Hell [noun]: 1. In various mythologies and religions, a place
inhabited by the spirits of the dead.
2. A place or situation that causes great suffering or discomfort.
May 2014. The Kid has returned to Las Pozas. He’s back in the exurb of San Lorenzo where he’d spent parts of his childhood, where he first came to know the Mara Salvatrucha 13. Seventeen years ago, Chepe Furia rolled up in his pickup, looking for the Cockroach’s bar, armed to the teeth and radiating the potent, enigmatic gang lore from his days in Los Angeles.
This is where the Kid and the Beast first met.
Now, after years of looking for him, that Beast has found him once again. The Beast knows the Kid lives in Las Pozas, and that it’s time to hunt.
It’s evening here in Las Pozas. A member of the Hollywood Locos, Lethal, stops under the shade of a ceiba tree at the barrio’s entrance, the same tree where Chepe Furia once plied the lost boys with Cuatro Ases. Lethal notices the Kid at the edge of the soccer field. He jumps off his motorcycle and cuts across the field. The Kid, nervously looking over his shoulder ever since he came to town, has already spotted him. Lethal’s wearing a motorcycle helmet, but his slanted eyes are unmistakable. Lethal was just a pup when the Kid was on the clique’s highest rung. The Kid runs past the goalpost. The wooded hills have always been a place of refuge for him. He scrambles up the slope. Lethal fires, but the Kid boasts some fancy footwork. He slides to the ground, bounces back up, and keeps on running. He’s been a soldier for more than a year, a gangster for more than ten, a traitor for almost five—he knows how to dodge a bullet, especially if the hitman has terrible aim.
The Kid counts the shots—six, seven, eight. He spots a tree with a fat trunk and runs toward it—nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. He doesn’t lose count. The tree is so close. Fourteen, fifteen. It’s rare for a magazine to hold more than fifteen bullets, which is why the Kid chooses this moment to turn and challenge him. From behind the tree he taunts him to come closer. Unable to complete the mission that would have made him famous among the Hollywood Locos, Lethal runs toward his motorcycle and speeds away.
The Kid returns to his house, which sits in front of the soccer field on one of the neighborhood’s five, dusty, dead-end streets. He knows the Beast. He knows she won’t bother him again today.
After only a month, the Kid and Lorena had left the cane field where bullets constantly chased them. But the bullets followed them straight to Las Pozas. Besides the bullets, they were also fleeing poverty, and poverty, like the air, is everywhere, impossible to escape.
At home, Rosa Tobar, the Kid’s mother, is also rotting to death.
Five months after the Kid’s father, Jorge Garcia, hung himself, Rosa Tobar took a man home. This man was old and had been a member of the now defunct National Guard, the military police force that terrorized Salvadorans from 1912 to 1992. The man also slept with one of Rosa’s daughters, the Kid’s half-sister, but this didn’t put her off. The ex-guardsman stayed a few days, between December 2013 and January 2014, having sex with the widow of the broken-armed miquero who’d hung himself from a beam on his back patio like a piñata. And then he vanished. A few days later, the elderly Rosa Tobar began to give off a foul odor from her crotch. Then came the rancid gas and diarrhea.
Her kids can only afford to treat her with medicine bought at a corner store. Her son and neighbors say she’s lost her mind. Sometimes she confuses the Kid with her late husband. She calls him Jorge Garcia, and the Kid scolds her. Other days, she refuses to let anyone in. If a neighbor comes by she’ll open a window and try to scare them off.
“The Beast, you sons of bitches, the Beast,” screams Rosa Tobar at the children who knock on her door, hoping to catch a glimpse of her before running away, laughing. She curses them, making the garra salvatrucha claw sign with her hand.
“Yeah, the Beast is going after my old woman,” the Kid says calmly, as if he were talking about something natural and inevitable. Rosa Tobar will die two years later. She will die, according to his diagnosis, of the same ailment as old Jorge: generalized decay.
Bullets and rotting flesh—tenacious ghosts—continuously haunt the Kid.
