by Ross Kemp
Like its enemy, MS 13 makes money from the clicas it controls. Many of these areas are tiny – a scattering of shacks straddling a suburban road – but they can also be city blocks and occasionally whole districts. Whatever the clica’s location and size, nine times out of ten the opposing gang is right across the street. Being so close to each other and general overcrowding mean that murderous gun battles break out at all times of the day and night, but especially at night. When darkness falls, rival gang members set out to hunt each other down with assault rifles, grenades, pistols, shotguns and knives.
How did these gangs come to plague El Salvador in the way they do? There are three main reasons: the first is the bloody civil war that took place between 1980 and 1992. The second is the race war waged in Los Angeles (as else- where in the United States) in the 1970s. That takes a little figuring out, but bear with me. The third reason is the huge gap between a small number of very wealthy haves and the extremely poor majority. These factors are closely interlinked and there are others but they will do for now.
In 1979 José Napoleon Duarte of the right-wing Christian Democratic Party led a revolutionary junta which overthrew the democratically elected President Romero. Matters rapidly deteriorated into a vicious twelve-year civil war between left and right. The terrified population suffered a wave of massacres and atrocities carried out by death squads organized and financed by both sides, but especially by El Salvador’s conservative landowning right. Some 75,000 citizens died in one of the worst civil wars in human history. At one point Ronald Reagan’s government was sending El Salvador’s government and military $1 million a day. Cuba, Russia and Guatemala, meanwhile, supported the opposition FMLN guerrilla forces.
What has any of this got to do with the gangs? Everything. With the economy a basket case and death squads roaming the country torturing and killing at will, thousands of Salvadoreans fled to the United States. Many of them settled in south Los Angeles, but for many of these refugees, it was out of the frying pan and into the fire. The LA Salvadoreans, like the Mexicans before them, found themselves caught in the interracial warfare then raging across the United States. Their response to violence at the hands of race-based gangs was to organize their own and fight back. The black LA gangs like the Bloods and the Crips might think they were tough, but their brand of thuggery mainly came down to plain old-fashioned shooting.
To get chapter and verse on this I went to meet a couple of high-ranking MS 13 gang members named Eric and Duke. We met in the shack they used as a headquarters in their home clica. Eric did most of the talking:
At that time, in the late seventies, early eighties, there was a race war in Los Angeles. Blacks didn’t like whites, whites didn’t like blacks – this shit was happening. All of a sudden we had to start defending ourselves. We were only a few of us, but we’d seen so much shit down here. When I was seven years old I used to go buy bread early in the morning and I used to find a lot of suckers decapitated by La Guardia [the police] and los escuadrones de la muerte – the death squads. They used to do all the dirty jobs. So we saw and we learned. Even though we didn’t want to do violence, we started having to defend ourselves. We started being proud. We saw whites being proud of being white. We saw blacks being proud of being black. Why wouldn’t we be proud of being Salvadorean?
‘How did you come to be the hardest boys there?’ I asked.
‘Well, the thing is, gangs at that time, they used to play being a gang member. The most we can get from our rivals at those times was being stabbed or shot. That was the worst that was happening.’ He shook his head.
But we didn’t come from a country where we were watching somebody get stabbed. We came from a country where we were watching somebody get twenty bullets in his chest. Then his head cut off. Or his arms cut off while he was still alive. They had reached their highest violence point. And we said, ‘Man, fuck this shit.’ They never seen shit. Let’s show them what violence is.
So they did. They formed MS 13 and went to war. And they are still way out in front.
As a result, Mara Salvatrucha 13 and 18 Street quickly came to figure among America’s – and the world’s – most violent gangs, a dubious distinction they still hold today. Rapidly establishing control over their local LA turf, MS 13 and 18 Street began spreading their vicious brand of gangsterism elsewhere in the United States. In no time at all they were running extortion rackets and the drugs trade with such ruthlessness that today the FBI classifies MS 13 and 18 Street as ‘internal terrorists’. When they catch them, the US authorities don’t just prosecute the Salvadorean hoods and send them to jail, in many cases they also export them back to El Salvador. This happens in spite of the fact that by now almost all the MS13 gangsters picked up in LA and elsewhere in the United States were born there and have never set foot in El Salvador. No matter; you’re in an El Salvadorean ethnic street gang, here’s the special prison plane, Con Air for real. Get on it and get out.
