by Ioan Grillo
“Never in Central America, particularly in the Northern Triangle and in Honduras, has there been so much loss of life as in this decade. Never. Never in history. And look, disgracefully, this is a not an issue that originates in Honduras.”
Hernandez made a fair point. The illegal drug trade is an international problem and we have to find an international solution. This is difficult when politics in every country is invariably local. Gangsters often operate more effectively across borders than governments do.
But Hernandez is only telling part of the story. The Maras do make money from drugs, but a lot of it is from the local market. They also make their money from extortion, prostitution, and loan sharking off their own communities. Over the border in El Salvador, the Maras are hardly involved in the international drug trade, with Salvador having little strategic value for trafficking north.
Still, it is in the United States’ strategic interests to stop countries in the neighborhood crumbling to gangsters. With the level of instability in Honduras, it’s concerning who could take advantage of the chaos. While fears of Islamic militants working with Maras are overblown, there are genuine risks in allowing the growth of mercenary armies, with networks of gun, drug, and human smuggling stretching through the continent. Building functioning police forces and justice systems in Central America is U.S. homeland security.
Another concern is the new generation of murderous Maras going back to the United States. In a twist of history, the same virus that infected Central America and mutated into a more deadly form is seeping northward again.
The crime reporter Orlin introduces me to a Honduran Mara leader who ran a clique in the United States for eight years; Soñador, or Dreamer, was He Who Holds the Word in Langley Park, Maryland. American police finally caught him with a kilo of cocaine, jailing him and then deporting him back to Honduras. I meet him in a house outside San Pedro Sula. He is a muscular thirty-two-year-old who tells me his story in a blend of English and Spanish.
Born in San Pedro in 1982, Dreamer grew up with a single mother and never knew his father. He jumped into the Mara Salvatrucha when he was eighteen when Maldito, Lagrima, and others spread it across Honduras. He said it was a way to make money and protect his family.
Spending several years in La Vida Loca in San Pedro, he racked up his kills and gained a reputation. Then he headed north. Jumping on freight trains through Mexico, he floated across the Rio Grande in a tire and went through Texas to the east coast.
Dreamer had friends in Maryland, which has been a big destination for Central American migrants since the eighties. Some were Maras. If a Mara emigrates to the United States, he is required to report to the local crew. Even though most will work as well, they will be on call to do what is required. Dreamer got a job in construction. But his nights and weekends were dedicated to the Mara. With his number of kills, he quickly became the boss of the Langley Park clique.
“The homies up in the United States know how crazy it is in Honduras and what we have been through. They see someone like me, who has done a lot of missions, and I get respect.”
It shows a full circle. Back in the 1990s, the deportees from Los Angeles were idols to the malnourished war orphans in Central America. Now the murderous Central Americans are seen as the real thing by American-born gangbangers.
Dreamer said kids lined up to join them. In his Langley Park clique, he had 150 active members and five hundred “sympathizers.” They are not only Central Americans.
“We have Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, Bolivians, Cubans, even Chinese kids. Lots of people want to join up with us. We have kids all over the schools who are sympathizers.”
As U.S. law enforcement is more effective, Maras can’t act like they do in Central America. If they carried out anywhere near that level of murder, they would attract unyielding crackdowns. So people are not required to kill to join up.
“We give people other missions, such as taking a package of drugs. They still risk getting sent to jail, but we keep off the radar.”
However, the Maras take many of their rackets from Central America to suburban Maryland, such as making businesses pay their war tax. The victims are often Central Americans and other Latinos; sometimes the Maras find out if the owner has family back home they can threaten, showing them photographs. Other times, their words are enough.
“I’ll sit down and talk to the guy in English or Spanish or whatever he understands and tell him he has got to pay. Like if it’s a liquor store we are going to collect three hundred dollars every Saturday. And most of these people don’t argue. But if you do, you know that you are going to get fucked up.”
Many of their victims do not have immigration papers so they are scared to go to the police. Latino businesses are not the only targets, however. The Maras also tax businesses in Chinatown, where there are many undocumented workers, Dreamer says.
