by Ross Kemp
Cracking a smile, I told him the happy truth: we were cool.
We knew in advance that this was an all-female prison, but it was still really bizarre to see upwards of 400 captive women in this big, mould-streaked, high-ceilinged Dickensian dive – and, as a male, to walk around in there freely. The surreal nature of the experience was heightened by the fact that in the background we could hear Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ playing over the internal tannoy system. Chucho – who was touchingly dressed up in his Sunday best – fell on his wife’s neck, then took his little girl on his knee and gave her a big hug and a kiss. It was the first time he had ever seen her, and while his daughter just cried Chucho cried tears of joy.
When the song’s guitar solo came round, Antony and I launched into a rather bad impression of Brian May, giving our air guitar solo. When the track ended, hordes of women crowded round us, cheering and clapping and demanding an encore. The local male visitors did not share their wives’ and girlfriends’ enthusiasm. In fact, they were mightily pissed off: they had bribed, pleaded and made all that effort to get in there, only to find their women more interested in two loco gringos.
Chucho’s mother now launched into a solo of her own, a long litany of family woe. Unsure whether to laugh or cry at seeing her little granddaughter for the first time, she reminded no one in particular that she had already lost a son, a husband, a brother, a cousin and a daughter-in-law in the gangs. The way things were headed, she was likely to lose her other son. To cheer her up, Chucho told his mum all the right things: how he’d get out of the gang and go straight, how Ingrid and the kid would get out of prison and everything would be all right. None of us believed a blind word of this, least of all Chucho’s mother, but it helped make things better for the time being. It was like putting a Band-Aid on a broken arm.
The bad news for Chucho’s wife was that she was being held indefinitely on suspicion of conspiracy to murder. Which meant that she and the little girl might be in there for a very long time. Just as Ingrid was completing her sentence for possession of marijuana a new MS 13 prisoner had been brought in to Susaltepeque. There are cells for inmates, but most of the women find a bed space wherever they can in the large communal dormitories. In other words, there is no place to hide. The new girl was suspected of informing on fellow MS 13 gang members to the police so a group of women – allegedly including Ingrid – stabbed her to death.
As time went on I began to see that in El Salvador the middle class is still a work in progress. It is mainly the haves against the have-nots, except that there a lot of the have-nots not only have guns, they are only too ready and willing to use them. You hear people complaining about the British class system and recently social mobility seems to have gone into reverse, but given a choice between life in the UK and life in El Salvador, I’m for the pushy, competitive but law-abiding British middle classes every time.
Anxious to find something positive to say about El Salvador, my next stop was Granja Escuela, an up-country rehabilitation centre for female gang members. A former government research centre that had fallen on hard times, this was a low-rise, rambling series of buildings stuck out in the middle of the bush about two hours’ drive from the capital. A counterpart to mano dura, mano amiga (helping hand) is a ramshackle and ill-administered government scheme that aims to give fourteen women at a time the chance to quit the gangs and get back into mainstream society. The only place in El Salvador where 18 Street and MS 13 gangsters mingle in the same place, Granja Escuela offers a six-part course that includes basic education, manual skills, spiritual counselling, family support, a bit of a brush with the arts and some sport. It also offers a temporary refuge from the gangs. Rapidly sinking back into the rainforest from which it had risen, the place resounded to the calls of forest birds. Dozens of chickens scratched around and clucked in the lush green vegetation, there to provide the eggs that seemed to form the staple of most Salvadorean dishes.
When we showed up, the latest Granja Escuela intake were busy baking beautiful little biscuits and cakes for the bakery business they wanted to set up. But what had really pulled them into this place, I now learned, was the laser tattoo removal machine on the premises. It had been supplied by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which describes itself as ‘an independent agency that provides economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the United States’. The chance to get rid of their tattoos was the main reason the women were there.
All in their teens or early twenties, they seemed like bright, friendly, lively people, the kind you might hope to meet anywhere. Except, that is, for their eyes, which in every case held the same cold flat knowledge of killing and death as their male counterparts. In return for letting us film them, they’d told Marta Shaw they wanted only one thing – make-up. But it couldn’t be any old make-up; it had to be pancake theatrical-strength foundation that would cover just about anything. This was hard to come by in El Salvador, and at twenty dollars a pot not affordable. They also wanted make-up remover. Without really wondering why they might need all this stuff. We agreed to the deal.
Seated around one of the long tables, we got chatting in the big, friendly kitchen where they baked their cakes and biscuits. When I was a kid, my mum ran a small hairdressing salon, so I grew up liking the company of women. One after another, while mosquitoes the size of small birds buzzed around us looking for an opportunity to suck our blood, the gang women told me their stories. Of the thirteen girls who had started this particular course six weeks previously, only eleven were still alive. One had accidentally electrocuted herself – she’d touched a power cable with a metal pole, trying to knock down some mangoes in the grounds. The other had been shot dead by a rival gang when she went back home to see her family for the weekend.
