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

by Ioan Grillo

  “You have to win respect.” He taps his head. “And you get this through intelligence. Sometimes you have to beat people or order executions. But you really control people with the mind.”

  The Maras took the business of extortion that they learned in Salvador to new levels in Honduras. They went from shaking down buses and taxis, to earning from shops, restaurants, and bars, and onto professionals, including lawyers, doctors, and independent journalists. The Maras baptized these shakedowns as impuesto de guerra or “war tax,” the term that guerrillas had used in the eighties.

  Some Mara bosses keep the shakedowns at low enough levels, such as 10 to 20 percent of income, so that businesses can survive and keep paying. But others make people pay such extortionate amounts they are forced to close down, and often run for their lives. It is a strain on anyone running a business in an already struggling country. I find a single mother in her twenties who opened a beauty salon. With the war tax, along with other debts, she shut down and turned in desperation to prostitution to feed her daughter.

  Maras also pimp prostitutes, often taking half of what they make. Others have got into loan sharking, giving out small amounts to people who could never qualify with a bank. The interest can be up to an incredible 20 percent a week.

  Lagrima describes how he would put their cash into a big metal safe in one of the Casa Locas. He would pay all the clique members a salary and give special bonuses for contract killings. He would then take his own money and kick back cash up the organization, paying for those in prison.

  As the Maras expanded, they laundered their money through businesses, owning strip clubs, taxis, buses, and shops directly. And they moved deeper into the biggest earner of all: drugs.

  Traffickers have long used Honduras as a trampoline for taking cocaine to the United States. From Colombia, they make short flights to airstrips in the Honduran jungle, or drop bundles off the Mosquito Coast. Sometimes, smugglers bring the cocaine in its paste form and process it in labs inside Honduras. From there, smugglers take it to the Mexican border, or through the Caribbean to the United States or sometimes Europe.

  As Honduras is like a big cocaine warehouse, it attracts traffickers from far and wide, including Colombia, Mexico, and Jamaica. There are widespread reports that kingpin Chapo Guzmán came to Honduras, and strong evidence that the Knights Templar bought cocaine there. Furthermore, a police officer I talk to says his informants witnessed Zetas buying weapons in Honduras. Arms including rocket-propelled grenades have been stolen from caches of the Honduran armed forces.3

  As the Maras grew from a street gang to an organized crime syndicate, they drew closer to these drug traffickers. However, they did not have a straight alliance with any one cartel, but more of a series of business transactions with different traffickers in different parts of the Mara-dominated lands. Their biggest role in Honduras was taking over street drug selling in much of the country.

  “We had money and we controlled territory, so it was easy to get into the business,” Lagrima says. “We would buy kilos and sell it on the streets in grams, or in rocks of crack. It was good money.”

  As they worked with drug traffickers, they did other jobs for them. If somebody was in the turf that the traffickers were after, the Maras could take them out—for a fee. Often the narcos would pay them in drugs, perpetrating the drug cycle as they have in Brazil and Mexico.

  The Maras also got pulled into the Mexican drug war, working with various sides. In 2004, Maras fought as mercenaries for the Sinaloa Cartel in Nuevo Laredo. The rival Zetas killed five of them and dumped their bodies in a house. A note lay next to the corpses, saying, “Send us more pendejos like this for us to kill.” (Pendejo is a Mexican swear word meaning “pubic hair.”4) Mexican gangsters were using the Maras as cannon fodder.

  Meanwhile in southern Mexico, Maras worked with the Zetas cartel to kidnap migrants from trains, calling their relatives in the U.S. for ransom payments. These kidnappings led to several massacres, such as the killing of seventy-two in San Fernando in 2010. After such brutality against their countrymen, the Maras broke relations with the Zetas, Lagrima says.

  “We never really trusted the Zetas and didn’t want to be involved in these things. So we banned our people there from working in these kidnappings. We also found out that a lot of the Central Americans helping the Zetas were not even Maras.”

