December 2012
It has been over a year since I made my way up the hill, and there, and throughout the country, some things have changed.
Destino, after growing the bakery and recruiting other homeboys to his project, has been arrested again. The cops accuse him of leading MS-13 and roping kids into crime. They took him, nearly naked, from his home in a huge operation with dozens of cops and journalists at the ready. Isaías, his wife, and their infant remain at home. The accusations are unlikely; he worked full-time at the youth center for a Catholic congregation, well removed from the clica he founded. Now he will be thrust back in prison, probably Ciudad Barrios, the largest one allocated for his gang. He will be forced to navigate hierarchies and win back the respect that allowed him to survive for so many years within MS. It all depends on the court ruling that’s yet to be scheduled.
Charlie, the young man who was deported from South America, sits in the Ciudad Barrios prison. He was convicted of killing one of the Columbia Little Sycos who participated in the bus burning. Moxy, the young man who asked to ride my bike, serves there too, charged with double homicide. He shot two laborers working construction in the neighborhood, supposedly because they lived in a place governed by Barrio 18.
In El Salvador the gangs have grown, restructured, and have somehow bent the government to their will. In exchange for cooling off on the homicides, they have secured lax penalties, and the transfer of their leaders to lower security jails. The pact has worked for now. From fourteen homicides a day, we now have an average of five. The authorities boast of having achieved the impossible: reaching a peace agreement between the two gangs. However, if you ask the people, you will hear rumors. It is said the pact will break, and what is next will be far more complicated and brutal. It is said that both gangs have taken advantage of this time to restructure and reorganize. Gangsters who expressed misgivings were promptly killed, like El Mafioso34 and Droopy, murdered in the Margaritas neighborhood by their own gang. Several others have fled. Meanwhile, the scale of MS-13 has grown such that the US Department of the Treasury included it, in October of 2012, on its list of transnational criminal organizations that represent a threat to national security.
The Salvadoran minister of justice and his higher-ups pat each other on the back. Meanwhile, in the streets, the poor live anxiously. They sense worse days to come.
June 2013
Edgar Giovanni Morales, alias Destino, was assassinated on March 6, 2013 by Barrio 18 hitmen on the skirts of Montreal hill. His death shattered the already fragile ceasefire and infuriated MS-13 homeboys at a national level. It is said that Destino was mounting his bike when a young man, dark and with slanted eyes, approached him gun in hand. They fought for several minutes, until the hitman lodged a bullet in Destino’s head. He was left sprawled on the pavement, in a pool of his own blood.
Hours later, his homeboys set out on their bikes toward Barrio 18 territory. They killed several, including a police patrol. After a few weeks, a young man, dark and with slanted eyes, was found a few kilometers from the hill, wrapped in a sheet with obvious signs of torture and a bullet to the head.
Days after Destino’s death, El Salvador’s President Mauricio Funes declared the killing to be politically motivated, and those responsible for the ceasefire made no statement. They kept their phones off.
That same day, in the Ciudad Barrios prison, the fortress par excellence of MS-13, a raucous celebration took place. It was of the sort only possible after a ceasefire. A theater group performed in front of over two thousand homeboys. The gangsters, too, performed. In the midst of the festivities, a moment of silence was called for Destino. Thousands of tattooed heads bowed and silence reigned for a moment in that hell known as Ciudad Barrios. The gang’s national leaders—El Diablito,35 El Sirra, Snayder, El Trece,36 among others—expressed their respects for their fallen comrade.
June 2015
Óscar Sigarán, alias Little Down, was killed by police in a confrontation in February of 2015, when the ceasefire was irreparably broken. After a shootout that left Óscar deeply wounded, a cop destroyed his cranium with the butt of an M16, leaving his brain exposed and killing him. In the same shootout, the cops murdered Trucha, Little Down’s right-hand man.