It turned out that Granja Escuela only offers refuge during the week – come Friday the women have to go back to the clicas. Of the eleven, two had been deported from Los Angeles while the rest had grown up in San Salvador. Most of them had babies and young children in tow. As long as they were up here in the jungle they were relatively safe. The minute they set foot back in the clicas they risked death and retribution from their respective gangs – not least for cooperating with the hated government.
The first woman I spoke to, ‘Angela’, told me how as a girl of fifteen she’d been cornered one morning and told she had to join the gang. She refused. Eighteen women set about her, slapping, punching and kicking her to the ground. After this castigo, or punishment, the men arrived. They held Angela down and took turns raping her. When the men had finished, the women forcibly tattooed Angela, covering the skin of her forehead and cheeks with big crudely drawn versions of the 18 Street logo. Since then Angela had been held as the gang’s common property, subject to any kind of abuse by any 18 Street gang member at any time. Looking into her eyes as we talked, I could see the depth and strength of the misery and utter devastation this had caused this young woman. Without warning Angela began to cry, in silence and without changing her expression. Inside, where it counted, Angela was broken.
One woman showed me her disfigured arm – she had tried to remove her gang tattoo with a piece of molten plastic and a knife. Even if girls did agree to join the gang, she said, and chose a beating instead of the train at initiation, the men would still rape them. With the police only entering the clicas in overpowering force and at widely spaced intervals, the only law was the law of the jungle.
Once in the gang, these women had to do the same jobs as the men, including armed robbery, extortion and assassination. How did she feel about committing murder? The woman shrugged. ‘A mission is a mission. It has to be done. If you don’t do the mission, they shoot you.’
‘Have you killed anyone?’
She giggled. ‘Yes. Perhaps many times.’
This invited the question, so I asked it: Who had killed someone? ‘Can you put your hands up?’
One by one, they ra
ised their hands. I was in a room full of murderers. Again. For me this was the defining moment of my time in El Salvador. The way this twenty-four-year-old woman admitted to murder was so matter of fact, and so chilling.
Many bizarre things happened while we were in this strange place. The women didn’t just tell tales of horror from the clicas; they joked, they messed about. Stuck out here in the wilds, having visitors, especially new male visitors, was a bit of a treat for them. But what impressed me most about these women was that they were so honest, so frank and so direct. They told the truth.
Even with all that I had learned, I was totally unprepared for what happened next. As if at an unspoken signal, each of the women in the room reached for the make-up remover we had bought for them. The first took a small ball of cotton wool. Slowly she began swabbing her face. Underneath the thick make-up they had applied before we showed up, their faces were a mass of black glaring tattoos. Surely no laser machine in the world had a chance in hell of removing them. In a moment these funny and charming women had become different people: the bad people you fear on sight, criminals you would go a long way to avoid. In the warmth of our conversation I had forgotten where these women came from and why they were there.
Though I tried, it was impossible to hide the way I felt. And as they watched my own expression change, their faces fell too. All the fun and life that had been in them just a moment before bled away. As I was getting ready to leave, a woman who had been forced to join 18 Street came up to me. Putting a finger to the skin of her cheeks, she said, ‘They put a gun in my mouth while they did this.’
There were two other sad things about the Granja Escuela project. The first was that the tattoo removal machine was broken and no one knew how to fix it. The second that if the El Salvador government – or for that matter USAID – set up a series of similar full-time residential programmes with removal machines that actually worked, they could probably reduce gang numbers significantly. A lot of people, not just the women, want to get out. The facial tattoos mean they never can.
As a way of saying thank you, I left money for enough make-up to last them six months. It seemed like the least I could do. In El Salvador an eighteen-dollar bottle of make-up can save your life. As we made our way back towards the car park, Angela stopped me with a tug on the sleeve. ‘Sir,’ she said in Spanish, ‘I want to speak to you.’ Calling for Marta to translate, I waited. Very simply, Angela said, ‘Thank you for treating us like women.’ I turned and walked along the path to our vehicle. El Salvador is a country that continually tugs at your heart strings.
As we had learned on our first day in the country, you don’t have to go very far in El Salvador to come across a dead body. On the way back to town we spotted more police activity by the roadside and again stopped. Making our way up a dirt track, we came across a cordoned-off crime scene. Officers were photographing two bodies. The men’s shoes had been taken off, but they still had their socks on. The investigating coroner had just arrived.
There were signs of torture on the half-naked bodies, particularly the small grey-black marks of cigarette burns. Shot through the forehead, a bullet had blown off the back of the first man’s skull. Black flies were busy in the red and grey mess. He had been twenty years old. A second corpse, his twenty-one-year-old brother, had already been bagged up and placed in the back of a flatbed truck. He too had been tortured after going missing the night before. The police told me the brothers had run a bus service for the local people, trying to make their way in life with one ancient bus that they operated on a shoestring. It had been hard for them to make money, he said, not least because they had been paying the 18 Street gang a ‘toll’ for using a section of road.
The evening before the killings, a group of 18 Street members had come calling to demand yet more money. The brothers had refused to pay the increased toll for the simple reason they could not afford it. That night they had been abducted, tortured and then killed. Both made to kneel, one brother had been forced to watch as the gang tortured and then shot the second, before he was tortured and shot in his turn.
