This second chapter on the split of MS-13 and 18th Street in Guatemala was published by El Faro in Spanish in November 2012. Read chapter two here.
The old L.A. prison codes were always a tight corset for Guatemala’s gangs. But in the 90s, when the paisas, or civilians, controlled the country’s prisons, closing ranks under a truce called El Sur seemed like the only way to survive.
The mass deportations of the first Bush administration were barely being felt in Guatemala: The gangs arriving from California had yet to take over the streets, and the few imprisoned cholos —as all gang members, without distinction of barrio, were called in those days— were treated like rare and dangerous animals to be tamed. And just in case they decided to show their teeth, the paisas made sure to keep them locked in separate cells and sectors, and under constant surveillance.
Anyone with tattoos who ended up in prison was subjected, without exception, to the humiliating grunt work of cleaning floors and bathrooms —talacha, in prison slang— and had to pay for everything inside, even for a place to sleep. Any hint of pride would be met with a beating. Gang members imprisoned at the time recall how indiscipline was often punished with torture: electric shocks, administered while the guards looked the other way. Challenging the authority of the paisa leadership could cost a person his life, in prisons where the daily counts of inmates —the tablas— often fell short, because the dead do not sleep in their cells.
Hence, El Sur, “The South,” and an acronym for Southern United Raza: an agreement still in force among Southern California’s gangs that prohibits bloodshed between Latinos in prison. It was a peace treaty imposed by the Mexican Mafia, the notorious La eMe (“the M”), serving as protection against Black and white rival gangs and involving a pact among enemies not to attack each other in any prison, nor within several miles of it.
In the streets, El Sur also forbids killing children, raping women, or attacking an enemy in the presence of his family. Both inside and outside the borders of the United States, the gangs that uphold this code of honor are called Sureños.
By 2002, Guatemala’s Sureños had become a little stronger and a lot more fed up. They decided to rebel against the paisas. In the prisons and in the streets, they formed ruedas sureñas —leadership councils, or “southern circles”— that convened one to two representatives from each of the numerous California gangs already present in the country: White Fence, Chapines 13, Eleventh Street, Lenux, Harpies, Play Boys... and of course, the Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street, which were much larger than the others. Enemies, united to command a single army and take control of the prisons.
For the next year, orders from the ruedas drove the gears of dozens of cliques and cells across the country. Suspiciously, certain prisons started filling with gang members convicted of minor crimes: robbing an old woman, possessing a firearm, smoking marijuana in front of a police station. “They’d tell the homies: Today, you have to get arrested and go to prison, and you, and you, because they need to take the corner in there,” recalls one 18th Street gang member who was part of the ruedas. “And so off they’d go, and we’d just let ourselves get taken to prison.” Firearms, machetes, grenades, and other weapons started entering the penitentiaries concealed on the bodies of these volunteer prisoners, or waved through in plain sight by guards blinded by bribes.
Another former gangster, a member of the Mara Salvatrucha, remembers how the gang would deliver guns to their imprisoned homies at the courthouse when they were taken there for court appearances. “You’d just tell them that your family had sent some food, or something like that, and then they’d hand you your gun. Then, when we went back to prison, and since they’d always take us in and out in groups of ten, right when they were about to search us, we’d start pushing and hitting each other to distract them, seven or eight of us at once, so that the guy carrying the gear could jump the rail and go offload the guns in sector 17.”
The Sureños settled on a date for the revolts. The main targets would be Pavoncito Prison and the Zone 18 Preventivo, a pretrial detention center, both controlled by paisa leaders notorious for their exceptional hatred for the cholos. For months, this secret army of imprisoned pandilleros kept their heads down, bowing to the authority of the paisas while quietly planning an insurrection.
