THE ACCOUNTS IN this book concern the last link of a chain of events and sociocultural processes that began long ago, and quite far from the marginal towns of El Salvador. To better understand this requires a dizzying trip through history and through the Americas. This book focuses on the life of members of an MS-13 clica in San Salvador, on the community they govern and their savage war on the young men of the Barrio 18 gang. However, a great deal had to take place before these young men would choose to mark their bodies with the two letters1 and dedicate their lives to one of the largest gangs in the world. A great many contingencies and coincidences had to transpire, as did injustices and inequalities, for the two largest gangs in the Americas to become enmeshed in the most brutal gang conflict in recent history.
In 1938, the German writer Carl Stephenson published a short story, “Leiningens Kampf mit den Ameisen,” that talks about the life of a millionaire who funds a cacao plantation in the Amazon rainforest. His dream is cut short by an invasion of millions of ants that destroy everything and, ultimately, consume Leiningen himself. The story was wildly popular, and was translated into English as “Leiningen Versus the Ants.” Some years later, the director Byron Haskin adapted the story for film. The tale was diluted, and reappeared in 1954 under the name The Naked Jungle, starring Charlton Heston. It was a box office hit. The film did not reach El Salvador until the 1960s, under the name When the Army Roars (Cuando Ruge la Marabunta). In the movie, Heston fights to defend his estate from the millions of ants that seek to devour it.
The film’s success in El Salvador was so great that it transformed the word from its title describing the plague of ants, marabunta, into a term used to refer to a group of friends, a crowd, or the masses. In this way, marabunta became simply, mara. The word mara quickly became a part of everyday slang, but it didn’t yet have a negative connotation. Mara defined a group of friends just as easily as it did a rambunctious group of strangers.
The 1960s saw a great deal of changes across the country. It was then that insurgent groups began to take power. It was then that the idea of armed struggle against a military regime began to take root in the heads of intellectuals and workers. However, it wasn’t until 1975 that the first groups capable of truly disrupting the state took form. Things quickly went downhill, culminating in a bloody civil war.2 Counterinsurgent repression was increasingly cruel (and, with help from the US government, increasingly sophisticated as well). By 1979, the disappeared (desaparecidos) racked up in the hundreds. The conflict claimed the lives of youths, whether recruited by the army or pulled into guerillas to fight the enemy. It was in this context that countless Salvadorans fled—some under threat from paramilitary groups, others from sheer terror at the prospect of facing armed conflict. They sought refuge in countries like Sweden, Australia, Canada, and Costa Rica; but above all they went toward the United States, particularly Los Angeles, California, which by then was known as a mecca for gangs.
Salvadorans made up one of the youngest migrant groups in Los Angeles, decades after Mexicans who arrived as informal workers at the end of the nineteenth century and again through the bracero program in the 1940s. The Salvadorans who thought of California as the land of milk and honey did not take long to find that California waged a different sort of war. Hundreds of Chicano gangs3 fought amongst themselves for control of territory, to secure status and run the streets. They, too, fought against gangs of other ethnicities—African Americans, Anglos, and Asians—who expressed through their conflicts the racial shocks and immense competition imposed upon migrants and other marginalized peoples.
The Salvadorans faced great challenges to adapting. Discrimination by the older, more established migrants was brutal, and like rocks that through sheer pressure become diamonds, the community found itself stronger and more cohesive throughout California’s cities. Anthropologist Tom Ward traced the first predecessors to Mara Salvatrucha in the late 1970s,4 groups of young Salvadorans, first generation migrants who’d been raised in the Salvador of repression, who now took refuge with their families in California. They had long hair, wore black, and listened to black metal. They weren’t a gang in the Angeleno sense of the word, though they had rivalries with groups like them including The Mob Crew, or TMC, and the Rebels or Crazy Riders, gangs who were also associated with a particular musical genre.
It was then, in this pressure cooker of marginalization, that the word mara came to be used to describe Salvadorans and became a symbol of their identity. A word that still resonated among those from its place of origin, that evoked El Salvador. This, according to anthropologist Abilio Vergara,5 is one of the central aims of slang: to distinguish oneself from others, to create an intangible barrier placing some within and some without. In this way, these groups of Salvadoran youth became known as the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners. Salvatrucha, slang for Salvadoran identity, and stoners for their punk affinities. Between 1979 and 1983, disparate groups of Salvadoran stoners began to intermingle, to standardize initiation rituals and to clash—each time more fiercely—with other Hispanic gangs. The group lacked Chicanismo, and clashed with other gangs in terms of both aesthetics and lifestyle. The shaved heads and loose pants, which were the hallmarks of older gangs like White Fence 13, Hawaiian Gardens 13, Artesia 13, or Barrio 38 were a far cry from the long hair, skinny jeans, and black shirts favored by the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners.
These other gangs had been in the state for decades. Some were founded by migrant Mexicans in the 1920s and had weaved a complex system of alliances and social expectations with other Latino gangs.6 This system, which still eluded the MSS (Mara Salvatrucha Stoners) in the early 1980s, originated in the mid-twentieth century when Chicano gang members in Southern California decided to create, from a variety of gangs, an exclusive prison gang. It was something akin to the national team picking standout players from a handful of soccer teams. After an explosive power grab within the California prison system, the group took the name The Mexican Mafia, or La Eme (M); they also identified with the number 13, as M is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. It is for this reason that Chicano gangs in Southern California add a 13 to their names—as a sign of deference to the gang of gangs that rules the streets from inside prison.7
By the mid-’80s, a mass of members had landed in prison due to brawls with other gangs, armed theft, drug trafficking, and the like. Slowly they began to absorb the Chicano lifestyle. As their sentences drew to an end, this transformation began to take shape on the streets, such that by 1986 the gang was known as Mara Salvatrucha 13. Now a prominent figure in Southern California’s gang landscape, they began to draw the attention of rival gangs.