In the house live not only the Kid and his family, but also his sister Sandra and her family. Sandra was the young girl who was repeatedly raped by the foreman while her dad got drunk on Cuatro Ases. She doesn’t talk much. Actually, she doesn’t talk at all. At least not with strangers. She lowers her eyes, hunches her shoulders forward and goes to some solitary inward place. Sandra is with a forty-five-year-old man known as Ñingle.
Ñingle served a fourteen-year sentence in various prisons. He was released a couple of years ago, then arrested again when a plea-bargain witness accused him of small-time drug peddling. He spent another year in prison before being acquitted. After that he went back to Sandra and their children—only to find his brother-in-law living with them, a man with a death sentence hanging over his head, a state collaborator, just like the guy who’d landed him in prison. Ñingle doesn’t like it. The Kid doesn’t, either.
“The Kid was the guy who handed me over the first time,” says Ñingle to anyone who will listen. “He’s why I did fourteen years.”
If you ask Ñingle about the Kid, he won’t miss a beat before telling you his side of the story. He says he was a marijuana distributer. He admits this frankly: “I trafficked marijuana.” He’d climbed the ladder and no longer carried pounds of it across the river from Guatemala, but pushed through Guatemala all the way to the department of Petén, on the border with Mexico. If the Mexican state of Sonora is the golden gate of drugs and arms trafficking into the United States, Petén is the golden gate into Mexico. All the big Guatemalan drug traffickers have owned land in Petén on the banks of La Pasión River, which runs north to the jungles of Tabasco state in Mexico.
In the 1990s, Ñingle moved hundreds of pounds of marijuana packed in plastic barrels. The former prisoner, who lived under the rule of La Raza in the penitentiary system, says he’d picked up around 700 pounds of marijuana and, along with the Kid who was still a teenager, buried them close to his house in Las Pozas. He also buried cash. “A shitload of cash,” says Ñingle. And weapons, too, at least one .357 gun and an M-16 rifle. One day in 1999, when the Kid was around fifteen and a newly minted member of the MS-13, some police officers came by the house and arrested Ñingle. He was surprised when, at the trial, they only accused him of peddling 100 pounds. Nothing more. Ñingle is sure it was the Kid who turned him in. The Kid confessed as much, one drunken night.
The Kid, Lorena, and Marbelly live in the more dilapidated part of the house, a kind of garage with a partition made of sheet metal, sticks, concrete blocks, and dried earth. Lorena is three months away from giving birth to their second daughter.
Ñingle regards the Kid as an intruder and, worse, as the traitor who made him spend fourteen years in a hole. And his sister, Sandra, barely impinges on the Kid’s thoughts. Her gaze seems permanently lost and her two kids hide under her skirt, fearful of this new stranger. For Rosa Tobar, meanwhile, it’s hard to focus on anything. The pain in her innards, from which the Kid spilled out thirty years ago, prevents her from seeing the world around her.
One day Ñingle explodes. He yells at the Kid without daring to name the reason. When he first went to prison, he’d left behind a newly jumped teenager. Now that he’s out he finds a murderer before him, one feared throughout the state. Ñingle shouts that ever since the Kid arrived, the house has filled up with pot smokers and vagrants. He insults him. In turn, the Kid responds the only way he knows how.
“Miguel Ángel grabbed hold of his machete and said: ‘Come on then, you son of a bitch, come on out! But don’t give me any of your shit ‘cause I’ll cut your head off,’” Lorena would tell us two years later, her words undercut by a nervous titter. “Ñingle wouldn’t come out. He locked himself in the toilet, he was so scared.”
The Kid, sick of his brother-i n-l aw’s temper, hacks with his machete into an almond tree behind the house, next to the latrine where Ñingle is cowering.
“Come out then, you son of a bitch, come out,” snarls the Kid, keeping his hatred from boiling over by hacking the small almond tree to the ground. This is the last time Ñingle will challenge the Kid. He won’t risk that machete slicing into his neck.
