ZeroZeroZero

by Roberto Saviano

  Christian Poveda knew this feeling well. He was born to Spanish Republican parents who took refuge in Algiers during the Franco regime, and when he was six he moved with his family to Paris. Curious, questioning, he embraced early on his life profession: journalism. With its extensions—pen, computer, lens—he travels in Algeria, the Caribbean, Argentina, Chile. He covers the war in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon. His reports are different from the sorts of stories you have to file for the TV news. A different quality, you could say, as if he didn’t have a job to do. Behind every photo, between the lines of every article there’s always a human story that breathes, demanding more oxygen and space.

  Christian decides to focus on making documentaries, a new extension of his curiosity, an extension that unites all the existing ones—pen, computer, and lens—and that finally allows him to observe the animal in the wild. He makes his first documentary in 1986, Shadow Warriors, about the Chilean rebel group Mapu Lautaro, which opposed Pinochet’s fascist regime. But it’s when he goes to El Salvador that he seems to find the land he’d been looking for. The place where he was really needed, where everything he’d wanted and all he had trained himself to be converged. El Salvador. A country tormented by a lengthy civil war that Christian himself first documented in 1980, together with the journalist Jean-Michel Caradec’h. He was the first photojournalist to cover El Salvador’s guerrilla warfare from the inside. “He went looking for it.” “It was his fault.” “If you play with fire, you’ll get burned.” The same remarks, still fair, still pertinent.

  Years go by, you accumulate experiences, you build up a protective shell, but the knot in your gut is still there. Christian feels them inside him now, those stories he tells on film. They bite and claw at him from within. And when a story moves inside you it’s like your soul is in labor, restless nights, not a moment of peace until you manage to give birth.

  His first documentary about El Salvador comes out in 1991. The name Poveda echoes throughout the country. Then the civil war ends; peace treaties are signed. These are years of renewed hope, years in which many El Salvadorans who had taken refuge abroad return home. During the war thousands of children had fled to the United States without their families—either their parents were murdered or their mothers preferred to have them safer far away from a poor land devastated by civil war. Deserters and ex-guerrillas flee as well. That is how the maras are born, the El Salvadoran gangs in Los Angeles that model themselves after all the other gangs there—African American, Asian, and Mexican. The maras are the new families for El Salvadoran kids that form on the streets of California. They start out as a form of self-defense, to protect themselves against the other gangs that target the new immigrants. Many of the people who organize gangs by gathering groups of kids are former guerrillas or paramilitaries: It’s not surprising that the structures and modes of operation of these groups resemble military practices. The Mexican gangs are soon defeated, and shortly after, the Salvadoran gangs split into two large families of mareros, which distinguish themselves by their “street number”: Mara 13, better known as Mara Salvatrucha, and Mara 18, a dissident branch. Then the civil war in El Salvador ends. The country’s on its knees; poverty is rampant, creating an opportunity for the gangs to go home. For many of them it’s a choice; for others their return is decided by the U.S. government, which frees itself of the thugs who’d served time in American jails.

  Today the maras have cells in the United States, Mexico, all over Central America, in Europe, and the Philippines; about 15,000 members in El Salvador, 14,000 in Guatemala, 35,000 in Honduras, 5,000 in Mexico. The highest concentration is in the United States, with 70,000 members. Mara 18 is considered to be the biggest criminal gang in Los Angeles. It was the first to accept ethnic diversity and to allow people from other countries to join. For the most part they’re kids between thirteen and seventeen years old. This army of children primarily pushes cocaine and marijuana on the streets. They don’t handle big orders, they aren’t rich, and they don’t corrupt institutions. But on the street they guarantee immediate money and power. They’re the retail drug cartel and are also involved in activities such as extortion, car theft, and murder. According to the FBI, the maras are the most dangerous street gangs in the world.

