El Faro English has translated this photo essay, published in Spanish in November 2017, as MS-13 returns to the forefront of U.S. politics in Donald Trump’s second term. Read the accompanying photo essay: A Funeral March from El Salvador to Long Island.
“Why did you come to Long Island?”
It’s June 4, 2017. We are at a Subway restaurant, far from the center of any of these small towns inhabited mostly by migrants of Latin American origin, many of them undocumented. Forty minutes away is the capital of the world, New York City, but these are the suburbs, the outskirts, the periphery. We are on the border between North Merrick and Uniondale, commuter towns where the main attractions are shopping malls and traveling fairs.
The person who answers my question is an 18-year-old Salvadoran boy, the son of a tortilla maker. He was born in a canton called El Niño, in a hamlet called La Ceiba, on the slopes of the Chaparrastique volcano, in the scorching-hot department of San Miguel.
“My mom and sister were already here. My dad died when I was in El Salvador. He was drinking when a car ran him over. I didn’t live with him, but with an aunt. They hit us all the same; my aunt had four other daughters who lived in the same house. They beat us all.”
He is a wiry young man. He still has the body of a campesino: bony, with knotted muscles, forged in the milpa, cropfields. He wears a New York Yankees cap and has two gold implants in his upper front teeth.
“What was it like arriving here at the age of 11?”
“Life here is just being locked up like a dog when you’re an immigrant with no papers, no car, and no one to make space for you and show you around. You feel lost. My mom already has a husband, a Salvadoran. They came here together. We rented a basement. The three of us lived there: a single room with a kitchen and bathroom for $900. I had my bed and my wardrobe in a small corner. My mom went to work at 4 in the morning and got out at 3 in the afternoon. Sometimes she worked double shifts and stayed until 11 at night. She only came home to sleep, and then it was back to work at 4 in the morning again.”
The kid from the rural canton arrived in 2010 in a place he did not understand, to live with a woman who for years was just a voice on the phone. Being young was tough on Long Island, even before hearing about the Mara Salvatrucha.
“What did you do alone in the basement?”
“Locked up, just watching TV.”
The boy’s cousin waits for him outside the Subway in a pickup with the engine running. He doesn’t feel entirely safe on this street. Some gang members still believe they have a score to settle with him.
“How long did it take before you met people from the gang?”
“I found out about the gangs about a year after I got here, but I didn’t think much of it. Then, when I started high school, that’s when it really hit me. Both the Letters and the Numbers are here. That's how it all started.”
By the Letters, he is referring to MS-13. The Numbers, 18th Street.
“You got to the point of initiation, chequeo, with the Mara Salvatrucha, right?”
“Up to that point.”
“Which clique?”
“Hollywood Locotes Salvatrucha.”
* * *
Much had happened, much young blood had been spilled. But it was mainly events in two months that put Long Island in headlines around the world. Long Island and an acronym: MS-13. The Mara Salvatrucha.
The account of those two months reads like a news clip from a violent, impoverished neighborhood in San Salvador, the murder capital of El Salvador. But it happened in New York, in different small towns on Long Island, not far from the Statue of Liberty.
The first of those months was September 2016. On Monday the 12th, in a town called Mineola, while walking down the street, a 15-year-old Salvadoran boy, Josué Guzmán, a tenth-grade student, was shot and killed. The next day, Tuesday the 13th, as night fell in Brentwood, a group of young men beat two girls to death with bats just outside Loretta Park School, where they were studying. Kayla Cuevas was a 16-year-old girl of Dominican descent. Nisa Mickens, a 15-year-old, was one of her best friends. They were beaten to death.
Their bodies were found a few meters apart in a residential area outside the school. On the 16th, police found the body of Óscar Josué Acosta, a 19-year-old Salvadoran who had arrived in Brentwood three days earlier. He had disappeared on April 19. Five days later, on the 21st, police found another body. It was found in the same area as the previous one, in the wooded surroundings of an abandoned psychiatric hospital called Pilgrim. It was the body of Miguel García, a 15-year-old Ecuadorian. He had disappeared seven months earlier.
2016. One month. Five bodies.
The police, their informants, the media, everyone said: MS-13. Twenty-five alleged gang members were arrested on Long Island. All of them, like the dead, were teenagers. Most were from Central America. Most were Salvadoran.
In December 2016, just one month after winning the election and days before taking office as the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump took the microphone and spoke about what was happening in those small towns on Long Island. He did so during an interview with Time, which had just named him Man of the Year: “They come from Central America, they’re tougher than any people you've ever met. They’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal.”
The new president was turning his attention to the Central American community, and it wasn’t good news.
The small towns of Long Island remained in the spotlight. Dozens of headlines were published. All of them carried the initials MS. More raids, more arrests, more trials.
Between Oct. 1, 2016, and June 4, 2017 —already under new leadership— Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported 2,798 alleged gang members from various gangs. An unusual number for that period, according to the agency itself.
