This piece on the origins of MS-13 was published by El Faro in Spanish in August 2012. Read chapter two here.
It’s not that the young palabrero from Fulton was much of a peacemaker. In fact, he did not earn the nickname Satan for promoting truces with his enemies.
He was leader of the Mara Salvatrucha clique in the San Fernando Valley, which borders the city of Los Angeles.
He had received elite training from the Salvadoran army; it was precisely these military skills which turned him, after just one year, into leader of one of the most powerful Mara Salvatrucha cliques in the United States — no small feat. Within gang protocols, almost nobody goes from being a wriggling sack on the floor, during initiation rites known as el brinco (the jump), to being the one who decides who is a punching bag and who is not.
He knew how to load and unload handguns and rifles, strategies for withdrawal, how to conduct an ambush, the purpose of small units, and the importance of holding onto certain territories. Probably, he knew how to kill. Satan knew all about war.
Born Ernesto Deras, Satan was no Hollywood-style Rambo, except for perhaps his voice — tired-sounding, almost a whisper, making him seem infinitely sad. And except for the fact that those who know him say they’ve never heard him shout, nor cackle with laughter. And his Green Beret training, which he received from U.S. advisors as part of a rapid response battalion during the civil war in El Salvador.
Aside from that, Ernesto could have been the cliché Salvadoran migrant who arrived in Los Angeles in 1990; a skinny twenty-something, tough like the branch of a guava tree, clean-shaven and shy. He was fleeing civil war and had found his way into the United States, stealthy as a nocturnal animal.
It’s worth repeating: Ernesto was Satan, and he was not fond of making peace with his enemies.
So in 1993, when a pair of mediators tried to convince him to attend peace meetings, they had to mention the unmentionable: they told him it had been given the go-ahead by the Mexican Mafia — men who, in those walks of life, it’s better not to cross.
* * *
The gang that Satan joined in 1990 was a group of outcasts.
When Salvadorans arrived en masse to California at the end of the 1970s and start of the 1980s seeking refuge from the horrors ravaging their homelands, Mexicans and their descendants, known as Chicanos, had decades of gang organization behind them, as a way of protecting themselves from white scorn. They were not ready for new arrivals to receive the kind of welcome they never got.
So Salvadorans established their own gang in order to face Black, Mexican, and their descendants’ scorn. It’s not easy being the new kid on the block who hopes others will invite you to play, even if the game in question is war.
As in all ecosystems, survival requires learning the pecking order. When the Mara Salvatrucha appeared, it had been clear in southern California for some time that any gang could be targeted by another, and at the top of the food chain there was only the Mafia, alone and insatiable, the final voice in deciding who could play.
The Mara Salvatrucha, for example, could not.
The clique that Satan began to lead in 1991, known as the Fultons, was the only Mara Salvatrucha cell throughout the San Fernando Valley, south-eastern California, where at least 75 other gangs were at war at the time. For them, the Mara were a common enemy.
The Fultons knew they were everyone’s prey, which made them fierce, standoffish, and extremely violent. Years as a common enemy taught them not to trust anyone; this is why in 1993, when Satan was approached by two men in order to invite him to a potential trap, the young man’s military instincts told him to have an escape plan, or at least a plan which —if needed— would mean that the Fulton homies wouldn’t be the only ones killed that day.
* * *
At this point in the story, all we’ll say of former Kickboxing champion William “Blinky” Rodríguez, and his business partner Big D, is that the two childhood friends, born-again Christians, had embarked on a quest that may seem like the foolish delusion of a zealot: a peace agreement between all the gangs in the San Fernando Valley.
It might sound far-fetched, if it weren’t for the fact that they had been given the green light from the Mafia; this guaranteed the crusaders, at a minimum, the attention of every gang leader.
On the day of Halloween 1993, the two mediators managed to gather dozens of gangs together for the first time in Pacoima Park, in one of the districts of San Fernando Valley. No violence broke out. They spoke to them about God, inviting them to reach out and settle their conflicts through dialogue. And that is what happened; the California press watched in surprise as what had previously been thought impossible unfolded right in front of their cameras. Subsequent meetings took place every Sunday. As was expected, the Mara Salvatrucha were some of the last to be invited.
Satan knew what was going on, and he also knew that the invitation would not take long to reach him:
“They came looking for me. I was interested, so I told them we’d go. Not to make peace, but we would go, because if we didn’t they’d say we were chickening out. I said I’d go the next Sunday, but they told me to wait so that they could lay the groundwork. They told me they were going to prepare the others for the Maras’ arrival. We had a meeting and I told the homeboys: ‘it seems like the Señores are on top of things, but bring any weapons you might need because we’re going to see the enemy face to face, we’re going into the lion’s den’. We were the last to get to Pacoima park. 30 of us went in and about 10 stayed outside, armed. They knew what they had to do if anything happened, whether we came out or not.”
“There were reporters there, and the park was full of gang members. They all got up. Some of them started looking for a fight, but nothing happened. When the reporters realized it was the Mara who were arriving they ran out to look for us. But the homeboys told them to get lost, and didn’t give them interviews or let them take photos. One of the organizers came over to ask me to take off my cap to show respect.”