They were playing a dangerous game, and it didn’t take long to make enemies of nearly every gang in their path. They were playing the game in earnest, whatever the cost. Several had been members of the armed forces or guerillas in El Salvador, and few had been untouched by violence back home. They had little to fear from their rivals: “They think they know about violence? We’ll show those bitches what violence is!”8 The gang had emerged, hungry and fearless.
Faced with war on many different fronts, a single gang helped to foster MS-13 in its growth within California’s gang landscape. It was an old gang from the 1970s, once made up of Mexicans and Chicanos, but it had later grown lax in its ethnic prerequisites and let Filipinos, Caribbeans, and Central Americans join its ranks. The Eighteenth Street Gang, or Barrio 18, partnered with MS-13 for a time, like sister organizations. This allowed MS-13’s clicas to grow and gain control of territories under the watchful eye of their mentors. New clicas began to emerge, like the Normandie Locos Salvatrucha, the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, the Leeward Locos Salvatrucha, and the Coronado Locos Salvatrucha, among many others. Their symbols marked the streets, and their names invoked fear and respect backed by machetes, bullets, and brutality.
The alliance with Barrio 18 was fractured at a party in 1988 near Martin Luther King Boulevard in South Los Angeles. It is not clear what happened, but some veterans say a spat between Popeye, from the western cell, with an 18er called Boxer, was to blame. Others say it was revenge for the beating of an 18er known as Pony, who was formerly in MS-13. There are others who say it was caused by payback for a cheating wife. Whatever it was, following the spat, members of Barrio 18 drove by and unloaded their bullets into Shaggy of the Western Locos Salvatrucha clica. What is known is that Shaggy bled out that night, and since then, the war between the two has been unrestrainable.
Meanwhile in El Salvador, the civil war that had embroiled the country in the ’80s came to an end on January 16, 1992. The country was in ruins, its infrastructure reduced to rubble, its social fabric irremediably torn. El Salvador was a country of orphans, of the unemployed, the crippled and maimed. And while the state tried to pick up the pieces, army combatants and guerillas alike found themselves out of work.
In this lawless terrain, bands of kidnappers and assassins were on fertile ground.9 Neighborhood gangs proliferated. And, in a twist of irony, the US government then decided to deport hundreds of gang members from the state of California. They were mostly young men, members of Mara Salvatrucha 13 and Barrio 18. Many had migrated in their teenage years or younger, and returned to El Salvador as men. The only thing uniting them was their knowledge of California’s gang ecosystem, and their time spent in prison. They descended like predators, like ants in a colony. They consumed everything in their path. Piecemeal neighborhood gangs saw no choice but to join one of the two for their own survival. The alternative was complete annihilation. MS-13 and Barrio 18 proliferated with such astounding force that before long not a single street corner went unclaimed. Homicide rates skyrocketed, and quickly became among the highest on the continent. Another war had begun, but this one would last far longer.
Members of MS-13 established the clicas they had belonged to up north, like Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha and Fulton Locos Salvatrucha. However, with the passage of time, newer, more localized clicas emerged. The two primary Salvadoran clicas of Mara Salvatrucha 13 formed—Sansivar Locos Salvatrucha and Harrison Locos Salvatrucha—quite likely the first outside the United States. Hundreds of groups followed.
In the suburbs of Mejicanos, one of the capital’s most populous and dangerous barrios, Guanacos Criminales Salvatrucha was founded in 1999. Since then, they have run the place. Concurrently, MS-13 GCS took root along the hillsides, with Columbia Little Sycos del Barrio 18 dominating a strip along the outskirts of La Montreal, at the base of the hillside.10 It was here, by the hill, that I first had the chance to live among members of MS-13 while conducting anthropological research on gang violence. From January to December 2010 I documented the war between these two groups and came to know the lives of the people caught in the crossfire. This book is a snapshot in time—a collection of field notes throughout the course of my research that served as the basis for my academic work. It must be said that this is not a strictly academic book. But it’s also not a novella. All that has been written here is true, and it was subject to the strictest ethnographic standards. It approximates what the late anthropologist Oscar Lewis called ethnographic realism.
I leave it for you to judge these people in the last neighborhood on the hill.
1 In Spanish, “las dos letras”—slang for the initials MS.
2 Galeas Giovani, Heroes Under Suspicion (San Salvador: Athenas, 2013).
3 Chicano culture exists as a hybrid. Neither Mexican nor Anglo, it is a culture that melds values, norms, and conceptions from both sides to create a set of values all its own.
4 Tom Ward, Gangster Without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang (London: Oxford University Press, 2012).
5 Abilio Vergara, Dentro de los túneles de sentido: Violencia, imaginarios, organización social, rituales y lenguaje en las pandillas juveniles de Ayacucho, Perú (Mexico: ENAH, 2010).
6 Marco Lara Klahr, Hoy te toca la muerte: El imperio de las maras visto desde dentro (Mexico: Planeta, 2006).
7 Chris Blatchford, The Black Hand: The Story of Rene “Boxer” Enriquez and His Life in the Mexican Mafia (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).
8 A quote from a veteran member of MS-13.
9 Hector Silva Ávalos, Infiltrados: Cronica de la corrupción de la PNC (1992–2013) (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 2014).
10 A neighborhood in Mejicanos.