It’s in this hellhole that Jennifer Liset, the Kid’s second daughter, is raised. Before she’s officially named, her father calls her Little Burrito. She is light-skinned and has her father’s eyes, except they’re innocent and pure. Lorena uses some old rags and a couple of hats to cover the baby. She barely has any milk. The baby works to suckle every last nutrient from her mother’s thin body. When there’s nothing left to squeeze out, she wails.
The Kid and his family are all malnourished. “Everyone’s hungry,” shrugs Héctor, his father-in-law, whose milpa barely produces enough corn and beans to feed his own dependents.
The Kid has no job. He misses the skimpy food basket he’d been receiving in El Refugio. He fled from what he thought was life at the bottom of a ditch, but he’s since discovered new lows. First, in old Jorge’s cursed sugarcane farm. Now, in the only place that’s left in the world, his own home. The prosecutor’s office hardly ever comes by. He’s now only useful for a case no one’s interested in—that of the bodies in the Turin well.
He’s needy and alone in a country that, after pitifully trying to hide its face, has shown what it truly is: nothing but war, repression, and hatred. All he can do is make use of his past life, of that sloppy MS tattoo on his hand. The mark that made him a gang member on the Day of the Cross, May 3, when he became a son of the Beast.
When their hunger becomes unbearable, the Kid goes out with his machete. He risks his life to reach the crossroad that leads to San Lorenzo, and he asks for money from taxi drivers. It’s not exactly extortion, not exactly robbery. It’s the gray area between demanding and begging for money. With what he gets he’ll buy a bit of corn, bean, pasta, perhaps a little more. Day by day, his family is dying of hunger.
Sometimes, when he can’t milk the moto-taxis, he’ll follow his father-in-law to the milpa. He’ll labor for free, hoping to be paid in corn, but his hands have forgotten, or perhaps never learned, the secrets of the earth. The machete has less ugly functions than those given to it by the Kid. In this land of campesinos, all he understands of the campo is how to turn it into a mass grave.
When he and Héctor rest under the shade of a tree, sheltered from the pounding sun, they talk, though they don’t understand each other. Héctor speaks of milpas, beans, compost, and rain. He says it’s bad to plant beans under a new moon because they won’t grow. He talks about the pests that feed on beans, and the type of pesticide best to fight them off. But the Kid doesn’t understand that language anymore. Death has deformed him. He tries to confide in his father-in-law, telling him about visions and prophecies, about beginnings that never begin and endings that never end. Hector doesn’t understand. That stuff doesn’t grow, it doesn’t bear fruit or feed hungry families.
So the sicario and the campesino go on working the land in silence.
“He couldn’t. He tried but he couldn’t. When he plucked the beans, he’d stuff little bunches of them under his arms but they’d always fall. He let the weeds grow tall. He couldn’t even drive the stakes in. I’d tell him how, I’d show him—do it carefully, don’t let them get scuffed, don’t let them peel,” Hector would tell us, years later, shortly after lowering the Kid’s body into his grave.
Héctor is scared of the Kid. In fact, when fourteen-year-old Lorena went off with him, the police advised Héctor to press charges for statutory rape. Héctor refused. He had other kids to think about, and knew the Kid would find him and kill him if he took legal action.
In this hellhole, unlike the sugarcane field, at least the Kid is not ogled like a circus freak. He’s not some suspect intruder. Here in Las Pozas he is who he is, Miguel Ángel Tobar, the Hollywood Kid. Those looking for him know who they’re looking for. Dozens of young MS-13 hitmen want to earn their marks by delivering the Kid over to the Beast. They dream of the moment when, after murdering the traitor, they start getting call after call from the prisons, faraway voices cheering their accomplishment.
The last to try was Lethal. The Beast almost got him. The Kid saved himself with the tricks he’d learned as a soldier, but the Beast stayed close behind. She had smelled blood, and nothing was going to stop her until she tasted it.
