Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America

by Ioan Grillo

  Some I talked to are low-level spies, dealers, and triggermen. Others are leaders of cliques that control neighborhoods or entire towns. These leaders are known inside the Mara as El Que Lleva la Palabra, which can be roughly translated as He Who Holds the Word. When I first heard this, I thought it sounded like an indigenous term. I also found it curious that the Maras occupy a geographic space in Central America that the Mayas used to dominate. I wondered if there is a connection. However, as I look into the history of the Mara Salvatrucha, I discover it has little to do with indigenous culture and more to do with killer ants, Charlton Heston, and the heavy metal band Black Sabbath.

  CHAPTER 28

  To understand the battle tearing apart Honduras you have to trek over the border into El Salvador to see how gangs developed there. And to understand the gangs in Salvador, you have to follow the path of Salvadoran refugees who fled the nation’s civil war to the ghettos of Los Angeles. Back during these war years, Salvadoran immigrants in a few L.A. neighborhoods formed cliques, made pacts, and started feuds that would have an impact on the whole of Central America during the decades to come.

  My history of Salvadoran gangsters owes much to Juan Martinez, a young anthropologist who has spent years documenting the MS13. Practicing immersive anthropology, Juan spent a year living with Maras in a San Salvador ghetto. He is also from a prolific family, with two brothers, Carlos and Oscar, covering gangs and other issues for the extraordinary online news site El Faro. Together with cutting-edge reporters such as José Luis Sanz and Roberto Valencia, El Faro is an authority on the Mara issue, breaking story after story. American journalists such as Samuel Logan have also done important research into the gang’s bloody origins.

  Salvadorans began fleeing for the United States in the 1970s, as the opposition decried fraudulent elections, police fired on protests, and death squads hunted dissidents. The disturbances escalated into war in 1980. That year, a right-wing gunman shot dead Bishop Oscar Romero, who had preached against repression; he was giving communion when the assassin fired down the aisle, and his blood soaked the holy bread. Leftists then formed the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front to coordinate a guerrilla uprising.

  As the insurgents ambushed soldiers, the military waged a scorched earth campaign—trying to take the sea away from the fish. Refugees abandoned the countryside for growing slums of San Salvador or trekked north to California. Many young people fled as both the army and guerrillas recruited child soldiers into their ranks. If you were dragged into the war, you had a good chance of dying, being crippled, or being psychologically traumatized.

  Luis Romero was one of these children who fled the war. His story, which he tells me over coffee in San Salvador, is typical of thousands. Luis is one of those naturally funny guys, with a lifelong belly and humorous gait (his nickname is Panza Loca, or Crazy Belly). Even when he describes his toughest times he touches the comical side. His colorful Los Angeles Latino slang adds flavor to his anecdotes.

  Hailing from a lower-middle-class family in San Salvador, Luis was fourteen when war broke out in 1980. Soldiers quickly tried to recruit him, pulling him off the bus from school and marching him to the base to shave his hair off.

  “They said, ‘Are you ready to fight for your country,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And then they gave me a big M16 and said, ‘Do you like that?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ I was happy. Now I am going to be a soldier. Because the soldiers have a lot of girls, the soldiers have money.”

  When he didn’t return from school, his mother searched frantically. She found him at the base and managed to get him released as he was her only son. Two weeks later, the army nabbed him by a market. With the help of a friend in the army, Luis’s mother got him out again. But she knew that if he stayed, he would wind up going to war, so she sent him north to stay with a sister in California.

  Luis flew to Mexico City and traveled with an uncle to the border. A coyote—or human smuggler—took them over from Tijuana in the back of a truck. After driving for a couple of hours into California, they stopped.

  “The coyote whistled and we jumped out the truck. The first thing I saw was an American girl, a blondie, on a bicycle with an ice lollipop. I got that picture right here in my head. And we could see the big screen of Disneyland. It was that dream of being in the United States. In my mind, the United States was Mickey Mouse, Pluto, and all these Disney people. When I saw Mickey Mouse I was so happy.”