To make it clear who they were speaking to, Satan had dressed for the occasion: baggy cholo clothes, and a cap that said “Fuck y’all”. The Fulton palabrerowent into the park looking for trouble, and the ex-kickboxing champion, Blinky Rodríguez, feared that the cap would lead to all out war. He asked Satan, in the most polite way he knew how, to take it off to show his enemies respect. Satan was unperturbed, and took off the hat. That was the Mara Salvatrucha’s first gesture toward peace.
The Last Migrants
There are those who believe that the Mara Salvatrucha were born on “13th Street,” in south-east Los Angeles. The former president of El Salvador Mauricio Funes even made this claim in public without a hint of embarrassment. The problem is that the street doesn’t exist. In its place, in this city of star-studded avenues and streets plagued with gangs, is the spotless Pico Boulevard, a showcase for Latino businesses running parallel to 12th Street, which heads northwards towards the now revitalized Downtown, and to 14th Street, which disappears and reappears from maps one block to the south.
There are also those who think that the Mara Salvatrucha emerged from a split in the 18th Street Gang. Such things do happen, in the gangs’ world of fragile loyalties and outsized promises of street glory: 18th Street themselves were born at the end of the 1940s as the result of a split from the veteran Clanton 14 Gang, who have roamed the city streets since the 1920s, probably the oldest Latino gang still in existence in California.
But the MS didn’t come from the 18th Street Gang. The 13 is in fact an homage to bigger criminal forces, to the Señores, the Mexican Mafia who rule southern California. It would take the MS some years to need, want, and deserve this friendship and those numbers.
In late 70s Los Angeles, the Mara Salvatrucha were just a bunch of scruffy teenagers and heavy metal fans. They were dubbed “stoners”, a translation of the word “rocker”, and because of the influence of The Rolling Stones. Like many other groups of youths —the Mid City Stoners, The Hole Stoners— they consumed rock and marijuana on the corners and in the parks of their neighborhoods.
None of the Mara Salvatrucha’s members were older than 18. Most were recent arrivals to the United States, their parents fleeing poverty in El Salvador. They were the last migrants to arrive, and none of them could yet claim even a shred of territory in that complex urban patchwork of African Americans, Mexicans, and Koreans.
Even so, today among the Mara Salvatrucha, to speak of the Stoners is to invoke the pure, the radical, the authentic. The Maras look back with the blurry gaze of oral history, and it is usually said that none of those pioneers are still alive. But there are still gang members who casually attest to having entered the game in those days, knowing the prestige that comes with such a claim. Hazy pasts proliferate amid the constant war waged for respect in gangs.
The Los Angeles police remember the existence of groups of Mara Salvatrucha Stoners in 1975. Researchers such as Tom Ward, at the University of California, have confirmed the formation of small cliques or nuclei of MS stoners in 1978.
The location of their first headquarters cannot be said for certain, but some veteran members in Los Angeles say that at the end of the 70s a dozen Stoners began to regularly meet in the Seven Eleven that still stands at the intersection of Westmoreland Avenue and James M. Wood Street. The Seven Eleven was probably the first Mara Salvatrucha clique. Nowadays, in Los Angeles and El Salvador, there are still gang members who were initiated years later and belong to the Seven Eleven.
The Mara Salvatrucha felt demonized. They wore tight jeans, ripped at the knees, black band shirts with cover art from ACDC, Led Zeppelin, and Kiss. Their long hair exuded rebellion. They got into fights with rival groups, stole tape decks from cars, and demanded respect at schools like Berendo Middle School, four blocks from the intersection of Normandie Avenue and Pico Boulevard. Some were even accused of Satanism when they sang the Judas Priest song, Hell Bent for Leather. But it only made them stronger, more ambitious, ready to go to the next show and raise a fist with devil’s horns, as was all the rage.
* * *
In the spring of 1984, with the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony drawing near, the Los Angeles mayor decided to rid the streets of everything, and everyone, who might tarnish this demonstration of sporting prowess, and social superiority of the West against the Soviet enemy.
In the midst of the Cold War, four years after the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games, Ronald Reagan not only wanted the Los Angeles Olympics to be the first in history organized by a private corporation for profit, but also a showcase for the kind of social harmony that only the capitalist model could provide.
With the planetary threat of nuclear weapons, Los Angeles had to be a safe city. And this safety meant purging the gangs of south-central and west Los Angeles from the streets, even if just for a few weeks. The streets were militarized. There were raids and planned mass arrests. The usual suspects were imprisoned. The heads of the city’s main gangs —Latino, Black and Asian— were among them.
Chele was already a member of the Mara Salvatrucha at this point, and she dressed as a Stoner. Although she was born in El Salvador, she was raised in Los Angeles. As an 8 year old she put up with other girls making fun of her because she didn’t know how to play Four Corners, a typical children’s game in the United States — despite the fact she spoke better English than Spanish. At 11 a school friend tried to convince her to join 18th Street, but she didn’t want to. When she was 13, tired of being beaten up and feeling trapped by the Chicano gangs at school, she joined the Mara.
