Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun

by Iain Overton

  ‘The reasons for joining a gang today, after the truce, are changing,’ the agent said. ‘Gangs have become more politicised, more strident, and this changes the type of people in the gangs. The gangs themselves are transforming – the government struggles to contain their communication networks, their structures, their armaments. Here the gangs have evolved into something else. Perhaps even the fifth estate – the criminal estate.’

  Jailed gang leaders had been granted generous concessions by the state. Videos had surfaced of trainers visiting El Salvador’s prisons, teaching incarcerated gang leaders combat tactics. Gangs were even now renting policemen’s uniforms and badges to set up roadblocks to rob passing vehicles, and worse.

  What upset this man so profoundly was that he knew, deeply, that the line between the state and the criminal underworld had become blurred, that all around him people were just looking the other way. And he was right.

  A few days earlier I had been shown a scrub patch of dirt and dust in the centre of San Salvador. It was less than half a mile from the capital’s main police station. Gang signs were spray-painted upon the surrounding walls, and a broken car was parked beside it, filled with young soul-stained boys: the ears and eyes of the gangs on these shantytown roads.

  My guide, a man who had seen violence up close, nodded to the illicit grave and said he knew of others like it. Children, street vendors, the elderly, rival gang members – these were just some of those found in graves like this one. As the days passed, people were to comment that the mutilations that appeared on these bodies had not been seen since the 1980s, when El Salvador’s vultures had grown fat upon the unholy carrion of war.

  These illicit graves were disturbing for another reason. The only reason for a truce between the gangs and the state was to reduce the number of homicides. Now it was apparent that, rather than dumping the bodies on the streets, the gangs were just burying them in secret.

  But you do not have to go to illicit cemeteries in Salvador to see the impact gun violence has had. Up from the graveyard we passed other scenes of desolation. Litter-swept homes gutted by fire, crumbling masonry on streets lined with fly-blown mounds of stinking refuse. The sharp smell of oil and decay lingered. And on each side graffiti scrawls on faded walls marked the territories of those who controlled these streets.

  It seemed everything in Salvador was laid with rolls of sharpened razor wire; a country under siege from the inside. People lived in homes high-gated and high-walled. Listless security guards cradled shotguns at even the smallest convenience stores. Old women sat behind iron grills and stared into the streets with fearful eyes. Everywhere was peligroso, dangerous.

  Later that day I travelled out to a district in the city run by the 18. So absent was the state in the streets of this small barrio that the gang was the only law here. Without being invited in, I would have been killed.

  I had been told that the young men, in their basketball tops and wide-rim caps, liked to eat fried food. So I handed over $50, and someone got us oil-blotted cartons of greasy chicken wings and thighs, and we sat at a makeshift table on a dirt track. Beyond, a dull red road led up to a bank of lush foliage, the silhouettes of men walking listlessly on its rutted surface. Ants crawled everywhere.

  I edged around the thing I most wanted to know: how their gang ruled the lives of others here. I had been told not to ask questions that might anger them, so I began to talk about my own experiences of violence, and the young men listened. Then they began to talk, because, compared to them, I had seen nothing, and they needed me to know that.

  ‘I don’t have to go to Iraq or Somalia; that violence I can find here in my home,’ said Mario, the captain of this gang. He had a rosary around his neck, and on the cross hung a small silver figure of the baby Jesus with outstretched arms. Mario’s own arm was marked by a spiderweb of gnarled white flesh from his wrist upwards – the scarring of a bullet. He began to speak about power.

  ‘The 18 have more control, more respect than anything else here,’ he said, ‘We have the control of the land here, but the fact that everyone has a gun means we will always be protecting ourselves from others coming in.’

  He talked about the collusion of the state in the gang violence, and you realised just how far things had slipped. ‘If the army captured you, they would take you to MS territory and leave you in the middle of it, with a gang. They’d take your cuffs off you and leave you to them.’ Some policemen would even rent out their guns for the weekend if you wanted to do a particular hit.