September 2018
It’s evening, 7:30. Around when it all happened. We’re at the edge of Jardín neighborhood, on Castro Morán street, where eight years ago the Columbia Little Sycos burned the bus with thirty-two people aboard. Alejandra, Carlota’s daughter, is now eighteen and on the verge of completing high school. She’s seated beside me, and I ask her how it feels to be back here. She ignores me for a moment, and stares on intently at the site where her life changed so much. There, her mother burned, as did her sister and her neighbors. There, she saw Los Columbia circle her unconscious mother and shoot her, multiple times, more times than she cared to think about. That night stole so much from her. But there was one thing it couldn’t take from her. Sometimes, the will to live is just too strong.
Carlota survived.
The flames couldn’t best her. Nor could the bullets. Nor the blow as she leapt out of the bus after saving her girls. Her will to live was stronger.
That day, the firefighters and cops left her for dead. Marlén, her eldest daughter, clung to her, and the cops yanked the child from what they thought its mother’s corpse. They sat the girl in a patrol car alongside Alejandra, her younger sister, and three adults. Among them was María, another woman from the Montreal hill. Her body was charred, but she was still breathing. The car took off, and bit by bit the girls lost sight of their mother. Carlota was the last to be taken to the hospital. She spent at least an hour by a pile of charred corpses. They thought she was one of them. How wrong they were.
Carlota is seated by my side. I turn to her, and tell her if that night had been a game of poker between her and death, she’d be rich and death would be penniless. She laughs, and stares on.
Today, she tells me that when she arrived at the hospital she was unconscious. Her daughters were taken to a different hospital. Marlén, aged eleven, began to panic. She felt she’d left her mother behind. Let her down. Alejandra, aged nine, could barely comprehend the situation. At the time, her mind shielded her from trauma, distanced her from the events. Now, eight years later, the images are etched into her brain. With the passage of time, that merciful bit of distance eroded. She has much to process.
Alejandra says it started with a family outing. She says it was her fault. She whined and whined about going to the park that Sunday. Carlota had said no. They couldn’t afford it. Carlota worked in the central market of San Salvador selling fruit and vegetables at a small stand. When things were slow, she’d sell afoot, bearing her wares on her shoulders. She’d clean up after other vendors, or run errands for a nearby restaurant in hopes of feeding her children. But that Sunday, someone gave her five dollars.
The girl insisted, it was nice out, Carlota had money, and she gave in. They went to Cuscatlán Park in central San Salvador. There, Alejandra played with her sister, they ran, bought a cheap plastic ball, and even managed to take an instant photo alongside her sister. They still have the photo. It too survived the flames, if somewhat charred and spattered with blood.
On the way back, they stopped to see their father. He has a bar downtown. They played for a bit with cousins, then went on their way. At a street corner, they waited for a bus. One passed by, they signalled to the driver, who ignored them. Another drove by. This one stopped. Juan Martínez, the driver, opened the doors and welcomed his passengers aboard.
Alejandra fell asleep on board. She always used to nap on bus rides. Not any more. It’s one of so many things that changed for her that day. She heard yelling. A man insulted Juan Martínez. She smelled of gasoline. She heard the bullets that killed Juan, and took in her surroundings. A woman licked by flames put a child, who too was aflame, underneath a seat. Perhaps to save her from the gunshots that peppered the bus, without knowing the child was already condemned to death by flames. She remembered her mother breaking the glass, her mother grabbing her by the waist, her mother throwing her, she remembered the blow of the pavement, her sister’s cries, the insults from the Columbia Little Sycos, the smoke in her lungs, the blood, the pain in her right leg. So much pain. She remembered looking back when her mother hit the ground. She fell face down, her neck twisted. She says she fell unconscious. Los Columbia surrounded her and shot her. They put five bullets in her body, not counting the shotgun pellets.