With the United States still El Salvador’s main aid donor and most important political partner – the country’s official currency is the US dollar – deporting MS 13 gangsters back to their ‘ethnic homeland’ is no problem. Every week a fresh planeload of hoods convicted in US cities on ‘third strike and you’re out’ lands back in San Salvador to discharge its resentful cargo. Sometimes members of the two deadly rival gangs arrive on the same flight. And so a constant stream of hardened urban gangsters flows into a country already beset with one of the world’s worst gang infestations.
Born and brought up in LA, bewildered gangsters suddenly find themselves deposited in a foreign country. Worried about their tattoos, some of these big hard Los Angeles gangsters are too scared to go out at night. Still, most fit right in with the rest of the gang and carry on with business as usual. Every time the streets of Los Angeles grow that little bit safer, the streets of San Salvador grow that extra bit more dangerous.
To get some idea of how mano dura is working – apart from its effect on the tattoo trade and clothing styles – we took a trip across country to Ciudad Barrios, one of El Salvador’s maximum security prisons. When I say across country, what that actually meant was a murderous, spine-cracking, legnumbing, deep-vein-thrombosis-inducing five-hour slog across increasingly mad, bad and dangerous roads into the heart of El Salvador’s dwindling rainforest. I remember it because I drove it. When we got there, we decided that the high walls around the prison were probably not necessary: if any of the inmates did get out, it’s unlikely they would get far before the fer-de-lance snakes, vipers, tarantulas or scorpions got them.
Cramped, thirsty and hungry, we stopped at the last gas station before the prison to fill up with petrol and take on supplies. Most countries do not have guards armed with shotguns at their petrol stations but in El Salvador every gas station I saw had at least one, and this one was no exception. The mosquitoes hanging around the trash cans on the forecourt were the biggest and ugliest I have ever seen, including the bee-sized variety that left my head looking like a golf ball in Alaska. Bearing in mind they carry malaria, what El Salvador’s mosquitoes most make you want to do is jump straight back into your air-conditioned four-by-four and never come back out again. Except that I had already caught the disease in Africa.
And if you think the mosquitoes are big, then you should see El Salvador’s flies. OK, the flies are bad in Africa. They can be terrible in parts of Australia. But as with just about everything else in this benighted country, El Salvador’s flies are somehow that extra bit nastier – uglier, more persistent and capable of transmitting the kind of diseases strong men only whisper of in darkened bars. Like dengue fever, Chagas’, and so on. When one of them hits you at high speed – and for some reason they all seem to be half blind – it’s like being hit by a ball bearing. I became convinced the flies were in fact part of a Mara Salvatrucha 13 outreach programme.
As I was eyeing these flying nightmares, the very worst thing that could happen to me did – I was seized by a sudden and overwhelmi
ng call of nature, the kind that frequently afflicts my sensitive English bowels in hot countries. As I stepped into what passed for the gas station’s toilet, a scene straight from a horror movie met my eyes, a scene so bad I forgot to notice the terrible smell. The seat I needed so badly to use was a moving layer of blue-black flies. They swarmed over the plastic and down both sides of the pan, in what at first sight looked to be a solid mass. With dozens more of their mates on combat air patrol, there were so many flies in there the buzzing sounded like some demented orchestra tuning up for a concert. Swatting my way through the airborne sentries, I gave the toilet seat a tentative kick. Most flies in most parts of the world would take this as a hint and realize it was time to buzz off. Not this lot. Sticking fast to the seat where they lived, they just got angrier and buzzed more loudly.
