Maras

THE TEENAGE GANGS OF CENTRAL AMERICA ARE A PRODUCT OF CIVIL WAR AND FAILED POLITICS. BUT THEY CAN BE INTEGRATED. NICARAGUA HAS SHOWN HOW

“You want to know where Calaca is?” Rocko screws up his eyes. “I’ll tell where he is. He’s in the cemetery.” And El Silencio? “No idea. He disappeared. Everyone’s gone underground these days.”

A few years ago it was easy to find Calaca (“The Skull”) and El Silencio (“The Quiet One”). They cruised the suburbs of San Salvador, got drunk and hung out on the rough grounds where the kids play football, or sat in the ruins of an empty house smoking marihuana or crack. They begged from passersby. Or sometimes robbed them. Calaca and El Silencio always had a weapon handy. A knife, a pistol or a “chimba,” the local name for a homemade “piece.” Calaca and El Silencio belonged to MS-13, to Mara Salvatrucha.

Mara Salvatrucha is the most feared youth gang in Central America. It has at least 25,000 members in El Salvador, with the same number or even more belonging to other maras. And in the neighboring countries of Honduras and Guatemala as well as in Mexico and the USA there are thousands more members of such gangs. Exactly how many there are in total, no one knows. Estimates vary between 200,000 and a million. The governments of the countries concerned blame them for up to 60 percent of all murders. If that is true, the maras kill more than 2,000 people a year in El Salvador alone.

THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE
The political response is to counter violence with violence. Laws have been passed branding the gangs as “terrorist associations.” Membership alone is punishable by up to twelve years in prison. At night joint army and police patrols prowl through the slums and sledgehammer their way into the homes of suspected mareros. Even a cross-border rapid intervention force has been set up to combat the gangs. In El Salvador alone there are 6,200 gang members in jail—where they continue to organize drug deals, extortion and murder.

Just one country has taken a different course. When the first maras sprang up in Nicaragua at the start of the new millennium, the police launched an integration program.The business community, tradesmen and local inhabitants in the districts where the gangs made trouble were all brought on board. “At the time, other countries said we were crazy,” says Amín Gurdián, the youth affairs commissioner of the Nicaraguan police. “Now they would be happy to have as few problems with the maras as we do.” According to national police statistics, youths have been responsible for half a dozen murders in the past year. “In El Salvador they have that many every day,” adds Gurdián.

The maras came into being after the civil wars of the seventies and eighties and represent a continuation of the culture of violence that began at that time. During the civil war years, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were run by bloody military dictatorships that employed death squads to pursue opposition politicians and intellectuals. Left-wing guerillas rose up against them. In Nicaragua the leftist Sandinistas first fought against the Somoza family dictatorship. After their victory, the right-wing Contras then waged war against the country’s new rulers. The wars were mostly fought out in rural areas. The civilian population fled to the cities, swelling the size of the slums. Hundreds of thousands moved on further to become illegal workers in the USA. There are now around half a million Salvadorians living in Los Angeles alone.

QUICK, CLEVER, CRUEL
It was in Los Angeles that the children of the refugees learned all about gangs. In the black and Latino districts, gangs controlled the drug trade and used guns to fight their turf wars. The young Salvadorians formed their own gang: the Mara Salvatrucha, an artificial word that combines the name of their country of origin with the word “trucha,” meaning trout. In El Salvador the fish is a symbol of agility and intelligence. Many of the first-generation mareros had the abbreviated title of their gang tattooed on their faces in capital letters: MS-13. The 13 stands for the 13th letter in the alphabet: M, for mara. A cross tattooed on the face means that the face’s owner has already killed. Besides MS-13, a second big mara originated in Los Angeles: Mara 18, which took its name from 18th Street which it claimed as its own territory.

In the nineties the United States began deporting young offenders from Central America back to their homelands.There they met others who had been uprooted, young people who had grown up in time of war.The traditional social structure of the extended family had been torn apart by migration from the countryside to the city slums. Few families remained intact. The youngsters had only a few chaotic years of schooling behind them and could hardly read and write. And there was no work for them. Mostly they got by as petty criminals. The deportees from the United States knew how to turn losers like that into powerful maras.

