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

by Ioan Grillo

  In early 2012, the negotiators met secretly with Mara leaders behind bars. As talks progressed, they put bosses of the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 together in a room inside the prison. They feared they might murder each other. But after hard stares, a Mara boss known as El Diablo walked up to the 18 boss Viejo Lin and shook his hand. Peace was possible.2

  To allow the Maras to explain the cease-fire to their soldiers, Munguia moved thirty bosses from high-security prisons to more relaxed jails around El Salvador. This pleased the gang leaders, who liked serving time in less severe prison regimes. But it was extremely hard for the government to sell the idea that it was negotiating with crime bosses to the Salvadoran public. People were bitter over Maras shaking them down and murdering their loved ones. Organizing a truce suggested giving the gangs legitimacy, comparing them to guerrillas with recognized grievances. In the face of this obstacle, the government decided it should keep the deal secret, at least until it had shown a dip in homicides.

  “What could I say?” General Munguia later asked El Faro. “That I had transferred (the Maras) as an experiment? Ha ha ha. Forget it. They would eat us alive. We needed to have results to show.”3

  Word of the truce went from the jail to the street. One of the gangsters who brought it there was Marvin Gonzalez, a Mara boss from Ilopango, an industrial city on the edge of the capital that is one of the bloodiest battlegrounds. I drive out to Ilopango to track down Marvin. Bizarrely, I manage to interview him in a room inside the town hall, an office for dealing with young people in the community. The government and gang leaders forged such links in the peace process and they remain highly controversial.

  Marvin is He Who Holds the Word for Maras in the whole of Ilopango, a city of over a hundred thousand. He doesn’t just represent his own clique of 140 gangbangers. He represents another fourteen cliques in the area, with a total of over a thousand members. Short with strong indigenous features, Marvin is markedly different from many gangsters I have met. He is humble and soft-spoken, appearing slightly shy and sometimes evading eye contact. Yet when I listen back to a recording of the interview I realize how sharp he is. Unlike a lot of gangsters, he knows well how to duck inconvenient questions. In other answers, he is very articulate. In his work on the truce, he has developed a political discourse in which he compares the Maras to the guerrillas and the truce to the peace accords.

  “In the war, the guerrillas and soldiers came from poor marginalized barrios and they killed each other daily. They were killing among the same people. None of them came from high society. This is similar to us. We live in slums, both the Mara Salvatrucha and the Eighteen. We are killing among poor people. It’s a war without sense.”

  Marvin is also a murderer. He was convicted of homicide when he was eighteen and spent over a decade, most his adult life, in prison. When I meet him, he is thirty-one. He tells me he read a lot inside, especially books on ancient wars. He was behind bars when the truce was made but released soon afterward, and took the orders of a cease-fire to the Maras in his city. I find this timing suspicious, but he insists that his release was coming up anyway.

  Born into a poor family that sold vegetables, Marvin describes how the civil war ravaged the slums. In 1989, when he was six years old, a death squad decapitated his uncle, who was in the guerrillas.

  “We have known violence since the time of the war. Since we were children, we have witnessed these scenes, scenes that never end, that come every day. There are deaths, bodies thrown out, decapitations. Near to here, people were hung up on a bridge. You get accustomed to it.”

  When peace came in 1992, Marvin remembers the deported gangbangers arriving with their Dickies pants and jailhouse tattoos. “The only thing that the United States has sent us in these years is murderers,” he says. “They haven’t sent us work or any other form of opportunities.”

  However, when Marvin was recruited into the Maras at fourteen it was by a boss who had spent his whole life in Salvador, serving in the army during the war. He describes him as a cold killer, who only offered the kids guns, not hope.

  When he came out of prison, Marvin formed the Ilopango clique leaders into what he calls a “committee” to oversee the peace process. The idea was for the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 to respect each other’s turfs and cease all aggression. Marvin describes how tough it was to persuade bloodthirsty Maras to rest their trigger fingers.

  “The truce between gangs was not something easy. People didn’t want to stop killing because of pride, because of all they had fought for, because of their barrios, because of their people. You have to sit and have a dialog with your rival, who wanted to kill you, who has killed your family members, killed your friends and neighbors. It was difficult to overcome.”

  It was especially tough to stop the young gangsters who wanted to prove themselves. In many ways, the truce was an effort by the older Maras to control the generation kill.

  “Young people want to show they have courage. But we have to show them that we don’t just want people with courage, we want people who can be productive members of the community.”

  Maras often hit a turning point and curb their violence when they became fathers, like Lagrima in the Honduran prison. Marvin also said that his thinking transformed with parenthood; he has fathered two girls since his release.

  “Becoming a father changes your life. Now I have reasons why I want a municipality free of violence. If there are gunshots, where will my daughter play? I don’t want her growing up in an environment like we grew up in. I don’t want her spending years in jail when she could be at university or learning a trade.”

  But instead of leaving the gang, Marvin says he wants to make the gang become a force of good. He believes the Mara structure can be used to steer kids on the right path, put them into training and oversee businesses. It is an ambitious goal.

