by Ross Kemp
With the enforcer sticking to me like an ugly shadow, Hugo and I met more of the inmates. As we talked I realized something else. Here, in this pit, the gangsters were fashion conscious. There was a look. Almost all of them were wearing knee-length surfer-style shorts, smart trainers and snazzy-coloured T-shirts. But the most amazing thing was their socks, which were blazing white, like adverts for soap powder. And now that I was beginning to relax and take in the scenery a bit more, I saw there was washing hanging everywhere. Despite the mud, the dust, the excrement and the disgusting water, even here in this desperate dump these men were doing their best to keep up standards. I suppose it helped them get through the day. The basic food they eat is eggs, tomatoes, cheese and beans, spiced up with chilli and anything else they can get. And more eggs, tomatoes, cheese and beans… The men cooked for themselves in small groups on ancient stoves powered by liquid gas, and had to buy their food either out of their own pockets or with shared MS13 gang funds. They slept in long, narrow and extremely cramped dormitories.
It wasn’t just MS 13’s tight organization that impressed me; the other striking thing was the way these guys gave each other support, loyalty and protection. It was a cooperative community. They didn’t just pool their money for food and take turns with the cooking and chores; Hugo said they took care of one another when they were ill. There was little or no official medical care. They were as tight-knit as a close family, in some ways even tighter. They had to be, to survive in there. There was no evidence of the systematic violence and bullying that I’d come across in other prisons I had visited in the course of the series.
As we went a little further and the full horror of Ciudad Barrios sank ever deeper into my brain, I could feel myself ageing physically. There was something so crushing about the place that beat me down and kept on beating. The dirt and disease, the smell, the alternating dust and mud, the flies, the water, the heat and humidity, the total lack of privacy, the tattoos everywhere reminding you of where you were, why you were in there, the loved one back in Los Angeles you would never see again. I don’t know how the prisoners could stand being in there for a single day, and I’m not at all certain I could last any time before wanting to do something drastic like find a length of rope and a beam to go with it. To take my mind off the grimness I asked Hugo, ‘Do you have any family on the outside?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I got my son in Los Angeles – he’s fourteen.’
I took a bit of a chance with the next question. ‘Will he become a member of MS 13?’
To my surprise, Hugo was not fazed. ‘No. I tell him not to hang around with gangsters. I tell him do his school work and grow up good.’ He knew and I knew Hugo was never going to see his son again. Abruptly changing the subject, he told me how an American news journalist who had made a programme about Ciudad Barrios had claimed MS 13 threatened to kidnap her. Back in the US, this had made a big splash. Now Hugo had the media to himself, in the shape of me and Andy, he wanted to seize his moment. ‘If MS 13 had wanted to kidnap her, we would have done it. Don’t make a big deal about nearly getting kidnapped. Wait till you get kidnapped. If you live through it, then you can shout about it.’
I looked at him to see if they had anything along these lines planned for me, but he was just making a general point.
Once they have been deported and locked up under mano dura, for most of these guys that’s the end of the line. Some of them have 1,000-year sentences. If by some fluke they are released, most of them try to get straight back into the US, where they have homes, families and an established way of life. And pizzas and steaks and movies instead of a constant diet of cheese and beans eaten looking at twenty-foot-high Devil-graffitied walls. But having previously been deported, they are viewed by the US authorities as illegal immigrants. The chances are they’d be picked up and exiled for the second time. With all of their options closed down, what’s left for these men? They have the gang; they have each other. That’s all. That’s why they stay so tight.
In an effort to contain the mayhem, the police carry out sporadic raids on gang houses. El Salvador police raids are not like our own, where at the worst a few dozen officers might come round your gaff with a battering ram and smash their way in. That’s bad enough, but when the law comes to call in El Salvador we’re talking full-scale mechanized warfare: blitzkrieg, only without the dive-bombing. To impress us with their diligence and purpose, the police invited us to join them on a night raid.
Designed to ‘seal off a notorious clica and search it for drugs, dealers, weapons, money and gang foot soldiers’, the party I joined involved a mixed force of some 500 heavily armed SWAT police plus army infantry. It looked as if we were about to invade neighbouring Honduras, not go on a drugs bust. As we drove up to the police station I thought a coup against the government was about to go down. I sincerely hoped for the sake of my new-found gang acquaintances that the clica in question was not up the end of a disused railway track. Dressing for business, most of the men – and they were all men – donned masks for the usual reason. Then we waited. For hours. By this time it was late at night and it was raining – one of the worst, most torrential downpours I have ever experienced. Even the police officers, who aren’t told the names of the target in advance in case they tip them off, didn’t know what the hell was going on. Some were worried they might be going into their own neighbourhoods. Only a handful of senior officers knew the target until a few seconds before the ‘Go’ command.
We shot off at high speed, in my own case in the back of a Datsun pickup. Now that we were moving, the rain was like a hail of twenty-pence pieces – with no protective clothing and only a black T-shirt between me and it. But as we charged through the streets, slicing through the traffic in the convoy with APCs and hundreds of armed troops, their regulation black ponchos glistening in the driving rain and their rifle barrels gleaming in the city lights, it was hard not to feel a part of it. So I did. Five hundred heavily armed men and me, roaring out to take down a bunch of gangsters, is some buzz. All we needed was ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ on the loudspeakers and a couple of helicopter gunships for company to get the full Apocalypse Now effect. So I started humming it. This started Andy off laughing.
