Gangs

by Ross Kemp

  Chucho claimed the Small Psychopaths operated a strict ‘blood in, blood out’ rule. In theory this meant that each and every one of the five men in front of me had killed someone to join the gang. He told me that when he was four years old a gang of 18 Street assassins had shot his father dead. His mother was still alive. His main girlfriend was in prison – as was their baby daughter. The girl was now eight months old but Chucho had never seen her. Still only in his mid-twenties, Chucho had two more daughters by another woman – eight and eleven years old – but he hardly ever dared go and see them. As one of the local 18 Street gang’s priority targets, every time he showed his face anywhere near any of his extended family he put them at severe risk. ‘They’ve got my family involved, so my family is scared too.’

  Chucho couldn’t remember how many times he had been arrested and locked up, it had happened so often. Released the week before we met him after ten months in prison for possession of marijuana, Chucho said he had joined MS 13 when he was about fifteen. As we spoke he took deep drags from the spliff smouldering between his long, skinny fingers. The day he was let out of prison last time around, seven 18 Street gunmen came along the railway line looking for him. He ran and hid in the bushes until they had gone. He told us he was scared to leave the house because of the way 18 Street kept on coming. ‘Every now and again, they come looking to kill me.’ One look in his eyes was enough for me to work out the truth: this was a man who felt guilty – and no wonder. ‘They killed my brother – he was deaf and dumb. It was because of me. I’m the one in the gang. He wasn’t in it, but that didn’t matter to them.’

  The heartless killing of Chucho’s fifteen-year-old brother is typical of what the gangs in El Salvador get up to every day, fuelling a cycle of homicidal gang-on-gang violence that shows no signs of ending any time soon. Chucho made it clear he wasn’t just on the receiving end; he dished it out, too.

  The youngest and smallest member of the Small Psychopaths was a twenty-year-old nicknamed Joker. The clica’s chief executioner, according to Chucho, Joker smiled that little bit too much. No doubt he smiled while he was shooting people. He told me he had joined the Small Psychos ‘when I was very young – about nine’. At first the other gangsters had nicknamed him mascota, mascot. Both Joker’s parents were still alive, but they had kicked him out of the house when he joined MS13. Two of his brothers were also in MS 13, but in a different clica. Joker said that although they all paid MS13 rent for the use of the local clica house or distroya, he was the only member of the Small Psychopaths who actually lived there – the others kept on moving around, so as not to get tracked down and shot.

  Smiling broadly, Joker, who stood about five feet tall in his socks, toked his Mary Jane as if his life depended on it. In between hits on the weed, he said that hanging around the ’hood was pretty much all the Small Psychos did every day. At night they went out hunting 18 Street. As Chucho put it, ‘Often they’ve hurt someone in our family; we can’t let them get away with it.’ He should know.

  I asked, ‘If someone from 18 Street came here, what would be your response?’

  This made them all laugh. ‘If they came we would just kill them.’ They all carried handguns hidden in their waistbands. Chucho let me take a look at his Argentine army 9-millimetre. That would make a hole in you all right.

  ‘What is the conflict between the two gangs based on?’ I asked.

  Chucho made a rectangle with his hands. ‘We defend this area because this is where we live. We look after it and we can’t let them come and operate here. This is El Salvador and Mara Salvatrucha are in control. We are not going to let any other gang exist here.’ They look on 18 Street as a Mexican gang that has come south.

  The more we talked, the more I realized that my first impression of these guys had been completely wrong. They weren’t just kids; they were very bad news – full-time, professional armed gangsters. In fact, given the record of shooting and murder that gradually unfolded as we talked together over the next few days, the gang name they had chosen was a bit of an understatement.