  Everything is codified within the organization: hand signals, face tattoos, hierarchy. Everything they do is filtered through rules that create and control their identity. The result is a compact organization that knows how to move quickly. In El Salvador mara means group, or crowd. The word implies disorder, but in truth these groups—thanks to their rules, and to the punishments with which infractions are met—have been able to become reliable partners to global criminal organizations. The origin of the name Mara Salvatrucha is disputed. A “salvatrucho” is a young Salvadoran fighter, but the word is composed of “salva”—in homage to El Salvador—and “trucha,” which means cunning. You have to pass really challenging tests in order to become a member: The boys have to endure thirteen seconds of brutal, uninterrupted beating—punches, kicks, slaps, and kneeings—which often leave the new recruits unconscious. The girls are often gang-raped as well. The recruits are getting younger and younger, and for them there is just one rule of life: the gang or death.

  Christian Poveda wanted to make a feature film about the maras. He wanted to understand. To live with them. To discover why twelve-year-old kids become murderers willing to die before they turn twenty. And they welcomed him. As if they’d finally found the person who could tell about them, the maras. “Why couldn’t he just have stayed home?” “What did it get him?” “Doesn’t he care about the people close to him?” At a certain point these questions don’t bother you anymore; they’re as annoying as a mosquito bite. They itch for a while, and then they fade away, gone for good.

  Filming for La vida loca takes sixteen months. For nearly a year and a half Christian follows the criminal bands in search of answers to his questions. He attends initiation rites, studies their facial tattoos, is at their side while members—male and female—get high on crack and cocaine, plan a murder, attend a friend’s funeral. Every mara operates differently, depending on the country it’s in. “It’s not the same thing selling drugs in the central market of San Salvador as it is selling drugs on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles,” Christian says. Theirs are lives of shootouts, homicides, reprisals, police checks, funerals, and prison. Lives that Christian describes without being morbid in the least. He tells the story of “Little One,” a nineteen-year-old mother with an enormous 18 tattooed on her face, from her eyebrows to her chin. He tells the story of Moreno, twenty-five, who wanted to change his life and started working in a bakery set up by a nonprofit called Homies Unidos. But the bakery closes when its owner is arrested and sentenced to sixteen years for homicide. He tells of La Maga, another young mother, she too a gang member who lost an eye in a fight. Christian follows her to her doctor’s appointments, to her surgery to replace the damaged eye with a glass one. A pointless operation, though, because she’s shot dead before he finishes shooting the movie, one of many Mara 18 members killed while he worked on the documentary.

  “He’s crazy!” “Reckless!” “Out of his mind!” Words thrown to the wind, which Christian Poveda fights with other words. “Most maras members are victims of society, of our society,” Poveda says. Because society and the state find it easier to point a finger at their violence, which is so recognizable, rather than to offer opportunities. Maras members look like the dregs of society, like trash; they’re revolting. It’s easy to consider them public enemy number one. Easy to underestimate them. But Poveda’s work dismantles such attitudes.

  This is the ultimate meaning of Christian’s work. Behind the door of the violence flaunted by the gangs he saw an inaccessible path that leads right to the root of the problem. To get a byline in the newspapers or his name on the opening credits of a documentary it would have been enough simply to affix evil to celluloid, and to speculate a bit. But Christian decides
to get to the bottom of things. He wants to truly understand.

  On September 2, 2009, Christian Poveda’s body is found next to his car, between Soyapango and Tonacatepeque, a rural area north of the capital of El Salvador, with four bullets to the head. His film equipment is lying next to him; it has not been touched. “I told him.” “He got what he deserved.” “At any rate, he went too far.” So say the same old voices over his dead body.

  In 2011, eleven people, all Mara 18 members, are arrested and convicted of the murder of Christian Poveda. José Alejandro Melara and Luis Roberto Vásquez Romero are sentenced to thirty years for planning and carrying out the homicide; a third person, a woman, is sentenced to twenty years as an accomplice. Other gang members have to spend four years behind bars for covering up the crime. In August 2013 three more mareros are sentenced to ten years for conspiracy to commit murder: They took part in the meeting at which Poveda’s death was planned.

