The Hollywood Kid

The Violent Life and Violent Death of an MS-13 Hitman

Juan Martinez, Óscar Martínez, Juan Martínez, John Washington, Daniela Maria Ugaz, John Washington, Daniela Maria Ugaz

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781786634931
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786634917
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Biographies politiques

As a boy, Miguel ?ngel Tobar fled a small town in El Salvador torn apart by warring guerillas and US-backed death squads. As a teen in Los Angeles, he fought discrimination and beatings by joining a gang--MS-13. By the time the US deported him to San Salvador, The Hollywood Kid joined a wave of thousands of US-bred gangsters, whose violence--in concert with corrupt offiicals--have in turn helped propel new waves of refugees.

The incomparable Salvadoran journalist Oscar Martinez got to know the Hollywood Kid and met with him as he first turned on MS-13, killing gang members, and then in turn was assassinated by other gang members. In intensely vivid scenes, Martinez and his anthropologist brother Juan tell the story of a violent life and death--and of the geopolitical forces that propelled a country into becoming one of the most violent on earth.

Part I

A Violent History

1

The End: The Death and Burial
of Miguel Ángel Tobar

The Burial

Miguel Ángel Tobar knows no peace, not even in death.

It’s noon on Sunday, November 23, 2014. Seven men struggle to get the body into the ground in the cemetery of Atiquizaya, in western El Salvador. The sun beats down on their backs.

Miguel Ángel Tobar’s mother, a small woman with gray hair, seemed calm when the boy’s father-in-law and brothers were digging the grave. Now that her son is being lowered inside his teak coffin, she kneels down on the ground beside him and cries out: “Why so young? Why again? Why another son? Why another murder?”

The coffin, a donation from the local government, has no glass window. Windowless coffins are often used out of respect for a family that prefers not to be left with the memory of a disfigured body. With Miguel Ángel Tobar, that’s not the issue. His murderers didn’t have the skillful aim he had, and they had to empty both their magazines to hit him six times in the back as he ran away. Three bullets pierced his head discreetly, as it were, behind his ear. The bullets were kind to him.

Miguel Ángel Tobar’s burial lasts only five minutes.

But hours were spent digging, judging the size of the hole in the ground, and digging some more. The preparations weren’t very solemn. You might have mistaken the scene for a group of family members coming together to dig a well. The men, dripping with sweat, like laborers erecting a house, bickering about the depth and width. The women shushing their children’s cries and watching the men work.

But once the men had roped the coffin and started to lower it, this everyday scene suddenly became the burial of someone they’d loved.

The mother screams for five whole minutes. She sways as if she’s about to faint. Miguel Ángel Tobar’s wife, Lorena, a shy eighteen-year-old hardened by life, allows herself to cry. Over the squeals and whimpers of their children, women sing evangelical songs as loudly as they can. They belt out words that describe celestial enclosures, an infernal lake.

The men, dry-eyed, lower their gazes to the ground.

Five graves away, four gangsters are playing dice.

Everybody knows that this cemetery is controlled by the Mara Salvatrucha 13. The gravedigger—who looked on as others did the grunt work of burying Miguel Ángel Tobar—knows it. The cemetery’s security officer knows it, too. When someone asks, “Who are they?” he nonchalantly responds, “They’re the guys in charge.”

The burial of a gang member, no matter which gang, is governed by rules that can’t be found in any manual. Whoever it is, he’s allowed to be dead in peace. But today, that shaky rule has been left in the dust.

Two more gang members come out of the row of shacks flanking the cemetery and approach the four dice players. The players halt their game. Another youngster emerges and approaches the mourners. He’s a thin, pale kid who’s put on gangster attire fit for a gala: a round black Charlie Chaplin hat, a loose white t-shirt tucked into baggy black pants cinched by a belt, white knock-off Domba sneakers. The kid spits at the feet of the mourners and looks to catch someone’s eye, ready for a challenge. No one meets his gaze.