Carlota, when she awoke, thought she had lost her daughters. She cried. She cried so much, and so loudly, that they sedated her. The next day, she had a heart attack. She survived. She cheated death yet again, but death intended to put up a fight. Carlota suffered a second heart attack. They gave her up for dead. But she fought back. They transferred her to another hospital, Rosales Hospital. An infamous facility, where more than once the living have shared stretchers with the dead. An old, dirty hospital. That day, though the story had made national news, though the President himself had made statements and the eyes of the world rested on San Salvador, that day, there was no hospital bed for Carlota in Rosales Hospital. They had to wait until María, the woman who accompanied her daughters in the patrol car, had died, for her to be attended to. The pain was intolerable. Her body was charred and swollen. She got pins in her broken arm. She had bullets removed. However, a week later, no one had noticed her lungs had been damaged by smoke. No one there thought to give her a chest exam. Death is insistent when it sets its sights on someone. If it doesn’t come by way of bullets or flames, it tries for medical malpractice. Her lungs lost forty percent of their capacity. She was hooked up to a breathing machine, and before long, with one last slight to death, she began breathing normally again. She left the doctors with breathing tubes in hand. She survived.
The doctors missed something else. Carlota had an M16 bullet lodged in her skull. A nurse found it while helping her bathe some weeks later. A doctor extracted it by hand, without anesthesia, and laughed:
“Look what you had in your head!”
We’ve returned from dinner, and Andrea, Carlota’s youngest daughter, who was born three years after the flames, is winded from playing on slides in the restaurant’s kids’ area. As we approach Montreal hill, they tell me to be careful, that the men who now reside on the hill don’t know me, and that the ones I met are little more than legends in the frenetic world of gangsters. I want to ask them something, but I don’t. It’s not my question to ask.
***
It’s June 27, 2018, and last week marks the eight-year anniversary of the tragedy. In a few months I’ll meet with Carlota and Alejandra, but for now I’m in the San Francisco Gotera prison, in Eastern El Salvador. An ex-gangster arranges two plastic chairs as far as possible from the roar of the evangelical ceremony his associates partake in. He’s young and thin, with bronzed skin. He reminds me of Destino. He sports a tattoo of his old clica across his face: On the right cheek, Columbia, at his chin, Little, and on the left cheek, Sycos. Now, he goes by his name, Gustavo. But before, he had different name, and a different life. In his clica, he was known as Fox. It was he who doused Carlota, her daughters, and twenty-nine others in gasoline over eight years ago, on a bus that made its way toward Montreal hill.
Gustavo remembers those June days well. The clica was on high alert, and the war with MS escalated more each day. However, that Saturday, June 19, one day before the attack, Gustavo decided to treat himself. He bought two cases of beer, got his hands on some drugs, and planned to spend a nice evening away from the stress of war. In Jardín neighborhood, where he lived, he came across his best friend. A man with slanted eyes that he’d embarked on an adventure with the past few years. Together, they’d launched a small drug business, together, they’d annihilated the competition, and together, they’d paid the price. A mere week ago they’d shared a jail cell. They were further linked still: Gustavo was dating the man’s sister. They were like brothers. The gang called him Crayola.
“He was on a road with a bump in it. It’s a nasty road, because if those fuckers follow you there you don’t have an escape.”
Crayola played soccer with two other gangsters and a group of kids. He was happy that day. Gustavo remembers him bathed in sweat, and happy.
“Dawg, let’s go drink. Come on, man.” Gustavo told his friend. But, ignoring his friend’s worried tone, Crayola said he’d join in a bit, that he was playing. Gustavo insisted. Crayola promised to finish this match, then shower and head over.
Gustavo had had other friends die. When he was a kid, the Guanacos Criminales killed his best friend, Victor. The young boy had started to ride with Barrio 18, in the clica that Gustavo now sports on his face, Columbia Little Sycos. The Guanacos Criminales Salvatrucha killed Victor in front of him. They shot him, less than two feet away. Gustavo saw it all, it was a Guanaco from Montreal known as Marmota. Gustavo saw his friend’s dying breath. When Los Columbia tried to pick up his corpse, an eye rolled out of his face to the ground. The next day, Gustavo joined the clica, and months later, Marmota died, shot on a bus. Marmota himself was close friends with another Guanaco known as The Blonde, who years later went on to change his name to something more imposing: Destino.
When academics declare that gang violence is cyclical, I suppose they refer to cases like these.
Some twenty minutes after leaving Crayola, give or take, Gustavo heard the bullets. He ran. He found his friend, still breathing.
“He was heaving, he made an awful noise from his chest.”
