documents and press credentials, occasionally glancing angrily at the Kid as he checks our papers.
He tells us to leave.
“Not until the Kid asks us to,” we respond.
The Kid makes a call on his old phone to the chief of the police at the outpost, Detective Pineda’s replacement.
“Yeah,” the Kid says, “they just want my life story, who I am, where I’m from … Yeah, I know you have to be careful talking about some of this … Yeah, I know I could be digging my own grave …”
He hangs up. He’s pale. Lorena watches the tense scene and sends Marbelly waddling over to say two of the five words she knows, to distract the officer so he’ll let go of his gun.
“Here … pidgey,” Marbelly says, pulling on the officer’s pants, trying to get him to turn his attention to an imaginary pigeon.
The angry officer turns and leaves the shack, promising to come back after talking to his chief.
“They’re nervous about tomorrow,” the Kid tells us, looking down.
A prosecutor from Ahuachapán, who asked to remain anonymous, revealed that he had seen some police officers pressuring the Kid, offering him money to keep quiet, threatening him with death if he testified against their colleagues.
We ask the Kid if we should leave them alone. Seemingly humiliated, he nods.
Lorena is standing at the door to the street, watching for the officer to come back. She opens the door for us and steps aside, smiling.
In the San Miguel Specialized Court for Organized Crime, where the sentencing hearing takes place, the Kid becomes Yogui.
Yogui is wearing a dark blue police uniform, without badges or insignia, that is about three sizes too big. He’s also wearing a black knit balaclava, and just imagining putting this on one’s head is suffocating. San Miguel is the hottest department in the country, where it’s not rare for summer highs to hit 105º. Yogui walks into the courtroom with his shoulders raised and tense, as if he were wearing a metal back brace.
It’s nine in the morning. The two prosecutors, a man and a woman, are looking grave. The defense, two lawyers who also defended Chepe Furia in his trial, are joking around. They whisper and laugh at their desk. The accused police officers are in the back of the room, their backs to the judge, sitting behind a screen that lets them hear but not see what’s going on. They sit very still. They close their eyes periodically, seemingly in prayer.
The judge, with his wrinkled, sharp-featured face, orders the witnesses to stand.
The prosecutor calls the first witness, Yogui, to the stand. It’s a formality, however, because there is no stand in this courtroom—just a few plastic seats. Yogui walks forward and sits on one of them.
“Good morning, Yogui,” the prosecutor begins.
“Good morning, sir,” Yogui answers in a voice that sounds like the Beast itself. As a protection measure, they distort the voices of the protected witnesses. They’ve made Yogui’s voice sound like it’s coming straight from the tomb, and it’s hard to distinguish his words between the cavernous echoes.
“What are you going to testify about today?” the prosecutor asks calmly and formally, flipping through his notes.
“I don’t know,” Yogui responds.
Silence in the courtroom. The prosecutors lift their heads, and the defense team lets out a muffled chuckle.
The Kid rips off Yogui’s mask, the black balaclava. Miguel Ángel Tobar, the Hollywood Kid, sits with his eyes wide, staring at the prosecutor, almost challenging him. It’s obvious that today, like he did almost four years ago, he’s come to rat on someone, and the air crackles with expectation. Maybe he’s going to rat on somebody unexpected. Maybe it’s not going to be the police or the gangs getting foiled.
The Kid still has the voice of the Beast, even with his face exposed. With no air conditioning in the courtroom, he’s perspiring. Beads of sweat drip down his face.
“I don’t know,” he repeats in that deep, booming voice.
The prosecutor stands up, clears his throat, and asks the judge if he can modify the Kid’s voice since you can hardly understand what he’s saying. He asks, as well, for the judge to order him to put the balaclava back on. It seems he’s trying to gain time to understand what’s going on. Maybe he hopes that if they change the Kid’s voice, the meaning of the words will also change, and he won’t be left standing in the middle of the courtroom looking quite so ridiculous.
“You say put it on, but it’s not you whose face is itchy, who’s practically suffocating,” the Kid says, now with the voice of a mouse.
He raises his eyebrows and stares fiercely at the prosecutors.
The prosecutor cautiously alludes to the first testimony the Kid provided.
“Do you remember? As you testified in 2011 —”
The Kid interrupts: “I remember that the first prosecutors made me say a bunch of things. I don’t know shit about what’s written in those reports.”
The defense team doesn’t hold back their laughter. The accused officers, eyes shut, continue to pray behind the screen. One of them has dropped to his knees. The lead prosecutor is dripping. The sweat will soon soak through his white shirt, and then his dark jacket. The seated prosecutor is also sweating. She lowers her gaze, not wanting to look at her partner, who shuffles some more papers on the desk. It’s an absurd scene. It’s obvious he’s buying time, dripping sweat onto the pages, trying not to seem completely lost.
“Have you been threatened?” the prosecutor asks, in a voice even quieter than a mouse’s.
“No,” the Kid says.
“Did you receive any visitors before coming to testify?”
“No.”
The prosecutor—voice now trembling—warns the Kid about giving false testimony, laying him open to perjury charges.
“Okay,” the Kid says.
The prosecutor, deeply embarrassed, keeps trying for another five minutes. His partner doesn’t make a move. The Kid, to the delight of the defense team, continues responding in the style of his wife: monosyllables and short phrases. The courtroom has turned into a sauna.