The Langley Park clique also runs prostitutes. Dreamer describes how they run a delivery service, taking girls to hotels or homes, fifty dollars for fifteen minutes.
“We have all kinds of girls. Dominicans, Colombians. The Colombians are very pretty girls. Sometimes, they might be the girlfriend of a member of the ganga [gang]. We split the money with the girls, fifty-fifty.”
And as could be expected, the Maras sell drugs. Dreamer said the MS13 buys directly from Mexican mobs, including the Sinaloa, Gulf, and Juárez cartels. As well as selling on corners, they also have members climbing up the food chain, selling kilos to other dealers, Dreamer says.
“There are homies that are making a lot of money from this and moving up. They are getting bigger into the business.”
The Mara Salvatrucha fights to defend its turf in Maryland. As well as Langley Park, nearby Takoma Park is MS13 territory. Their old nemesis Barrio 18 is in Silver Spring. They clash and sometimes murder each other, although on a much lower scale than in Central America.
Going into Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, African American gangs such as the Crips still hold sway. A lot has been made of Latino versus black violence, especially in Los Angeles. However, Dreamer and some other Maras I talk say they have no special beef with African Americans.
“Sometimes we might do business with the Crips, like selling them a kilo or something. We have respect for each other. They know that although the Hondurans and Salvadorans might be short, we are quick on the trigger.”
The Mara Salvatrucha gained national attention when members stabbed to death a seventeen-year-old pregnant girl, Brenda Paz, in Virginia back in 2003. Born in Honduras, Brenda had hung around with gang members while informing for the police. Since then, federal and state gang units have flagged the Mara Salvatrucha as a priority. The FBI made a series of high profile cases against the gang using racketeering laws designed for the Italian American Mafia. In 2012, the Treasury Department named the MS13 as a Transnational Criminal Organization, the first time it has awarded this title to a U.S. street gang. It is an official recognition of how the Mara Salvatrucha has mutated into a new threat. The act gives federal agents enhanced powers to go after its businesses and money laundering networks.
The efforts have weakened the Maras, but they still operate and murder on U.S. soil. In October 2014, police nabbed Maras waiting outside Gar-Field High School in Northern Virginia with machetes and a sawn-off shotgun. They were waiting for a student to finish class but somebody informed. Police charged the men with another three murders in Virginia.
The United States is not the only place where the Maras are spreading. Central American migrants have brought the gang to Spain and Italy. As they set up cliques in Barcelona and Milan, they jump in members of other ethnic groups. When Spanish police busted a clique in Barcelona, they found it included a Bulgarian, a Romanian, an Ecuadoran, a Moroccan, and a Spaniard.
These immigrants in turn take the Mara back to their own countries, so the MS turns up in bizarre places. YouTube videos and Facebook pages show the Maras from Morocco to the Philippines to South Africa. The
y are coming to your neighborhood soon.
The MS13 was born of the U.S. street gang system but has become the most global of any street gang. Its reputation and simple but effective structure helps it spread. And it gels with marginalized youth from different cultures, whether they be the Salvadoran migrants who founded the gang in Los Angeles or Eastern Europeans living in Spain. Vulnerable and displaced, the Mara provides them protection.
The Mara model may be less threatening than vast drug cartels with their wealth and political connections. But the fact that Mara cliques don’t depend on big resources also makes them tough to destroy. The gang sets up in towns, villages, cities, whether there is a drug trade or not. It feeds on broken families, poverty, and hopelessness. It makes sense to scattered children in soulless slums who feel loyalty to no government or country, but will pledge their lives to the Mara Salvatrucha.
PART V
The Saint: Mexico
They say that every society has the government that it deserves. While I say that every society and every government have the criminals that they deserve.
—NAZARIO MORENO, THEY CALL ME “THE MADDEST ONE,” 2011
CHAPTER 34
Hidden in the smog-ridden north of Mexico City, inside the headquarters of the Ministry of National Defense—or Mexican army HQ—sits one of the most fascinating museums on the planet. The army humbly calls it the Museo de Enervantes, which can be roughly translated as the Museum of Stupefacients. But this boring technical title underplays the incredible collection of artifacts on display, the highlights of what Mexican soldiers have nabbed from drug traffickers.