  Christian was sure he wasn’t taking any risks. He had entered into the community of the maras, into their lives. He felt he’d found a sure, safe way in and thought he’d made friends with many of them. But it’s a fantasy to think you’re ever safe when you’re covering a criminal organization.

  In Christian’s story, bad luck plays a role as well. It seems, in fact, that Juan Napoleón Espinoza Pérez, a former police officer, met a Mara 18 member while under the influence of alcohol and told him that Poveda was an informer, that he had turned his videos over to the Soyapango police. So the gang gathers, and after three long meetings in the El Arbejal farm in Tonacatepeque, decides to condemn Poveda to death.

  There are lots of rumors about those meetings, whole orchestras of whispers, symphonies of accusations. Some mara members defend Christian, saying he is honest, that he did a good thing telling about the maras from their point of view. Others are envious: He’ll get rich by looking like the good guy against us bad guys. The women defend him. A lot. Or so it seems. The most authoritative members, those who had agreed to be filmed, are frightened by the documentary’s success. Too many people are talking about it. It makes its way to the web. So maybe that cop Espinoza wasn’t lying, maybe Christian did sell the video to the police. But the sense is that anyone who says too much about the maras, anyone who has in a certain sense taken advantage of them, has to be punished.

  On August 30, 2009, the group decides to kill Christian. At the time he’s acting as an intermediary for a French journalist who writes for Elle magazine and wants to interview some of the girls in the gang. For the first time his contacts ask him for a fee, ten thousand dollars. Even though Christian doesn’t like it, he accepts. The magazine has the money and can afford to pay. Christian meets Vásquez Romero in El Rosario. But a little after noon Vásquez Romero gets behind the wheel of a gray Nissan Pathfinder 4 x 4 and drives Christian onto the bridge over the Las Cañas River. That’s where they kill him. I can’t imagine those final seconds. I’ve tried. Did Christian realize, even for a moment, that it was a trap? Did he try to defend himself, to explain that killing him was unjust? Or did they shoot him in the back of the head, like cowards? A moment. They must have pretended to be getting out of the car, and in that moment when Christian lifts the handle to open the door they must have fired. I don’t know; I’ll never know. But I can’t keep from asking myself these things.

  If the ex–police officer hadn’t been drunk that day, if he hadn’t told a bunch of lies, would Christian still be alive? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they would have eliminated him just the same, because some of the gang members were unhappy with how Christian had portrayed them in his film. Despite his assurances that the documentary would not be released in El Salvador, some pirated versions were making the rounds. Maybe they would have killed him anyway, because the new generation of Mara 18 leadership was even more violent and ferocious than the previous one. According to Carole Solive, Christian’s French producer, his mistake was to stay on in El Salvador after he’d finished shooting. Maybe he’d come to know too much about the negotiations between Salvatrucha and 18, two rival bands that were trying to reach an understanding, and that knowledge condemned him to death. No matter how much he trusted those kids Christian never forgot to take certain basic safety precautions. He had a cell phone that he used only to contact maras members. But it wasn’t enough.

  Christian Poveda believed in the power of images to influence events. That’s why he worked as a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker. He devoted all his efforts to chronicling extraordinary political and social situations, making sixteen documentaries that were well received at the world’s most prestigious film festivals. I often look for La vida loca when I’m in a bookstore, or when I go to someone’s home, in the stacks of DVDs next to the TV. I almost never find it. What did you die for, Christian? The question rises up in me like some melodramatic lullaby. What did you die for? Would your life have made more sense if that documentary were in every home? I don’t think so. No work of art can make sense of or justify death with a gun to your head. Your last words are more eloquent than any epigraph could be: “Government authorities have no idea of the monster facing them. Now the 18 is full of crazy people. I am very worried . . . and sad.”

  18.