Everything was in turmoil, and it continued to revolve around the same acronym: MS. The undocumented community on Long Island was trying to survive by keeping a low profile. Young, undocumented, and Central American quickly became synonymous with suspected MS. And in those days, after more than 64,000 unaccompanied minors entered the United States without the necessary documents in 2014, there were many young, undocumented Central Americans on Long Island.
As the storm tapered off, another month arrived that changed everything. One day, actually. On Tuesday, Apr. 11, 2017, in the town of Central Islip, five boys and two girls went to hang out in a forest near the town’s recreation complex. Not long after, they found themselves surrounded by a group of masked men with machetes. Álex Ruiz, a young man who had recently arrived from El Salvador and survived alongside the two girls, recounted the entire incident. The other four were hacked to death. Justin Livicura, 16, from an Ecuadorian family and a restaurant employee, died. Jorge Tigre, 18, who had arrived in the country from Ecuador at the age of 10, was killed. Michael Banegas, a Honduran who had fled the violence in his country three years ago to join his parents, was killed. Jefferson Villalobos, Michael’s cousin, also from Honduras, 18, who had arrived from Florida four days earlier to visit, was killed.
One day. Four more bodies.
In total: nine bodies in two months. To be precise: nine bodies in five days. Same area, same ages, same culprit: MS-13.
The causes of the murders that were reported in various media outlets were twofold: The first was that some of those killed were close to other gangs and had offended members of the MS; These offenses were nothing more than schoolyard taunts, teenage bravado. The second was that they had refused to join the gang.
More than ever before, these towns full of workers and undocumented Latin Americans returned to the center of the U.S. debate, echoing around the world.
This time, Trump didn’t just speak. He spoke several times. He traveled to Brentwood to speak. “MS-13 is particularly violent. They don’t like shooting people because it’s too quick, it’s too fast. I was reading —one of these animals was caught— in explaining, they like to knife them and cut them, and let them die slowly because that way it’s more painful, and they enjoy watching that much more. These are animals,” said the most powerful man in the world on July 28, 2017, in an address to police officers from the two counties where the murders took place.
MS-13 on Long Island was Trump’s battle horse all that week. He talked about “those animals” and then about the need to eliminate sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants. He explained how the MS “cut with a knife” and promised more deportations of Hispanics. MS-13 fit Trump’s deportation plans as well as it fit postwar Salvadoran society.
Long Island remains at the center of the debate over the presence in the United States of the world’s most bloodthirsty gang. MS-13 kills in cruel and elaborate ways. They dismember, machete, slit throats, hang, rape, kill. But in this amnesiac debate about how it was possible for so much blood to be spilled in so few days, the U.S. government forgets what has already happened and magnifies its enemy —“the MS-13 cartel,” said Trump— while stepping into the ring against a weak opponent. The MS in El Salvador is not the MS in Long Island. Brentwood is not Soyapango. The MS in Long Island is a small-time street gang, violent like an angry teenager with a bat, not like a Mexican cartel. What drives these young people to kill in Long Island is the same thing that drove them to kill in Los Angeles decades ago. You have to visit Long Island to see that clearly.
* * *
“We were like six Hispanic friends. We weren’t in any gang. We were in high school, 15 years old. We used to go play ball at the court, where we met more friends. None of them were in a gang. But the guys with the two Letters, the Numbers, and the local gangs, like the Bloods, were looking for us to beat us up... Sometimes I was in class and the mollos [Black people] would walk by saying, ‘We're waiting, come on outside.’”
The problem with the boy who was born near the Chaparrastique volcano and now speaks at Subway in Uniondale was not that he was a gang member. His problem was being young and Central American. His problem was that he could be a gang member. He was a threat, then.
It is worth remembering that in the United States, the gang universe is widespread and the catalog is organized by race and nationality, unlike in El Salvador, where only equals are pitted against equals. The Bloods and Crips are Black gangs. Vatos Locos, for example, is an essentially Mexican gang. The Mara Salvatrucha refers to Central America. In Long Island public schools, a newly arrived Salvadoran wearing baggy pants will be viewed with suspicion by the Bloods, by the Crips...
The Indian woman working at the Subway counter has been uncomfortable since the Salvadoran boy came in. I go to the counter for a sandwich. I ask her if there are many gangs around here. “Last week we were mugged by one with a huge knife,” she replies listlessly.
The suburbs of the United States disrupt the whole scene of gangs and violence that has transcended Central America and its working-class neighborhoods of small houses that look like cement boxes, one after the other, divided only by a tiny cement corridor. Here in the towns of Long Island, the image is one of prosperity — the opposite of Central American overcrowding, at least in appearance. Across from Subway is a house with a huge, perfectly manicured front yard. In the yard is a wooden pony with blue decorations and a sign announcing the arrival of a new member: “It's a boy.”
The Long Island of gangs does not even resemble the El Salvador of gangs in terms of aesthetics.
“How did that harassment happen?” I ask the boy with the gold teeth.