“For the 1984 Olympics the police took all the heavy-duty Cholos from the big gangs, and the Mara filled the void,” she recalls.
“Why only the Mara?”
“It wasn’t just the Mara. Throughout all of Los Angeles the number of gangs increased, and more people joined.”
Left without leaders, many cliques of Angeleno gangs went through violent internal battles in 84 and 85 to redefine their leadership. The Mara were still strangers to internal battles for a power they didn’t yet have, and they dedicated themselves purely to growth through attracting ever-younger Salvadorans who were arriving in Los Angeles with their families, escaping civil war. They fought for territory with their fists and knives.
“Sam the Eagle —the Olympic mascot for those games— was responsible for what the Mara is today,” Chele says, laughing.
The details of how the Mara began to wrestle territory from the Chicano gangs’ grip depend on who you’re talking to. Today Los Angeles gang members tell you what they want to remember, or what they heard from the veteran homeboys: that, armed with youth and Salvadoran rage, they fiercely took over street corners from men who were less crazy, less tenacious, or simply less manly.
But there are less epic versions. One veteran of the Playboys gang says, for example, that in the early 80s El Flaco, palabrero of the Playboys clique Normandie Locos, who controlled the intersection of Normandie Avenue and 18th street, had to be operated on multiple times after he was shot in the back and seriously injured. A few months later, he was discharged from hospital, now wheelchair-bound, but his homeboys had scattered across the city and his clique had fallen apart. The Mara Salvatrucha, who had previously been subordinate to the Playboys, a guest in their territory, inherited this now-ownerless intersection. They even took the name of the disappeared Playboys clique, to form one of the most powerful cliques of their own: the Normandie Locos Salvatrucha.
For the Salvatrucha these were months of rapid growth and change. People who joined the Mara in the second half of the 80s say that most of the Chicano gangs did not accept the new arrivals and subjected them to constant harassment. They made it clear they were enemies — as if by discriminating against new arrivals, new migrants, they might themselves earn the status of non-immigrants. As if you could become an American through discriminating like one.
In the prisons and on the streets the Mara were ridiculed for using words like cipote, cerote, vergo, and mara, which the Chicanos considered vulgar. But in reclaiming their origins they found a means of consolidating themselves. Alone, they became more united. Beaten, they grew stronger. The Mara Salvatrucha were not popular, but they were becoming notorious. Soon their fame for brutality grew. While other groups fought with chains and knives, the MS began using machetes; former Playboys members say they have met Maras who armed themselves with axes.
With some of their members arrested and sent to juvenile prison for petty crime, their identity as metalheads was taking a backseat, while their street gang identity took shape. In prison they were defenseless and isolated; forced to lose their long hair and confronted by numerous enemy groups, the Salvatruchas began to learn how the prison codes of southern California worked. They realized they would need to adopt the cholo aesthetic to blend in with the crowd.
If in the early years the streets were relatively clear for the Salvatrucha to make their way, prisons became the real place where these new migrants were socialized. Like a meat processor that turns people into what the system says they are, prison is where the Mara learnt the ways of California gangs.
If the system tells you you’re the same as the rest, a Latino gang member, you accept that and dress like what they’ve convinced you that you are: a Latino gang member.
By 1985 most MS cliques had left the Stoner aesthetic, identity, and name behind. Over the following years petty drug dealing became routine, as did extortion of local dealers. It made no sense to control an area if there was no economic gain. Competition with other gangs meant needing to beat them in every sense: presence, control, violence… Money. Chele remembers how homies who came out of prison began teaching new members the arts of intimidation and control, studied through long conversations inside. She herself remembers how after a short stint in prison, she set about getting her clique in order. According to her, they were losing money from only demanding payment from drug dealers once a week.
“The homie in charge said to me: “You think you know things ‘cause you’ve done time. You got a better idea?” and I said to him: ‘Yeah man, the rent comes due every day. And also, the dealers see you coming from a mile off with that red truck. They hide from you and that’s why you get nothing.’”
“Did you explain the new rules to the dealers?”
“They already knew the score. But we let them decide: if they wanted to sell drugs in the gang territory they should pay rent, or go somewhere else. There should always be more than one option; without that people have no free will, let’s say. And free will is what makes us human, not animals.”
“Weren’t there people who refused to pay daily?”
“There always are, but if someone opens an unregistered business, sooner or later the tax collectors will come for your payment. Of course there had to be some kind of exemplary punishment, like how a pimp might hit a prostitute to set an example, or a nun in an orphanage beat an orphan’s hands with the Bible… Believe me, everything in gangs is a reflection of a society.”
“Did the Mara kill anyone to set an example?”
“The police could tell you that. Violence is bad for business, but no-one said those fools had an MBA.”
The Mara had kept the metalheads’ symbol of devil horns, which the Salvatruchas now call “The Claw”. But there was no time left to enjoy their adolescence; they were a fully-grown gang now. There were at least 12 cliques in west-central Los Angeles; the main ones were the Normandies, the Hollywoods, the Leewards and the Westerns.