* * *
Silvestre remembers the day he was booked into the Zone 18 Preventivo in September 2002. He was 20 years old and wore the letters of the Mara Salvatrucha on his skin. He thought he was pretty tough. He had been killing people as a matter of routine —and, he admits, not without a certain dose of pleasure— ever since his sister had handed him his first pistol: a small, Brazilian-made Amadeo Rossi .38-caliber revolver. In theory, the gun was supposed to be for defending himself against the constant attacks from a small group of Dieciocheros —18th Street gang members— who patrolled his neighborhood with the attitude of plantation bosses. But Silvestre was a young man with initiative. He started using the weapon to rob stores and buses in other parts of the city.
He says that at first, he would only shoot at the air or at people’s legs. It was Sadman, a friend and fellow gangster deported to Guatemala from Northern California, who sharpened his focus and taught him to aim for the head. It was also Sadman who, when Silvestre asked to be jumped into his gang, slowed the young thug’s roll with some sage advice: “That’s a bad idea. In Guate, the Sureños are gonna be the only gangs left, and the only ones that are gonna come out on top are the 18 and the MS. You’d better join one of those.” Before the end of 1997, the ambitious Silvestre had already obtained permission to set up his own clique of the Mara Salvatrucha. When he was booked into the Zone 18 Preventivo in September 2002, he had ten separate murder charges stacked against him.
“They weren’t all mine, but it doesn’t matter. That’s just how the game goes,” Silvestre says, smiling. He knows that he was spared from paying for other deaths, ones that are indeed his.
* * *
That December 23, a young Mara Salvatrucha leader who went by Vago de Coronados spearheaded a riot at Pavoncito prison on the outskirts of Guatemala City. While over one hundred Sureño prisoners tore down walls and pried apart bars to seize control of the prison, El Vago was set on one objective: to track down Julio César Beteta, who for years had been the leader of the prison’s paisas. According to newspaper reports from the time, El Negro Beteta, as this top paisa was known, had been collecting more than 50,000 quetzals (over $6,000 dollars) in taxes every month from other prisoners, had his own office right next door to the prison director’s, and locked up anyone who refused to comply with his rules, forcing them to languish alone in a cell, with water up to their knees, for up to 15 days.
According to what other prisoners told Silvestre, El Vago strapped mattress scraps to his chest and back as improvised armor, grabbed a machete in each hand, and headed directly to Sector Five to find Beteta. A few hours later, El Vago was posing in front of the cameras of every major news station in the country with the head of the paisa mounted on a long spike. That Christmas Eve, El Vago de Coronados decided to change his nickname: from then on, he would be known as El Diabólico de Coronados. His name would ring out over the next decade. It still does.
The Pavoncito riot lasted two weeks and reinforced El Diabólico’s position of respect in the Mara Salvatrucha. Fourteen dead and 50 wounded: medals of honor for an executioner. In early January, El Diabólico made a personal call to Silvestre to deliver some instructions: He wanted Byron Lima, the leader of the paisas at the Preventivo detention center, to suffer the same fate as Beteta.
Captain Byron Lima Sosa was Guatemala’s most popular prisoner. He had been convicted, along with his father and three others, of murdering the bishop and human rights defender Juan José Gerardi in 1998 on the orders of who-knows-who, but someone with the soul of Cain and enough power to avoid jail time. Lima, who had served on former President Álvaro Arzú’s General Staff, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The mastermind of the crime was never identified. This, perhaps, is why the captain was able to avoid expected disgrace and retain his key connections with elite political circles and the Guatemalan Army. The prison was quite literally his personal kingdom. Not only did he enjoy favorable treatment; he also imposed strict military discipline on the rest of the prisoners and controlled all of the business that went on inside, both legal and illegal. Several former inmates have since spoken about this; ten years ago, it was an open secret: Lima had a monopoly on the purchase of products for the prison commissary and the various stores managed by inmates. Lima would get you a phone and then sell you the credit to use it. He imported and marketed all the drugs available inside.
“If you had money, he’d welcome you with open arms,” Silvestre says of Lima. “But for us… it was always, ‘Get those cholos out of here or the boys are gonna kill them down there.’ He’d talk to the guards like that. He even had the warden’s personal cell phone, and he’d order the guards to open or close whatever cellblocks he wanted. He’d talk to them like he was their superior, saying things like: ‘Hey, those boots you’re wearing, I ordered those. Hand ‘em over! Or do you want me to fire you or have you transferred?”