Some seized narcotics themselves are in the cabinets, but these are the least interesting items. A lot of people already know what marijuana, crystal meth, and heroin look like (although the black cocaine on show is a novelty). The drug lab machinery is more enthralling, including sprawling shiny contraptions to cook meth on an industrial scale. Pieces from trap cars, the vehicles used to smuggle drugs over the border in gas tanks, tires, and false seats, also illustrate the ingenuity of narco engineers. More frightening is the heavy weapons room of captured cartel firepower; you see that narco thugs don’t only use belt-driven machine guns and grenades, they even possess shoulder-held rocket launchers, such as the RPG-29, or “Vampire,” which can take out tanks.
But the museum’s main attraction is undoubtedly a room under the title narco cultura. The narco culture cabinets display the ostentatious bling that drug lords buy with their billions of bloodstained bucks. Some pieces are worth high five digits in the stones and metal alone.
Guns are bathed in gold and decorated with gems in the shapes of words and pictures. Some stones form the names of their capo owners, such as a pistol with an engraving of ACF—Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Lord of the Skies. Others have images of Mexican revolutionaries who the gangsters hail as heroes, including Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. Others still have names of fashion designers such as the Italian tailor Versace. I find it bemusing that drug lords can praise both revolutionaries and entrepreneurs; they are rebel capitalists.
The narco memorabilia extends to awards that cartel armies give their warriors for bravery. A medallion from the Zetas has a letter Z on one side and picture of gangster soldiers in heroic battle poses on the other. It is the narco equivalent of the Victoria Cross—or Tiffany Cross. Walking on through the hall, you see a cowboy waistcoat, which is really a bulletproof vest; a cell phone bathed in gold; and a carved wooden chair in the form of the grim reaper. It gets weirder and weirder.
Dominating the end of the narco culture hall is the weirdest item of all: a four-foot high statuette of a saintly warrior clad in medieval armor. It’s an impressive piece of art. Its core is a plaster figurine, which is worked over with gold and gems for the coat of mail and fine paint for the skin and goatee beard. The crusader vaunts red Templar crosses on his chest and sleeves and clasps a broadsword. He has that despondent expression of a holy man, wise but sad, as seen on images of Jesus and his saints. He also resembles one of Mexico’s most brutal gangster warlords.
Soldiers seized the statuette from cartel thugs who baptized themselves as the Knights Templar, after the order of warrior monks who fought for Christendom between 1119 and 1312. The narco Templars made dozens of similar statuettes and put them in shrines to kneel and pray before. They call them “Santos Nazarios.” It is the image of their leader, Nazario Moreno, known as El Chayo, or El Más Loco—the Maddest One.
Troops have also found prayers to Saint Nazario, printed in booklets in the style of regular Catholic prayer books that vendors sell at the stoplights in Mexican cities. As one says:
Give me holy protection,
Through Saint Nazario,
Protector of the poorest,
Knights of the people,
Saint Nazario,
Give us life.
Anthropologists can have a field day dissecting this narco holy image. Saint Nazario mixes Latin America’s popular Catholicism with the bling of the drug trade with the rock-star status of crime lords. Personally, when I first see a narcotics trafficker looking like Jesus, it seems hilarious; then I think about it for thirty seconds and realize it’s terrifying.
Adding to Nazario’s cult status, he wrote his own holy book. Journalists often refer to it as his bible. But Mis Pensamientos (My Thoughts) doesn’t have complete religious stories and parables like the Christian Bible. Instead, it is a collection of musings, similar in structure to Mao Tse-tung’s little red book.
As Nazario authored his religious rant, named his cartel after crusading monks, and was venerated like a saint, this dominates coverage about him. In journalese shorthand he is “the head of the bizarrely named Knights Templar who wrote his own bible even as he trafficked tons of crystal meth to the United States.”