In the neighboring San Fernando Valley they had cultivated another clique, the Fultons, a group of defiant hotheads who grew rapidly and gained respect among their peers. It was the clique that, years later, Ernesto Deras —Satan— would come to lead.
The Salvatrucha had even had their first martyr, murdered that same year, 1985, in the parking lot behind the Seven Eleven on James M. Wood Street. In this world, killing someone is a kind of acceptance, a way to make clear you consider yourself part of the game, the battle for territory. The first member killed in the gang war still had a Stoner nickname: Black Sabbath.
A Trip through Gangland
The Curacao building will never feature in any architectural magazine. Or at least, not in any that are about beautiful or decorative constructions. It’s a huge cement monster with dark windows, with the same charm as the statue of a coup leader that stands in the middle of the Pico Union neighborhood, on the southern border of West Side Los Angeles.
Its only virtue —at least, if you don’t have to spend eight hours a day inside— is the unique smell wafting into the lower floors from a nearby Pollo Campero. This Guatemalan fried chicken chain has become the focus of Salvadorans’ nostalgic appetites; this scent of the left-behind homeland may lightly coat the building with tenderness.
Downtown Los Angeles is still unable to shake its bad reputation from the 80s and 90s. It was seen as an area full of lowlives and nerdowells; it conjured images of homeless Black vagrants pushing shop carts full of bin bags that smelled even worse than they did; of hordes of crazed Latinos killing each other on any filthy street corner; a place of drug dealing, robberies, and shootouts. In other words, the gringos assumed it to be a place full of illegal immigrants — and they were right.
As new waves of migration came, neighborhoods with high numbers of undocumented people began to spill towards the periphery of Downtown, sweeping along with them the angry sound of the arrival of the dispossessed. One of these locations is the Pico Union neighborhood, which was the focus of Salvadoran immigration at the time. It was also the site of the Curacao building, with its Pollo Campero scent.
On the seventh floor, in the middle of a corridor of cramped offices with one bathroom, is the headquarters of United Homies, overseen by a short, Salvadoran man with a paunch, called Alex Sánchez.
Alex Sánchez’s unofficial resume would go something like this: He came to the United States aged seven, fleeing civil war. He joined the Mara Salvatrucha young, and claims to have Stoner ancestry. He was deported to El Salvador in 1994. He came to the United States again illegally a year later in order to establish the organization for youth prevention and social reintegration that he still runs today.
Homies United are highly respected in Los Angeles, something that their Salvadoran counterpart has lost in recent years.
In 2002 Alex Sánchez managed to convince an American court that his life was endangered in El Salvador because of his gang past, becoming one of the few cases of humanitarian asylum granted by the Bush administration. But he was caught up in a 2009 FBI operation against the MS: Alex was taken from his home and accused of leading a double life between gang rehabilitation and as a Mara leader. Together with 24 other people, he was accused of a long list of crimes including murder and conspiracy to murder. He remained in prison for two years, and after a huge mobilization by local activists he was freed under the condition that he would not leave the state of California, would not drink and would have no relations with —including speaking to— members of the Mara Salvatrucha.
It’s worth mentioning that after speaking to public administration employees, active and retired gang members, academic researchers, and experts, we found no-one in Los Angeles who believed Alex Sánchez to be guilty of these charges. He tells whoever will listen that he was the victim of a vengeful police plot.
To sum up, the life of Alex Sánchez has been traversed, like a scar across a face, by gangs; when we asked him to explain something important about that world, he told us the following:
“The gang world is a game where, from the moment of your initiation, you authorize the enemy to kill you the moment they see you, just for being from the gang you’re from. The truth is that being a gang member is essentially an act of self-destruction.”
Alex left the gang ten years ago. In his words, ten years ago he stopped committing suicide daily.
“Why do you think Latino gangs kill each other? Look into the face of a Mexican, a Salvadoran, a Honduran, a Guatemalan. What do you see? The same skin color, the same Aztec or Mayan features. You don’t see Latino gangs killing white people, nor fighting for territory with African American gangs, despite being enemies.”
“What do you mean to say?”
“That gang violence is born from the desire to be something other than yourself. It’s a struggle against yourself, against your reflection.”
* * *
In the 80s, the clearest reflection of the Mara Salvatrucha were the veteran gang 18, who had been around for 30 years. While other gangs with Chicano roots rejected non-Mexican migrants, or sometimes even refused a welcome to migrants born in Mexico, clinging solely to the Chicano flag, 18th Street defined themselves as a gang open to Latino migrants from a range of places. This allowed them to rapidly become one of the biggest gangs in Los Angeles. Even today their members refer to 18 as “el grandote” (the big one).
The geographical overlap between cliques from both gangs, the 18’s slightly paternalistic view of the recent arrivals and the strong presence of Salvadorans in their ranks created an easy affinity between the 18 and the Mara Salvatrucha. The two gangs were fellow travelers; their members went to the same parties and fought together against common adversaries.