The murdered men’s mother was there. She was screaming. It was a high-pitched wail, the kind you only ever hear at the scene of car crashes or at funerals, like an animal losing its cubs. I felt sick. It was one of the very few times in the series I wanted the camera to stop. I asked Andy to turn it off. He quite rightly ignored me – rightly, because showing the reality of what gangs can do was what we were there for. We didn’t film as much as we might have done.
The words rang in my head: ‘A mission is a mission.’ These two innocent, hard-working kids, cut down for the sake of a few bucks a week. A mother’s life destroyed. After the bodies had been removed we walked up to where the brothers had spent their last moments on earth. The imprint of their bodies and some of the blood, brains and skull where they had died, eye to eye, were still there on the grass.
Just before we left for the airport, we heard that Groupie had gone into hiding. Word was he had shot dead his sister, the very sister he had lived with all his life and who had helped raise him. He thought she was going out with an 18 Street member. Groupie had gone after the 18 Street guy and mistakenly shot his sister. Now his own gang were out to kill him.
We also heard that Chucho had allegedly been involved in the group rape of a female minor.
On the road out we passed a strange sculpture. A figure symbolizing justice had been placed beside the road. Our local driver called her the ‘lady with the big boobies’. She was naked and had large breasts. In one hand she held the sword of justice, in the other she was meant to have the scales. But someone probably with first-hand experience of El Salvador’s judicial system had removed them. For me it just about summed up the country’s sense of humour.
Chucho, Joker and Groupie are all in prison, serving long sentences.
4. St Louis
This is a sad thing to say, but if you were new to the city of St Louis and wanted to make some money, you could do a lot worse than go into the soft toy trade. Wherever I went in the poor parts of the city, I saw stuffed bears tied to street signs, lamp posts and palings. In Europe we generally say it with flowers, but here every time a young gangster dies his relatives and friends fix a fluffy toy – usually a brightly coloured bear – near the spot where he or she fell. Since gang-bangers are shot, stabbed and otherwise murdered all too often in the city of St Louis, there’s a brisk market in mementos. Why fluffy toys? Because so many of those who die are still teenagers – kids snatched from their families before they have even had time to grow up. Too young to vote, too young to drink, but not too young to fall to a volley of drive-by bullets or in a gang ambush. Like so many modern totems, the lamp post tributes are sad statements of loss – the loss of a city’s young men and women to gang violence.
A quick chat with the local police in the shape of Sergeant Carlos Ross, head of the St Louis police department’s gang unit, made it painfully clear that beautiful, laid-back St Louis is one of the most dangerous cities in the US. The Bloods and the Crips have been at war in its northern and eastern districts for longer than twenty years; now, I learned from Sergeant Ross, both gangs are trying to expand south.
Styling itself the Gateway to the West, St Louis is a vast city that curls languidly along the west bank of the mighty Mississippi. Steaming hot in summer – when we were there – and freezing cold in winter, a better name for it these days might be Gateway to the Gangs. There have always been gangs in St Louis – Jesse James operated not too far away in Clay County, Missouri, and there were some fearsome Irish and Italian gangs bootlegging here during the Prohibition years.
But modern mobsters are much deadlier than the early models – not least because the city is awash with firearms. Assault rifles, sub-machine guns, shotguns and automatic pistols are two a penny, and they are all far more accurate – and much more reliable – than weapons were in the days of the Wild West. They also have a much higher rate of fire and even the ammo’s better.
The St Louis authorities estimate that some 8,000 gangsters are currently at large in the greater metropolitan area, which means the gangs are much bigger and more widespread than they used to be.
This isn’t going to win me many Missourian friends, but in St Louis, despite the fact that black–white relations generally in the US are way better than they were, the sense of racial division struck me hard. The more affluent, mainly white suburbs are in the south; the poorer, and this means the mainly black areas, are to the north and east. When I asked them about this, most locals looked at their shoes for a couple of seconds and then admitted it was true. The unofficial dividing line is the lively Delmar Boulevard, with its trendy shops and top restaurants and clubs. It slices through the city from east to west, marking a kind of demilitarized zone between rich and poor.
The downtown area is a nice confection of eighteenth-century French and nineteenth-century Victorian architecture, some of it restored, some ‘re-created’. Hardly anybody in the city speaks French any more, but for sentimental and touristic reasons the people cling to the city’s heritage as a French colonial trading centre. What they don’t cling to and would like to forget is the disaster that hit the US motor manufacturing trade towards the end of the last millennium. The city’s manufacturing industry collapsed. Employing thousands of mainly blue-collar workers, the engineering plants that built the machines that kept the vehicles rolling off the production lines in Detroit all closed down in the space of a few years. Better-built, more fuel-efficient foreign cars were grabbing the market from American gas-guzzler cars and trucks. As the plants closed, the jobs and the people went with them: thousands moved out to seek work elsewhere, triggering a 40 per cent fall in the city’s population between 1960 and 2000. The flight gave rise to jobless urban blight, with empty homes rotting where they stood.