  I asked him what he would do if the government tried to curb their powers.

  ‘If they attack us, we will respond,’ he said and left the unsaid hanging in the air. This was it: what happens when a gang’s grip on violence supersedes a corrupt state’s ability to curb that violence. Broken lives, ruined infrastructure, abandoned hope.

  There were parts of Salvador still functioning, but when a country starts negotiating truces with criminals with guns, you wonder where it will lead. Then when the government starts ignoring the clandestine cemeteries that fill up during that truce, you know that the path to righteousness has long been lost. And something is forever broken, because something is always broken when guns are used without justice.

  I’ve been held up at gunpoint three times in my life. I’ve also been shot at twice. The reasons I was shot at were indiscriminate, so I didn’t take those times personally; I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Being held up at gunpoint, though, was intimate. Those moments of rushed demands and ugly threats have stayed with me longer and touched me more deeply than most of the horrors I’ve seen. Something in me broke a little.

  The first time I was held up I was twenty years old and in Amsterdam. I was with friends, and we had staggered from a bar, a wraith of sweet-smelling smoke curling from the door behind us. We had walked into a Dutch world of shining cobbles and wet canal railings, cheap neon lights and hooded shadows. That is when the two men approached. One was white, a South African, his face taut against his skin, a shade of mottled green in the light. The other was a black guy, silent, his background unknown. He held a tightly wound package in his right hand.

  ‘See this,’ the cadaverous white man said to me, his mouth thin, spittle on his lips. Then he demanded money, he said they had a gun. I asked him if I could see it, as I did not believe their threats, and they unwrapped the package until I could see gunmetal in the dull light. So I told them that I didn’t have any money for them, and the South African let loose a thin line of spit on the ground and told his friend I wasn’t worth it. They walked away, their jackets furling in the wind.

  The next time I was held up was a few years later. It was too similar to the first time to warrant the retelling. A late-night street; a man with a gun; a realisation that I didn’t have any money. This time it was in Guayaquil, a languid heat-stamped town in Ecuador.

  So I took to carrying a $100 bill with me because I felt it was better to have something rather than nothing in my pockets to give these midnight vultures.

  The third time? Well, this one stuck with me.

  It was 1996 and, at twenty-three years old, I was brimming with confidence – perhaps too much so. We had not been out of the village for more than an hour when we were robbed.

  The slope leading up to the thicket of trees that lined the upper levels of the rainforest mountain were bare, save for the willowing grasses and the low clumps of scrub. Beyond was an endless spread of trees, impenetrable and secret – a green hell for the stranger to these lands.

  On either side of us ran a troupe of excited Papuan children. They had followed us from the village below and were singing back the lyrics to The Sound of Music I was trying to teach them.

  I was with a friend, Robin Barnwell, a talented BBC filmmaker and someone I had known since childhood. We had decided, one drunken night in London, to pool our last savings, borrow some more money and have an adventure. We wanted to go night hunting, dive on wartime wrecks, hike at t
he edge of the known world. The best way to have that sort of trip was to go to Papua New Guinea. Outsiders had only reached its Highlands some fifty years before; ancient tribes were still living in the depths of these green mountains, and people existed as their ancestors had done. Customs and traditions here were only lightly touched by the modern world; cannibalism, tribal warfare, animism – all lay just beneath the surface.

  We were young and, walking so blithely up that mountain path, a little foolish.

  ‘Doe, a deer, a female deer. Ray, a drop of golden . . .’ the children’s voices lifted and were filled with laughter. Flashes of teeth and bubbling excitement; they tripped and gamboled. Then, suddenly, they fell silent and stood.