  This dream quickly turned pear-shaped. He arrived at his aunt’s, and they had a party with pork chops to welcome him. But when he said he wanted to go to school like his cousins who were born in the United States, his aunt got angry. She got up at three in the morning to work in a food truck and only scraped by. Luis would have to work too.

  “She tell me, in the United States all the wetbacks, she said that, they have got to work.”

  There weren’t great job prospects for a fourteen-year-old without papers. Luis found work in a mechanic’s shop for two dollars a day. The mechanic, a Mexican, gave him beer and ganja to smoke. Back in the house, Luis also found his aunt’s Colombian boyfriend taking a package of drugs out of the fridge.

  “I thought it was spinach or something, and he open it, and said, ‘Man, this shit smells good,’ and starts rolling a big joint. Then he said, ‘You want to taste Peruvian flake?’ I said, ‘What?’ He said pericazo, fool [cocaine]. And he get a mirror and he start.

  “I get addicted to many things, and I start stealing. And when my aunt catches me, she is mad. She said, ‘You get the fuck out the house, you are drunk person, you high on drugs, you stealing. You get the fuck out of here.’”

  Luis slept in Lincoln Park and got food from a shelter. The streets were particularly tough for a Salvadoran. The dominant gangs in L.A. were Mexican and African American, and they had fought long and hard for their corners. Salvadorans were a new and small group who all sides bullied. Luis had to learn to take a beating.

  Eventually he found a cousin of his mother who would put him up. He got a job delivering Greek food, learning how to pronounce baklava, moussaka, and taramasalata. Making deliveries, he also got recruited by Mexican cocaine dealers, taking packages to customers. He made an extra five dollars a hit and felt rich for an undocumented fifteen-year-old. But he began to snort from the packages before he delivered. The dealers found out and took turns on Luis like he was a punching bag.

  “They beat me up badly, and so I was three days with a fever. When I came out, it was Thanksgiving Day. I was sad. I went out to Seven and Shatto Place and got drunk by myself. I thought that nobody likes me.

  “Then this girl comes, this beautiful young lady. She is Latina but part Chinese or Korean or something. She asked me if I was okay, and what I was doing. Then she introduced me to the homies.”

  The girl and her friends formed the Shatto Park Locos clique of the Barrio 18 street gang. Luis’s introduction is typical of how kids gravitate to gangs. They aren’t looking to be killers. They want friends. Many, like Luis, also need protection, someone to stop bullies beating them to a pulp. Luis remembers his entry with joy, the time when he became part of something. One of the gang members was a Salvadoran called Shaggy, who took him to his apartment, cleaned him up, cut his hair with clippers, and gave him new clothes to wear.

  “He give me a big shirt with tirantes [braces], a nice pair of shoes, and he let me use his sombrero. He said you look nice right now. They dress me up like Tintan [a Mexican comic]. I was looking so good, man. They was nice with me. The girl, she see me all dressed, and she even make me sex. I took them like my family. They give me money, they call me Pancita Loca.”

  Still, to become a gang member, he had to go through the initiation. For both the Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha, this means taking a hiding, which they call “jumping in.” The 18 do it for a count of eighteen and the MS for thirteen. Either way, it is a bad beating. However, the gang members have strange ways of describing it. They say it is an act of love.


  “There was four of them who jumped me in. They were all Salvadoran. They were beating me, and one of them called Tino was shouting, ‘One, two, three, four, five, five, five, five, five, five. When they finish, they start hugging me.”

  This tough love reflects the schizophrenic mix of affection and aggression in street gangs, the switching between victims and victimizers.

  Street gangs are different in their nature from drug cartels or mafias. A gang is first a group of friends, an alternate “family,” a group for mutual protection. Gangs can vary widely in their form, and some may not even be criminal. Many gangs members are broke and wield little power. Mafias and cartels are formed to defend criminal interests. They move millions or billions of dollars and control politicians.

  However, this picture gets blurry. Some street gangs have evolved to manage organized crime syndicates. Collectively, the gangs in Central America have become very powerful and protect major criminal interests. Likewise, cartels have incorporated street gangs into their lower ranks, using them for muscle (and cannon fodder).