By the time we reached our top secret first target, a heavily fortified drugs outlet, there was a scrum of TV news teams on the spot, already up and filming. The target had unaccountably been leaked to the press – those strict ‘need-to-know’ security precautions must have fallen down somewhere. Quite possibly as a result of something that folded ending up in someone’s back pocket. The target house was enclosed from top to bottom in an iron cage, with bars and grilles extending right up to roof level. The seedy, ramshackle building was like a classic Los Angeles crack house and then some. To gain entry, the police had to climb the front of the cage and cut through the bars on the first floor with oxyacetylene torches.
Naturally, this all took some time. Explosives would have been useful. By the time the MOE (methods of entry) specialists had got the assault elements of the task force inside, four of the six men they had hoped to arrest had already fled into the storm. Of the others, one was lying face down on the floor in the living room. His underpants were brown, he was that scared. But the gangster wasn’t alone: with his eye glued to the camera, Andy stepped in a drain and sank in the sewage up to his ankles. Being a cameraman carries with it all kinds of unforeseeable risks.
The raid was an anticlimax, not to say a journalistic free-for-all. But as we walked out into the driving rain, looking forward to our comfortable hotel beds, I couldn’t help asking myself what the poor sods living round here made of it all. If you saw 500 heavily armed men coming after your neighbours in the UK, you might conclude you were no longer living in a lawful or safe society. And you would be right. That’s the problem with gangs: once they take hold, it is very, very difficult to root them out, no matter how hard you try.
Before we joined the raid I had been invited to meet a government official with
specific responsibility for tackling drug trafficking. I didn’t warm to this man, who wished to remain anonymous, and I certainly didn’t trust him. He told me that the cocaine trade was controlled entirely by the clica gangs. As far as he was concerned, all El Salvador’s problems began and ended with people like the Small Psychopaths. ‘With the help of US advisers and American financial and military aid,’ he said, ‘the El Salvador government is doing everything in its power to end both this and the power of the gangs.’ The second I met this man, it was crystal clear to me that if I asked him any challenging questions at all, then not only would we not be allowed to go on any more drugs raids, we’d be on the next flight out of the country. So I kept shtum, nodded and smiled at everything he told me and tried to look happy.
Cameras are heavy awkward things. As we were leaving, by way of thanks for our host’s cooperation, Andy accidentally swung our camera into the plate glass that formed one wall of his palatial office. There was a faint tinkling sound and a small star-shaped mark appeared in the centre of the glass. Then, as we stood watching in fascinated horror, a long, jagged split began to crawl out from the point of impact, followed by another and another, spreading as they do in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, until, with an almighty crash, the entire wall fell apart and smashed into shards on the tiled floor. Optimistic as ever, Andy took out some gaffer tape and offered to stick it back together. Grabbing him, we left our host standing there staring at the remains of his office.
If I’d had trouble believing everything the government official told me, my next interviewee confirmed my doubts. An ex-intelligence officer, Lionel Gomez was now an ‘adviser’ on El Salvador with powerful connections in and ties to the US Senate. The interview took place at his house, which was built like Fort Knox. A heavyset man in his early fifties with a broad fleshy face and small round spectacles, Gomez let me know he had at least one very attractive twenty-two-year-old Salvadorean girlfriend and possibly more. He also had an office decked with photographs of himself chewing the fat with Senator Edward Kennedy, President Gorbachev, Fidel Castro and various other global bigwigs, and a nice line in seen-it-all-before spook world-weariness. He would have been right at home in a Graham Greene novel. The white coffee mug stamped with CIA on his desk might just have been a hint about his former job. Someone’s man in San Salvador, he definitely wasn’t selling vacuum cleaners.
Without going as far as to say the government controlled the narcotics trade, Gomez explained that the MS 13 and 18 Street gangs provided useful cover for the real masters of the cocaine trade in El Salvador: the nameless powerful figures I was never going to meet who would kill me and the entire crew if we ever did bump into them.
‘Everybody will tell you the clicas are involved in drugs – dealing drugs, moving them. But there’s a problem with that: according to the DEA 570 tonnes of pure cocaine go through El Salvador every year.’
I stopped Gomez to make sure I had heard him right. ‘Five hundred and seventy tonnes?’
‘Tonnes. Of cocaine. Pure cocaine. This could be worth $30,000,000,000. The clicas are not doing that. They wouldn’t live the way they live if they were moving 570 tonnes of cocaine. In order for the big business to exist and move about in an efficient way, it is necessary to have the ambience, the society of corruption. So it’s very useful to have clicas, because it catches the attention of the press, and it’s very flamboyant because of the tattoos. But the real story is the guys who move the 570 tonnes.’
‘So who are they?’
‘Well,’ he said in his slow Spanish-accented drawl, ‘I would say some of the most powerful people in the region.’
‘People in the government? Businessmen?’
