Killers on a shoestring: Inside the gangs of El Salvador

SAN SALVADOR — On a sultry evening in late July, the Salvadoran authorities executed their very first assault on what they called the financial cupola of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, the largest of the ruthless gangs that have made El Salvador the murder capital of the world.

Until that point, the National Civil Police had followed an almost choreographed routine, again and again, as they sought to cripple the gangs economically. In the dead of night, often accompanied by television cameras, officers would batter down the doors of ramshackle houses in marginalized communities and then arrest and put on display a cluster of tattooed and half-naked men.

Between 2012 and 2015, the total amount confiscated in these showy anti-extortion raids was $34,664.75 — an absurdly tiny sum considering that the United States has designated MS-13 as a global criminal organization on a par with the Zetas of Mexico, or the Yakuza of Japan.

On July 27, however, in a mission baptized Operation Check, the authorities shifted gears. They deployed 1,127 police officers to raid scores of supposed gang fronts, including car dealerships and bars, motels and brothels.

With great fanfare, they presented to the news media rows and rows of impounded buses and cars, along with 77 suspects identified as the financial operatives of MS-13 and their collaborators. Among them were the supposed CEO of the street gang, Marvin Ramos Quintanilla, and two other leaders portrayed as controlling millions and possessing luxuries unimaginable to the destitute gang members beneath them.

But the presentation was something of an exaggeration, as are many official characterizations of the gangs whose criminal sophistication and global reach tend to be overstated by authorities frustrated that they cannot vanquish them. For instance, that supposed chief executive officer hardly lived like a kingpin; he leased a squat concrete house with a corrugated roof in a neighborhood where rents rarely reach $400. He owned an old Honda Civic and a Nissan van.

In collaboration with The New York Times, El Faro, a digital newspaper based in San Salvador, sought to pierce the secrecy surrounding the finances of the gangs that terrorize El Salvador, which is experiencing a level of deadly violence unparalleled outside war zones: 103 homicides per 100,000 residents last year, compared with five in the U.S.

With an estimated 60,000 members in a country of 6.5 million people, the gangs hold power disproportionate to their numbers. They maintain a menacing presence in 247 of 262 municipalities. They extort about 70 percent of businesses. They dislodge entire communities from their homes, and help propel thousands of Salvadorans to undertake dangerous journeys to the U.S. Their violence costs El Salvador $4 billion a year, according to a study by the country's Central Reserve Bank.

And yet, the reporting determined, MS-13 and its rival street gangs in El Salvador are not sophisticated transnational criminal enterprises. They do not begin to belong in the same financial league with the billion-dollar Mexican, Japanese and Russian syndicates with which they are grouped. If they are mafias, they are mafias of the poor. El Salvador has been brought to its knees by an army of flies.

A Message Written in Lead

At 4 p.m. on a summer day in 2015, two young gang members intercepted a businessman as he was returning home from work. "I have kids. Calm down, please," he managed to say before the youths grabbed him, threw him to the ground and shot him: in a shoulder, in the stomach, and twice in the face.

They were delivering a message written in lead.

"It was because of the extortion, not for any other reason," the man's son said.

The man owned a bus. His son, who also owned a bus, said his father, tired of being extorted, had finally stopped making his $1 daily payment to the gang three weeks before his death. It murdered him because of $21.

Among Salvadoran businesses, transportation companies, whose vehicles crisscross gang territory, have proved especially vulnerable to extortion. Over the last five years, it has been more dangerous to drive a bus than to fight gang crime: The gangs have killed 692 transportation workers — and 93 police officers.

Genaro Ramírez, the owner of a large bus company and a former member of Congress, calculates that he has handed over $500,000 in gang extortion payments over the last 19 years. "When they tell you they are going to kill you, you don't have a choice," he said.

The only transportation company chief who has refused to be extorted — and has made his refusal public — is Catalino Miranda. Miranda owns a fleet of several hundred buses.

Since 2004, the gangs have killed 26 of his employees. But he refuses to reconsider his position.

"As I told one of them," he said, referring to a gang representative, "go ahead and kill them. This cannot continue for a lifetime."

Little Devil of Hollywood

When the Salvadoran authorities draw a flow chart of MS-13's organizational structure, they always put a mug shot of El Diablito de Hollywood, the Little Devil of Hollywood, at the very top.

Hierarchically, El Diablito — Borromeo Henríquez Solórzano, 38 — is as far above "homeboy" as one can get. If gang leaders are enriching themselves at the expense of the rank and file, Henríquez should be the wealthiest capo di tutti. And yet.

In the late 1970s or early 1980s, Henríquez and his family fled the Salvadoran civil war along with thousands of their compatriots who resettled in Los Angeles neighborhoods dominated by Mexican gangs. Mara Salvatrucha was born there and then.

At the end of the 1990s, as part of an anti-gang offensive and a crackdown on "criminal aliens," the U.S. shipped planeloads of gang members made in the U.S. back to El Salvador and other Central American countries. El Diablito returned to his homeland in one of those waves of deportation.

He was just a teenager, but in that era coming from Los Angeles conferred status in the branch of Mara Salvatrucha that had sprouted in El Salvador.

Prison, where he was sent in 1998 after getting a 30-year sentence for homicide, only solidified his stature.

Soon after he was first locked up, Henríquez summoned the leader of one of Mara Salvatrucha's most powerful cells to visit him in prison, the leader related in an interview.

El Diablito said he wanted to institutionalize extortion nationwide, the leader related. He was insistent that the leader accede to the plan, or quit. The leader communicated the new directive to his troops. A few years later, the leader quit and emigrated to Washington, D.C., where he now owns a small business in a Salvadoran neighborhood.