They finally give up. The Kid is taken back to the waiting room. The prosecutor whispers to his partner, gets to his feet, adjusts his jacket, and asks the judge for an adjournment to be able to step out and make a phone call. The judge denies the request. The prosecutor asks to speak to the witness privately. As if they hadn’t been humiliated enough, the judge glares at the prosecutor and reminds him that they’ve had years to prepare the witness, and a few more minutes shouldn’t make any difference. The prosecutor sits down and nervously starts bouncing his leg. He shuffles through his papers again, as if he could find something useful in there, or maybe he’s wishing he could turn back time, figure out a way to spend more time with the witness, make sure he receives his basket of provisions, or stop the local police from threatening him.
“I request permission to go to the bathroom,” the prosecutor says to the judge. The judge drops his head and, exasperated, puts both hands on his forehead. The prosecutor looks like a scolded child. The defense attorneys chuckle openly. The judge reluctantly grants the request. The prosecutor rushes out of the room, as if it were only his bladder, and not his whole being, that was suffering.
The Kid is a murderer. He’s a multiple murderer. He’s also a traitor to his gang. He is undoubtedly a man who could kill again. Nevertheless, without the Hollywood Kid, the state of El Salvador in this courtroom is nothing. Or worse than nothing: it’s a prosecutor pretending he needs to pee.
The prosecutor comes back into the courtroom a few minutes later. The expression on his face makes clear that he got nowhere—the Kid didn’t give in.
The hearing goes on for another four hours. It’s an experience the prosecutors will struggle to recover from for a long time. One by one, the other witnesses—mostly policemen—will deny knowing anything, just like the Kid. All of the police witnesses who previously admitted to seeing their fellow officers take Rambito to the Atiquizaya police station—even the one who had confirmed that the officers had failed to fill out a police report—say they don’t remember. All of the police witnesses, without exception, repeat the same phrases: “I don’t know,” “I don’t remember.” They all hang their heads and keep their gazes on the floor as they deflect the questions of a prosecutor who’s melting into a puddle of sweat on the floor.
The defense team, meanwhile, spends the day earning the easiest money of their lives. Watching with obvious delight, they hardly even need to cross-examine. The judge, finally deciding that the show has gone on long enough, advises the prosecution to throw in the towel and refrain from calling any more witnesses. His tone of voice shifts sympathetically, drawing out the vowels in a sort of sing-song, like a soothing friend: okay, okay, that’s enough. One of the defense lawyers, cruelly rubbing it in, asks the judge to let his adversaries continue.
There seems to be something masochistic compelling the prosecutors to go on. The hearing continues. They call the next protected witness: the woman who worked at the store where Rambito bought the ropes that would be used to tie him up. Everybody in the courtroom knows that the woman creeping like a dark specter into the court, using a cane and wearing a black balaclava, is the store clerk from Atiquizaya. She’s a secondary witness.
“This is going to be good,” one of the defense attorneys says to the other. “I want to see what the hell they’re going to ask her.”
The questions are absurd. Did she see the ropes, does she remember who bought them, what kind of rope was it? Her testimony serves only to support the Kid’s testimony. The poor woman has spent hours dressed as Santa Muerte for nothing. Or maybe just for the amusement of the defense team. The state prosecutors, after almost four years of investigation, have managed to prove that one day a woman sold two lengths of rope to a young man she did not know.
A case that seemed as good as won has unraveled into nothing. Police officers were told to arrest a man. Some witnesses saw those same officers in the street. The man was later seen with gang members. The man was later murdered. The police acted oddly and didn’t want to provide records or justify their arrest. That was all the prosecutors needed to show. Chepe Furia, Liro Jocker, and El Stranger—the gangsters implicated in the murder—have already been convicted. They were the killers. The police, the other actors in the crime, were those who had the victim in their custody before the gang members took over. It should have been an open-and-shut case. But it turned into a pathetic comedy.
That afternoon, officers Tejada and Hernandez are declared innocent of Rambito’s murder.
We call the Kid at six in the evening of the same day, just after he’s returned to his shack on the other side of the country. What happened in San Miguel? When did you lie: today, or when you first told us what happened? Did you see the police with Rambito, or was it all made up?
“I saw them with Rambito,” the Kid says, “and I saw Rambito head out with Chepe and the others … The thing is … I didn’t want to say it myself. I’m already carrying a lot of crosses, don’t want to pick up another.”
The Kid has done it again. He turned his back on his first gang when he betrayed a couple of members of the Mara Gauchos Locos 13, obeying Chepe Furia’s order to purge the weakest. He turned his back on his second gang, the MS-13, when he killed his brother’s killers. He turned against the letters tattooed on his own body when he decided to become a protected witness and testify against his homeboys. And now he’s turned yet again, this time on the prosecutors, who forgave his crimes in exchange for his testimony.
Betrayal is the exit the Kid takes to change his path in life.
And yet, the Kid was never the first to break faith. The Gauchos betrayed him first, when they tried to run with MS-13 and then repented, thinking the Beast would understand. His MS homies betrayed him first when they killed his brother, El Cheje. And Chepe Furia betrayed him over and over, abandoning the Kid when the clique was going through its worst time, ordering him to kill a woman and burn a pickup truck, violating the creed he had taught him in one of the first clique mirins: barrio first, barrio second, and barrio third. Truth be told, the MS-13 made a lot of promises to the Kid, and it was he, Chepe Furia, who jumped ship time and again when the seas got rough. And then there was the state prosecutor, who not only promised to expunge his history of violence, but also to take care of him, protect him, give him something to eat even if it was just a meager basket of basics, and protect him from police threats.
The Kid is a traitor who gets back at traitors by betraying them.
Today, the Kid turned the attorney general into a laughing stock. The news spread fast: prosecutors in other parts of the country heard of the fiasco and mentioned that their colleagues might take legal action against the Kid. It was time for betrayal to change direction once more. It was time to move.