  As the Maras grew into a more sophisticated crime syndicate, they mutated again. They realized that facial tattoos are a big giveaway and ordered initiates not to put ink on their mugs. While Lagrima stands out with his teardrop tattoos, most new members look like any other Honduran youngsters.

  But despite clean faces, the new generation of Honduran Maras became increasingly bloodthirsty. Teenagers murdered at a rate that shocked even veterans such as Lagrima. It became a struggle to control the unruly youths.

  “They have lost any kind of values,” Lagrima says. “They smoke too much crack and kill all the time. They have made this country too violent.”

  At the same time that the death toll increased, Lagrima’s life changed as he became a father.

  “Seeing my son made me think a lot. I don’t want him going into the same gang life as me. I don’t want him seeing these things.”

  A turning point came when police arrested Lagrima for murder. He broke away from Mara prisoners and got himself transferred out of their wing. The act is seen as betrayal and he says they have passed a death sentence on him. But he doesn’t regret the decision.

  “I felt in my heart that I couldn’t do this anymore. I don’t want to be part of this disease. I want to think about my family. I hope that when I get out of here, I can leave Honduras and make my life somewhere else. There are places that are not like this. There is a world outside gangs.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Searching for the new Mara generation that Lagrima described, I visit a prison for juveniles in San Pedro Sula. When I walk in, I find it is as crazy as the adult lockup.

  The youth prison is divided into two sections, one for Maras and the other for non-gang members, or paisas. Courts send Barrio 18 members to another jail to avoid a slaughter. But the Maras are still worried that their rivals could attack the prison. To defend themselves, they have members sitting on the roof watching out for movement in the bushes and nearby streets. It’s a bizarre sight, teenage gang members squatting on the rooftop of a supposed penitentiary. They tell me they keep watch round the clock.

  These teenage Maras also have their prison leader, He Who Holds the Word. He is a seventeen-year-old called Dani, inside for murder. Dani is only about five foot two, and I have to stoop down to talk to him. But he has the hardest thousand-yard stare I have ever seen. His eyes show the penetrating look of a killer but also reveal the pain of one who has seen too much. I feel that one moment I am looking at a kid, and the next I am looking at a hardened murderer, a power broker, a chieftain.

  When I ask him if he fears death, he shakes his head and looks at me incredulously. It strikes me how teenagers who have all their life in front of them don’t care about dying; as we get older we fear death more, even though we have less to live for.

  I head across town to a drug rehab clinic where I am introduced to another young Mara from this new generation of killers. The skinny twenty-three-year-old has thick scars on his face, earning him the nickname Montana, after Al Pacino’s character in Scarface. Montana is relaxed and likeable, making jokes and laughing a lot. I spend all afternoon listening to his life story. It makes me shiver inside.

  While he is in a rehab in San Pedro, Montana hails from a barrio in the capital, Tegucigalpa, where he grew up and joined the Salvatrucha. His clique was founded in his neighborhood in 2000 by the Salvadoran Maldito.

  Montana grew up with both parents, who owned a small restaurant, and he never had money problems to drive him into gang life. But he joined the Maras for another reason. When he was twelve, the Barrio 18 killed his father over an extortion payment. He wanted revenge.r />
  “It was hate that drove me,” he says.

  But Montana reveals that even before his father’s death, his life had gone off the rails. When he was eight years old, an older brother gave him marijuana to smoke. By the time he was eleven, he had tried cocaine. By thirteen, he had smoked crack.

  I had thought that drug-taking itself wasn’t a big factor driving violence in Latin America. After all, people generally take more drugs in European countries, such as England and Spain, which are much more peaceful. But seeing Montana makes me wonder if smoking weed and snorting coke as a young child could have contributed to how he became a serial murderer who seems to show little regret about his bloodshed.

  When I interviewed assassins from Mexican and Colombian cartels, I asked them how many they had killed and they said they had lost count. I thought they might have been avoiding the question. But as I interviewed more cartel members, I began to think they were telling the truth and they really didn’t know. In their minds, it is perhaps as clouded as the number of women they have slept with.