Like El Diablito, most of the national gang leaders operate from behind bars. Through ready access to cellphones and private visits with lawyers, they retain tight control of their organizations — the money the gangs earn and the havoc they wreak.

In 2012, the U.S. Treasury Department designated MS-13 as a transnational criminal organization, alongside four criminal syndicates: the Zetas, the Yakuza, the Russian Brothers' Circle and the Italian Camorra. It was the first street gang that had ever received that designation.

Howard Cotto, the general director of the National Police, estimated in an interview that 50 to 70 gang leaders, including Henríquez, have accumulated some money or business interests. But only enough, he said, to permit their families to escape "conditions of poverty, overcrowding, unhealthy conditions and sheet metal" and have a chance at a future.

"I cannot say the leaders are living in places of luxury," he acknowledged.

Most of the leaders, in fact, are expected to spend the rest of their lives in prison, either in solitary confinement or in malodorous cells shared with dozens of others.

'Keep Two Bucks'

One day in 2014, an imprisoned leader of the 18th Street gang — MS-13's main rival — who goes by the alias Chiki was issuing instructions to a low-level gang member identified as Shaggy.

Speaking by phone from the Izalco penitentiary, Chiki, who was serving time for extortion, ordered Shaggy to make a pickup of an extortion payment. It was $100 from an operation in Colonia Rubio in the department of La Unión. And, though Shaggy risked up to 20 years in prison if caught, there was something special in it for him, Chiki said.

"Keep two bucks so you can get yourself something to eat," Chiki said, in what turned out to be a wiretapped conversation. He added: "And tell El Demente," the Demented One, "to give you some custards for your kid."

Chiki, whose real name is José Luis Guzmán, was the third in command of the 18th Street gang's Southerners faction in eastern El Salvador. Another prison wiretap recording showed an even higher-level 18th Street leader, Carlos Ernesto Mojica, getting involved in negotiations with a chicken vendor who sought to lower her monthly extortion payment to $200 from $400.

That these leaders were overseeing such small-bore operations typifies the pettiness of gang business.

In the four years before Operation Check, the biggest sum collected in a police anti-extortion raid was $6,377; some raids netted only $5.

Grunts Seeking Respect

According to an internal code, only leaders can speak on behalf of the 18th Street gang. But in the rural department of La Paz, one of the most violent in El Salvador, a 15-year-old gang member agreed to grant an interview on two conditions: that his identity be protected, and that breakfast be provided.

The boy, gangly and pimply, is a fledgling member of the 18th Street Revolutionaries, a faction of the 18th Street gang, and he works as an extremely small-time roadside extortionist. He collects $15 monthly from each of three food trucks that rumble through his district. He then turns over the proceeds to the leader of his clique.

Like so many young recruits, the teenager is an obedient soldier who risks his life to protect his territory without earning a penny from his organization. It is a bargain for the gang leaders: tens of thousands of grunts who are not seeking personal profit, only respect and a sense of belonging.

One of 14 children, the boy never went to school and does not know how to read or write. He probably could have found work in the nearby sugar cane fields, where, even if conditions were miserable, he would have earned $100 a month. But, feeling bullied and vulnerable at 13, he believed that gang membership would give him something less tangible but more valuable at that age.

"I was a kid: I was stupid," he said about joining. "A bunch of crazy guys were messing with me because I was a kid, smacking me in the head, knocking me around. It made me think: I have had enough. Since I joined up, nobody screws with me."

In two years of gang life, the teenager said he had been involved in two "collective homicides." In both cases, members of a rival gang had dared to breach the invisible border that separates MS-13 from 18th Street territory. One man was looking to buy some marijuana; the other to meet girls at a village festival. They were killed for their defiance.

The day of that interview and in follow-up conversations throughout the summer, the boy made it clear he was scared of the police. Since February, officers had been stopping by his house from time to time, and he had spent much of his time hiding from them in the mountains.

"I need to save money to get out of here," he said. "If they catch me, they're not going to let me live."

They did catch him, in October, and arrested him for extorting $40 from a local merchant. He was jailed, and faces up to 15 years in prison.

Failure of the 'Iron Fist'

When the government ratcheted up its "iron fist" approach last year, three gangs, working in coordination, responded with a show of force. On a Sunday night, they distributed written and oral messages to bus owners and employees: "He who takes out a vehicle tomorrow is going to end up glued to his steering wheel." To underscore their seriousness, they killed a driver and burned three microbuses as a warning.

The next day, six drivers who had disobeyed their order were killed. The authorities sent soldiers and tanks into the streets, and deployed government vehicles to substitute for the buses, but the gangs succeeded in almost completely paralyzing San Salvador's transportation system for four days. Some 1.3 million Salvadorans were affected; many high schools and universities suspended classes and the economy suffered an $80 million loss, according to the Chamber of Commerce.

The authorities have continued to treat all gangsters as mortal enemies and have doubled down on their use of force. Some 424 gang members had died in confrontations with the police this year as of September.

"If the use of force is not the correct path in this moment, at this stage, at this juncture, then what is?'' Óscar Ortiz, the country's vice president, asked in late October.

The government cites as evidence a recent drop in murders: 4,431 by mid-October, compared with 5,363 by that point in 2015. But that is still the second highest toll since 1995.

For a gang member tired of the gang life, at any rate, there is nowhere to go. There are no rehabilitation centers where they can seek refuge, no programs to reintegrate them into society and no gang-prevention initiatives aimed at high-risk youths.

The only alternatives appear to be those that gang members themselves spray-paint on walls throughout the country: "Jail or the Cemetery."