“Let’s say we were going to play ball and the Bloods were passing by, and they started making signs at us and telling us, ‘Fuck off, Hispanics,’ and things like that, to fuck us up. There were also about nine kids my age from the 18. They would come after school, wait for us in their cars, and start making hand gestures and saying things to us. Once, they sent a friend of mine who was a nobody to the hospital. They broke his elbow with iron bars. The guys from here [the Uniondale Bloods] wanted to beat us up. They didn’t want to see us here. We would go down any street and they would try to beat us up. We would go there [Hempstead, which has another big mall with a movie theater], and it was the same thing. We headed to Garden City, to the mall, looking for some fun, and we found about 15 or 18 guys. There were only four of us and two girls. One guy came in and kicked one of my friends. He started talking trash: That he was in a gang, that fuck the MS, that he was going to kill him. ‘Let’s go outside, let’s fight,’ they said, but there were only four of us, and there were 15 of them. What were we going to do?”
This boy’s story is the true story of what happens between Long Island and MS-13. Far from the idea of a large organized mafia controlling its members, it is the story of boys who came to join families they knew only by telephone. Boys who had to go to special classes in their schools, mixed with newcomers of different ages, to learn how to say good morning. And in those classes, fishbowls of newcomers from gang-controlled countries, the schoolyard gang members saw potential victims, homies, enemies. Everyone was against them: the language, the gang members from their countries, the Black kids from other gangs, their mothers’ work schedules... and now, the police, the news, President Trump himself.
Becoming a gang member didn’t seem like a choice at times, but an imposition. You are who you are, no matter what you say.
The small towns of Long Island, it must be said, are no place for undocumented young people.
* * *
Uniondale is a movie-set suburb. Big houses, wide streets, green lawns, huge cars. Outside many of those houses, there are not one or two, but four or six cars parked. That's because in those houses, not only in this town but in the surrounding ones, there isn’t just one family living there, but four or six. Several undocumented families crowd into the different rooms of these large houses which, following the cliché, invite you to have a barbecue on the green lawn. These houses are a shell of prosperity. Inside, many are on the verge of exploding.
On one of Uniondale’s main streets, there is a restaurant that just opened in May. They sell tacos and pupusas, chicken soup, and hamburgers. It is a restaurant for migrants. Inside, people speak Spanish and drink Coronas in a small basement lit by a bare light bulb where, at night, large women in tiny shorts arrive to try to seduce the men playing pool. Then they charge them. For company. For sex, if they agree to go somewhere else or out to the alley next door.
The restaurant is a snapshot of migrant Long Island these days. The owner has been here for a decade. He is from the eastern department of San Miguel, in El Salvador. He has a problem. He is housing a new tenant in his home: his younger brother. The boy had “problems with gangs” in El Salvador. That is a phrase we will hear many times in this part of New York. His parents sent him to join his older brother, a complete stranger to the boy who was eight when his brother emigrated. The newcomer is now 16. He arrived in mid-2015. He was, in every sense of the word, one of the unaccompanied minors who entered this country.
He started school in Uniondale. He became a member of the Mara Salvatrucha.
“I had to take him out of school, at least get him away, because I don’t have time to keep track of him,” says the restaurant owner as he opens two Coronas.
Right now, on this afternoon of June 1, 2017, the older brother doesn’t know where his relative is. “He's probably in some park with who knows who,” he says. No one has time to guide the 16-year-old teenager in this new world. Or rather, yes, there is a group that has time: the MS. The older brother says that if the younger one doesn’t shape up, he’ll kick him out of the house. “Out on the street, to see what he does.”
And that’s how a gang member is made in the United States.
On Long Island, it often seems that the problem is the gang, an efficient recruiting machine, but the gang is actually the consequence. The cause is more like neglect.
The restaurant cook knows where her children are. Doña Vilma is 44 years old and is from Tacachico, La Libertad, El Salvador. She turns the beef for the tacos and the cheese pupusas while recounting how she came here in 2016 with her 18- and 14-year-old sons. “Problems with the gangs,” she says, without taking her eyes off the griddle. What problems? “They threatened us for selling weed,” she says, and won’t explain further. Maybe they crossed gang borders, maybe they didn’t pay extortion... Maybe. Unlike the restaurant owner, Doña Vilma does know where her children are. They are here, right beside her. One does his homework on the small table. He goes from the restaurant to school, from school to the restaurant, and from the restaurant to home. The other, the 18-year-old, goes out to work and then returns to his mother’s side to wait for her to finish, so they can go together to the room they rent. Doña Vilma’s strategy for repelling gangs on Long Island is closeness. Not metaphorical closeness, but the most literal kind. For much of the day, her children are within two meters of her. In this respect, Long Island is similar to El Salvador: In the absence of efficient states, a mother has always been the best antidote to the Mara.