Some members of the 18 with Salvadoran blood held a secret admiration for the Salvatrucha identity, who claimed they were different from the rest. They would think: if there had been a Salvadoran gang like the MS when I arrived, I wouldn’t be in the 18 now.
For years many had hidden —and continued to hide— that they were from San Julián, Chinameca, or Santa Rosa de Lima, in order to join gangs like the Playboys. Others, even in the pluralistic 18, had masked their accent to fit in and not be considered inferior. The Salvatruchas didn’t force themselves to talk like Chicanos, nor renounce their origins, present in the name of their gang.
A former gang member from 18 remembers that in the early 80s she regularly went to the same parties as MS members. As a joke she would order them to cut their hair, dress better, and leave behind their slacker aesthetic with their ripped trousers.
“I used to tell them they smelled bad, and if any of them tried to win me over I’d say he shouldn’t eventhinkthat I was going to get together with one of them. But we were allies, and even though girls from 18 were forbidden to go out with guys from other neighborhoods, various of my homegirls ended up in relationships with homies from the MS.”
The barriers between both gangs were as porous as human skin. Even now that the MS and 18 are deadly rivals, there are cases of 18 members who form families with girls with MS tattoos, and vice versa. In those days it was normal to swap glances. Affection was tolerated.
Cliques from both gangs came to share territory. The MS from Leeward and the 18 from Shatto Park even fought for a neighborhood together, and would make a hand gesture which merged the E from Eighteenth Street and the devil horns of the young MS. The Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 together on one hand in a gesture that united what in gangs usually provokes the saying: kill or be killed.
If the Mara Salvatrucha ever had a brother in Los Angeles, it was 18th Street. Maybe that’s why the two gangs hold their enmity above those they maintain with other street groups. Hate is always deeper when you have loved, when you have been close, when the feeling of betrayal hides a more intimate pain: the shame of having trusted.
* * *
Alex Sánchez learnt the rules of primal hate the hard way, as a boy recently arrived in a jungle where the rules were already set: if your accent and words sound weird, you're the fool — unless you have the balls to fight and draw a line.
When he was eight years old he carried out his first beating: A Chicanito had broken one of his paper airplanes. He was suspended from school, but his father had two jobs and his mother worked full-time in a factory. In any case, neither of them spoke English, so when the news arrived from the school he himself signed it. Problem solved.
Over the years his Salvadoran accent faded. He learnt to disappear, to camouflage, to feel that what he inherited from his parents was a burden: a shitty accent, ridiculous words, a country that was just a vague shadow bent on pursuing him. Over time he discovered he wasn’t the only Salvadoran who went through life disguised as a Chicano; there were other young men who had managed to slip through into the few gangs who allowed people of dubious origins to join, like Eighteenth Street or the Playboys.
Until he met Cuyo.
Alex was 14 years old when Cuyo introduced him to the Mara Salvatrucha, a group of teenagers. The word ‘gang’ still didn’t fit, like when children dress up to play in the ties and shoes of adults. But for Alex Sánchez, the group of youths shone true, and was welcoming: they spoke in their natural voices, a handful of Salvadoran kids standing up to the world of the Chicanos and winning the right to be there, to raise their flag without hiding from anyone. Of course, he joined. Soon he, himself, was putting together the first child cliques with students from Berendo Middle School, surrounded by the streets Berendo and Catalina. He was part of the Catalinos Locos clique who had to join a bigger gang, the Normandies, once they found themselves in conflict with other gangs. In the Normandies there were a couple of boys a few years older than him.
“Alex, how did the war against 18th Street start?”
“These first MS cliques were defending themselves against other gangs in the area, but there was always a friendship with the 18. 18 came from before, and for many, before the MS existed the 18 was the only gang who would accept Central American immigrants. So they already had Salvadoran gang members. They kept up relations with the 18 for many years. Sometimes problems happen because the guys here start to fight, then you start having disagreements, misunderstandings, and from one fight an enmity develops. Someone ends up dead, and that’s where it all starts.
“But, how did the war start?”
“They had a close relationship with the 18.”
“Close?”
“The 18 and MS had a lot of enemies and friends in common, with some exceptions. For example, the Easy Riders gang who always got along well with the MS but not with the 18. But in general we would defend ourselves together, the MS and the 18. And sometimes in prisons we would defend ourselves against other gangs. But the problem was that there was a clique in the MS called the King Boulevard Locos, and that was where the fight began.”
“What happened? Did an 18 come and kill them?”
“No… Well, no because they… It seems like what happened was there was a fight over a girl, and the guy lost the fight, the guy from 18, and he wasn’t satisfied…”
“Was that in the street?”
“It was in an alleyway, right where the MS used to meet between King Boulevard and Normandie.”
(Writes in notebook) “Bet-wee-n Ki-ng Bo-u-le-vard and Nor-man-die.”
“Look, if you want we can go see it.”