  In contrast, all the Maras I talk to remember a clear number of kills. It is like a scorecard, cementing their standing within the organization. Montana confesses he has murdered thirty.

  He first shed blood when he was thirteen years old. Guns are rife in Honduras and he got his hands on a 9 mm pistol to go mugging—and win the attention of the Mara crew. He held up a man who was about thirty years old, demanding his wallet. When the man refused, he gunned him down.

  I ask him if he felt guilty.

  “I was paranoid,” he replies. “Every time I went out, I thought someone might recognize me from the shooting. But nobody did.”

  The local Mara boss heard about it and offered Montana a job, which he calls a mission. It came three months later when Montana had turned fourteen. By this time, in 2006, He Who Holds the Word was a Honduran who went by the apt moniker Sadist. He told Montana to take out a drug dealer, a middle-aged man who refused to work with the Maras.

  “The target had sold drugs for a long time and was stubborn. He had been told, ‘You can work for us or you can leave and we might not kill you.’ But he wouldn’t listen.

  “I went round to his house as if I was going to buy some cocaine. There were a lot of people there, including children. There was even a baby in a woman’s arms. I pulled out my gun and shot the dealer with five bullets. The magazine had six bullets so I kept one in the chamber in case I needed it. Nobody did anything. I walked out slowly.”

  I ask him how he felt when he did this, a fourteen-year-old killing a grown man. What was going through his head?

  “It felt great,” he replies. “I liked it. I felt powerful.”

  For that murder, the Mara paid him a thousand lempiras, about forty-five dollars. That is how much life is worth in Honduras.

  As he killed more, the Maras would hike his pay, giving him several hundred dollars for a hit. Yet he still wasn’t a fully fledged Mara member. They raised the bar on what wannabes had to do before they could join. Montana would kill seven before they jumped him in.

  While Montana gained his reputation as a killer and smoked crack, he was still going to school. Kids have to share the classroom with such murderers. Teachers are terrified of their students. In both Honduras and Salvador, gang members have killed teachers for telling them off in class or failing them in exams.

  For Montana’s next mission, he had to discipline a drug dealer who had been smoking what he was meant to be selling. Montana was still fourteen, while the drug dealer was fifteen; it was a child against a child.

  “We gave him twenty-four hours to come up with the money for the crack. When we came back, he said he didn’t have it. We took him into a house and tied his hands and put him on his knees. He begged for his life. But we couldn’t show mercy. We couldn’t show weakness.”

  I ask Montana exactly how he killed him, and he mimes how he stood behind the kid and shot him in the back of the head. I asked him again how he felt after this.

  “I felt excellent. You get addicted to killing. You want to kill again just to get that buzz.”

  Addiction to killing. This is even more frightening than murdering for forty-five dollars. Yet, like cartel hit men, Montana’s murder spree was taking part within an institution—albeit a gang. Killing on orders takes away part of the responsibility. Montana considered himself a soldier.

  Turning fifteen, Montana got his next chance to slay. A woman had a beauty salon in the neighborhood. She was a pretty twenty-six-year-old who Montana liked—although he realized she was scared of him. The Mara clique had discussed charging her war tax, but decided they would let her off. However, she revealed to Montana that someone was shaking her down. It was a man connected to the Barrio 18. As well as extorting her, the man would abuse her, groping her and forcing her to kiss him.

  The extortionist collected on Tuesdays, so Montana hung outside to watch him come. He had learned by this time to plan hits, to work out who might be around and what the escape routes were. On the first occasion, he just watched. The following Tuesday, when the extortionist came again, Montana unloaded five bullets into him.

  Montana felt invincible. Yet in his following mission, he messed up. On orders from his boss, Sadist, he shot a target. But despite the fact he hit him with several bullets, the man survived. His gang castigated him for the failure.

