Gangs, Champagne, and Pictures

IT IS AROUND 9 P.M. at a photo exhibition inside San Salvador’s National Museum of Anthropology.

A French photographer speaks into a microphone to a crowd of well-dressed men and women. Wine glasses adorn the tables. Waiters serve delicate pastries. People clap politely at the photographer’s every word.

“You have to be crazy to come to these places and do this work,” he says in French, and a beautiful interpreter translates. He receives hearty applause, then continues: “And crazier still to bring your son . . . but what can I say . . . I’m crazy.”

The Frenchman looks to his right and pats his son, also exceptionally well dressed, on the back. The audience rewards him with another rush of applause.

“We expected to find hoodlums waiting with a knife between their teeth, but instead we found little birds fallen from their nests. Forgive the poetry . . . I’ve always been a poet, ha ha ha.”

The audience laughs with him, even before the young woman can translate. Most of them speak French.

The man speaking is Klavdij Sluban, a famed French photographer who has come to El Salvador for a project on gangsters in prison. He visited the youth jails for a few days—in Izalco, where the young men of Barrio 18 are held, and in Tonacatepeque, where the MS-13 men reside. He gave them disposable cameras to capture their surroundings. He did so alongside his son and an entourage from the French Embassy.

When he finishes his speech, the wine starts to flow. Appetizers too. Both are devoured, but with that same performative politeness. At the end of the day, they differ little from the Guanacos encroaching on rice and chorizo on the patio.

Photographs line the walls. Tattooed bodies, men with lost expressions behind bars. Single file lines of handcuffed men, blue cages, tearstained eyes, graffiti.

Guests wander through the exhibition, whisper, smile, and greet each other. They look at the photos like children visiting a zoo.

“Look, they’re artists,” says one woman to another, staring at a photo of an MS mural.

“It’s beautiful! If only we could steer that creativity . . .” says the other excitedly.

The mural they refer to is in the Tonacatepeque jail. It is in memory of a deceased homeboy, and reads: RIP Scuby, forever with us. Its creators pose at its side, hands still covered in paint, profound sadness in their eyes.

Other women pose with the framed pictures, to be photographed themselves. Some call over Sluban and his son to take photos with them. One of them is Aída Santos de Escobar, a judge who has won a certain fame and secured her place in government after being featured in Christian Poveda’s La Vida Loca.²⁵ Some academics wander nearby, studying the phenomenon of gangs. I make out a pair of journalists and some security guards. It seems the cream of the crop has been invited. They speak over each other with enthusiasm while emptying their liquor glasses.

Two older men laugh heartily while saying something in French. Behind them, in a corner of the room, El Noche of Guanacos Criminales Salvatrucha eyes us furtively from inside a picture frame.

25   A 2008 documentary that follows members of Barrio 18. Poveda was shot and killed by members of the gang in 2009.