* * *
We leave the Curacao building in the compact, recently-rented Mazda, with Alex Sánchez as copilot. We go down West Olympic Boulevard, which connects Downtown with the West Side. We carry on until Alvarado street and turn left. We pass the intersection with Pico Boulevard, legendary in gang lore. Right on the intersection there is a very well-to-do restaurant, which at first seems like a branch of any American fast-food chain, with pupusería in big red letters.
We carry on down Alvarado Street until it becomes Hoover, which runs parallel to Bonnie Brea Street; we cross Venice Boulevard —at the intersection is another ostentatious pupusería— and over to the right onto the wide Washington Boulevard. The whole way we pass signs in Spanish, and with each lavandería, taquería or ventas de autos —no cars, no vehicles— Alex Sánchez announces, like a lottery, the names of the gang who claims each block: “Drifters”, “Playboys”, “Mid City”, “Harpies”, “Easy Riders”...
In the Angeleno ecosystem gangs have more than one concern. Territories are generally narrow, divided up by thin alleyways or, if you’re lucky, by boulevards or avenues that allow more certainty regarding who each sidewalk belongs to. Sometimes, two neighboring gangs put signs up on the same corner, with arrows facing opposite directions so that there is some clarity to the border. Other times —most times— they simply live amid potentially fatal disputes with their closest neighbors. The 18 aren’t always the MS’ main concern, and vice versa. They fight with whoever’s closest.
This mix of gangs have heterogeneous origins: some were car clubs, or a neighborhood American football association, or a graffiti crew… It’s estimated there are currently 300 Latino gangs in Los Angeles. More than 700 in southern California, which is without counting the Black gangs, Asian gangs, white gangs.
As we carry on down Washington Boulevard, 18th Street appears intermittently, running parallel. A traffic light forces us to stop alongside the vast Angelous Rosadale Cementery, where four of our guide’s brothers are buried. All four were Easy Riders. All four died in gang wars of the past. A blue sign just after the cemetery tells us that this wide street that crosses Washington Boulevard is Normandie Avenue. We’re in Mara Salvatrucha territory. We go down Normandie, which leads us to a residential area of quiet streets.
In the 80s and 90s real wars were fought here. Streets were signposted by their owners, and the youngest homeboys patrolled the streets with guns, ready to defend their territory from others who claimed it. There were two kinds of outsiders: people buying drugs, or enemies. In both cases one had to be ready to respond adequately.
This whole scenario changed with the introduction of laws known as ‘gang injunctions’, which still today prohibit three or more gang members known to the police to gather in the street. Police have powers to arrest, and the fine is one thousand dollars. On top of that, of course, is the risk of deportation. From the late 80s and more than ever during the second half of the 90s, gang injunction laws forced gangs to change their ways.
Nowadays, the streets of southeast Los Angeles appear as any other peaceful town, where residents walk tiny dogs and the elderly chat on the sidewalk. From time to time you see the initials of one or another clique tattooed onto a tree or, timidly, onto the ground. There are no gang members on street corners, but locals watch with distrust from the balconies.
Our journey through the streets belonging to various cliques is coming to an end. We leave Normandie to descend Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, where Alex Sánchez tells us to pause and turn into a narrow alleyway, where our small Mazda just fits. In Los Angeles it’s rare to come across an unsurfaced alleyway such as this one. Muddy puddles pock the ground and scrub bush grows at the foot of wooden fences along both sides. Some homeless people have built a plastic structure next to a wall where once was written “Rest in Peace Shaggy”. Here is where it all began.
Shaggy’s Revenge
The intersection of Normandie Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is the territory of a Mara clique, the Western Locos. And the long alleyway, just a few meters away but concealed, was the site of regular MS meetings. Still today, each house on the block has two floors with wooden doors, a garage, and a small garden backing onto the alley. They say the party, that night in late 1989, was in one of these houses.
In meetings like the one that night, members of the Salvatrucha and multiple 18 cliques would share beer and liquor while the scent of marijuana wafted through the air. People would come and go, and there was always someone new to meet amid the spider’s web of relations that made up the cliques across the width and breadth of all Los Angeles. Loud music echoed through neighboring houses: rock and hip-hop, broken up with classics by James & Bobby Purify, or Mary Wells. The 18 insisted on song requests from the 60s, and zoot suits, typical of Mexican pachuco style, worn with a sombrero and carefully coiffed hair. Their aesthetic reflected a real, old-school gang history, which they could claim because they had it.
The Salvatrucha were only starting to write theirs, so they lived in the present.
Nobody seems to remember the girl the fight was over, but most versions coincide in saying that that night the party was broken up with a fight between Shaggy, from Western, and a member of the 18 who ended up getting an UZI machine-gun and settling the argument in the alleyway, with bullets. The story is told with no elaboration, as if murders can happen any time, and memory has reduced events to the image of a gun being fired. As if there is no need to explain the explosion, because it is taken as understood that the party was covered in gunpowder. They say Shaggy’s body was left lying in the earth where today the homeless people make their bed.
But not even that is known for sure. The genesis of hate’s creed is muddled.