  I had the strong feeling that Chucho was a man living with more than just regret. High on the neighbouring 18 Street hit list, he knew his every waking moment might be his last – or even a sleeping moment, for that matter. The other thing that kept Chucho and the others inside their home clica was the fear that the police would rearrest them on sight because of their criminal records and tattoos. As a bit of a change from the usual demonic MS 13 gang symbols, Chucho had a full cemetery tattooed on his left arm, with each of the grave names marking one of his dead ‘homeboys’ or fellow gang members. Out of more than fifty founding members when the Small Psychopaths had been formed back in 1992, the gang had only seven remaining active members. Most had been shot dead. This probably explained the lack of new recruits. Others were in prison and a few had simply vanished without trace.

  I asked him about his children. Thinking about the question, Chucho held in the Mary Jane smoke for as long as he could, as if he was in a hold-your-breath competition. Finally, he admitted that he didn’t want them to lead the same kind of life as him. But he himself could never leave the gang – he said there was nothing else he could do with his life. Looking round, it was hard to disagree.

  The next man in line said his name was Groupie. Harder-looking than Chucho, his face and arms were scarred more than tattooed, although MS 13 was inked large on his chest. Groupie too had spent many of his twenty-seven years in prison. Members of 18 Street had murdered his father when he was one year old; then, when he was twelve, they murdered his mother for good measure. In more recent times they had shot and killed his uncle. He lived with his elder sister, who had helped raise him. Groupie had joined the gang to get revenge. You could kind of see his point. A lot less forthcoming than his leader, Groupie complained the police harassed the Small Psychopaths the whole time, and the gang was sick of it. A heavy drinker, he said he was trying to go on the wagon but was finding it extremely difficult.

  Miguel, the clica’s most recent recruit, had joined the gang only a year and a half before we met him. Despite having reached the ripe old age of twenty-four, Miguel still lived with his mother, a short way down the railway line from Chucho. But the fact that an 18 Street clica occupied the turf directly between meant that social visits were a tad risky. Like the others, Miguel had been arrested for asociación ilícita (illegal association) and served ten months in prison.

  In an effort to stem the tide of criminality that threatens to engulf the country, in 1999 El Salvador brought in a law known as mano dura. Loosely translated as ‘iron fist’, this is the country’s equivalent of America’s RICO Act. Anyone suspected of criminal association can be arrested without all that bothersome business of collecting hard evidence. They are kept on remand for as long as it takes to establish their guilt or, rarely, innocence. In practice, mano dura has meant that hundreds of MS 13 and 18 Street gang members have been swept up off the streets and sent to prison for no other reason than having prominent gang tattoos. The unintended consequence? Gangsters now tend to get themselves tattooed from the neck down and the elbow up, leaving no visible outward sign of their affiliation. Miguel’s tattoos, for instance, were small and on his arms.

  A second outcome has been to drive the gangs that little bit further underground. Some of the gangsters have also started moving upmarket, at least in the way they dress, wearing stuff like tennis clothes so they are harder to spot. They also spend a lot less time out on the streets. However, the worst result of mano dura is that now, instead of simply getting ‘jumped’ or beaten up when they join, some crews make new recruits kill a member of an opposing gang. The idea behind this policy is to lock new members in: once you have murdered someone and the rest of the gang know about it, you are very much less likely to turn grass.

  Listening to the way the Small Psychos talked about their 18 Street enemies hammered home the visceral hatred between them. Neither gang acknowledges the other by name – it’s always
the ‘people in the other neighbourhood’ or the ‘foreigners’. Naming them would only be giving them respect. Imagine being in a permanent state of armed conflict with your next-door neighbours but not about fences, overloud music or how high your hedges have grown. Your neighbours want to kill you, and they know you want to do the same to them. That’s how it is all the time if you are in one of these gangs. The Small Psychopaths told me that if they met a rival gang member anywhere at any time, they had to kill him – that was the code.

