January 9, 2018. We arrive at the cemetery of Atiquizaya at three in the afternoon. It seems like not one more body could fit in this graveyard. If many more come, they’ll have to bury them in the ravine, close to the cluster of houses where some local kids are popping their heads up to peer at us.
The last time we were here was more than three years ago, the day they buried the Kid. That day, the members of what was once his clique, the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, wrecked his funeral. They didn’t let people finish crying, they didn’t let the evangelists finish singing, nor did they allow his relatives time to bury the national flower with dignity and care. They didn’t let the traitor go in peace.
Since that day, no one has come to visit the blanket of dirt that covers the Kid. Not one family member. Once, a cemetery employee came to offer Héctor, the Kid’s father-in-law, a cement cross that someone had left behind. The campesino wisely preferred to decline the gift. “I didn’t want to risk having to dig another grave just for putting up a cross.”
Before coming to the cemetery, we stopped by the town hall. We identified ourselves as journalists and said we were on our way to visit the Kid’s grave. The town hall thought it best to send two security guards along with us.
The manager of the cemetery greeted us. He’s a tough-looking guy, around fifty years old. His right forearm is deformed by an enormous scar: an amorphous scorpion tattoo that he acquired after the war in honor of his battalion. He gave himself the tattoo one drunken night, using car battery fluid and a sewing needle. The scorpion is the symbol of the Atlacatl Battalion, the most ferocious wing of the military during the Salvadoran war, financed and trained by the CIA and notorious for massacres like El Mozote, where up to 1,200 civilians were slaughtered in 1981. Carlos, the killer turned undertaker, doesn’t hide his past. He wears it with pride. He still refers to Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, the leader of this death squad, as “mi coronel Monterrosa.” Carlos’s ringtone is the Arena marching song, whose lyrics include: “El Salvador will be the tomb where all the reds end up.”
Carlos is the uncle of a jailed Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha member, and his sister is the wife of El Stranger, now serving time for the murder of Rambito. El Stranger has retired from the gang. As his homeboys would say, he’s a penny beggar now. He’s a traitor, just like the Kid, whom he’d tried to kill for years. El Stranger, so Carlos says, is now dying of brain cancer in the stinking prison of Sonsonate, here in western El Salvador.
El Salvador is a cruel parody of itself. Carlos, who killed in the civil war, now lives by burying the dead of a new war fought within his own family. Different war, different kinds of tattoos.
The veteran of the cruelest battalion stopped doing cocaine—which he’d used as a form of escape after the war—twenty-one years ago. He stopped drinking—which he’d done to drown his memories—twenty years ago. He’s an evangelical now. He says he was rescued by God. This is the story of so many, the syncretism of a whole country inside one man.
The cemetery is plastered in gang insignia: a solitary black claw drawn on the wall behind us; an “MS” with horns and the initials of the clique, HLS; the words “see, hear, and keep quiet” scrawled on another wall; other gang signs and letters marking the tombstones. Carlos says that when Eighteens die in the area, they’re not buried here but in the cemetery of El Refugio, which is their turf. In El Salvador, even the dead belong to a gang. Even the dead belong to a clique.
“That was a special case. The Kid made history here,” Carlos says, remembering the Kid’s burial. “It was historic.
“Yeah, for me it was historic when they killed him. It was sad because they didn’t even get him out of the bag. Only his face was visible when they put him in the ground, and he looked like a Chinaman. It was a black bag. Things were tense that day in the cemetery, and I thought: Maybe there’s gonna be a big shootout here … Well, that’s all.”
That’s all. More death.
“Where is the Kid’s grave?”
“Right here,” he says, pointing to a mound of dirt.
The mound is crowned with a blue cross and a wreath of red flowers. Plastic flowers are nailed onto the cross. Behind it grows a small izote bush.
“This one?” we ask in disbelief.
“Yeah. This one. Thing is,” Carlos goes on, “we just don’t have enough space. There’s nothing left of the Kid underground. So we didn’t even have to dig anything up, we just dug right down and buried another body.”
“You’re saying there’s another body on top of the Kid?”
“Right.” Carlos lifts the wreath of red flowers. Carved into the cross is a name: “Mercedes de J.”
The red flowers are not for the Kid. The blue cross isn’t for him either. That izote bush is not the same plant his family hastily stuck in the earth in front of the menacing eyes of the gangsters. That one, Carlos tells us, “dried up and died.” This grave, in fact, isn’t even the Kid’s grave. This grave is someone else’s. For other mourners to come and grieve.
The Hollywood Kid, Miguel Ángel Tobar, once known as the Clown, the protected witness of the Salvadoran state, was swallowed whole by the Salvadoran west. He’s now nothing but dirt and roots. He has forever escaped this rotten corner of the world.
“He was serious business. He denounced some seventy maras,” Carlos says.
Carlos isn’t alone in his exaggeration. He isn’t the only one building a legend out of the life of a murderer, a witness, the son of a miquero, a man who’s so similar to so many other men in this country. A town hall janitor says that when they killed him, the moto-taxi of the hitmen looked like a hearse, and a nurse ran toward the town of San Lorenzo, screaming, “They’re killing each other! They’re killing each other!” Others say the Kid walked bare-chested down the dusty streets of the west with a giant machete in his hand, and, as he passed, the residents would close their windows and lock their doors, crying, “Here comes the Kid! Here comes the Kid!” Others, who didn’t witness his death, describe how he fought off his assassins, wounding them with the blade of his machete.
The Kid goes on killing, fighting, resisting death. The struggle between the Kid and The Beast continues. The battle intensifies. It goes on and on.
Miguel Ángel Tobar has no peace, not even in death.