THIS WEEK GUANACOS Criminales Salvatrucha are inaugurating a new leader. He has promised to elevate the clica’s status, to make them feared and respected above all. It is rumored that things are changing, not just for gangsters, but for everyone around here. Little Down’s reign has begun.
The Informant tells me that if it was difficult to leave the clica before, it is now impossible. No more concessions, and gangsters and aspirants alike will face new obligations. The gears of war are turning, and Guanacos need all hands on deck.
The Zacamíl attack seems to have been a sort of coronation. It was a way of informing the Barrio 18 clicas that things are changing. That the hill still belongs to Mara Salvatrucha. The Informant tells me that after the death of Calazo the bus driver, there was tension within the clica. He tells me that Dark, the gangster I met that first day alongside Destino, has been steering the clica after the latter’s withdrawal. However, complaints started to spread, and Barrio 18’s repeated incursions did not help. It was then that El Viento,28 the senior head of the clica, decided to make his move and name Little Down as leader.
“I’ve never told you about Viento?” asks The Informant as if it were a given. “Oh god, then you don’t know anything!”
He tells me that El Viento isn’t just the leader of this clica, but several others too. He commands his army of gangsters from a prison cell. He crowns and dismisses as he likes, setting their path from afar.
He was one of the young men delirious with admiration for Destino when, years ago, he still patrolled, gun in hand, in search of Barrio 18 enemies. In fact, it was Destino himself who initiated El Viento. But the clica’s story begins a few years before.
Mara Salvatrucha doesn’t really have a founder. Academics speak of an ex-guerilla named El Flaco29 of the Stoner clica in Los Angeles. They say he founded the gang in the 1970s. An interesting take, as the war didn’t officially start in El Salvador until 1980. And the first groups who could without shame call themselves guerillas were born as late as 1975. It was more of a collective movement, a cultural process.
In El Salvador, too, there was no sole founder. It was hundreds of young men who were marked with the two letters, who saw in the desolate landscape of postwar El Salvador a suitable niche for what they had known their entire lives. Gangs.
Those who came back cloned the gangs they had belonged to in Los Angeles. In this way, Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, Normandie Locos Salvatrucha, Coronados Locos Salvatrucha, and Leeward Locos Salvatrucha came to be. It wasn’t until the mid-’90s that some gangsters began to create newer ones, with reference to where they operated. From this process arose the Teclas Locos Salvatrucha of Saint Tecla, the Iberia Locos Salvatrucha from the Iberia neighborhood, the famed Sailors Locos Salvatrucha of Saint Miguel, and the Guanacos Locos Salvatrucha from Montreal Street.
Guanacos Locos Salvatrucha was founded by a young man called Sky. It is not clear if he was killed or if he returned to California. Some say he was deported, others say no, that he was never in the United States. This is how oral histories go in the Mara. Unclear. There is no truth, and it all depends on who’s telling things. Whatever his story, Sky’s legacy lives on among other men who live, probably much like he did, just a few blocks from here. Sky governed the clica for several years, positioning it as one of the largest in San Salvador. The Informant doesn’t know exactly what happened to him. What is certain is that the clica was left without its key leader. A few months later, they got a note in his handwriting leaving the gang’s leadership in the hands of Destino.
Destino made it grow and took control of the territory. He did so with bullets, and an ironclad refusal to find a truce with the other predators who inhabited the area. An older gang from the ’80s, the Gallo, resided here. They were among the few who resisted the onslaught of the two colossal structures that are MS-13 and Barrio 18. But they weren’t the Mara’s only competitors. A group of men from several years earlier had dominated the drug trade on the hill and a greater part of the city. They clashed furiously with the Guanacos and sent several to their graves. Via an informant, the Guanacos found out about a plan: the traffickers planned to call Destino and other leaders to a meeting to establish a truce, where they would be slaughtered. The MS leaders showed up anyway, ready for a fight. Several gangsters died, but so did the traffickers, and since then, the hill is theirs without dispute.
When Destino was put in jail the clica passed to Dark, who wasn’t up to the task. When Destino returned, his role was more of a wise elder than an active leader. The clica fell into the hands of the most violent hitman that has ever been seen on the hill: Little Down. A great deal has changed between the Sky years and Little Down’s reign. However, the logic remains the same. A handful of young men playing at war.
In the last neighborhood on the hill, a bus gets ready to descend. Full of passengers, it waits. It waits for Bernardo and El Maniaco, who eventually jump on quickly. They sport long-sleeved dress shirts and shiny black shoes. No tattoos or earrings in sight. One sits in the back and the other by the driver. Due to complaints by motorists on this route after Barrio 18’s assault, Little Down has assigned a few gangsters to ride along on each trip as protection. One final passenger manages to hop on and the bus takes off.
At the youth center I am greeted by Isaías, Destino’s eldest son. Inside, his father and another gangster discuss something important while kneading dough. As I arrive their language shifts, and I can’t make it out. It’s like a dialect made up of words turned backwards with numbers interwoven standing in place of words.
Two young men of some fourteen years enter silently. Destino guides them to a corner. The young men are nervous, sweating profusely. They look at each other for reassurance. Destino speaks to them closely, patting them on the back. They have been sent by Little Down, perhaps to receive final instructions for some mission, perhaps for advice or some sort of blessing. Destino leaves them on the patio and returns inside, to his bread. He is distraught. A gangster at his side looks at him and smiles.
The two young men sit in silence. They look at the ground, breathing rapidly, then nod and stand up. One is trembling.
Before they leave, Destino yells without raising his eyes from the dough, in that same gangster’s dialect:
“Chatru, little homies. Chatru!”30
Hugo has returned to the community and takes refuge in Little Down’s house. Neither the locks nor the constant surveillance could hold back this bright young man. He learned the schedule—when the doors opened, when the guards passed out, and fled. It is said the teachers at his boarding school in Zacamíl would beat him if he didn’t listen.
There, no one put up with his tricks or his insults. There, he was nobody. He tried to threaten them by invoking his friendship with Destino, or his sister’s relationship with the feared Little Down, and said that, if they didn’t stop bothering him, the full fury of Guanacos Criminales Salvatrucha would fall down upon them. No dice. Now Hugo has returned to the belly of the beast.
More gangsters enter the home. I don’t know them, they are from neighboring clicas. They look for Destino and speak to him in that coded language. One of them comes up to me and flashes the Salvatrucha claw.
“What’s up dawg, what’s good?” he says.
I return the gesture clumsily, and he is red with indignation as he realizes I’m no gangster. He looks at me, fury in his eyes, and asks Destino for an explanation.
It is time for me to go.
I say goodbye to Destino, and he signals an apology with his expression. It is night, and it’s cold on the hill.
28 In English, The Wind.
29 In English, The Thin One.
30 Pig Latin for Trucha, short for Mara Salvatrucha.