  Ahead was a small group of men. They were, like many here in Papua New Guinea, wearing tight and elaborate wigs. I waved. It seemed to be a small hunting party coming home, but they had nothing to show for it. No short-beaked echidna or a long-fingered triok or whatever else they caught up there. Then I noticed something wasn’t quite right, and they began to run hard at us, their muscles taut under their dark skin. The children – the pikininis as they call them in Papua New Guinean Pidgin English – squealed and scattered.

  Then, in a stumbling, scrambling grasp of what was happening, we realised these men were part of a ‘Raskol’ criminal gang, the name for the wild groups in the Highlands of PNG. They were carrying two long rifles and a sharp-edged machete, and the three of them came up close, levelling their guns.

  ‘We will kill you!’ they screamed.

  The words tumbled from them. They were demanding money. We knew that Raskol robberies normally ended in violence: they won’t just rob you, they’ll end you. So we bowed our heads and fell to our knees, and they grabbed our rucksacks and money pouches. Passports, clothes, everything: all gone. Then, as quickly as they had arrived, they left. The children beside us began to cry, but we were thankful to be alive.

  Then we heard screaming, and things took a turn for the worse. They were running back – one of them had levelled his rifle again, and the space was filled once more with snarling and screaming. They ran straight at Robin. He swivelled and, pushing away, bolted back down the path. I remained. I didn’t want to die with a machete in the back of my head. Instead, I began to unbutton my shirt.

  I recalled reading somewhere that it’s harder to kill a naked man than a fully clothed one. That human flesh somehow humanises people. So I took off my shirt, button by fumbled button, without really taking it on board that the man who stood before me pointing a loaded gun at my head was totally naked, save for a quivering penis gourd. My nakedness was, clearly, not going to sway any intention of violence.

  Robin was dragged back up the track, a knife close against his throat. And then, in all the screaming and threats of violence, they handed us our passports back and, with an angry push that sent us tumbling into the dirt, they disappeared back into the green screen of forest. I guess they thought taking our passports might cause our governments to come here with even more guns and attack them.

  With just our trousers, shirts and now passports, we looked at each other on the side of this Papuan mountain, miles from anywhere, and considered our options. This was not a good moment, but we knew it was best to leave before they came a third time. So we walked back to the last village.

  There, the village headman of the Hulis, a stocky man in a tweed jacket and grass skirt, met us; he was pushing a long reed through a hole under his nose. Some of the pikininis from his six wives had already told him what had happened, and a messenger had been dispatched to a local police officer in the valley below.

  ‘It was the Engans. They are always doing this sort of thing,’ he said to us in Pidgin. ‘They are just a bunch of idiots.’ Or words to that effect, because Pidgin English insults are hard to translate.

  We were not surprised. The Enga tribe had a long history of violence. Walking had shown us the sort of low-level war they were waging. Houses had been burned, trees reduced to ugly, jagged stumps. It was a type of conflict fought in weekly battles on football-pitch patches earmarked for combat. Here, like medieval warriors, each side would stand and hurl weapons at the other. This violence was devastating. One tribe, the Mae, had an estimated annual death rate of around 300 killings per 100,000, almost a hundred times that of the US.12 It was once estimated that two-thirds of the men of another tribe, the Gebusi, had murdered someone.13

  Then there were the violent raids upon neighbouring territories that took place every few years; some tribes even raided a dozen times a year. What they did during their slaughter, when the red mist descended, was graphic. Some tribesmen believed they could boost their masculinity by eating the brains or even the penises of their enemies to absorb their strength.14

  Yet a fundamental shift had happened. Once these killers used to have bows and arrows, but today they have shotguns and high-powered rifles. The introduction of guns into this tribal culture changed everything. Before, the traditional weapons of clubs and arrows killed few, but their new weapons massively increased the numbers killed. One report even said the spread of semi-automatics was ‘out of control’. And the Southern Highlands, where we were now, was considered the worst place of all.15

  I guess we were lucky not to have been executed. But now, in the sanctuary of the village, there was not much else for us to do but wait. So, a tattered and much-used leather ball was brought out, and we played a terrible game of basketball and, sipping a warm bottle of Coca-Cola that the local village store sold, we sat under a reddening sun.