Twenty years ago, the American researcher Tom Ward began to ask members of both gangs how the war began. He has collected other testimonies of a machine-gunning from a moving car where MS members wanted to kill members of a rival gang, the Harpies, but mistakenly killed a member of the 18 who was among them. According to that version, the 18 asked MS for financial compensation for the death of their homeboy — a common gesture among gangs to demonstrate regret or ask for forgiveness. But the Mara did not want to pay. They saw it as a humiliation and criticized the 18 for allowing their members to meet with the Harpies, enemies of their friends.
In none of the versions does anyone say who fired the first shot. The name of the person who triggered the war between the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 has disappeared, even from rumor.
* * *
Alex Sánchez says that the night that Shaggy was killed he was with friends on his cancha, or turf, near the corner of Normandie and 8th, when someone came to break the news. “Everything’s going to kick off,” they told him.
It didn’t surprise him. In recent years, scuffles with the 18 had been increasingly frequent. They fought over businesses, personal feuds, and because the street breeds hate. But above all, the slow but constant migration of Salvadoran members of the 18, anxious to stop presenting as Chicanos, into the Salvatrucha ranks. At first it was tolerated, but it made the leaders of 18th Street increasingly uncomfortable to see their younger brother grow up; it was at their cost, and this made them angry.
“They felt that the Mara Salvatrucha were disrespecting them,” Alex Sánchez says.
And in the gangs’ world, when respect has gone there is nothing left to preserve, and any brotherhood vanishes. Once that symbolic dam has burst there is only the blunt and brutal language of violence.
The way Alex tells it, the night they killed Shaggy there were those who immediately proposed trying to make a deal, to stifle the echo of bullets already fired before they drowned out the sound of bullets fired in return.
“We said we should talk about what happened and try to find a solution. You couldn’t start a war like that, with those people, because… because you couldn’t.
“You won’t believe me, but in the Normandie we were different, because the Playboys were still around in the Normandie area. In those years my clique got along with the Playboys, even though they were enemies of the 18. And we kind of didn’t get along that well with the 18. But other cliques were really attached to them, and that was the relationship that had to be maintained.”
“And what did you do to resolve it?”
“Nothing. We were going to try but there was no time. The guys from Western and Shaggy’s close friends didn’t give us the chance — the next day there were already, like, four people dead.”
After what happened, it was easy to grease the wheels of vengeance. 18th Street and the Mara Salvatrucha were so close that each gang knew the other’s hiding places and where their members lived. Over the coming years when one enemy gave the green light, someone’s death sentence, there was always someone who knew how to find them. And the names of the newly dead made forgetting the first ones easier.
“Gang members don’t care about history. If they did, they would be at school studying it,” says Alex Sánchez. “I knew Shaggy. When they killed him he was more or less the same age as me, 17. I used to see him all the time, spending the afternoon in a Taco Bell near that alleyway with his girlfriend. But now almost no-one in the Mara remembers him. People come, people go… only legend is left.”
* * *
“Do you really think all that began over a woman?”
Chele is sitting on the terrace of a bar in San Salvador, her second eer in front of her. She gives a tired look, and repeats what she has told us before: people invent stories, they take the facts and dress them up. In the world of gangs, homies talk like they know everything but almost no-one really knows who or what happened in Mara history. Chele is a proud feminist and has pointed guns at the heads of men who disrespected her, but she tells us again that the war between the Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street began because of something more important than a girl’s affection.
“Well, that’s what they say: that the row began that night, and the next morning there were four dead,” we insisted.
“Yeah, but things didn’t happen overnight. They went way back. What happened was that around the day of the party three Salvadorans from the 18 had joined the Mara. But they hadn’t left the 18 first. And two of those had joined the Western Locos clique.”
“And they were at the party?”
“It seems like it. There was an argument about that, and that’s when the UZI came out. The bullets blew up Shaggy’s hand and they killed him. But it wasn’t planned. The next death wasn’t that night, it was a few days later, that same week.”
“Who was it?”
“Funny, from 18. Funny was going through Normandie territory and didn’t know what had happened. The Mara homies called him, kept him for hours in a house doing all kinds of things to him until they killed him.”
“To get revenge for Shaggy?”
“Yes. They went one by one. Now they’ve lost count. But it wasn’t over a woman.”
In a gang, a woman is an insignificant person. There are veteran female gang members in Los Angeles who say they’re respected in their neighborhood, treated as an equal, that their neighborhood is different from others… But in most Los Angeles gangs, and especially in their Central American counterparts, a woman is an unimportant, worthless person.
For years in Los Angeles, Mara Salvatrucha cliques like the Fultons —Satan’s clique— don’t initiate women as gang members, relegating them to a lower role. They fear that women are more likely to rat on their homies or cause internal conflicts. In El Salvador the 18 don’t accept women into their ranks either. Women are for logistical support, they collaborate on business, they’re partners to one or multiple gang members. But they have no vote nor say, nor do they have the prideful place that would warrant vengeance in the same way as when a homie is killed. Women are disposable.