Gomez nodded. ‘Maybe, yes.’
‘So the biggest gang in the country is the government?’
‘Yes. But they don’t wear tattoos. They wear Rolex watches and very expensive ties.’
‘What you’re saying is, it suits them to have gang warfare going on as a smokescreen and that takes everybody’s eye off the fact that what they’re doing is shipping all this cocaine through the country.’
Gomez just looked at me.
‘But if the corruption is so obvious, why doesn’t anybody do anything about it?’
He looked at me again for a second or two and then replied, ‘Fear. They kill you. They can starve you to death. They can shoot you. Or you could have an “accident” done by one of the clicas. They can steal your wallet in the street and shoot you. This is a very casual country when it comes to violence.’
Having spent time in the clicas I could see the force of his argument. If Gomez is right, El Salvador is the main conduit for the supply of cocaine to the entire western United States, Canada and the Pacific. The whole raid had probably been little more than a show of strength – with the emphasis on ‘show’ – to convince El Salvador’s television viewers, along with any powerful foreign observers who happened to be watching, that the government meant business. If there were gangsters getting arrested for drug trafficking live on the nightly TV news then, hey, the government must be doing its best. It cannot possibly be to blame for the cocaine economy.
When we got back to my hotel after the interview with Gomez I found an urgent message waiting from Chucho the Small Psychopath. He wanted help. His wife, Ingrid, was in Susaltepeque, San Salvador’s MS 13 female prison, originally for selling marijuana but now for her alleged role in a prison murder. As with the men, female gang members are segregated into either MS 13 or 18 Street jails. Since the chances of his being arrested were extremely high if he stepped outside his home clica, Chucho asked if I would help him get in to see both Ingrid and his little daughter. The toddler had been born in prison and was locked up with Ingrid. In El Salvador imprisoning small children with their mothers is seen as more humane than the system in the UK, under which mother and child are separated and the children often put into care.
We stuck Chucho in the back of our hired MPV, told him to keep his head down and picked up his sister Maria and his mother on the way. Maria, a short buxom teenager with big hair and a smile to go with it, immediately took a shine to me. Gringos are targeted by local women desperate to get out of the country and live somewhere with fewer gangsters. This may have had more to do with it than my personal charms, but I wouldn’t want to sound too cynical. At any rate, as soon as the opportunity arose Maria bought me a big stuffed toy bear. It was the kind you win at fairgrounds, except that she had drowned this particular animal in perfume. Racked with violence, in El Salvador stuffed animals are something of a national passion, especially with the women, who seem to use them as a kind of comfort blanket. God knows, they need one. Not quite sure what to do or say, I later gave Maria a big stuffed toy in return. This was the worst thing I could have done, as it signalled undying love between the two of us. Luckily I had the foresight to give her my present as we were leaving for the airport.
We reached Susaltepeque. Our researcher, Marta Shaw, had gone in to set the prison visit up. She had been cavitysearched. The guards who had searched her were female, but they didn’t wear sterile surgical gloves as they do in the UK. They used plastic shopping bags from the local supermarket, and they used them regardless of whether they had already been employed for shopping. And they recycled them. This isn’t very hygienic. Or very comfortable, from Marta’s account.
Now we were there, it was our turn. En route across town, the main topic of conversation in the MPV was the inevitable ‘Who’s going to get cavity-searched first?’ Since the whole Gangs series was my idea in the first place, it seemed churlish not to volunteer. A guard showed me into a bare, strip-lit room furnished with a table, a chair and a second guard in the corner armed with an automatic rifle whose expression was the most wooden thing in the room. The first guard, I assumed, was the person who was going to delve into my bits.
Keen to get the ordeal over and done with, I undid my belt, dropped my trousers and underpants and stood there waiting for him to get on with it. The guar
d’s eyes bulged from his head, and then a furious frown replaced his astonished expression. In a mixture of Spanish and English he demanded, ‘What is the matter with you? Are you mad or loco?’
Bewildered to say the least, I stared back at him. Then it dawned on me: there wasn’t going to be any cavity search. By some amazing stroke of luck we had been excused shopping bags. But there I was standing with my trousers and pants round my ankles, ready for action. As I hurriedly pulled up my trousers, he thrust a round wooden disc with a number painted on it into my hand. ‘This is your ID number for when you are in prison,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Keep it with you at all times.’ Tapping his temple with a forefinger, he motioned for me to leave. As I went, he spluttered, ‘You loco, gringo. Loco.’ Looking back, I’m inclined to agree with him. The moral of the story is, never drop your pants before you are asked – especially in a prison.
Generously deciding to share some of my deep humiliation with the team, I put on the kind of bent-legged, limping walk you might adopt when you really have had a plastic bag shoved up you, and assumed an agonized expression to go with it. Andy and Antony were waiting anxiously outside.
‘How was it?’ Antony asked.
Staggering up and leaning on him as if for support, I croaked, ‘It’s OK, really – it’s just that my throat’s a bit tight.’
Antony stared at me in undisguised horror. My throat? Had they really shoved the bag up that far? ‘Right,’ he said. ‘That’s it. I’m not going in. You’ll have to do this one on your own.’