  “They heated me up as punishment, for letting the guy live.”

  I ask him what this means and he explains. “They gave me a beating. We have certain rules and you can’t break them. One is not going through with a kill. Another is leaving a Mara you are with in trouble. You can’t leave any man behind.” (Unless he’s dead.)

  For his next job, Montana killed another drug dealer who was selling on the Maras’ turf. He followed him to the market and shot him in the back while he bought vegetables. The stall owners were too terrified to do anything.

  When Montana was seventeen, he had completed his seven kills, and the Maras finally jumped him in. They gave him a severe beating with sticks and kicks. And he was reborn with the family.

  As a fully fledged member he drew a salary and enjoyed the power a Mara had in the neighborhood. He could also commission others to murder. But with his love for the gun he carried on killing, building up his scorecard. He went from pistols to Kalashnikovs. Corrupt soldiers steal weapons from military caches in Central America, while guns from old arsenals of guerrilla and Contra armies move around the black market. Maras also have grenades and plastic explosives.

  Finally, when he was twenty, the police arrested Montana for carrying an illegal firearm. He did six months in prison, the only time he has served for his crimes. But he perhaps suffers psychologically from his killing “addiction.” He smoked more and more crack, until he was high every waking hour. One day, he smoked dozens of rocks while also sniffing glue and was taken to hospital almost suffering a hemorrhage. Eventually, he realized he had to go into rehab. Sadist thankfully gave him permission to dry out, realizing Montana could be of more use if he wasn’t messed up.

  When I speak to Montana, he has been in the rehab shelter for six months, kept active in workshops. After he leaves, he will have to go back to the Mara clique or face their death penalty for desertion.

  Evangelical Christians run the clinic, so Montana prays daily and takes part in Bible discussions. I ask Montana if he has taken God into his heart and he nods his head. But I find it hard to believe him. He doesn’t appear to show real regret for his killings. Maybe he will at some point in life.

  When I ask Montana about the future, he laughs. He lives for the moment. Many in this generation kill cannot even envision the next day.

  CHAPTER 32

  Back over the border in El Salvador, a new generation of Maras also painted the streets with blood. Faced with this slaughter, some of Salvador’s politicians and church leaders backed a controversial mechanism for peace: a truce between the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18.

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sp; The Salvadoran gang truce is one of the most important experiments to deal with the crime wars in Latin America. It needs to be analyzed closely to see if it is a model that can work in other places or a tactic that needs to be avoided. But a key problem in understanding the truce is that the government was not open about it. It was organized in secret before the website El Faro exposed it. Even after it was outed, the government continued to be evasive about whether it was really supporting the truce and finally backed away completely.

  The roots of the peace process lie with the rise to power of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the party formed by the guerrillas of the civil war. In 2009, it won the election under President Mauricio Funes, ending twenty years of rule by the conservative ARENA. Salvadoran leftists hoped the dreams they had fought for with bullets in the eighties could finally be fulfilled peacefully. But like other leftists taking power in Latin America, they faced the tough realities of a globalized economy and the stubborn persistence of poverty. They were also confronted by rising gang violence; the number of murders in the small Central American nation shot up from 2,207 in 2001 to 3,778 in 2005 to 4,382 in 2009, when Funes was sworn into office.1

  Salvadorans begged for something to be done about the bloodshed. But nobody seemed to have a solution. Some of the former guerrillas looked at more radical ideas; among them was Raul Mijango, an old insurgent commander who took part in the civil war peace talks. Later, selling propane gas, he suffered extortion and a kidnapping from the Maras and was hungry to find a way out of the mess.

  However, a key player in the truce was a general, David Munguia Payes, who Funes named security minister in 2011 amid rising pressure over the violence. Munguia considered taking a more hardline military approach to the Maras. However, he hired the ex-guerrilla Mijango, who he had known since the peace accords, and Mijango persuaded the general that the gangsters could be negotiated with. To help with the truce, they also brought in a military chaplain.