  They didn’t just use semi-automatic pistols: the gang’s big chief, Ronaldo, or Blue, who was currently in prison, had blown his right hand off when he fell on a home-made grenade and it exploded. Warming up a bit, Chucho launched into a rant about how the government was the real problem in El Salvador: it used the clica gangs both as a convenient scapegoat and as a smokescreen for its own illegal activities. Especially, he insisted, its direct involvement in the cocaine trade. At the time I didn’t believe him. Later on I became less sure.

  From the gang members I’d seen in detention at the courthouse, MS 13 and 18 Street are exactly alike. They looked the same, they dressed the same, and no doubt they enjoyed themselves the same. I told Chucho, ‘They have tattoos the same as you too.’

  He shook his head. ‘Yes, but they are different tattoos.’ The gangs were the same but they killed each other because they had different tattoos? Now, I really didn’t understand.

  Anticipating death on a daily basis, the Small Psychos lived life in the fast lane: every time I saw Joker he had another set of love bites from a different girl. They claimed they both made and dealt in firearms, especially shotguns. Helps keep up the murder rate. Their lives were about drugs, alcohol, murder, sex and music, in any order and frequently several of them at the same time. Shooting at and getting shot by their 18 Street neighbours was an everyday reality. For the Small Psychopaths, death was a way of life.

  Gangs need constant supplies of fresh blood or they wither and die. Most gangs feed off the local population, sucking members up in a never-ending cycle of poverty and hatred. In the case of 18 Street’s male members, initiation involves getting savagely beaten by a circle of established gang members for eighteen seconds – or for as long as you can endure it. The longer you can take it, the higher your ranking in the gang. For MS 13 similar rules apply. It’s supposed to be thirteen seconds, but no one is standing there with a stopwatch. When people are hitting you as hard as they can, any seconds at all is a very long time. But the men don’t get raped.

  The initiation process is so vicious the gangs have a real problem recruiting young women. No surprises there. So here’s what some do to keep up the numbers: female gang members pick a young woman from their local neighbourhood. She’s usually strong and good looking – that’s what the men like, and that’s the type of person the gang needs. First, they go to the targeted girl and invite her politely to join the gang. If she refuses, the women surround the girl and invite her to choose between the same violent ‘jumping’ as the men, which can leave you with missing teeth, broken bones and/or facially scarred for life, and the ‘train’.

  The train is gang rape. Anyone can get on board and take a ride. If a girl chickens out of the beating and opts for the train, the rape doesn’t end there: she has to make herself available to any gangster who wants to use her sexually at any time for as long as she lives. If she tries to resist, then the gang kill her.

  To make sure she can never leave the gang the gangsters use a tattoo gun to etch MS 13 or 18 STREET across the victim’s forehead and cheeks in great big glaring blue-black ink. Once she has the facial tattoos no other man will touch her: she belongs to the gang and can never again lead a normal life.

  Squeezed into the south-western corner of the isthmus that connects North and South America, the little rainforest republic of El Salvador has to be one of the least fortunate, most blighted countries on the face of the planet. It sits on a tectonic fault line that boasts no fewer than six active volcanoes. These trigger regular serious eruptions, earthquakes and tremors. There was a tremor while I was there: feeling the earth move beneath your feet adds a certain spice to the daily round.

  In January 2001 an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale triggered landslides that killed more than 1,200 people and left roughly 250,000 homeless. One month later a second quake killed at least 250 people and seriously damaged thousands more homes. This tiny country also happens to have the highest population density in Latin America – 245 people per square kilometre. There is also a serious and growing Aids problem. A very bad year, 2001 also saw one of El Salvador’s worst ever droughts, which destroyed more than 80 per cent of the crops and gave rise to yet another of the country’s periodic famines. As a result of these, most of the country’s once rich and diverse wildlife has disappeared into the stomachs of the starving.