But these entertaining details overshadow other features of Nazario’s empire that are important to understanding what Mexican organized crime has become. Nazario moved from drug trafficking to a portfolio of crimes that made him a major player in the local economy—a gangster capitalist. The Knights Templar took over iron mines, ignoring environmental regulations so they could sell record quantities of metal to hungry Chinese factories. They took extortion to new extremes, making cents of every dollar that moved, even from big business, and attacking those who didn’t pay (they burned thirty trucks of a local unit of PepsiCo). And they waded into the avocado, lime, and cattle industries. For Americans, your guacamole on game day, the metal in your kid’s remote-controlled car, and the beef in your burger may have passed through the Knights Templars’ hands—alongside the meth smoked by your local fiend.
In his home state of Michoacán, the Maddest One got his tentacles into the entire political and judicial apparatus. With mayors, police commanders, and politicians on his payroll, the state apparatus rotted to the core—making it later implode like a putrid tree trunk.
Nazario’s rule was so insidious and brutal it ultimately unleashed Mexico’s largest vigilante movement to take him down. The so-called autodefensas—or self-defense squads—became a significant third force in the Mexican drug war, fighting alongside the government security forces and cartel death squads. The militias unleashed a bloody but bewildering battle. They built a network of barricades that weaved through the state; they took back towns that the government supposedly controlled already; sometimes they fought alongside the Mexican army, sometimes against them. The conflict embarrassed President Peña Nieto and led his government to make a dangerous alliance with the vigilantes.
Migrants in the United States were also key in toppling Nazario. Michoacán émigrés from California to Oregon were so distraught by the terror in their homeland they helped finance the vigilante movement. Some returned home and took up Kalashnikovs. I found immigrants on the frontline who went within weeks from washing dishes in Los Angeles to fighting gun battles against cartel hit men.
And if that isn’t enough color for Nazario’s crazy tale, the narco saint als
o died twice. A drug lord of the Maddest One’s status has multiple lives.
Nazario first died in December 2010. Mexican federal police claimed they killed him during one of the most ferocious battles of the Mexican drug war: a fight involving two thousand federal officers and about five hundred criminal gunmen. Amid the melee, the officers said they shot Nazario but his gangster henchmen carried his corpse away. His death was confirmed when a grave appeared with his name on it. (Apparently, police didn’t want to dig it up and check.)
The president at the time, Felipe Calderón, trumpeted Nazario’s demise as a grand victory in his war on cartels. It was especially sweet as Michoacán is Calderón’s home state and the place where the president had launched his campaign against organized crime.
After his supposed death, Nazario’s followers began venerating him like a saint and statuettes and shrines appeared. Even more bizarrely, people reported seeing his ghost wandering around Michoacán dressed all in white. Under the leadership of this phantom saint, the Knights Templar became more powerful than ever.
By 2014, the sightings of ghost Nazario had become absurdly common; on a single day, I spoke to three people who claimed they had seen him. But I still wasn’t sure. I discussed the testimonies with a fellow journalist. Were these sources really seeing him, we asked. Or was this a figment of their collective imagination?
The former turned out to be true. In March 2014, Mexican marines announced that Nazario was still alive. But they also said that they now had killed him. Really.
This bizarre situation reminds me of a quote attributed to Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. The master supposedly said: “I won’t return to Mexico because it is a country that is more surreal than my paintings.”1
To prove that Nazario was truly in heaven (or hell), the marines released a video of his body. It certainly looks like him. However, while the marines say they killed the Maddest One with two bullets in the chest, this film shows a face that has blatantly been beaten, the eyelids black and nose purple. In the murky world of the Mexican drug war, there is always a second story, and I hear a credible account that explains this bruising. According to this alternative version of events, Nazario wasn’t really killed by marines, but he was battered to death by his own bodyguards working with vigilantes. It is of course illegal for vigilantes to murder people (in theory). So the vigilantes handed in the corpse and it was convenient for everyone to say the marines did it. The bodyguards had got so fed up of Nazario’s megalomania they turned on him. His final legacy was not of his troops venerating him, but of them hating him.