Lima’s word was God’s law in the Zone 18 Preventivo, and the Mara Salvatrucha had just told Silvestre that he had to assassinate that God.
On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, a total of 250 Sureños unleashed an explosion of violence inside the Zone 18 Preventivo, led by Spider, from 18th Street; Psyco, from the Alfa and Omega clique of MS-13; and Chopper, also from Alfa and Omega. Silvestre, who participated in the riot, says that Captain Byron Lima saved his life: when the battle broke out, as Silvestre recalls, Lima was not in his cell in Sector Seven, but in the visiting area, where he was protected by guards.
The lieutenants failed to escape the cholos’ guillotine. That day, gang members used barbells from the prison gym to break open padlocked cells and kill seven men. They decapitated four of them. One of the beheaded was Obdulio Villanueva Arévalo, a sergeant major and Lima’s former comrade-in-arms, convicted together for the murder of Gerardi. Witnesses say that Villanueva tried to escape from his cell by pounding a hole through the wall with his fists, but he was too big, and couldn’t get through.
After the Preventivo massacre, Lima was transferred several times, but wherever he went, his power and authority went with him. As did his hate for cholos. In 2008, Lima had his final confrontation with the gangs, at Pavoncito prison no less. Four veteran leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha were decapitated by civiles just a few hours after being transferred. Lima, the gang’s prison leader, claims that he attempted to prevent the slaughter but couldn’t. Ten years later, as if time were mocking the dead and laughing with those who do the killing, Captain Byron Lima remains the top paisa leader in the country, governing Pavoncito prison with a friendly face and iron fist. He runs the cartel that controls the prison’s business operations, which include a factory that manufactures uniforms for Guatemala’s Armed Forces. Despite the fact that other inmates have filed complaints against Lima for abuses, the current director of the country’s penitentiary system considers him a model prisoner.
Silvestre still dresses like a gangster, but seven years ago he decided to get off the moving train that was the Mara Salvatrucha. He had met his second wife in prison, and together they conceived his second son. He didn’t want to lose this child like he had lost his first one, who lives with his mother in the United States. “I have another person to live for now, and I want to live for that person,” he remembers telling the Mara leaders. They sentenced him to death.
Sitting on a stone bench, in the prison where he serves his sentence surrounded by paisas and fellow retired gang members —pesetas, traitors, the active gangsters call them— Silvestre retells the story of Lima’s escape like it were a minor play in a soccer game that had been going on for years, and had started to bore him a long time ago. He says that, at the end of the day, killing Captain Lima was just one part of the mission, and that the instructions Diabólico gave him in January 2003 included another more important plan:
“The riot at Preventivo had another objective. When we spoke, Diabólico told me that the plan was that, because of the riot, they’d transfer all of us to Pavoncito, where we could finally finish what had been discussed in ‘99.”
“And what had been discussed in ‘99?”
“The rupture of El Sur. Diabólico wanted to break it right away, all at once, at Pavoncito, but he needed more people, because los números [“the numbered ones,” 18th Street] were too many.”
And just as Diabólico had calculated, the authorities punished the perpetrators of the massacre by transferring them to Pavoncito, since no other prison would take them. Operating under a logic similar to the one applied in El Salvador during those same years —separating MS-13 and 18th Street prisoners so they couldn’t kill each other— the Guatemalan state decided to isolate the cholos from the rest of the prisoners. They never imagined that the Mara Salvatrucha was gaming the system for its own ends.
But those ends came up against a new obstacle. “When we arrived at Pavoncito, we realized how few of us there were. They had twice as many soldiers as we did,” Silvestre says. The Dieciocheros, he thinks, knew what their enemies were up to, and so they had ramped up efforts to get more of their people inside the prison while they waited for MS-13 to throw the first stone. Of the nearly 700 total inmates, Silvestre estimates that some 250 were with 18th Street, while the Salvatruchos numbered less than a hundred. And they didn’t have enough guns or ammunition to ambush that many people.