There are seasoned exceptions. Like Chele herself, who gained and held onto respect in Los Angeles. Or like The Queen, an aggressive Mara Salvatrucha leader in Honduras to whom gang members from various countries attribute control of a large part of the drugs and arms business in San Pedro Sula. Women who are more men than men themselves. But that’s what they are: exceptions.
For that reason it seems strange, almost twisted, that members of both gangs in Los Angeles as in Central America— claim that the hate between the Mara Salvatrucha and the 18 started as a fight over a girl.
“The real reason is that they didn’t want Salvadorans from the 18 to join the Mara,” Chele insists. “They wanted us to forever be in the shadow of the dominant Hispanic group.”
“...”
“Do you really think someone would be tortured for hours because of an argument over a woman? That they would put a broomstick up someone’s ass, like they did with Funny, because of a woman? No, man… it was something more important than that.”
* * *
It changes nothing to know if this Helen of Troy of the Los Angeles streets, who unleashed war between MS and the 18, really existed. It doesn’t matter if she had a name that was forgotten. There are even gang members who say that Shaggy was not the first killed in the war; that a short while before, the 18 had killed another MS homie nicknamed Boxer. It doesn’t matter. Twenty-three years after the party in King Jr. alley, the bitterness between the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 no longer depends on who you recall.
Especially in Central America, where both gangs landed at the beginning of the 90s, when they already hated each other. There have been so many deaths —tens of thousands of them— that each gang member has their own motive for vengeance, and the boundaries and limits of what is considered ‘respect’ have become warped.
A former member of 18th Street says that in Mariona Prison in El Salvador, in 1995, there were IT classes for prisoners which had to be suspended because his former homeboys from the 18 were refusing to use computers whose operating system was MS DOS. And that’s not a joke. The poisonous fibers of the conflict are increasingly unpredictable and ravenous. One bad look can contain enough to kill someone, or a life may be so empty as to warrant trading on a bad word.
One veteran member of MS-13 in El Salvador, with more than fifteen years in the gang, remembers drinking with some homies in late 2011 when someone else joined the group. They offered him a drink and he turned it down, saying: ‘No, I don’t want to drink, I got really wasted (“una gran peda”) yesterday’. Most of the group reacted violently, to the extreme. One told him: ‘What do you mean, “una gran peda”? Only the chavalas (18th Street members described in feminine) use that word’.
“And they beat him. They killed him,” he says, with some repugnance. A decade ago he believed he was part of a brotherhood united by tradition and common enemies. But one homeboy used a word in the feminine gender and his brothers from the clique, his friends, called him a traitor and beat him to death. It disgusts him. But it does not seem to surprise him; in Salvadoran gangs, when someone dies in the name of a diffuse hate, with no origin, it is not surprising.
* * *
Alejandro Alvarado, 38, was a member of the 18. He’s Guatemalan, but he’s been in Los Angeles so long he struggles to speak Spanish. He’s been cooled off for years; he has put distance between himself, guns, and the streets. He works in Homies Unidos, like Alex Sánchez, trying to get other gang members tocool offas well. That’s what he talks about as he reluctantly eats a sandwich on the ground floor of the Curacao building; how to break the cycle of violence that gangs get you into.
We tell him how, in El Salvador, the Mara Salvatrucha and the 18 agreed a truce last March, promising not to kill each other. They have managed to achieve a drastic reduction, almost incredible, of homicide statistics. He doesn’t seem surprised. It seems like nothing we say or show to Alejandro Alvarado comes as a surprise. He speaks slowly and looks as if he is just minutes back from the exhausting journey of a lifetime.
“Well, you can reach an agreement, but you need there to be more people, too. What’s the point of peace if there are no resources, no alternatives, you know?”
“Of course.”
“There was a while here, too, around 1993, when they tried to make peace. You know, to not go around shooting each other, and all that. For a while it worked. But the old ways crept back, saying that it can’t be like that with enemies, and that there’ll always be something really deep inside that won’t let it continue. It’s as if the truces are a respite, like if you put glasses of water in the desert. Do you see what I’m saying? But if someone comes and takes those glasses of water away, you’re going to go back to the same thing, because your life depends on drinking water. The gang ends up being like the water that gives you life.”
“Has that peace already been broken?”
“Yeah, it’s already gone. Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s always someone who starts something. Because in the gangs, just because one person changes doesn’t mean everyone has to. I stopped drinking twelve years ago. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke — and I smoked my whole life. Two police officers killed my brother and cousin, and look, I don’t think now that every police officer is bad. I’m testimony to the fact that a person can change, even at their most extreme. But everyone has their point, their… you know, their checkpoint… where it’s like, this is as far as I can go.”
“So no-one can order you to cool off?”
“How? If you’re wounded, if they’ve treated you badly, violated you, harmed you physically and mentally? How are you going to accept all that, you know? It’s like saying to an alcoholic, “you can’t drink anymore”. As if! They’re going to carry on drinking. They’ll find a way to drink. You feel me?”
This piece, translated by Ali Sargent, is chapter one of El Faro’s 2012 special, “The Journey of the Mara Salvatrucha.” Read chapter two: “13, the Mark of the Mexican Mafia.”