Since then, there’s been a stream of cars staking out the Kid’s house. Their occupants don’t do anything. They don’t yell, they don’t threaten, they don’t shoot. They simply make their presence known, reminding the prey that the hunt continues. Sooner or later they will make their move. But the Kid has always been a step ahead. He never leaves the house without a machete in his hand. The visitors drive off then. They’re afraid, too. This prey isn’t just any prey. As the Kid himself once said, “He has nails and teeth, and they’re very sharp, the better to fuck everyone up with.”
To the Kid, his assailants are not anonymous figures. They’re Cocheche, Ades, Las Pescadas, El Burro, Gin, and another handful of boys and men who knew him well when he was still considered one of the clique’s foremost heroes. The great killer of chavalas, the perfect sicario, the grasper of enemy hearts. Today they want to kill him, but they’re also afraid to get close. They’re hunting an animal braver than they are.
The Kid’s enemies know where he is. The Eighteens of El Saral know. The police officers accused of handing Rambito over to Chepe Furia know (and fear that the Kid will reconsider, putting them back in the dock.) The entire Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha knows where he is. The Beast, too, knows.
This is why the Kid sometimes suffers from paranoia. He’s alone. The whole world against him, his machete, and his hand cannon.
Sometimes the paranoia reaches a fever pitch, and the Kid goes out in the middle of the night with his grenade in hand to lurk among the cherry trees in front of his house, waiting for one of his killers so he can blow him up. Recently, he drew another picture of the Beast.
One of his neighbors, one of the few who comes to see him and give him some marijuana now and again, thinks he needs help: “He only talks about killing and dying, he’s obsessed.”
Once, while watching a soccer game in the local field, the Kid thought he noticed the gaze of a gang member in the eyes of the players. He chased the whole team out of Las Pozas with his machete.
Other times he’d change course on his way back from picking up small quantities of pot in Guatemala. When he heard or saw owls or roadrunners, birds of bad omen according to western campesino lore, he’d turn around. Believing the birds were warning him of nearby enemies, he’d go hide, and bury his pot. Even the nature around him hummed of death.
Months went by. In June 2014, impossible though it seems, matters take a turn for the worse. Hell is closing in, the Beast crouches just around the corner.
The Kid crosses back from Guatemala with a few ounces of pot in his pocket. He’s bringing it for others, in exchange for a hit or two. Some rural policemen detain him, finding his stash and weapon. He begs them to let him go, telling them he’s a protected witness, rattling off the names of the police officers he knew: Detective Pineda, he says, Sergeant Pozo. Nothing doing. The cops take him to the outpost of Ahuachapán.
Salvadoran outposts are like miniature jails. Sometimes the police squeeze up to 300 detainees in spaces designed, at most, for fifty. Legally, a person can only be detained for up to seventy-two hours in one of these cells before being freed or transferred to a prison. But this law, like so many others, is simply ignored: there are men and women who serve their entire sentences in these reeking cages. They are never let out for exercise. They receive no visitors.
These unlucky people, just like in the prisons, are divided into MS-13 members, the two factions of the Barrio 18, and “civilians.”
“Are you a civilian? You’re not mixed up in anything?” one of the officers asks the Kid. He repeats that he’s a plea-bargain witness, who musn’t be placed in a cell with the MS-13 or the Eighteens. The officer, whose query had been sarcastic, opens the cage housing the MS-13s and pushes him in.
These gang members are young and don’t recognize him right away. After all, the Kid abandoned the clique almost five years ago. He lies. He says he’d been part of the Centrales Locos Salvatrucha in the capital, years ago. Says he retired in 2000.
The Kid knows how to handle even the worst situations, largely because the worst situations have been his entire life. He’s a convincing liar when he needs to be. So many years in the Mara Salvatrucha 13 taught him how to toy with the minds of murderers.
“I’ve been deprogrammed, but I’m always on the lookout for the bichas so they won’t break my ass, and if one lets himself get smoked out, then I’ll smoke him out,” the Kid tells his fellow inmates.
The police officer, when he realizes the Kid has gotten off the hook so far, walks up to the bars and says: “Nah man, this here’s the Kid, the one who turned witness in El Refugio, the one who trapped the leader of the Hollywoods.”