“At Pavoncito, the ruedas sureñascontinued meeting, but it was all a lie. Every time there was a conflict, the llaveros [“keyholders,” or second in command] for the numbers [18th Street] would summon the llaveros for the letters [MS-13] and for the rest of the Sureños to try and get them to calm things down, but our llaveros always packed a couple of grenades and a nine with them, just in case something went down,” Silvestre says.
On April 13, 2003, Holy Tuesday, two small planes flew over the prison dropping paper flyers that read “Christ loves you, convert now.” It was the police, recording aerial images of the prison in preparation for a raid the following day. At dawn on Holy Wednesday, a thousand police stormed Pavoncito prison with the goal of handcuffing every gang member inside and transferring them to other detention facilities around the country. Milton Navas of 18th Street, “El Gato de Hoover,” came out of his cell firing a sub-machine gun and managed to kill one police officer before he was gunned down himself. Silvestre thinks Navas responded this way because he hadn’t realize it was a raid, that he thoughtEl Surhad been breached and a war had broken out.
Most of the gang leaders were transferred to Escuintla, a city two hours south of the capital. The state reacted with a show of ruthlessness, isolating the most murderous and separating the tattooed beasts from the prisoners deemed normal. In reality, the effect of this iron-fist spectacle was to give the gangs their own prisons. Now, free from paisa harassment, the leaders of MS-13 could focus on stockpiling enough weapons to complete their mission.
“We wanted to break El Sur because those vatos from the numbers were… they just had such an ugly way of doing things,” Silvestre says. “They were always stepping on our heels, copying everything we did. We wanted to operate alone — from prison, but alone. So from then on, we kept El Sur alive, but it was all hypocrisy, pretending to keep the pact but spending the next few years preparing to break it up, working in the streets to buy more weapons and get them into the prisons. We spent those two years in a state of ‘wait for it, wait for it.’”
* * *
Buster is 26 years old and skinny, with a sad, distracted disposition that makes him easy on the eyes. He doesn’t have face tattoos, just a thin mustache without which he might struggle to pass as an adult. He was in MS-13 for more than fifteen years, before and after El Sur, and knew the Mara in an era that few survive to remember: a gang taking its first steps in Guatemala, confronting its first dilemmas.
A gang that thought about doing big business before any other. A gang that was ruthless before the rest.
“Trafficking came in ‘96, and the guys from the Gangster Locos [clique of MS-13] started killing people from the same gang because they realized trafficking was where the money was,” Buster says. “They were the first ones to decide to start working for traffickers.”
“And the rest of the cliques followed their lead?”
“Part of the Mara didn’t think the gang should be working for someone else. That’s when the wars started breaking out between factions of the same barrio [gang]. And the barrio started to choose its clicas. And then everyone else was given the green light [to kill].”
“Just like that? The Mara gave the green light to some of their cliques?”
“That’s right. In those days, I was just a chequeo[a young, probationary member, yet to be jumped into the gang as a full member] and my job was to take orders. I’ll put it this way: they gave our clique 13 days to finish off another, and it was either us or them. El Shark de Normandie, El Soldado de Coronados, and El Chapín de Centrales who had come down from El Norte [the United States] were the ones who told us. And they gave us cars, guns, motorbikes… The same thing happened to my brother’s clique; they all had to kill each other too.”
Buster had heard his older brother, a Marero like him, tell a story about MS-13 that he can only imagine was true: In 1998, a handful of Mara Salvatrucha gangsters, led by El Shark de Normandie, had decided to follow the example of El Salvador, where El Sur had never gone into effect and the war with 18th Streetwas waged not just in the streets, but in the prisons, too. The group wanted to break with the Los Angeles tradition and establish their own rules for gang warfare in Guatemala.