Rushing outside again, I spotted an oily rag lying on the ground. Grabbing it, I charged back inside, thrashed at the seat until the bluebottles had cleared something resembling a space and plonked my butt down before the enemy could regroup. Eyes focused on some distant imaginary spot and pretending this really wasn’t happening to me, I performed one of the fastest evacuations in human history. Waving goodbye with the oily rag I’d used in the absence of paper and throwing it at the enemy, I legged it out of there as fast as I could. Behind me, the massed ranks closed up and dived.
After dodging the flies and mosquitoes, it was time to go and visit some of El Salvador’s human pests. Ciudad Barrios jail reared up out of the jungle before us in all its white-painted peeling ugliness. Stuck high in the middle of the rainforest, the prison was a big rectangular compound with watchtowers set at intervals along its twenty-foot-high walls. Although we were now at an elevation of some 2,000 metres and there was the usual thick blanket of cloud, the air temperature was still in the mid-thirties Celsius. Some countries force-mix rival gangsters in the belief this will somehow make them learn to love one another. If you did that in El Salvador, you would be down to single figures in a couple of months. Entrance to Ciudad Barrios is by MS 13 gang membership only: it’s an exclusive club. Seeing this creeperladen Raiders of the Lost Ark-style scene that now opened up in front of us, Andy Thomson, our cameraman, got out and started shooting.
The guards, in black US special forces-style combats with black boots and sinister, Nazi-style shiny black gaiters, were leading examples of contemporary fascist fashion. All their weaponry was American, and they had so much of it strapped around them that to a man they walked the gorilla walk, arms akimbo and legs to match. Staring and fingering their triggers, the guards made it obvious what they were thinking: Unless you stop filming us right now, gringos, we will shoot you.
Although we had permission to enter the prison and film from the ministry of the interior, the authorities would not allow us in. At first they refused to give us a reason but after a little probing they said they were worried about the date. It was the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year: 666, the number of the Devil, the mark of the beast and all that. Worried that MS 13 prisoners, who like to pose as satanists, might have something special prepared for us on this especially unholy day – like a big gringo barbecue – the guards rebuffed all our attempts to get in.
With nowhere else to stay, we had to turn round and head back to the capital, another five hours away over the be-nice-if-they-were-finished roads. By now it was growing dark. Just to make the day perfect, the next thing we discovered was that our driver, José, who now took the wheel, had a genuine problem seeing in the dark. We already knew he had trouble seeing in the light. And so began one of the most hair-raising journeys I have ever made, over narrow, twisting, potholed roads through the mountains with Joseé braking too late for obstacles he had failed to spot in time. I spent most of the journey stuck to the windscreen.
We returned to Ciudad Barrios a couple of days later. This time they did let us in, but only on the strict understanding that once inside the main compound we were on our own, at our own risk and with no guarantee of help. The prison authorities could not have ensured our safety even if they’d wanted to: the guards stay outside. The prisoners manage themselves.
One thing we had failed to realize fully until now was that in El Salvador everything works on the bung. If you want something, almost anything, money has to change hands. Our failure to offer a bribe on ‘666 day’ may have been the real reason we hadn’t made it through the main gate. Now, even though we were in the administrative section of the jail and money had changed hands, we still had to negotiate access to the prisoners. They, and not the guards, decided who came into their domain. They also decided who came back out again.
On the way in a prison officer reminded us that if this lot were mixed in with their 18 Street rivals, the prisoners would kill each other down to the last man. About a month before we arrived, he told us, he and a couple of the other guards had noticed some of the prisoners playing football with an object that didn’t look quite FIFA regulation shape and size, or bounce in the approved fashion. On taking a closer look, they found out why: it wasn’t a football. Hacked from the shoulders of a suspected informer, it was a human head. About to visit hundreds of these maniacs unguarded, this story cheered us all up no end.
There was a queue of women waiting to get into the compound with us, most of them in sexy clothes. Wives, girlfriends and prostitutes, they were waiting for a conjugal visit. These are rare and in the gift of the prison governor, but they are also a smart move: they give the men something to look forward to and help keep them in order.