A cage. The Kid. The Beast.
The gang members, like rabid animals, encircle him. They’re barefoot and shirtless. But the Kid has a plan B. He’s got no plan B for anything else in life, but always a plan B for confronting death. Always. While the police doctor performed his routine examination, the Kid filched a blade lying on his desk, a small scalpel.
“Shuddup you son of a bitch. You have no more right to talk. One word and we’ll smash your face in,” spits the leader of the cage.
The Kid doesn’t stop talking. He starts cursing.
The MS surround him. The Kid whips out the tiny scalpel. He screams. He rants. He threatens. Before long, the young gangsters are hollering for their lives.
“Knife, knife, knife!” they scream.
The police intervene before the scene turns into a bloodbath and pull the Kid out of the cell. They kick him over to a metal post in front of the MS-13 cell and tie him up. Now the inmates have the upper hand again, taunting him:
“Oh yeah, you son of a fucking bitch, so you’re the Kid, the guy who castrated Chepe Furia!”
Miguel Ángel directs his response to the leader of the cell, with whom he’d done a hit job years ago, though the youth didn’t recognize him at first.
“Yep, so what’re you going to do about it? You’re the Silence, bicho, you son of a bitch. Who wouldn’t recognize you? Just tell me where, when, with what.”
The policemen don’t want to take any more risks. They call their bosses on the phone. A commissioner returns the call, tells them he’s a protected witness and orders them to give the Kid a lift to Las Pozas. They let him go and sentence him to community work, though he won’t live long enough to do it.
The Kid makes it back home, without his marijuana but also without a scratch, just a bruise from one of the police officer’s boots.
Since the Kid became a protected witness in El Refugio, since he became a traitor to the Mara Salvatrucha 13 in 2009, the Beast has never gotten so close. The Beast had him alone, cornered, but the Hollywood Kid, once again, slipped her grasp.
The Kid is more paranoid than ever. He doesn’t sleep and trusts no one.
Cars continue to idle in front of his house.
The Kid chose Las Pozas in part because of its reputation, because it’s known for its rough, ruthless people. He thought maybe that would keep the Hollywood Locos at bay. Two pot-dealing brothers live on one street corner, and they have an M-16, which earns them the same sort of respect the owner of a Mercedes-Benz might enjoy in a middle-class neighborhood. Near the amate tree at the neighborhood’s entrance lives El Siri, who once belonged to a gang from the warring 1980s called 11 Puntos—toughs who made a living stealing cattle, knowing they’d be summarily shot if they were ever caught by the army or the guerrilla. There’s also an ex-hitman who spent eleven years in prison, and now cultivates yucca plants and trades in marijuana wholesale. And a gaggle of young boys who smoke the marijuana and assault whomever they can. They’re lost boys, like the Kid was when Chepe Furia arrived on the scene; kids waiting for someone to give them a purpose in life.
But Las Pozas is also home to Pai Pai, Las Pescadas, El Emo, and Gin—all of them MS-13 collaborators. The Kid smokes with them and tries to read their minds. He knows they want to walk him, just as he walked so many others. He keeps them close, but doesn’t trust them. Those kids will be adulated by all the western cliques if they kill Miguel Ángel, or just deliver him alive. They dream of one day being able to offer him up to the Beast, to finally receive her approval.
“When I smoke with El Emo, I look into his eyes; when I take a hit I control that son of a bitch with my gaze. I want him to see I’m in control,” the Kid insists.
He’s trying to convince himself that he has a sound strategy, that he’s not helpless as dust in the wind, that he’s not trapped in a hell with no way out.
Las Pozas is a dead end. Beyond, you’re in another country. With another story, other crews, and other beasts. For the Kid, this is a dead end. He doesn’t know it yet, but it’s his final stopping place, before the bullets bite him for the first and last time. But this was also a beginning. This is where he met Chepe Furia. This is where he met the gang that branded his life forever.
Here, in hell on earth, the Beast will soon end her son’s life.