“For us, those who came back were our heroes,” says Rocko. The United States shipped more than 10,000 young offenders back to El Salvador. They wore the baggy pants made fashionable by US rappers, took drugs and knew how to handle guns. “We’d only ever seen things like that in the movies.”El Silencio was a deportee, and boys like Rocko looked up to him. He even claimed to have killed a member of Mara 18 in Los Angeles.“When people like El Silencio arrived, it got real hard,” says Rocko. Since then, whenever he leaves the house he tucks a pistol into his waistband.

The maras quickly controlled entire districts, extorting protection money from bus drivers, prostitutes and shopkeepers. Those who did not pay were first given a warning—then killed. Bloody battles between rival gangs left dozens dead. The harder the police cracked down, the more professional the maras became. Once the tattooed faces and flashy, macho manners were part of the street scene. Now they operate in the shadows. Besides protection rackets, they also control the local drug trade. And they hire themselves out as hit men. As little as a hundred dollars buys a murder. For the perpetrator in El Salvador, the risk is minimal: fewer than ten percent are caught and convicted.

Maras are nowadays by far the most serious threat to internal security in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Only Nicaragua has escaped the cycle of violence. “We recognized the problem five years ago,” says youth commissioner Gurdián. “At that time we counted 171 groups considered to be a risk, and 35 actual youth gangs.” But instead of confrontation, the police sought dialog. “We knew that in reality these boys are losers, unable to find a place in society. And we also knew that the only way to solve the problem was to integrate them.”

So the police initially negotiated a ceasefire with the gangs, then progressed to disarmament and finally integration into the districts they inhabited. “We had to convince not only the mareros, but also the population suffering from their activities,” explains Gurdián. The police talked to sports clubs, churches, local tradesmen. Everywhere they talked up the problem youngsters and tried to find a place for them in the community. Together with the local authorities they built sports grounds and small parks and made the mareros responsible for maintaining them. “It wasn’t easy to get the population to accept our concept,” says Gurdián. “The people were afraid and they wanted us to crack down hard. But when we said to them, look, that could just as well be your son—then they began to understand.” Some 4,000 mareros have since opted out of the gangs.

SIMPLE DREAMS OF A DECENT LIFE
El Salvador too could have taken the same course. Because at heart what many of the young mareros dreamed of was a simple, decent life. When El Silencio was deported from the United States in the nineties, he told people in the district he moved to that what he was looking for now was “a woman for life, one I can make a home with.” Instead of hanging around on the streets, he wanted “to work and be an example to others.” And when Calaca, who grew up fatherless in a refugee camp hut with four brothers and sisters and had just four years of schooling, first joined MS-13, what he really dreamed of was “getting a job in a car repair shop, or a furniture factory.” Then he wouldn’t have had to rob and deal drugs to provide for his girlfriend and his oneyear- old daughter. “But with tattoos on your face, no employer will take you on,” he complained shortly before his death.

After years on the street, Rocko has opted out and is now trying in a small way to follow the pattern that Nicaragua has set on a broad scale. With half a handful of ballpoints in his shirt pocket and a crease in his jeans he goes from one aid organization to the next, drumming up support for projects—maybe to set up a car wash, or a small bakery— that will enable the mareros to realize their simple dreams.“What I am doing is too late for most of them.”He has no illusions,“They smell the big money to be made from drug dealing and protection rackets and they drop out of sight.” El Silencio is probably among them.

But Calaca almost made it. The boy was even thinking of having the tattoos removed from his face. Then one evening he went with his girlfriend and his daughter to the corner shop. A white pickup with blacked-out glass drove by, the passenger wound down the window, drew a pistol and fired. Calaca took one shot in the head, two more pierced his chest. He died on the spot. Not even twenty years old. Another murder that was never solved. It was probably committed by a hitman, paid for by businessmen whom the maras were putting the squeeze on. If Calaca had grown up in Nicaragua, he might still be alive.

(Text: Toni Keppeler, Photos: Yvonne Berardi)