I walked through the heavily barred entrance gate into the big open space I could see on the other side. There was a very competitive game of football going on. They were using a real ball. Other groups of MS 13 gangsters were hanging about in what little shade they could find under the high walls, watching or talking in groups in the dusty yard. Every single one of them was facially tattooed. Most had a Devil mask.
The prison was a shit hole. The toilets, if you could call them that, were in a row to my immediate right and standing open to general view. They leaked. They were mostly blocked. They stank. And if I’d thought the flies on the outside were big, the ones in here would have been at home on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Going down a low wooden step to make sure the facilities were as bad as they looked, I immediately sank up to my ankles in shitty water.
The big surprise was the artwork on the compound walls. Everywhere you looked they were covered in colourful graphic graffiti of a very high standard: big, in-your-face murals in nearly every case depicting writhing, demonic women endowed with improbably pneumatic bodies, but amazingly well drawn. The other graffiti chart topper was the MS 13 gang sign: the Devil’s horns in the shape of the letter M.
The man who had agreed to show me round was a senior MS 13 gangster named Hugo. Aged about thirty but looking much older, Hugo was a veteran who had risen to the status of consejero, or adviser. He was also a convicted murderer. The fact he had survived to such a ripe old age meant that in gang terms he was by definition a wise man. Patient and polite, he was the opposite of his personal bodyguard, a hulking, brute-faced mule of a man, who swaggered up, fixed me with a look that said, ‘I own you, white boy, say your prayers,’ and hovered at my elbow itching to do me some serious harm. Watching his fingers curl repeatedly into fists did nothing to calm my nerves. Between the brains and the brawn, I preferred the brains. Part of the US export drive, both men had been arrested on the streets of LA, flown to El Salvador, rearrested by the San Salvador police and plonked down in this filthy stinking jungle prison in the middle of nowhere, possibly for the rest of their natural lives. Imagine how happy that made them.
Everyone in the place looked tough, but Hugo’s enforcer was in a league of his own. He was the type who can keep up the kind of silence that really hurts. His face and upper body a mass of MS 13 tattoos, and just in case you didn’t get the message he had Devil’s horns tattooed on his head. He had decided from the off that he did not like me, did no
t want me there and was about two heartbeats away from killing me. There is only one way of dealing with this kind of problem. Turning to him and meeting his gaze I asked, ‘Have I upset you?’
The key thing, as always, is to relax the shoulders, soften the face and show no fear. Once they see or smell fear on you, then you might as well forget it. It would have caused them problems to harm us, and these prisoners already had more than enough problems to be going on with, but in a prison like Ciudad Barrios when you are doing 400 years what have you got to lose?
The enforcer finally opened his mouth. ‘You remind me of a policeman who used to beat me up when I was a kid in south LA.’ Just my luck.
Now that we had broken the ice, I took a moment to check out my admirer’s body art. It was women, women and more women, naked or half-naked beauties who looked as if they had been inflated with a bicycle pump. The tattoos, which I suddenly realized represented the enforcer’s real girlfriends, showed them in sexually suggestive poses with their names next to them. Except for the last one on this fleshy roll of honour, all the names had been crossed out with a thick black line and BITCH tattooed alongside in capital letters. That’s the thing about love: with the best will in the world, some relationships just don’t work out.
I noticed straight away that the American MS 13 gangsters like these two showing me round the prison took precedence over the local boys. Just as they ran much of the gang’s business, the deportees looked like they ran Ciudad Barrios penitentiary. The local hoods did as they were told, sticking to a strict and scarily well-organized hierarchy. The MS 13 command and control structure seemed far better than that of the local police.
Hugo and the Hulk took me to a corner of the yard where there was a tap and turned it on. The water was filthy – a luminous green trickle that looked as if it harboured every serious disease on the face of the earth, from cholera to dysentery and plenty in between. And in fact, Hugo told me, the prisoners were often ill, mostly with bad stomach upsets. The water, Hugo hinted, was the only reason the gang had let me and the crew film them. By using my influence as a well-known gringo (I don’t know why they thought I had any), MS 13 hoped I could somehow convince the prison authorities to pipe in the cool, clean water they dreamed about.