According to what Buster’s brother told him, when they heard about the plan, the L.A. gangsters, los homies angelinos, dispatched an emissary from the southern California city: El Snyper de Adams, a burly gangster with a mustache and combed-back hair, with the letters of the Mara and a dragon tattooed on his chest. El Snyper came to deliver a message, and a death sentence: El Sur would not be broken, and he had been directed to kill El Shark to make the message clear. The gang convened a meeting at the National Cemetery in Guatemala City’s Zone 3, a headquarters under the shared control of MS-13 and the hundreds of vultures that inhabit the massive landfill next door. All the palabreros who led the gang’s various cliques were there. El Snyper thought they would listen to him. Maybe, he thought, he could even save himself a bullet.
Whatever Snyper may have thought, one thing is clear, according to Buster: On that day, at that rueda, as if performing a ritual patricide, the Mara Salvatrucha executed El Snyper, burned his corpse, and threw it in the garbage dump. The voice of Los Angeles, if it had ever been heard at all, fell silent that day inside the shaved skulls of Guatemala’s mareros, buried with El Snyper among filthy scraps of clothing and stinking piles of rotting food.
“Who told you that?” Diabólico asks, looking at us sideways when we tell him about El Snyper, about the meeting in the cemetery, about the body dumped in the landfill.
Chained by his hands and feet and dressed all in white like a santería priest, with a white watch cap pulled down to the brows of his leery eyes, Jorge Yahir de León, El Diabólico, hides behind single syllables when we ask about the years the Mara Salvatrucha spent planning to break El Sur. He lifts his chin, showing neck tattoos that look like they might be holding his head all on their own. Guatemalan authorities say Diabólico has served as the national leader of the Mara Salvatrucha for several years, dispatching orders to other prisons, and to the rest of the country, from the maximum-security facility where we are visiting him now: Fraijanes II.
Diabólico’s authority was forged from a reputation for being more violent and brazen than his peers. “He had been starting riots since he was in juvie,” says Silvestre. In February 2007, he was accused of orchestrating the murder of four police officers in Boquerón Prison — cops who had, in turn, been convicted of the infamous murder of three Salvadoran members of Central American Parliament and their driver, though Yahir would later be acquitted of those murders. In late 2005, Diabólico tried to stab three Dieciocheros to death during a court hearing. Now, in Fraijanes II, six guards armed with batons keep watch over the shackled gangster, standing over us as we speak. Another guard menacingly holds what looks to be some kind of fire extinguisher, with a pistol-grip end. It’s an industrial-sized canister of pepper spray.
Diabólico listens more than he speaks. He carefully measures the meaning of our words, and the potential effect of his.
“We can’t give you our source. We just want to know if the story is true.”
He responds: “It’s not true. There is no Snyper.”
But there was. Gang members interviewed in the United States say they remember a Guatemalan who everyone called El Snyper de Adams, and when told Buster’s story, finally seemed to understand why the homie had suddenly disappeared from Los Angeles in the late 90s. But they deny that the gang would ever have sent him to Guatemala on a mission to defend El Sur. “He was a strange dude. He thought he was más mente [smarter] than he really was, always acting like he was the smartest guy in the room,” one of El Snyper’s former homies said. “The kind of guy who talks like he has a lot of knowledge, who thinks he’s really wise, you know? But it was all bullshit.” Another L.A. gang veteran who lives in Washington, D.C. says he also remembers El Snyper. “We beat the piss out of him one time, because he wasn’t showing up to meetings and he wasn’t acting right and standing up for the Mara. That was the last time I saw him.”
“In any case, in the end, the Mara Salvatrucha did break El Sur, didn’t it, Yahir?”
“Yeah, we broke it. Why deny it? The situations we survived in the prisons, the pressures, they forced us to break it. Back then a person used to think, ‘If I fall sleep, they’ll come for me.’”
“So the idea was to break it yourselves before the other gang did?”