I’ll eat the tacos. The pupusas are for a forty-something Salvadoran who came to Long Island in 2012. He made some money and returned to El Salvador. There he had “problems with the gangs” and came back in 2014. Now he is thinking of bringing his 16-year-old daughter, but he has his doubts. “They say the gangs are bad here,” says the man who has lived here for more than five years. I ask him if any gang members have ever done anything to him on Long Island. “No, but read the newspapers. They’re everywhere,” he replies.
The restaurant has a new waitress. She is a slender 18-year-old girl with pale skin and red-dyed hair, wearing a very short, tight, low-cut dress. “It’s to attract customers,” says the owner. “She came from another town around here, where she hung out with gang members. Ask her,” he suggests.
The girl brings me a beer. I ask her where she’s from. “El Salvador,” she replies with the pronounced Puerto Rican accent she has cultivated in her four years on Long Island. I ask her where she used to live. “I lived near the Salvador del Mundo monument,” she says, referring to an area of San Salvador. I explain that I’m a journalist. I tell her I want to understand why young people join gangs on Long Island. I say I know she was at least close to the Mara Salvatrucha. “I used to hang out with the gang a lot,” she says, and walks away to the counter.
In less than two minutes, the red-haired girl returns with napkins. “When I came, I was alone,” she says with a frown. “They’re the first ones to reach out to you. They look for you, to reach out to you.” Then the girl who arrived in this country at age 14 goes back to the counter and immerses herself in her cell phone.
* * *
Media coverage speaks of a strong MS-13 presence on Long Island. The main voice in the media, that of Trump, speaks of a battle between the state and a powerful “transnational” mafia. However, several other voices from officials who know the situation firsthand offer another perspective: It is not a battle of anyone against anyone, but rather the sheer futility of a state that has not known how to deal with teenagers who have recently arrived from violent countries.
Pure disinterest.
Howard Koening, the superintendent of schools in Central Islip, where the four boys were hacked to death in April 2017, said in public statements that the $9.2 billion cut in education spending for this year’s budget “becomes a tool that fuels gang recruitment activities.”
The police commissioner of Suffolk County, which includes Brentwood, where the two girls were beaten to death in 2016, said that, between 2014 and March 2017, his county had received 4,624 unaccompanied minors. More than 90 percent, according to ICE data, come from Central American countries. Less budget, more kids. Less budget, more kids who need special attention.
Even Border Patrol data reinforces the idea that the fight is being lost within the United States. On June 21, 2017, Carla Provost, acting head of that agency, told the Senate that, since 2012, 250,000 unaccompanied minors have been detained at the Mexican border. Only 56 were suspected of having ties to the MS. The data from the feared Patrol suggests that this is not a problem of people entering the country without papers. It is a battle being lost within the greater country. MS-13 is winning here, inside. Or, seen another way, the U.S. state is losing here inside. Not all U.S. problems come from outside. Not all evils occur on the other side of the wall.
In May 2017, an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) tracking MS-13 in Central America and the United States assured me that the gang is attempting to consolidate the East Coast program. A program is a gathering of gang cliques, headed by a single leadership. If the East Coast program is consolidated, cliques in Boston, Houston, Washington, and New York would begin to follow similar guidelines. However, the agent said, consolidation has not yet been achieved. The new members are very young and impulsive. “They want more of La vida loca,” he said. The crazy life. He says this is nothing new, that the MS-13 tsunami warning goes off every so often in the United States. The MS on the East Coast is growing at its most basic level: young, lonely kids. “Lost,” said the agent. “Mass deportations are coming,” said the agent. “We’ll be having this conversation again in 10 years. It will be the same,” predicted the agent.
After a long day of hearing from Long Island officials in June 2017, one senator said it most clearly. “The total failure of the government to establish an efficient process and meaningful oversight of the placement of these children has led to the current MS crisis,” said Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa. He is a politician from the Republican Party. Trump’s party.
* * *
“One of my friends told one of those guys [18th Street] from Hempstead to come down here [to Uniondale] on a certain day and fight us one-on-one, no gangs. A guy named Farruquito from Hempstead showed up, and my friend beat him up on this very street, on a court we call La Bombonera. My friend is from Honduras,” says the Salvadoran boy with gold teeth.
He wasn’t a gang member yet. Neither was his friend who beat up Farruquito. They were just kids who had recently arrived and were trying to get ahead in a strange place, but they were constantly being crushed by other kids. Until they got fed up, realized they were alone, and started fighting back.
“But a few days later they came back,” he continues. “That time they really beat me up, and my friend who had fought. They were in a pickup truck and a little Honda. Three of them got out, with chains and bats, and we had nothing. Around that time we met the two leaders. Some of them were already 16 or 17 years old. They were looking to beat us up inside the high school. We told them we weren’t gang members, that the Hempstead gang wanted to beat us up, that the Bloods also wanted to beat us up. The dude [from MS-13] didn't believe us. But one day, one of them gave me his number and said that, if we had any problems, we should call him, that he was on call.
The kid from Chaparrastique endured almost a year of harassment from all the gangs. At school, at the mall, at the movies, on the street, in front of girls. Being a young immigrant was tough on Long Island, even if you weren’t in a gang.