Another gang member—materializing from a nearby ravine, and at first hovering at the edge of the scene—begins to inch closer, towards the other side of Miguel Ángel Tobar’s grave. The site is surrounded, the mourners about to be trapped between the circling gang members and the ravine.

The father-in-law mumbles: “This is getting ugly.” The last shovelfuls of dirt fill the tomb. One of the mourners, machete in hand, whacks off a head of izote, El Salvador’s national flower, and sticks it into the mound of dirt covering Miguel Ángel Tobar’s coffin.

Mourners sing evangelical hymns under candlelight in the Kid’s mother’s house. The songs have to be shouted to compete the reggaeton music from a nearby party. On the left is Doña Rosa, Miguel’s mother.

There’s no time to pack the dirt, which is left with no tombstone, no cross, no epitaph.

The small, sorry-looking procession then quickly exits the cemetery. As they pass, other gang members come out of the shacks and tell the mourners to stay put. Instead, everyone just scrams.

Miguel Ángel Tobar, the sicario who betrayed the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, a “clique” (clicas in Spanish) of the Mara Salvatrucha, had departed the gang in the only way possible for someone who had lived his life.

In this country there can be no peace for someone like Miguel Ángel Tobar, El Niño de Hollywood.

Miguel Ángel Tobar was a member of the Mara Salvatrucha 13.

He belonged to one of the largest and most feared street gangs in the world, the only one whose leaders made the US Treasury’s blacklist of transnational criminal organizations, on a par with the Mexican Zetas and the Japanese Yakuza. It’s a gang that, for two straight years—2015 and 2016—made El Salvador the most murderous country in the world. To put this in perspective: In 2015, in cartel-occupied Mexico, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and the Zetas helped drive the homicide rate up to eighteen for every 100,000 inhabitants; El Salvador, meanwhile, had a rate of 103. In the United States, the rate is around five. More than eight murders for every 100,000 inhabitants is, according to the United Nations, an epidemic.

But before becoming the Kid of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha, Miguel Ángel Tobar was a semi-orphaned youth crushed under the heel of a war that had just finishing razing everything around him. In the mid 1990s, when Miguel Ángel Tobar first picked up a gun to join a gang-led war, the remains of the 75,000 victims of the other conflict were still smoldering. This twelve-year hell had begun in the 1970s, when El Salvador was a pressure cooker

An all-out civil war was raging then. The clandestine leftist groups had matured and begun to seriously organize themselves.

This wasn’t a unified movement, but a collection of factions with diverse political ideologies. The middle-class youth, with mostly Catholic backgrounds and influenced by Asian communist movements, fell in behind the idea of a popular armed struggle. They formed the Revolutionary Army of the People, or ERP. Another group, which broke off from the Salvadoran Communist Party, linked up with a mass of industrial and agricultural workers to create one of the largest guerrilla organizations in Latin America: the Popular Liberation Forces (FPL). Insurgent groups sprouted from all sides, and the idea of armed struggle became more and more entrenched among the people.

At the other extreme, the pseudo-democratic government was composed of ultra-rightist military officers who’d led the previous coup d’état in 1979 and then defended their grip on power with all the notorious sadism of a Latin American army. Its right arm was the National Guard, whose name still sends chills down many Salvadoran spines. Manned by thugs, it functioned as a hit squad for the state and the small coffee-cultivating elite. In the 70s, the National Guard’s information-gathering methods consisted of hanging buckets of water from a suspect’s testicles or paddling a prisoner until he confessed where he’d hidden a stolen cow or a purloined necklace. Such methods were effective for terrorizing bandits or unarmed union organizers, but not so much for standing off guerrilla fighters galvanized by the spirit of revolution. The latter were much more agile in their combat strategies than the old and blundering state forces.

By 1975, bullets were flying in all directions. Guerrilla fighters bolstered their arsenals by kidnapping wealthy business owners and buying arms with the ransom fees. Contrary to the standard Marxist manual, they also developed a rear guard in remote agricultural communities, where the first camps and bases were established, and where the guerrillas filled out their ranks with campesinos tired of military oppression.