“It’s just, they’d brought so many gangs together under their wing, and they wanted to put all of us from the Mara into one place. But we don’t put up with bullshit. There aren’t that many of us, but at least we know who we let in — not like them. When they saw how many they were, compared to us, they decided to destroy us through pure politics.”
By the late 90s, 18th Street’s numbers were skyrocketing in the capital’s most populous neighborhoods, and the imbalance of forces was making the Mara Salvatrucha increasingly uneasy — in the streets, but especially in the prisons. The Guatemalan MS-13 harbored a bone-deep hate for 18th Street, and now, watching as the gang initiated more and more kids, seeing it puff out its chest, las letras feared that one day, they too might be forced to bend their knee before los números.
But the pressures Diabólico mentions actually had more to do with the commercial operations that both gangs ran inside the prisons, and the Mara Salvatrucha’s secret plans to grow their business in the streets. Silvestre claims that the Dieciocheros copied the telephone extortion systems developed by the Salvatruchos, attracting the attention of the police. Leaders of 18th Street also say that, as their prison population increased, they were able to bring in larger quantities of drugs, in turn allowing them to lower the price per dose and corner the market.
The war between the MS and 18 ceased long ago to be merely about honor or perpetual cycles of vengeance. In Guatemala, El Sur had become a drag on the Mara’s business plans. In gangs, the prison rules the street, and MS-13 was done sharing its corporate offices.
* * *
Standing in the middle of the yard, his gaze fixed on his 18th Street homies, but shouting toward the other side so that his Mara Salvatrucha enemies could hear him, El Troublewas pleading for calm: “ ¡Nel, al suave! Chill out! Come on, raza, what did we talk about?!”
To appeal for calm was almost to impose it. Even so, in that moment, many of El Trouble’s own comrades were chomping at the bit, ready to stampede over him in a race to launch themselves, knives out, at the shirtless inmates on the other side. “Hell no, fuck that!” they wanted to tell him.
Minutes earlier, an argument between a Dieciochero and a Salvatrucho had escalated into a fist fight. At that very moment, in one of the small holding yards of Commissariat 31 in Esquintla, a 200-person prison that everyone calls El Hoyón (“the big whole”), two groups of inmates had formed, ready to retrieve the weapons they had hidden in their cells and, with machete blows and gunfire, put an end to El Sur for good.
The only thing that could stop the Dieciocheros was the commanding authority of El Trouble. Guatemalan gang members remember how in 1998 and 1999, with the arrival of El Trouble, who had just “come down” —been deported— from the United States, Guatemala City’s Zone 6 gang clique, the Hollywood Gangsters, had become the main focus of attention for gangsters all across the country. El Trouble’s authority radiated beyond his clique. The whole barrio respected him. “Tenía mente” — “That compadre had a really big brain,” current leaders of 18th Street say “He was one of those dudes that, for real, would be like, ‘Oh, the homies over there want a corner and MS is cutting in on them?’ And shit, just like that, there’d be cars and weapons on their way, because he said so.”
It was this respect that empowered El Trouble to uphold the laws that the Dieciocheros had brought with them from L.A., and to contain the murderous instincts of his crew in El Hoyón. A few MS-13 members did the same among their own ranks, and El Sur was not broken that day. It would hold until 2003.
El Trouble was released from prison in 2004 and was killed shortly thereafter. He had gone to the Pavón prison farm to visit some of his 18th Street homies, and the Mara’s gunmen were waiting for him when he left the prison gates. They followed him in a cab for a few kilometers until he left the perimeter of the prison. Then they killed him.
* * *
The Barrio 18 rueda was meeting in a cell when the first two shots rang out. Blam! Blam! “Vaya, homies, what the hell, that’s coming from inside.” The explosions came from the other side of the wall, from the cells and the yard used by the Mara Salvatrucha, but the shouting that followed spread through the whole compound. El Abuelo, El Pantera, Criminal, Driver, Snoop, Spider, Lobo... all the gang’s biggest names instantly knew they had made a mistake. Outside the cell were 160 barefoot Dieciocheros, dressed in boxers and T-shirts, defenseless, waiting for death with empty hands.