  A truce involving tens of thousands of gang members was always going to be hard to keep a secret. But El Faro exposed it in just five days, with a story on March 14, 2012. As General Munguia had predicted, the exposure sparked a storm of criticism. Pundits, the conservative opposition, police, and aggrieved citizens slammed the government for negotiating with murderers.

  The government stumbled in reaction, with officials giving varying and contradictory explanations. But as they realized the media was staying on the story, they saw that they had to give out better information and brought in former guerrilla press officer Paolo Luers to help run public relations on the truce.

  I meet Luers at a bar he owns in San Salvador. He is originally from Germany, coming to Salvador as a journalist to cover the civil war in the eighties and flipping over to join the guerrillas. He worked in their Radio Venceremos, broadcast from Vietcong-style tunnels, and filmed guerrilla propaganda videos in the bush. He has since become a Salvadoran national and given up his German passport. He says he supported the gang truce out of a genuine belief it was saving lives.

  “I couldn’t let such an intelligent attempt at peace be killed by a storm of criticism,” Luers says. “I felt a responsibility to do all I could to make this peace process sustainable.”

  Like Marvin, he also makes the comparison between the Maras and guerrillas.

  “The [gang leaders] are serious people. If they had been born twenty years earlier, they would have been combatants with the guerrillas. I don’t have any doubt. And they would have been strong commanders. They got on with the former guerrilla Mijango, and saw that he was not going to betray them. This is because they are similar, in their thinking.”

  Luers organized press conferences in prisons so gang leaders themselves could talk of their hopes for peace. TV cameras went behind bars to film the surreal spectacle of killers with tattoos on their faces sitting at a table like officials and talking into a cluster of microphones.

  The conferences did not stop the criticism. But then something extraordinary happened. The truce started working. Spectacularly.

  In its first months, the death toll div
ed from about fifteen a day to about five a day. On some days, there were no murders—a dramatic news story in a country so accustomed to slaughter. Over the whole of 2012, the death toll dropped 40 percent compared to 2011. It was the biggest dip in violence since the civil war peace accords.

  In early 2013, the truce reached its highest point. Building on the cease-fire, Mara leaders such as Marvin worked with city officials to oversee “Violence Free Zones.” They held meetings in town halls, in which residents could directly address gangs about local concerns, such as difficulties getting down a certain street because of gangbangers on the corner. In return, the government and businesses promised social work and enterprises to transform the slums.

  It seemed the experiment was carving out a new way forward for dealing with Latin America’s crime wars. But then things fell apart.

  First, the criticism of the truce returned with a vengeance. A central complaint was that while the homicide rate may have gone down, Maras still committed other crimes, especially shaking down businesses. Allowing Mara bosses to sit down with officials only increased their power, critics said. The whole mechanism for the peace process, in which gang bosses such as Marvin formed committees of clique heads, also reinforced the Mara structures. And the gangs used the threat of a return to violence if the process collapsed. Murder rates had become the Maras’ currency that they could bargain with.4

  One of the most fervent critics was Police Commissioner Pedro Gonzalez, head of the anti-gang unit. His hard line is shared by many in Salvador.

  “I call gangs a cancer, the new cancer of society,” Gonzalez tells me, returning to the disease metaphor. “Every epoch of humans has its problems, and this is a big problem.”

  When I ask Gonzalez about the truce, he shakes his head.

  “It’s a farce, a lie. It’s very difficult for them to stop committing crimes. It is like if you put a chorizo in front of a dog. It’s going to eat it. If a gang member is on the street and he isn’t thinking about killing someone, it’s because he just killed someone.

  “I am not interested in them having a dialogue. If they agree not to kill each other, they get stronger. And if the two sides unite, who will they fight against? The state, and society.

  “If you give them money, they use it to buy arms. If you give them a bakery, do you know what they do? They go to the shops, and say you only buy from us or we are going to kill you.”

  Amid such criticism, a Salvadoran court ruled that General Munguia had to leave his post as security minister; under the 1992 peace accords, military officers could not be in such positions, it said. The truce negotiators said the peace process was being sabotaged. The new security minister, Ricardo Perdomo, backed away from the dialogue when he took office in May 2013. He expressed many of the same concerns that the opposition had about working with gangs.

  The final blow came in 2014, when President Funes finished his term and was replaced by Salvador Sanchez Ceren. While Funes had been lukewarm on the truce, Sanchez Ceren lashed out against it, and called for a new offensive against gangs. Authorities transferred leaders back to high-security jails.

  Some Mara leaders, like Marvin, desperately try to keep the truce alive. The press officer Luers also continues to support it. But without government backing, without any of the promised social work, and with police hitting Maras hard, most gangsters returned to the gun. The murder rate shot back up. In 2014, there were 3,912 killings, a hike of 57 percent compared to the previous year.

  This created another paradox: there was more blood on the streets of Salvador; yet the president suffered less criticism.