In 1979, everything changed in Central America. The three guerrilla groups in Nicaragua banded together and took down the Anastasio Somoza Debayle administration, the third generation of the Somoza dynasty still clinging to power. This was a ray of light for the Salvadoran guerrillas: the realistic possibility of installing a socialist government by way of the bullet. Fighting intensified. The campesino rear guard consolidated. And the US government, fearing it would lose control of its backyard, amped up its support of the Salvadoran army with both money and expertise. By the end of the year, an intelligence unit was formed, as well as an infiltration unit known as ORDEN. And, ultimately, the United States funneled something like $4.5 billion in aid to the Salvadoran government and military over a dozen years, coordinating with its leaders via the US Embassy in San Salvador and helping to cover up its crimes. It’s been estimated that the United States sent military weaponry worth $1 billion to the country in that decade. On the other side, Cuba and the newly installed Nicaraguan socialist government were quick to support the Salvadoran insurgency with resources and training.

All these guns, however, needed arms to carry them. In a country whose population was 60 percent children, the result was inevitable. Thousands of kids younger than fifteen were recruited to both sides of the conflict.

El Salvador, a tiny country that would fit inside of California twenty times, threw itself and its armies of children into an abyss from which it would not emerge until 1992, with 75,000 people dead and countless more displaced.

Even before the war, Salvadorans had been coming to Southern California. But it was no longer a gradual migration—one by one, family by family. It was droves after droves. And the Salvadorans were fleeing, not migrating. They were fleeing with little more than they could pack in a night, and without even really knowing where they were going. It wasn’t so important to get somewhere as it was to stop being where they were.

Almost none of the thousands of Salvadorans who came to California in the second half of the 1970s spoke English. Few had family there. Most congregated in the Angelino neighborhood of Pico Union, where they could find cheap apartments: up to four families squeezing into a matchbox.

Many were young kids who’d already known war. The recruiting process in El Salvador didn’t entail getting a letter on your eighteenth birthday, as American kids experienced during Vietnam. No. In El Salvador it was military trucks pulling into poor barrios where packs of soldiers with lassos trapped kids and teenagers. The soldiers then shaved the rookies’ heads, gave them a little training, and sent them to kill and die in the mountains.

In the mountains were the guerrillas. Hard-bitten guerrilla fighters who were also in the business of training kids and teenagers. A good number of those fighters, young and old, after seeing death up close, escaped to California where a network of the recently arrived was quickly forming. The more there were, the more they attracted other refugees. They thought California was the promised land.

“We fled the war. We didn’t want more war. But over there we found another bunch of problems,” said a veteran member of Barrio 18 who’d come to California in the ’80s, after more than a year of battling guerrilla fighters in the Salvadoran mountains.

Los Angeles, where most migrated, was anything but a peaceful place where one could calmly put down roots. Another battle was being waged there, one also fought by youth.

The Salvadoran kids, who didn’t speak English, were almost all put into special education classes. But language wasn’t their only problem. These kids could probably assemble an M-16, no sweat, or distinguish the distant sound of a rescue helicopter from that of a combat copter echoing through the mountains. But they had no idea who Abraham Lincoln was, or what had happened at the Alamo in 1836. They knew which roots you could eat and which to avoid if your ration had run out, but they didn’t know anything about square roots.

If classes were a torment for the confused Salvadorans, recess was a nightmare. The locals played baseball, American football, or four square—games they didn’t understand. Others—some, like the Mexican kids, who had migrated earlier—organized themselves into groups that continuously fought and had a complicated system of hand symbols. They were members of something previously unknown to the Salvadorans: gangs. There were gangs of every type. Most were made up of Mexicans, and even so they attacked each other all the time—a trivial yet serious game, where kids occasionally ended up dead. The school bathrooms and hallways were tagged with esoteric symbols that marked the presence of this or that gang. Leaving school at the end of the day was a gamble. The new arrivals had to know where they could walk, or risk crossing a forbidden line that would provoke a beatdown. These gangsters saw the Salvadoran kids as prey. They weren’t organized, they were very poor, and they represented, above all, unwelcome rivals. As the Mexican kids saw it, they already had enough to deal with the black gangs. Now they had to worry about these new savages. The Salvadorans were disrupting the understood meaning of the term “Hispanic.”