Crayola died in his arms.
Another dead friend. Another friend killed by Guanacos Criminales. He cried. He yelled. He got the clica together, and called for weapons. He was ready to get those pieces of shit off that fucking mountain.
One option was to attack the Guanacos from the top of the hill, ascending by night and taking them by surprise. They decided against it. They were sad, but they weren’t stupid. The hill was their turf.
The next day, the Columbia met up at a neighborhood park. They decided to attack what was within reach.
“The idea was, we’d kill the driver. Before that, I’d killed a driver, but I let the people off. The plan was to kill that piece of shit driver, and that was it.”
Gustavo is lying. He tries to sell me on the idea that his plan was to kill, yes, but kill fewer people.
Gustavo was outed by his accomplices. They were captured that same week, and several of them talked. I had access to the police report. But Gustavo doesn’t know this. He wants to minimize things. He doesn’t want this visiting anthropologist to see a monster. This is the first visit he’s had in two years, since the government cut off all visits and communication for gangsters behind bars.
He says he was betrayed by his own gang. He said it was the neighboring clicas, hailing from neighborhoods historically ruled over by Barrio 18. He says they wanted to burn him alive on the bus. Gustavo blames one of the neighborhood leaders, Xochil, or Rosado. He’s a gangster who sits behind bars at the Zacatecoluca maximum security prison, better known in this world as Zacatraz. Gustavo says a great deal about that day. At times he takes the blame, but he’s quick to blame others as well.
Gustavo fled. He was the most wanted gangster after his clica snitched. The cops hunted him for three years before finding him in July of 2013, in a routine raid in gang territory. The cops found a gun in the house, and so he was taken in. He tried to give them a fake name, but his fingerprints quickly gave him away.
He was sentenced to 466 years. He’ll die in prison. He was moved to one of the Barrio 18 gangs. The gang leaders were furious. That fiasco wasn’t on their orders. It didn’t help the gang in any way. It only made more problems for them. They decided to kill him.
Another ex-gangster recounts that Gustavo entered the prison silently. He spoke to no one, and nobody spoke to him. The gangsters assigned to extract their revenge relished the work of death. They meandered, showing Gustavo their knives. People called them sharks. They loved the thrill of the chase.
“The sharks wouldn’t leave him alone. They followed him everywhere, knives at the ready,” the ex-gangster told me.
Gustavo had earned a life sentence from the government, and a death sentence from the gang. However, a year ago, the Salvadoran gangs had reached an agreement with the government. In short, the gangsters ease up on the killings, and they get better prison conditions. A prison death would throw that out the window. The sharks would have to wait.
Then, a massive transfer to Gotera Prison, in Eastern El Salvador. There, some gangsters joined an evangelical church, and their sector converted. It quickly spread, and by 2018, the entire prison had converted. They renounced gang life and now answer instead to pastors. It was here that I met Gustavo. I’d come with other aims, but once there, the pastors made me an offer that, much like at the youth center, I couldn’t refuse.
“Want to meet the guy who burned down the bus in Mejicanos?”
We shook hands, and Gustavo grabbed two plastic chairs. At the end of our talk, Gustavo asked for a favor. A question for his victims that June on Montreal hill. He told me it was important.
***
It’s late. Carlota and Alejandra are anxious. They don’t like being out at night on the streets of Mejicanos. Before our conversation comes to a close I tell them that I was at a prison. They stare at me solemnly. I tell them I was at a prison for ex-gangsters at San Francisco Gotera. They look at each other, their panic visible. I tell them I spoke with Fox, and they know exactly who I’m talking about. I tell them he has a message for them, and a question.
“I can’t give you back your burned skin, or your loved ones who were taken that day. But I want to tell you I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. Do you think you can forgive me?”
Carlota bursts into tears. She says she’s already forgiven him. That she doesn’t hold a grudge. Alejandra is stone-faced. She stares intently, and says: “No. I’ll never forgive him. I wish they were all dead.”
We make our way up Montreal hill.
34 In English, The Mobster.
35 In English, The Little Devil.
36 In English, The Thirteen.