* * *
“They are the devil, and we have to fear them,” says Sergio Argueta, one of the people who best understands what is happening with MS-13. That is the message, he says, that the US government wants to send. “There is a lot of exaggeration,” he concludes. Argueta, the founder of the organization STRONG, is a social worker at a public school. STRONG has been working with at-risk youth on Long Island for more than 15 years. Some of the youths were gang members; others almost were; others were their victims; and others were victims of the gang cliché. Many are young, undocumented, and from Central America: the devil on Long Island.
“Gangs are a symptom of a failed state. Our people’s schools are the ones with the worst grades. At Uniondale, where I work, we have 2,313 students. There are two social workers. Only one speaks Spanish. I am a social worker, but I’m in charge of attendance. It’s my job to go looking for those who don’t come to school. Every day, 300 or 400 don’t show up. I have young people who haven’t reported in in 60, 70, or 80 days. How the hell am I supposed to help those families when I’m putting out a bunch of fires? When a system can’t help these young people, who else can? The only option, they think, are the gangs, because what the gang offers... Well, it offers nothing, but at that age it seems like the best option.”
Argueta knows. Argueta was a gang member. He was born here on Long Island. His mother, a Salvadoran from a canton in Ahuachapán, who studied until sixth grade, came here in 1974, before the civil war broke out half a decade later. Between the ages of 13 and 19, he was a member of the Redondel Pride gang in Hempstead. There were deaths, guns, and federal prison sentences for many of his colleagues, most of them Hispanic. Argueta knows what he is talking about because he has lived it and seen it happen for more than two decades.
What is happening is not new. Nor are the voices calling for deportations.
Argueta explains that what elevated his gang, founded by friends from the neighborhood, was a series of news reports about the arrival of the Latin Kings on Long Island. In some of those reports, a police chief explained that this behemoth of a gang had arrived and made contact with the tiny Redondel Pride. “Oh, shit, we were famous,” Argueta recalls his reaction to those events. Fame allowed them to grow. What happened in those years, in the early 1990s, is now repeating itself, according to this member of STRONG.
“What this government has done, that guy, [Suffolk County Police Chief] Tim Sinny, is to give the MS more fame. They have served as high-level recruiters for the gang. If you are a gang member and want to belong to the most powerful gang, the strongest, the one that controls everything, what better than to be a member of MS?”
Argueta does not deny that Long Island has seen blood like never before, such as the two girls beaten to death in the street. But he believes that the main reason for this is not that a large, organized, transnational gang is doing its job well; rather, the authorities have been unable to respond to the wave of new Central American migrant children: “Becoming a gang member is a symptom,” Argueta repeats over and over.
“Some come and have only studied to third or fourth grade back home. Others come prepared, and we put them all together in the same ESL classroom. Yes, they also join for protection, to have friends and girlfriends, but the biggest problem is that we have put all these traumatized young people in one room, and we have put them in one room where they take out all their frustration on each other. They sink together,” says Argueta.
And yet, despite the fact that the system forgets these young people until their immigration court date rolls around; despite the violence with which those girls were crushed; despite the headlines and Trump and Sinny, Argueta is convinced that the MS on Long Island and the MS in El Salvador have nothing to do with each other.
“They don't show their colors much here, and the authorities haven’t lost control. There might be 10 or 15 gang members who think they’re tough, but when the police show up, they scatter like cockroaches. They describe it as a well-organized international terrorist organization, and yes, there are individuals who stay in touch [with others in Central America], but that has to do with deportations. Or Facebook. An organized crime ring where thousands of dollars are coming in? No, these guys are poor. Here they work mowing lawns or in car washes. The veterans don’t want anything to do with the gang anymore, because they’ll get 30 or 40 years. There were big raids in 2004 and 2007 across the country, and this is one of the regions where they captured the most MS members. And they’re still there. Because gangs are a symptom... The MS isn’t so different from the young man who came here without a father or mother, couldn’t read or write, and arrived in New York in 1800, but was Irish,” says Argueta, referring to the gangs of the early 19th century that disputed New York.
Gangs are a symptom, he repeats. Abandonment is more like a cause, marginalization. And one more idea he emphasizes: the “mob” Trump talks about mows lawns and washes cars.
“I have a young woman who was raped when she was there [in El Salvador]. She comes here and the same gang is here. So she joins the rival gang to protect herself and go against that gang. She smokes and uses drugs and alcohol to process the trauma,” Argueta explains.
Before the interview ends, Argueta asks to add a detail. The detail includes most of the young people who arrive undocumented. A huge exception that MAGA politicians forget to mention, even though the government’s own figures indicate it.
“Remember that most of those who come don’t join a gang. But there are some who come and have nothing left to lose.”
* * *
“One day we left school and there were three little Hondas, these low-riders that they [the Hempstead 18] drive. They threw the gang on us. I was already tired of always being on the run, living here without bothering anyone. So I picked up a rock and threw it at one of those sons of bitches,” says the boy with the gold teeth. And then he repeats it like a slogan:
“I’m macho, too.