Half an hour earlier, a homie had warned the rueda that he had seen a Salvatrucho with a gun, but they brushed it off. That’s impossible, they told him. For years, the breakup of El Sur had been a known possibility, and some 18th Street leaders, like Criminal, Lobo and Abuelo, had even repeatedly suggested that the rueda should seize fate by the reins and make the first move. But when fears and desires never come to pass, they tend to fade, dissolving in the daily routine. When someone proposed bringing at least a couple of pistols into the prison, just in case, Driver and Spider’s answer was no. “If las letras see them, they’ll want to blow the whole things up for sure.” On August 15, 2005, when the first two shots rang out from the MS-13 sector of El Hoyón, 18th Street inmates didn’t have a single firearm between them.
The day had dawned strangely. When the prison cells were all opened at 7 a.m., the Salvatruchos were ready, their socks on and their shoes tied. The Dieciocheros, on the other hand, were still walking around the yard in their flip-flops, washing up, eating breakfast, waiting for the rueda to convene for its 9 a.m. morning meeting, and for the gang’s self-imposed daily exercise routine to begin.
At 9 a.m., the Mara Salvatrucha’s rueda was gathering in a cell too, just like any other day. But this time, they only took a few minutes before reemerging from the cell, guns in hand. The first blam! blam! were two shots to the head, taking out two White Fence gangsters who had gotten in the way. Breaking El Sur meant more than just breaking with the 18; it meant war with all Sureño gangs. Even those, like White Fence, with which MS-13 had maintained long-standing alliances on the streets and had treated as equals in the prisons. Those first shots were followed by a grenade explosion that caused the first deaths of the Dieciocheros. After that, in the small police barracks retrofitted as a gang prison, it was all screams, gunshots, explosions, and running.
El Hoyón, the 31st precinct police station in Escuintla, is a white-walled building with turrets and battlements — a small, one-story castle with a fragile-looking facade that gives the impression more of a miniature stage set than an impenetrable prison. Inside, in addition to administrative offices, a square compound encloses a smaller rectangular containment, divided into twelve cells, six per side, separating the larger compound into two small yards that are connected around the sides of the cellblock.
When the Salvatruchos, who numbered less than one hundred, began advancing from one yard to the other, armed members at the front, the Dieciocheros, even though they outnumbered their enemies, were mice cornered by an army of cats.
A few managed to retreat to their cells, taking shelter under the beds and protecting themselves with mattresses. Most opted to run straight into the line of fire in a desperate attempt to dodge the bullets. No one tried to grab their machetes out of their cells. What good is a knife, however long it might be, against a gun?
But the Mareros, expecting a war, shot crouched down, cowering in fear and ducking for cover, shielding themselves from bullets that never came. They hadn’t even considered the possibility that their adversaries might play fair, that they wouldn’t have an ace up their sleeve, that they didn’t have even a single pistol.
If the Mara had known that the Dieciocheros weren’t armed, they probably wouldn’t have left any of them alive.
The 18th Street rueda were the most trapped of all. Amid the hail of lead, the leaders tried again and again to leave the cell and join their besieged homies, who were crawling around wounded, pinned against walls or scrambling to escape, bloodied, by the rooftops. Until a grenade was tossed through the cell bars and exploded at their feet. The shrapnel wounded Lobo and ripped Pantera to pieces.
One Dieciochero shouted desperately for someone to call the other prisons and warn the others, but it was too late. The coup had been coordinated, the attacks deployed simultaneously. At 9 a.m., every MS leader in every prison with a gang population in the country had dialed into a conference call on their cell phones. Nine prisons in total, including the juvenile detention centers.
At every one of these facilities, the guards were taken by surprise. In Chimaltenango and Cobán, the authorities managed to intervene before anyone was killed. In Pavón, where Diabólico led the attack, prison staff provided shelter to a sizeable group of Salvatrucho asylees who had climbed over the walls of their sector to escape, after refusing to break the Sureño pact and take part in the massacre. In El Hoyón, when they started seeing gangsters climb onto the rooftops, the guards started shooting at them. Some of the Dieciocheros who died that day, in that prison, were killed by those bullets. The life of one inmate, or ten inmates, or a hundred, is of no concern to authorities when faced with the possibility of an escape.