“The Mexicans would assault us on our way to school, they’d take our things. They wanted to squash all the bichas (little girls). I mean they saw us as inferior, you know. They wanted to force us into their gangs,” said a veteran gangster sitting in a bar in downtown San Salvador, almost twenty years after the United States retched him out like bad food. He doesn’t say this in the tone of a victim, knowing full well he doesn’t fit that bill anymore.

It was this social rejection and violence that made the new arrivals band together. They didn’t understand LA, and the city didn’t understand them. And yet, the city enclosed a secret that would soon dazzle them.

AC/DC, Slayer, Black Sabbath … heavy metal. Heavy, hard music that couldn’t be more different from the rancheras and ballads crooning out in Salvadoran towns. Those irreverent and frenzied compositions blared through the South Side barrios of LA and, though the Salvadorans couldn’t always understand the lyrics, they understood the euphoria smoking off the well-tuned basses. At last they recognized something within the great chaos around them, something that meant they’d actually reached the United States. They had suddenly come to understand one of the many languages spoken in the city.

Everything else melts away when you’re standing in front of a stage, or even in front of an old radio in an alleyway in Pico Union, and you yield to an inner passion, bursting into a whirlwind of kicks and slaps. The metalhead movement, with its dark, satanic lyrics, was a magnet for Salvadoran kids. Long hair, heavy chains, and black boots became their identifying symbols. And it was one, small, almost imperceptible detail in the history of rock music that became the refugees’ most cherished symbol.

As everyone knows, Black Sabbath and its lead singer, Ozzy Osbourne, were icons of heavy metal. Ozzy’s emblematic symbol, a relic of the hippie era, was a peace sign, the two-fingered V. When, after years of alcohol and drug abuse, Osbourne was forced out of the band, a new star took his place: Italian-born Ronnie James Dio. This vocalist did away with many of the band’s previous quirks, among them Osbourne’s notorious peace and love sign. In its place Dio used an old-country gesture borrowed from his grandmother. The sign of the horns was part of a ritual to cure the “evil eye” or simply to spook away bad luck. You make it by sticking your pointer and pinkie fingers into the air. This sign would soon become the icon of heavy metal.

Among the Salvadoran kids in LA, the sign became known as the “Salvatrucha claw.” Even today, Salvatrucha homies use it around the world.

By 1979, large groups of Salvadorans were being drawn together by heavy metal and satanism. They called themselves stoners.

In order to set themselves apart from other groups once and for all, the Salvadorans landed on a new name: La Mara Salvatrucha Stoner, or MSS.

The name harks back to a mostly forgotten film, The Naked Jungle, starring Charlton Heston. Made in 1954, it only premiered in Central America in the 1970s. It was an adaptation of a 1938 story by the German author Carl Stephenson, about a rich landowner in the Amazon whose property is devoured by millions of ants. The movie was popular across rural El Salvador, where these small windows into the Western experience marked the passage of time. It was so affecting that it inspired a new lexicon. The Salvadoran term majada, which colloquially referred to any group of people, was traded for marabunta, a type of army ant, or simply “mara.” Initially the word had no criminal connotation. The second part, “salvatrucha,” possibly coined by construction workers on the Panama Canal, is simply a reference to Salvadoran people.

The Mara Salvatrucha Stoner, a small cluster of autonomous cells that rarely interacted, wasn’t at all organized. And its members were not as innocent as those of other young stoner groups. They became obsessed with the satanic lyrics of the heavy and black metal bands, and they took their adolescent games seriously. They’d congregate in cemeteries to invoke “the Beast.” By the end of the 1970s, it wasn’t uncommon to find stoner mareros cutting up cats, making blood pacts, and praying to Satan over the slabs in Pico...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: A Violent History
• Part II: Shacks
• Part III: Abyss
• Part IV: Alive