I know how to fight, too.
I don’t mess around.”
The boy was ready. Cannon fodder for a gang of teenagers in New York. The United States lost. Trump lost. The Mara Salvatrucha won.
* * *
This would not be a fair account of young people on Long Island if it only talked about young gang members. About the minority.
“We're from the department of La Unión, from the municipality of El Carmen. We’re campesinos. We grow corn and beans,” says the oldest of the brothers, who is 21.
Next to him, in a restaurant serving desserts in the town of Westbury, is his younger brother, 20. The elder studied until sixth grade. The younger, nothing. They have been planting crops since they were children.
They left their country on Aug. 24, 2016. Their sister, who has lived on Long Island for 20 years, paid a coyote $7,000 for each of them. They were resigned to living and dying in poverty. Their only option was to work another’s land six days a week, from 6 to 11 a.m., for $36, and only during the rainy season. Six dollars a day. But the Mara Salvatrucha gang would not allow them to continue their precarious life as campesinos.
“They wanted us to grow marijuana for them to sell. We were going to plant it and take care of it, just like we did with the corn: take care of it. They wanted us to plant drugs in the middle of the cornfields. We are Evangelical Christians. We can’t do that,” explains the eldest.
Many of their days began with a beating at 5:30 in the morning, as they walked to the fields they were growing for others. On Aug. 10, 2016, they were threatened with guns. On the 15th, the brothers went to report the incident to the police sub-station in El Carmen.
“They told us to go show them who we were. They put us in the patrol car, but they took us to a somewhat isolated alley called El Cacho. There were two police officers. They made us kneel down and asked us why we hadn’t accepted the proposal. Because we go to church. They started kicking us. They threatened us, saying they would force us to cooperate. They left us there. We couldn't find anyone to ask for help,” says the older brother.
The brothers locked themselves in their home. But on the 20th, they had to go to work. With a salary of $6 a day, their savings dry up quickly.
“We were waiting for a store to open at around 5:30. It was a gray van, the same police officers, but dressed in civilian clothes. Several people saw them throw us to the ground and handcuff us right there. They put us in the car and hooded us. They took us to an isolated house. When they got us out, the gang members were there. They started asking us the same questions again. We said no, that we believe in God. They got so angry that they beat us badly. They punched and kicked us and threw us on the ground. There were four gang members and those two police officers. They fired several shots near us. They said that next time they would kill us if we didn’t cooperate,” says the oldest.
That’s what the Mara Salvatrucha is like in El Salvador. It’s more like a parallel government exerting, in many cases, much more control over people than the government itself. It’s a mafia. A mafia of the poor, but a mafia nonetheless.
A friend took them to the local clinic. They were kept under observation for two days to make sure they didn’t have internal bleeding. That was on the 20th. On the 22nd, they started making arrangements with the coyote. On the 24th, at 5 in the morning, their month-long journey began. They crossed the Rio Grande one day in September at 8 p.m. They walked for three days through the desert. There were 14 of them. Only 11 made it. Three women from Honduras could not go on. They sat down and waited for someone to find them. “They were fat, really fat,” says the youngest of the brothers.
According to the oldest brother, the group was discovered because a Mexican migrant fell asleep during one of their brief rest stops. The group walked every night and part of the day toward a radio tower. The tower, recalls the Salvadoran, “seemed to be walking backward.” They were extremely tired. When the Mexican woke up and realized he had been left behind, he ran and shouted for them to wait. Seven Border Patrol cars appeared out of nowhere. And at one o’clock in the morning, after three days of walking, their attempt ended.
Then, what happens to thousands every month happened to them. First, they were taken to the hieleras, discouraging rooms where migrants spend their first days in detention. Cold cement as punishment for migrating. Then they were transferred to a detention center to await deportation. But the brothers told the story that has been told here, and after 15 days, a judge granted them bail. If they wanted to wait for the outcome of their asylum process in freedom, the farm workers who earned $36 a week had to pay $12,000.
“Who paid?“ I ask.
The two brothers make the same gesture. They bend over, roll up their pants, and reveal the cell phone charger-sized devices attached to their ankles.
“This is from a company. They’re watching me wherever I go. They can see me,” says the older brother.
This has nothing to do with the Mara Salvatrucha gang. There are things, however, that a journalist must not avoid reporting once they know them.
Since they fled, the brothers have each taken on a debt of $7,000 to their sister. The brothers owed $14,000 before they started mowing lawns on Long Island. Life had not afforded them the wherewithal to pay $12,000 in bail, per person, to the United States. That’s where bail bond companies come in. Enter Libre by Nexus. No matter how much confusion and melodrama they explain on their websites, these companies are nothing more than migration loan sharks. The $24,000 bail for the two brothers was paid by Libre by Nexus. That means that each brother not only owes $7,000 to his sister, but also $12,000 to Libre by Nexus. In other words, before they can even prune a garden, each brother owes $19,000. And that’s not all, because Libre by Nexus has to make a little profit in the land of freedom. That’s why they will charge each brother 20 percent more than the deposit: an additional $2,400 per person. Before they can even pick up a hoe in the United States, each brother owes $21,400. But it doesn’t end there.