  Then there is the weather. For most of the time, as the porter in my hotel helpfully pointed out, there are only two kinds of weather in El Salvador: mud or dust. Thick, heavy and humid, the equatorial heat beats you down. The low grey cloud that seems to clag the sky up most days traps and intensifies the heat, and when it rains, it rains like nowhere else I’ve ever been. If you have ever stood in a tropical monsoon, then you understand what really heavy rain can be like. El Salvador’s downpours pick up a monsoon and run with it, with raindrops that give you a good slap if you are follically challenged like me. When it hits the tin roofs all around it sounds like a war’s going on. The effect of all this pounding is that floods and mudslides also figure heavily in the national litany of woe. In addition the country is malarial, and other tropical diseases are widespread. We still haven’t mentioned the odd tropical hurricane, like Mitch, which killed more than 200 people in 1998. Funny how they always give these killer cyclones a friendly-sounding name.

  As if natural disasters weren’t enough, El Salvador’s roads are lethal. One of the most dangerous things you can do here is something that would be completely normal in the UK – drive somewhere, especially in the countryside at night. That’s when the gangsters come out to play. Heavily armed thugs ambush any likely-looking vehicle at gunpoint and fleece its occupants. The slightest sign of resistance or failure to hand over your valuables gets you shot.

  There seems to be no formal driving test, or if there is you can bypass it with a bribe. Most people drive at breakneck speed without troubling their indicators or rear-view mirrors. As far as I could see, it is considered a sign of weakness to give way to oncoming traffic, and since people drive in the middle of the road where the surface tends to be best, there are quite a few head-on collisions. Carcasses of animals mown down by speeding drivers lie rotting by the side of the road or on it – another reason why there is hardly any exotic wildlife left in El Salvador. It is important to avoid the larger corpses as your car can turn over, making you part of the general carnage.

  Then there’s the smog. We in the First World might angst about global warming, but I suppose we can afford to. In El Salvador few people seem to care about the environment. In the resulting free-for-all, some of the world’s filthiest vehicles chug around cheerfully polluting what’s left of the air. One of these – a giant truck – came close to killing us early in the shoot.

  We were travelling behind it on day three. The exhaust fumes belching from its tailpipes were so dense that despite staying at what should have been a safe distance, we could hardly see the road in front of us. Without any warning – like brake lights – the truck driver stood on his air brakes. The juggernaut screeched to a halt. Our Land Cruiser kept going – and going. With my right foot flat to the floor on the brake pedal I wished was there, I saw the back of the truck looming up. Scenes from my past life flashed before me. At the last instant, our driver, José, swerved, missing the truck by an inch. At fifty miles an hour, if we had hit the outcome would not have been good. I turned to José and asked why he hadn’t stopped sooner. Peering through his bifocals, he croaked, ‘I don’t see so good in the d
ark.’ I pointed out it was broad daylight.

  As if things like this didn’t make driving difficult enough, the roads are thick with roadblocks. The police and army in El Salvador must have more of these breeze-block barriers set up at any one time than the rest of the world put together. To make things worse, breeze blocks are quite often hard to see against the tarmac. In theory the checkpoints are there to intercept gangsters, and with them the river of cocaine that pours continually through El Salvador. One thing the police certainly do not do is check vehicles for roadworthiness – if they did at least half the traffic would be straight off the road. Instead officers hand out spot fines for more or less imaginary infractions – for cash.

  There are good things about El Salvador. It is a cheap place to live. It has a magnificent coastline, some of the Pacific Ocean’s best surfing, stretches of spectacular scenery and fine Mayan ruins. Most visitors who take sensible precautions will avoid the gangs and have a good time. And the vast majority of the people are polite and friendly. They also have an engagingly dry, self-effacing sense of humour. There may even still be a few of the beautiful native red-throated hummingbirds left, along with the odd ocelot and a new generation of hippies. But the country’s rainforest has shrunk to less than 2 per cent of its original size. It does still have some of the globe’s most horrible insects though, including giant poisonous centipedes. I realize I am not doing the El Salvador tourist board any favours here, but these are the facts, or at least some of them.