  ADDICTED

  Writing about cocaine is not so different from using it. You always want more—more news, more information—and the stuff you do find is so potent you can’t live without it. It’s addicting. These stories, even when they conform to an overarching plot you’ve already grasped, continue to fascinate in their particulars. And they stick in your head until another one—incredible but true—takes its place. You see that your stimulation threshold is on the rise, and you pray you don’t ever go into withdrawal. Which is why I keep collecting stories ad nauseam, more than are needed; I can’t bring myself to stop. One evening, long before El Chapo’s actual capture, I got a phone call from Guatemala with the news that he was killed in a shootout. I didn’t know whether to believe it or not; it wouldn’t be the first time that false information about drug lords was circulated. Still, these bits of information roar in my ear. But relatively few others hear the noise. The further I descend into these infernal circles whitewashed with cocaine, the more I realize how much people don’t know. There’s a river that runs under big cities, a river that starts in South America, flows through Africa, and spreads everywhere. Men and women stroll down Rome’s via del Corso, along Parisian boulevards, meet up in Times Square, walk with heads lowered along London streets. Don’t they hear anything? How can they stand all this noise?

  That old story of Griselda, for example, the most ruthless female narco of all the Colombian drug traffickers. As a child she learned that all men are means, tools to manipulate so as to reach your goals. A reasonable theory if you grow up with a mother who got pregnant by a half-Indian guajiro landowner called Señor Blanco, who threw her out on the street as soon as the baby was born. An alcoholic, poor, abused, and desperate, Griselda’s mother dragged her daughter through the putrid streets of Medellín, forcing her to beg. A couple of miserable, human beggars who’d part ways only when the mother got herself pregnant by the umpteenth guy she’d picked up who knows where, only to join up later, now with the addition of a half brother or sister. These are the years of La Violencia in Colombia. Brutality is the order of the day, and if you want to survive, you have to be brutal too. Griselda turns thirteen, she starts to prostitute herself. The men she goes with are pieces of meat who vent themselves on her body, and who pay her just enough to get by till the next day. Her amber skin collects bruises and cuts, bites and scars. They don’t hurt, though; they’re just nicks on her thick armor. Men are a means. Nothing more. Griselda learns the art of pickpocketing to round out her income. She’s quick with her hands and doesn’t permit herself to steal from her clients, because she doesn’t want to risk ruining her beat. For her love is a foul-smelling bed she lies on, waiting while the sweaty creature on top of her does his duty. But one day she meets
Carlos. Another man, one of many, and Griselda gives him the usual treatment: indifference. Carlos is a small-time criminal in Medellín, an expert pickpocket and thief who has a thriving partnership with a narco named Alberto Bravo. A long courtship begins between Griselda and Carlos. He brings her a different flower every day, which every day she throws away after accepting it with false courtesy. She never looks him in the eye, but he, unperturbed, makes the rounds of all the florists in Medellín, looking for different varieties. He teaches her a few tricks to make ends meet; she pretends not to listen but is actually memorizing everything he says. This skirmish lasts a long time, until Carlos’s stubborn perseverance breaks through, and Griselda surrenders. For the first time in her life a man has shown her that a relationship does not necessarily have to expire, that there exists a word she has never heard before: trust. They get married, they love each other, they make big plans. He introduces her to Alberto Bravo, who makes her see that the real money is in narco-trafficking. She is young but quick-witted, and doesn’t hesitate to set foot in that world. And besides, she has Carlos, who always says yes whenever she asks him if they will be together their whole lives. They move to New York, to Queens, where Colombians are starting to settle and the drug market is really flourishing. A new life. The city that never sleeps welcomes Griselda and Carlos like royalty. Things are going really well, and Carlos keeps saying yes whenever Griselda asks him: “Will we be together our whole lives?” Yes, yes, yes. But then Carlos gets sick—cirrhosis of the liver—and dies in the hospital. Griselda stays at his side till the end, and when her husband dies she doesn’t feel a thing, just as she used to feel nothing when she came home after a long night working and counted her new bites and scars in the mirror. Carlos didn’t honor their pact to stay together their whole lives; Carlos is just like every other man; men are a means.