FLAMES OF WAR engulf the hill. The feud has left a trail of charred bodies in its wake. It was a raging night.
The Columbia Little Sycos made their move. Their escalation was brutal. Last night they intercepted a bus, one of those protected by Guanacos Criminales Salvatrucha, with all of the passengers—residents of the hill—still on board. They took them to the Jardín neighborhood, in front of the school. Right near where Calazo was killed just a few months before. There they were drenched in gasoline and burned alive. The men circled the bus, waiting for people to die. Those who managed to escape through the windows were promptly shot. Eleven people have been reduced to ash. Three more agonize in the hospitals. Within weeks, seventeen people will have died.
At the same time, other Barrio 18 members attacked a second bus that was ascending the hill. As the driver approached, they shot and killed him in cold blood. Despite the hail of bullets, they failed to stop the bus, which raced with its cargo of dead and wounded to the hospital. There lay Hazel, a six-year-old girl. She took a bullet right between the eyes and was killed instantly. The bullet didn’t destroy her skull, it exited neatly through the other side, leaving her slumped against the bloody seats as if she were napping. The lucky ones cling to life in hospital beds.
Columbia Little Sycos, blind with rage, have gone all in. The Zacamíl massacre was not the only strike. Yesterday the Guanacos launched an attack on 18’s turf, in the Polanco neighborhood, on a plump and bug-eyed gangster known as Crayola. They littered his head and chest with bullets in front of his family, and then fled to the hill. That night, as Crayola’s family wept at his wake, the Little Sycos leader El Carne31 assembled his homies by Jardín park’s battered swing sets to plot their revenge. It was there that they arranged for the attack on the buses. A dark, short-haired gangster known as Fox ran out in search of gasoline. From the battered swings of Jardín park in a downtrodden neighborhood of El Salvador, a group of young men descended with death on their minds.
The Columbia Little Sycos had heard that, aside from the Guanacos Criminales, two others had a role in the death of Crayola: Juan Martínez, the bus driver, and his helper, Juan Erazo. Both from Route 47. They are both dead now. They were the first to be killed, before the bus was engulfed in flames.
Today at dawn, a woman lies comatose in a hospital bed. She is young, in her thirties. Her arm is smashed to pieces and the rest of her body is charred. Her lungs are destroyed from breathing in the smoke. A tube snakes its way into her throat, and the family has braced itself for her death. Yet the woman clings to whatever semblance of life she has left, that which the flames could not take. The doctors were about to amputate the remaining shreds of her arm. For now, they have decided to wait and see. There is an air of resignation, as if the flames will soon claim what they left behind.
Before she was a charred corpse, before becoming a statistic, this woman had a name. Her name was Carlota, she lived in a neighborhood on the hill and birthed two daughters. One is twelve, the other nine. She had a home and a life. On Sunday, she and her daughters took a bus home. Countless times she had made the trip with her little girls, each ride mundane and uneventful. Not twenty minutes into this journey, Fox, El Payasín, El Wuilita, and other members of Columbia Little Sycos arrived with death—gunshots and drums full of gasoline. Avenging the murder of their homeboy with flames.
The incidents are straightforward. Each deed betrays its author, and these, like actors in a play, leave the scene one by one. Yesterday I spoke with Alicia over the phone. She is hoarse, and it sounds like a constant stream of snot is running down her face. She tells me that the neighborhood is limp with terror. She tells me, between sighs, that one of the little girls, the one with the bullet between her eyes, was her niece. The rest have yet to be identified. They are so charred, the women can’t be distinguished from the men. Or, at first glance, the people from the scorched seats and upholstery.
The firefighters had to disentangle the living from the dead. The living were rushed to the Zacamíl hospital. The dead were placed in black bags.
I speak with Destino. He tells me the Guanacos are all accounted for, but civilians have died. He says he will explain more later, but for now all he can say is that things are hot. I don’t think the choice of words is lost on him.
When Carlota felt the first flames engulf her, engulf her daughters, she beat the window with her arm, time and time again, with the insistence of a mother. With the insistence of someone who sees her daughters burning alive before her eyes. She beat it until she shattered her elbow . . . then beat it again, and again. When at last the glass began to give, her arm was in tatters. By the time the glass was cleared, her body was a sack of broken bones, engulfed in flames. Outside, her tormentors lay in wait to shoot those who managed to escape.
Today it is said that the Guanacos Criminales Salvatrucha have decreed a curfew.
“None of you leave your house after 7. Blood will run!”
A police helicopter circles the sky, and police patrols wander through the city. On the radio, a senior officer stresses that it is just a rumor, that there is nothing to fear. With a bus, passengers and all, reduced to flames, it is hard to believe him. The streets are empty. The police have captured eight members of Columbia Little Sycos. They are all young, and their handcuffed images are on the front pages of every newspaper in the country. They are dark, short, tattooed. They look so much like the Guanacos.
Despite the chaos, the police and the neighborhood know well that Barrio 18 is responsible. Another thing, too, is clear: MS-13’s retaliation is not far off.
The war is all out. One gang makes a pact with the other. The pact consists of killing each other. Their status, and everything they know, depends on it.
After every blow, another follows, and like chess, each moving piece implies a play in response.
Little Down went too far with the killing of Crayola and the Zacamíl massacre. He also injured the families of other gangsters. He plunged the neighborhood into terror and indignation. So began the monarch’s reign. Nearly two months after the massacre, and a mere day after Crayola’s death, Barrio 18 has gotten payback, and in doing so has brought on an escalation of violence and barbarity. For now, all that’s left to do is wait for the inevitable onslaught of Little Down and an army of young men from the Montreal hill.
Before the flames could overtake her, Carlota managed to fling her youngest daughter through the gap in the glass she had made by breaking her arms. Carlota’s daughter was launched onto the street.
Outside, the men kept shooting.
Carlota faced a choice: bullets or flames.
I don’t know if by then her eyes had burnt up, or if the flames had robbed her of reason. I don’t know if Carlota could still see when the glass destroyed her daughter’s face. The woman fell unconscious, and so she remains. She may never know if her sacrifice bore fruit, if her daughters—there were two—survived, if the result of so, so much pain was life or death.
The girls are alive. Alejandra, the youngest, took a bullet to the leg. She lost bits of flesh and skin that her body will soon regenerate. The eldest, Marlén, had shotgun splinters in her face. But the killers failed. They didn’t kill her. They couldn’t even do significant damage. The flames did their thing. But they, too, failed. They burnt the girls’ skin and singed their hair. But the girls are young, and skin and hair grow back. This sacrifice was not in vain. Carlota, though she may never know it, danced with death and won life for others.
31 In English, “The Meat.”