Warwick Fry, February 7th 2019
The second day of Christmas 2017. Outside an 'Evangelista' is on a rant for Jesus with a loudspeaker that can be heard for several blocks. You don't often get that in the middle of the week, but then you don't often hear gang members – pandilleros – encouraged to seek forgiveness in Jesus. The evangelist was blatantly capitalising on the death of a local pandillero at the hands of the police, on Christmas Eve.
It’s a signifier of how gang culture has changed over the last few generations. Some former gang leaders are now Evangelical Pastors. No longer the tattoos (a teardrop denoting a murder – a requisite for promotion in the gang hierarchy). No more soccer games with the macheted head of a rival gang as a football (as occurred once in a prison riot). No more (or not so much) forced recruitment of schoolkids, with the assassination of teachers who objected. The former ‘reformed’ gang leader now has another captive audience willing to listen to two (or if you’re lucky three) chords monotonously pumped out on an irreverantly amplified electric organ on loop for several hours straight. Sometimes until midnight. (‘At least’, the patient Catholics say, ‘we pray quietly’). You’re a Pastor now, mon; Halelujia !! Hear the People Testify!
The gangs still have a sinister presence. The corner stores in our suburb pay a ‘tax’ of $US5 to $25 a week depending on the size of the business. Three years ago my taxi driver had to be persuaded to enter the suburb. He’s cool now, (he has to douse his lights if he comes in after dark to indicate that he is a ‘local’). But if we have a different taxi a boy runs up with his mobile to take a dollar ‘tax’. Some walk around with phones glued. Others watch who enters the barrio (neighbourhood). They don’t have tattoos, now, and they don’t have to kill anyone. At least not in our neighbourhood. They just don’t want to go to school. And they get a free Iphone.
Police have made sweeps since I first lived there. Our neighbours changed as gang related families were evicted. We no longer heard the odd shot in the night. But the reputation sticks. It is hard to get deliveries made or the internet fixed .
Other areas are more unlucky. In the first half of 2018, 160 police were killed in confrontations with the gangs. A disturbing development - police overreaction, and the formation of vigilantes who go out and assassinate suspected gang members.
This is the environment that has generated the marches of refugees to the US border. While the media presents this as an invasion by the envious, the Central American people see it more as a protest march against the conditions created by US support of dictatorships (as is the case in Honduras) and profoundly corrupt government (as is the case in Guatemala – and Honduras). The exodus has been going on for years, but now the refugees are marching as a combined, organised group to bring international attention to the damage US policies have brought to the region. The obsecenity of Trump’s wall is intended to exclude the vision of collateral damage coming home to roost.
The notorious gangs of El Salvador and the evangelicals are both made in the USA. In 1996, 60,000 Salvadoran ‘undesirables’ were deported en masse from the US, most of them from Los Angeles. Twenty years later care packages from the US Bible Belt ensure that the Evangelical churches are well attended and the compliant gang leaders rewarded with the position of ‘Pastors’.
In Honduras the gangs are in open collusion with the US funded police, and with drug traffickers. The brother of the current (elected under a US condoned fraud) President and the son of a former President (illegally appointed after a US endorsed coup) have both been arrested for massive cocaine smuggling. It makes the petty extorion rackets of the Salvadoran gangs (born in the USA) look like small beer.
Maria’s Story
Mari’s youngest brother was killed by gangsters five years ago near the family farm up in the hills near the Guatemalan border. He was killed for his ID papers and mobile phone. The gangsters use fake ID for their criminal activities.
Another brother owns the house she lives in. He was a security guard on an armoured van that was attacked in an attempted bank robbery. One of the bandits killed was a gang member. The gang found out where he lived. He resigned from his job and moved out of town.
Last year another brother died. He had been deported for the fourth time, but kept trying to get back. Why? He had lived in Los Angeles for seventeen years. Had a partner, a thirteen year old daughter, work and business assets. After five months in a Texan prison he came back to live with us. A jack of all trades, helping us out on the house, on the family farm near the border, he simply gave up when he got news that his partner had married an evangelical pastor.
When I first met Mari she had been threatened by the pandilleros with a gun at her head and a knife at her throat, to extort a ‘tax’. (I only learnt this later). She invited me to meet her family, visit the family farm up in the hills. The rest is history.
Mari does not feel that her circumstances is unusual for Salvadorans. Does not feel that she is a victim.
She loves her childhood on the family farm based on sustainable agriculture. As the first child in her family to finish school at the age of 14 she had to accompany her father to read the documents he signed with his thumbprint. Her mother is also illiterate.
After working in the city as a street vendor, as a US$8 dollar a day cellophane sweet wrapper in a sweatshop factory for two years, as a live in maid for similar wages with a half a day off each weekend, as a barmaid and a waitress, she still yearns for the country life.
Her dream is to grow things.