On that day, August 15, 2005, a total of 36 people died in Guatemala’s prisons. President Óscar Berger, on an official trip to Taiwan, said in his first statement on the massacre that he regretted the loss of life, but was happy to report not a single fugitive.
The streets erupted in violence that day as well. Buster, the sad-faced Marero, says that his clique called a meeting for 8 a.m. that morning and handed out weapons to everyone: to the seven pandilleros who, like him, had been jumped in, and to all of the uninitiated chequeos — 25 of them in total. “They told us El Sur was breaking that day, that we knew what to do, that we had to take out as many guys as we could,” he says.
Buster remembers jumping on a motorbike —a stolen one, the kind he and other gang members would often ride in pairs— and drove toward Carolingia, 18th Street territory, with a 9mm tucked in the front of his pants and a .38 revolver at his back. The .38 was his favorite. Buster had killed before, but he knew that day was his day to shine. He arrived in Carolingia at around eleven o’clock, parked the motorbike, and walked three blocks to the CLG clique’s punto, their main gathering spot. He found the gang all assembled there, 12 or 15 men in total, and started shooting, over and over again without stopping, while walking toward them. He says that when the group scattered, three bodies lay on the ground. He didn’t want to give the rest of the clique time to grab their guns, so he ran to the motorbike and sped back to his punto to load up on more ammo, then headed towards the city’s Zone 6 with some other homies, all on motorbikes. They wanted to kill more people before the day was done.
By the time they got to Barrio San Antonio it was already late in the afternoon. They knew what had happened in the prisons, and all the puntos were on alert. The vibe was hot, they could feel it in the air. “They were waiting for us with guns, and when they saw us, they just started shooting,” Buster says. One of their own died that day, a brincado, one of the newly jumped-in Dieciocheros. “We left our homie lying there. That night, his family came asking for him.” On their way back, in Zone 1, they exchanged gunfire with a group of police then continued on their way. From there, they went to Zone 18, to Limón, to Paraíso.... They wounded multiple 18th Street members and lost one of their own, a chequeo .
Eclipsed by the riots in the prisons, none of those shootouts or deaths elicited a single line in the next day’s newspapers. Not a single line.
That night, Buster and his MS-13 homies celebrated with beer and carne asada. “I think we stayed up till dawn,” he says. “The next day, everything had changed.”
In the days after August 15, 2005, 18th Street vowed to never again trust their enemies, and to never forget what had happened. Many Dieciocheros have inscribed the date of the assault and the name of the fallen on their skin, on their arms, on their faces. Most harnessed their pain into a new hatred for the Mara Salvatrucha, chanting the names of their bravest llavero warriors, like Lobo, like Criminal, who in the years that followed would become the gang’s new leaders, dedicated to proving to all of Guatemala —in the streets, with violence— that 18th Street was not weak.
The gang sent the same message through its own ranks, too. With the bullet and shrapnel wounds barely beginning to heal, the 18 launched an internal purge. Its first victims: the members of the rueda who had defended El Sur to the very end. Driver, whom El Trouble had handpicked to succeed him as the barrio’s highest in command, was executed in El Hoyón by his own homies in mid-September. Spider died in Mazatenango prison before the end of the year, likewise executed by his own people.
Other men respected in their circles who managed to survive the purge would also, over time, lose leadership in a gang frustrated and torn apart by the pain of a wound. In a way, 18th Street also began to lose meaning for the old-school gangsters, who had been molded in the mystique of brotherhood, and of keeping one’s word.
This piece, translated by Max Granger, is chapter one of El Faro’s 2012 special, “Guatemala After El Sur.” Read chapter two, “Two Sister Gangs, Two Paths.”