  The Latino gang system in California is traced back to the early twentieth century, during a big wave of Mexican migration to the Golden State. These first gangs had names such as the White Fence, or Cerro Blanco, and Hawaiian Gardens.

  In 1921, Mexican migrants founded the Clanton Street gang. (Clanton Street was the old name of Fourteenth Place.) Black and white photos show Clanton members clenching their fists and looking mean in zoot suits.

  A few years after the Second World War, a faction of the Clanton who hung around 18th Street and Union Avenue in the Rampart district broke off to become the Barrio 18. This gang stood out by letting non-Mexicans in. Filipinos and others looking for a home joined. When the Salvadoran refugees arrived, many such as Luis also found their place there. Later Hondurans and Guatemalans got in the mix. It was a fruitful tactic. Barrio 18 swelled in members, and in turn, territory.

  But while Barrio 18 became a national, and then international, network, it was still built on its cliques. The loyalty of members is first and foremost to their local crew. This is their inner family. An interesting feature is that inside a clique no two members can have the same nickname.

  Luis, the Crazy Belly, describes how his Shatto Park Locos clique had about sixty members. There were many Mexicans, about twenty Salvadorans, and other ethnicities including an immigrant from India.

  “We called him Capulina, after the Mexican comedian, even though he didn’t even know who Capulina is. And he got me to do him a Salvador tattoo, even though he was from India.”

  I asked what happened to him.

  “Some drug dealers killed him. They shot him because he steal some cocaine.”

  Luis and his clique fought rival gangs. They battled with Hispanics called the Playboys, Maravillas, and Crazy Riders, and with a Filipino crew called the Satanas. They rucked with fists, knives, and bats, and later pistols and Uzis. The L.A. violence gained national attention, reaching more than five hundred gang murders in the city in 1989.1 But it was nothing compared to the scale of mayhem that would later ravage Central America.

  Gangs fought to defend territory. Many sold cocaine and other drugs on the corners, so they were battling over narco real estate. But the gang members also just liked to fight. The rucks meant excitement, adrenaline, and a way to prove themselves.

  The anthropologist Juan Martinez sees this as a driving force in gang violence. Members build their reputation inside their gang by their fighting. They elevate themselves as warriors—and you can’t be a warrior unless you have someone to battle. In this sense, it can be compared to the violence of rival tribes, who are constantly in conflict to build their warrior status. It becomes endemic, low-intensity fighting that goes nowhere.

  While many Salvadorans made their home in Barrio 18, others formed their own gang. Word of the Maras first hit the streets in the late seventies or early eighties. According to Luis, they started from Seventh Street to the Leeward Street area. An El Faro investigation says they likely began a couple of blocks south on James M. Wood and West Moreland.2 Others point a few blocks southwest to the heavily Salvadoran neighborhood of Pico Union. Wherever it was, the founders were a few teenagers hanging on a street corner.

  As Martinez explained, the name Mara has nothing to do with Mayas. Bizarrely it comes from a Charlton Heston movie. Back in the 1950s, the film The Naked Jungle was a hit in El Salvador with the weird translation of “Cuando Ruge la Marabunta” or “When the Ants Roar.” Following this, Salvadorans took the name Mara to mean group of friends, who, like ants, protect each other.

  Another odd characteristic is that the first Maras in Los Angeles were rockers, dressing in black T-shirts, long hair, and listening to heavy metal music. In line with this look, they originally called themselves the Mara Stoners. This contrasted with other Hispanic gangs, including Barrio 18, who had what is called a cholo style—loose-fitting pants, wifebeaters, and buzzed heads.3

  The Maras have a sinister hand symbol, which also comes from this rock beginning. Many members followed the metal band Black Sabbath. At this point, the British rockers had Italian American Ronnie James Dio on vocals. During concerts, Dio did his trademark “throwing the horns” with his hand—extending his index and little fingers and holding down the middle fingers with his thumb. He had picked this up from his Italian granny to scare away spirits, but in raucous heavy metal it became a devil sign. The Mara Stoners came out of Black Sabbath concerts waving their own hands in devil signs; they later flipped it upside down, making an “M.” In the bizarre world of gangs, a symbol that started at Black Sabbath concerts would become connected to massacres, bus bombs, and a government truce.