How can Libre by Nexus be sure that a couple of poor farm brothers from La Unión will pay their share, $28,800? Libre by Nexus attaches a GPS device to each brother’s ankle. But in this land, nothing is free. Libre by Nexus does not give away GPS devices; it rents them. Each brother has to pay $420 a month to Libre by Nexus for the rental of his black GPS device. If the brothers’ trial takes, say, a year to happen, they have to pay $5,040 to Libre by Nexus for the GPS. If they break it, it’s another $3,800. Each brother, before even smelling the American grass, owes Libre by Nexus and his sister $26,440 for one year, $31,480 for two years... And so on, until they pay off their debt, connecting to the electricity every night for two hours so that the Libre by Nexus GPS doesn’t run out of battery, and the company can know where its money is. Where its Salvadoran campesinos are.
Libre by Nexus, with offices in 22 cities, presents itself as part of a “religious organization.” Not content with what they do, their website describes them almost as nuns of charity: “There are many horror stories about families struggling to pay immigration bail bonds. We have met families who have been forced to sell everything they own to pay the bond for a family member. We have seen families forced to go to their communities to beg people to use their property as collateral. And, unfortunately, we have seen countless detainees deported because they could not pay their bail and get out of custody. Libre by Nexus represents the hope that this will never have to happen again. We are constantly innovating our services to help more detainees in crisis. We are here to help you. Contact us today!”
Libre by Nexus had the boys’ sister sign as a guarantor. If they don’t pay up, she will.
“Thank God we’re working on the lawn — yarda is what they call it here,” says the younger.
Landscaping gardens as employees of a company, they earn $100 a day from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
“You’re running from the MS, but you say the MS is here. Have you seen any of them?“ I ask.
“No,” says the younger brother.
“Is there anywhere you’re afraid to go?”
“No,“ says the younger brother.
“What’s the difference between here and El Salvador?”
“Here we can go out. There, we can’t,” says the older brother.
The Border Patrol’s own data says so. Young people like these make up the majority of those who come. Young men who disembowel young girls with bats are a tiny minority. However, that’s how things work. It's not news that an honest young man mows lawns to pay thousands of dollars to a company and make a living. It is news that young men disembowel young girls. One thing a president doesn’t talk about; the other, he does.
* * *
French writer George Perec wrote in his posthumous book The Infra-Ordinary: “It seems to me that what attracts us most is always the event, the unusual, the extraordinary: written in eight columns and with big headlines. Trains only begin to exist when they derail... Behind events there must be scandal, a crack, a danger, as if life could only reveal itself through the spectacular, as if the convincing, the significant, were always abnormal.”
* * *
“When the stone hit him, the guy got out of the car and came down to wait for us. We had already called the MS. There were four of us, and three from the MS showed up. They [the 18 from Hempstead] were about seven. They were carrying weapons. We weren’t carrying anything. The MS guys had chains and bats. Those locos didn't mess around: I think they sent one guy to the hospital with the first blow, because they hit him on the head with a chain. Those guys [the 18] called the police. Three of my friends were arrested,” recounts the boy with the gold teeth.
His cousin is still outside the Subway with the car running.
“One of the guys who got arrested was Jeustin, right?” I ask.
“Yeah. At the time, they accused him of hitting one of the 18 in the stomach with a rock. They let him go then, but later...”
All this harassment took place between 2015 and 2016 at Uniondale High School. The shouts of Black boys calling themselves Crips and Bloods: “We’re waiting for you, come outside.” The kicks in the shopping malls in front of the girls they were courting. The harassment from the Hondas outside the school. It was all too much and ended in that whooping, but above all in that phone call. When the boy with the gold teeth and his friend of Honduran descent, Jeustin, 16 at the time, thought about asking for help, they could only think of two letters: MS. The only ones who had offered to respond. The only ones who had said: Call me, I’ll come help. The only ones: the MS of Uniondale. The Uniondale Locos Salvatrucha and the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, from the same small town.
The state had two years of high school to make the same offer to the boy and Jeustin: Call me, I’ll come help. But it didn't happen. Neither to the victims nor the perpetrators. The mother of Kayla, one of the girls beaten to death in Brentwood in 2016, told Agence France-Presse: “My daughter was bullied for two years [by a gang member] and the school did nothing, absolutely nothing.”
“These are children killing children,” the same woman told El Diario de Nueva York.
Not mafias or cartels: children.