  The roar of an off-road vehicle disturbed the quiet. The track leading up to the circle of mud and thatch huts was deeply scarred by the mountain rains – ravines in the road. But the vehicles here were as rugged as the barefoot tribes, and the police car pounded up it with ease, braking in a squeal of metal in the middle of our game.

  A huge man, his shirt straining at his barrel chest, got out of the car. A Papuan policeman, he was the largest person I had seen up there. He had a thick moustache and wore mirrored aviator glasses, like a 1980s New York cop. He was chewing betel nut, the seed of the areca palm, and his mouth was a red smear. It gave him, along with his heavy black combat boots and the oiled pistol on his hip, a dangerous air.

  He listened to what had happened and climbed onto the bonnet of his vehicle. His voice was forceful and deep. ‘If these white men don’t get their bags back in the next twelve hours,’ he said in the local dialect, ‘I will burn down all the villages in this valley. Each and every building.’

  And that was it: Papuan law enforcement. We were horrified: our uncalled-for presence here had resulted in the threat of a mass burning of villages. We tried to protest, but he ignored our pleas. This was the Highlands, and this was how they did things: a form of retributive justice.

  His threat worked. Twelve hours passed, and our bags turned up, slipped back to us under the cover of night. A neat cut of our money had been sliced off the top, but we were told not to bother about that. The case was settled.

  Looking back on it, perhaps I now see how so much about guns and crime and policing lay in that small episode. The terror of the robbery and the small humiliations that come when you are faced with intimate lethal force. The breakdown of the rule of law in remote and impoverished armed communities. The state’s exercise of power through a stronger, better-armed force and the casual dispensing of justice.

  It was an incident that helped frame my thinking, too, when I was to shift my research away from the illegal use of guns by killers and criminals to looking at those who use their guns in the name of the state: the police.

  7. THE POLICE

  The trouble with police embeds – the gun-sniffing dogs of South Africa – chasing gangsters in Cape Town’s slums – talking to an American police sharpshooter – understanding their warrior cops – the Philippines recalled – when the police murder – the death of an activist in Mindanao and beyond

  One of the challenges as a journalist, as a writer, is
meeting the police.

  Generally, when you embed with the army in a conflict zone you are sent in to see some ‘action’. Politicians and military press officers want to show the world that their troops are at the hot end of things, guns at the ready, doing the job they were sent in to do. Journalists have made careers from these high-octane embeds, risking their lives in bloody campaigns, often acting as the liberal conscience of a nation at war.

  Hitching a ride with the police, though, is different. Rarely do you get on a hard-ended raid. I have been on embeds with cops in some of the most criminally active parts of the world: El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, Brazil. And each experience, oddly, felt the same.

  It begins with a tense shaking of hands, because policemen distrust anyone who is not one of them. There is the donning of a bulletproof vest; the faint promise that something might happen. Then, after a briefing, there is a drive and the inevitable crackled call to a crime scene, sirens flashing. The destination, though, is reached as another police unit has apprehended the criminal, or a body is already lying in the street, or it was a false alarm.

  The basic truth is that policing is deeply political, and no police media officer wants a journalist seeing anyone getting shot by their boys in blue. So they send you to places that once were terrible but have since been tamed. They get you on community policing initiatives. It’s all heart and minds, not blood and gore. And it’s not just the censorship of a press officer that’s at work here. The reality is this: most police don’t really use guns that much.

  With the people I had looked at so far – mass killers and criminals – guns were central to their actions. But I have found, over time, that police forces often have a much more complex relationship with guns. Some forces are very weapons-focused; some concentrate on intelligence-led policing; others use different forms of restraint, like Tasers. A policeman’s gun, when used appropriately, is not used in attack, but rather in defence – upholding the law, not imposing something.