  Established street gangs first saw the Maras as easy pickings. Not only were they from a new and small ethnic group. They also looked like hippies. Luis cracks up with laughter when he remembers how the Mara Stoners came on the scene.

  “Everybody was like what the fuck man, these motherfuckers look like gabachos [Americans]. You know, that is a bad trip. So all the gangs start fighting them and killing them. But then in 1984, they start getting bad.”

  To sound tougher and reinforce their Salvadoran identity, the Stoners re-baptized themselves as the Mara Salvatrucha. People have speculated that Salvatrucha might be a play on the words of Salvadoran and trucha, meaning “street smart.” Others say it just sounded good.

  The Maras swelled in numbers, recruiting refugees who fled the war zone back home. The new arrivals were battle hardened; some had served as child soldiers; others as guerrillas; others had just seen unspeakable horrors, such as soldiers shooting their fathers or raping their mothers with dogs. Escaping that, they weren’t going to let shaved-headed thugs scare them. They hit back hacking and decapitating. The Maras made their weapon of choice the machete, which many used at home to cut crops; in L.A., it became their sword.

  As Maras left their trail of machete victims, courts threw members into jail. Inside the penitentiary, the gang dynamics change. Prisoners give up trying to fight for their corner cliques and are drawn into bigger forces based on ethnic and regional lines. They have to defend themselves against the Aryan Brotherhood and Black Guerrilla Army wanting to rob, stab, and rape them. Latino prisoners divide into norteños, from the northern part of the state, and sureños, from the southern part, with the line cutting through Bakersfield, California. The sureños are dominated by a gang called the Mexican Mafia or La Eme.

  A dozen inmates at the Deuel Vocational Institution had founded the Mexican Mafia back in 1957 to stand up against African American and white prisoners.4 Their self-defense soon turned to offense (victims to victimizers …) as they took over prison rackets, collecting cell “taxes” and smuggling in drugs.

  Mara inmates realized they had to join with La Eme to survive, and the mob was happy to add war-hardened machete wielders to its cellblock armies. The Mexican Mafia uses the number thirteen (M is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet), so as Maras joined up
, they became the Mara Salvatrucha 13. This affiliation meant that on the outside the Maras would pay tributes to those in prison, the same gang insurance system used by Brazil’s Red Commando. In return, being affiliated with Eme won the Maras respect.

  As they gained a formidable reputation, cliques of Maras became friendly with cliques from the Barrio 18, especially those with many Salvadorans. Among them was Luis’s Shatto Park Locos.

  “They are just a block from us, from Shatto Place. There was a 7-Eleven close to them so they called them the clique of 7-Eleven. We were Salvadorans too, but we jump into Eighteenth Street.

  “We are friendly and we teach them how to be cholos, so then they change from this rock style to cholo style. They start using Dickies baggie pants, good shoes. They start getting bald headed.”

  This Salvadoran solidarity lasted several years. But then it broke into a bitter gang feud.

  The roots of this beef are blurry. Author Samuel Logan looks at two street murders sometime in the late 1980s. Meanwhile, anthropologist Juan Martinez, alongside El Faro journalists, says it may have all started with a fight at a party in 1989.5 Some witnesses they spoke to say the ruckus was over a girl. Others say it was a gang member who had flipped from the Mara Salvatrucha into the Barrio 18 without going through the rituals. Either way a fistfight broke out, in which a young Mara was said to beat a ranking Barrio 18 member.

  “They couldn’t permit that this little gang member had humiliated them. So they returned with an Uzi and shot one of them,” Martinez says. “And that is how it started. This started an open war, a total war, with many homicides.”

  This war helped push L.A. gang deaths to new levels. They went up from 554 in 1989 to a high of 802 in 1992.6 The fighting between the gangs would also spread way beyond California, to lead to tens of thousands of deaths in Central America. A simple ruck in an L.A. party may have caused one of the most costly gang feuds in world history.