  The Salvadoran gang truce leaves me with mixed feelings. It is often referred to as the “failed gang truce” because it ultimately broke down. But was it really a failure? It saved perhaps two thousand lives. And it provided hope that another way out of this bloodshed is possible.

  El Faro’s criticism of the process was not of the idea itself. It was the fact that government was deceptive. As El Faro’s Oscar Martinez wrote in a New York Times editorial: “The president of El Salvador has helped save more than 2,000 lives in the past two years. Now if only he would admit it.”5

  Yet leaders across the hemisphere will likely learn the lesson that a truce is politically toxic. They have seen how hard it was to publicly defend negotiating with murderers. It is easier to let them massacre each other.

  While the most publicized, the Salvador truce is not the only gang cease-fire of the Americas. In Medellín, Colombia, in 2010, a former guerrilla and priest backed a truce between two cartel factions. In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, it is likely the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels agreed to a cease-fire in 2011, which reduced homicides by a stunning 90 percent within two years. If there was any Mexican government backing for the Juárez truce it was a well-kept secret. Governments may see that it is best to be more secretive rather than less.

  I ask Douglas Moreno, who was vice security minister during the Salvador truce, if the tactic has a future. From his experience, he says it is something that has to be done by independent actors, such as priests and activists, but it is impractical for a government to back it. When gangsters stop killing each other it is helpful for society. But you cannot give them any concessions, he says.

  Moreno also points to gang mediation in the United States that police and social workers have developed over the years. After gang murders in Los Angeles, social workers will go to the funerals to try and stop revenge hits. Some form of peace mechanism along these lines could be used in Latin America, Moreno says.

  The reduction in Salvador’s homicides made the rebound all the more painful. A sharp increase in murders creates a feeling of instability, of things spinning out of control. This surge happened in 2014, creating shock waves on the streets. It was the same summer that children from Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala rushed to the U.S. border in record numbers.

  CHAPTER 33

  The text message threat is simple and ominous. Seventeen-year-old Jeffrey Pineda in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, has kept it to show to a U.S. judge if he ever makes it over the Rio Grande.

  “You mother is very angry with you. Come back now for punishment.”

  A lanky teenager with a mop of curly hair, Jeffrey had gotten close to a clique of the Barrio 18. I first met his father, who expressed his concern about his kid hanging with the gangbangers, but they dominated his street corner and it was hard to avoid them. After several months with the crew, they gave Jeffrey a mission: to kill his own uncle. He was too terrified to say no, and went with the gun toward the target. When he got close, he chickened out and ran to his father. That was when they sent the message. It is in code. His “mother” means the clique boss; “punishment” could mean death. His father buried the gun in case they need it as evidence. Jeffrey is sitting indoors, terrified to go on the street. They ask me how much chance he would have of getting political asylum in the U.S.

  Jeffrey’s case might win less sympathy because he had chosen to hang round with the gangsters before they ordered him to murder. Other children fear for their lives because the Maras have targeted them out of the blue; from girls refusing to go out with a gangbanger to a kid just brushing past a boss too closely. But in Jeffrey’s case as in the others, their lives are in genuine danger. It is tragic to see these people, who are typical teenagers in other ways, playing with smartphones, nodding their heads to music, terrified for their lives.

  Violence is not the only reason for northward migration. I met a thirteen-year-old riding freight trains who said simply, “I want to see my mama.” He hadn’t seen her in five years; she was too scared of coming home as it could mean she might never get back to the U.S. and would lose her lifeline of income. Some kids run from country poverty. In 2014, coyotes, or human smugglers, also spread the (untrue) rumor that children arriving would be given papers.

  But violence is a major factor pushing people north and making them believe such myths and risk their lives jumping freight trains. It is notable th
at Nicaragua, which is also poor but much less violent, has way less migration.

  Many migrant parents in the United States send for their children because they are terrified Maras will either recruit or kill them. I find a coyote who takes people north for sixty-five hundred dollars a shot, giving them two chances. A thirty-year-old man with tattoos on his eyelids, he says has taken children as young as five without their parents. It is hard to comprehend putting a child of that age into the hands of this tattooed coyote and on a path where they could be kidnapped by cartels or disappear in the desert. But this shows how desperate people are.

  When the presidents of Honduras, Salvador, and Guatemala met with Obama at the White House, they debated the idea of a “Marshall Plan” to build up Central America, which they dubbed the Alliance for Prosperity. The Northern Triangle countries are poor and small, so even a few hundred million would go a long way in changing them. It is a place where aid could really transform a reality. But it’s a hard sell in an indebted United States, already tangled up in various wars.

  Before he flew north, I interviewed Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez in his presidential palace in Tegucigalpa. A forty-six-year-old conservative, Hernandez made the case, as other Latin American leaders have, that the U.S. has a responsibility to help, because Americans buy drugs.

  “I call for the principle of shared responsibility between those who produce [drugs] and those who consume them in the north. In the United States, many officials see the drug problem as basically one of health, as how much it costs to treat an addict and stop them getting involved. But for us it is life and death. That is the difference.