The boy from the skirts of Chaparrastique says that, since he was a teenager, his relationship with the U.S. police has been that of a suspect and his pursuer. “Young, Salvadoran, wearing a T-shirt and a Yankees cap, to them you’re a gang member, even if they have nothing against you. They stop you all the time, and don’t think they’re going to say, ‘Are you a good student?’ They can see you dressed nicely, and the first thing they’re going to say is, ‘Are you in the gang? Everyone here is in the gang,’” he explains. Long Island authorities thought that, by going after everyone, they would find some. They never thought that, by going after everyone, everyone would fear them.
That day, MS-13 came to the aid of the boy with the gold teeth and Jeustin. They felt what it meant to win for the first time on Long Island. To be the hunter and not the prey. To be 15 years old and feared for the first time. It must have been an incredible feeling. Since then, they have rolled with the Letters. That doesn’t mean they got together in basements with a mafia to plan high-level robberies. It means they started hanging out with young people their own age who openly called themselves MS. They smoked marijuana in parks. They pooled $20 a week to buy bats and chains. The one calling the shots at the Hollywood Locotes’, a palabrero called El Demon, was an 18-year-old boy already deported to El Salvador. There are veteran gang members on Long Island, and cliques founded more than a decade ago. However, most of the young people, the newcomers, the ones Trump talked about, the ones who left high school fed up with bullying, don’t know those veterans.
For months, and even now, those MS-13 members were friends with the boy from Chaparrastique. They smoked together, drank together in the parks, played pool, fought against “las chavalas” (18th Street, in feminine), “los sangritas” (Bloods), “las cangrejas” (Crips, feminine), and “las vacas locas” (Vatos Locos, also feminine). They were strong together, and feared. When they went to the movies, no one bothered them. Now, they were the ones doing the bothering.
The boy with the gold teeth drifted away. Not from the gang at first, but from high school. Too much tension, too many problems, and his 55-year-old mother worried about him every day. He started working on roofs and packing products, and he thought there were opportunities to make money, that his life could be better than a life of bats and chains. He still hangs out with his friends, but leaving school changed his life.
Jeustin, the boy who was also defended by the gang members against 18th Street from Hempstead, had a different fate.
In a photo from Jan. 18, 2017, which appeared in several media outlets, he is standing with his arms behind his back, a serious expression on his face and a lost look in his eyes. Each of his arms is in the grip of a police officer, large white men holding a thin, dark-skinned 17-year-old boy about to enter court and be charged with three counts related to the murder of another young man. The police claim that on Dec. 13, 2016, at around 11:30 p.m., Jeustin and another boy arrived on bicycles, surrounded a group, and fired three shots with a nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol. The other boy fired at a group on Fenimore Avenue in Uniondale. Jeustin, they say, shouted, “La Mara, La Mara!” One of the bullets hit Alexon Moya, another 16-year-old boy, in the head. He died three days later in a hospital.
A boy, a victim of gangs, joins a gang to protect himself from other gangs — and then goes after other boys who become his victims, in turn looking for another gang to protect themselves from that gang. From him.
It could be Los Angeles in the 1980s, with the same initials, MS, but now it’s Long Island’s turn, three decades of misunderstanding later.
The boy with the gold teeth says that last week he went to a car show in the town of Levittown, with his 55-year-old mother, nine-year-old niece, and girlfriend. They bought special $50 passes that gave them access to all the cars. They wanted to ride every one, and he had paid for it with the money he had earned after a hard week of fixing roofs. They rode three. The third was a regular Chicago. They left the more extravagant rides for last. They would take it slowly. From the heights of the Chicago, the boy with the gold teeth saw one, two, three, four, five boys gathering below... Latinos, like him. They followed him with their eyes. They watched him go around and around. The rides ended. When he got out, there were eight of them.
“Nothing was working. I clenched the car keys between my knuckles. Whatever I touch, I said. They were the vacas locas, the Vatos Locos as they’re called, from Hempstead. Those assholes were Guatemalans and Hondurans,” recalls the boy with the gold teeth. His mother asked, “You’re going to get in trouble, aren’t you?” The Vatos Locos were fighting over his neighborhood with their fists. ‘“Let’s go eat somewhere else, Mom,” said the boy with the gold teeth. The luxury passes went to waste. The boy from Chaparrastique felt a deep hatred inside. They ruined his perfect Sunday.
He says he wants nothing to do with gangs anymore, but if they come looking for him again, like that afternoon at the amusement park, he knows who he’ll call.
“I know who will stick their neck out for me,” he says.
* * *
Final note: In October 2017, Nassau County authorities found three more bodies in wooded areas on the outskirts of Freeport, Merrick, and Roosevelt, all on Long Island. They were three boys, two aged 16 and one 19. The authorities attribute this to MS-13 and say that these bodies bring the number of Mara Salvatrucha-related murders to 25 in two years. Ángel Soler, 16, one of those killed, had disappeared months earlier. He had arrived from Honduras four years ago. Before he disappeared, according to his mother’s statement to Univision, he received a message on his phone. It read: “You're next, perro [dog], so get ready, perro, and quick.”
See the accompanying photo essay: A Funeral March from El Salvador to Long Island.
