Helen has not heard from her parents for two years since they left El Salvador to work illegally in the United States. She has run away from her aunt’s house to live with a gang. ‘My parents think I’m a little angel,’ she says, making horns with her fingers above her head, ‘but really I’m a little devil.’ She is 13 and she has already killed a man.
It is Saturday afternoon in La Campanera, an overcrowded suburb of Soyapango, a satellite of San Salvador. It’s another oppressively hot day in the rainy season and muddy children sway on rusty swings outside a rapturous congregation in a happy-clappy Baptist church.
By nightfall the residents of this barrio take refuge in their fortified houses. Being out after dark is asking for trouble in a suburb where children and teens from rival gangs kill each other and ordinary residents get caught in the crossfire.
In a typical colonia, or narrow pedestrianised street, we enter Helen’s home, a small neat house shared by four teenage girls aged 13 to 17, and 18-month-old baby Franklin. The girls do not work or go to school. The 15-metre square house, left to one of the girls, is clean and homely, with pictures on the wall, a ‘Shalom’ sign and little china christening gifts. Outside, a tank collects rainwater for washing. There has been no running water since two earthquakes devastated El Salvador last year.
The girls’ parents are dead or have abandoned them to work illegally in the US. Thousands of children were orphaned during El Salvador’s war and a basket-case economy has forced 1,5-million Salvadorans to emigrate, often without their children. So these girls have created their own family.
In the poverty of La Campanera, the girls look like beauty queens. Like teenagers the world over, they are dressed in trendy tank-tops and figure-hugging jeans which have been sent by relatives in the US. They do not look like pandilleras — gang members.
But Cristabel (17) pulls up her top to show the numbers ‘one’ and ‘eight’ tattooed on her midriff, signifying her allegiance to the Calle Dieciocho, the 18th Street gang, named after a Los Angeles street. To enter the gang, she had to be ritually beaten by three of her ‘homies’ while the gang counted slowly to 18. On her back is a tattooed crucifix and RIP, in memory of her ‘homegirl’ who was killed by the rival Mara Salvatrucha gang last year.
Cristabel’s 17-year-old boyfriend, Nelson, has diecocho inscribed on his forehead, making him a walking target. It is ugly, but what is pathetically tragic is that it is spelt incorrectly — the tattooist has left the second ‘i’ out of dieciocho.
Nelson is ruined anyway. In El Salvador anyone with a tattoo is unemployable. Hiding them is difficult — this is a country where ‘medicals’ and lie detector tests are commonplace even for jobs in sweatshops.
‘What difference does it make?’ he asks. He expects to die young. If you want to be cruel, ask him: ‘What if you don’t die? What is your future?’ and he and his homies are horrified. The prospect of not dying young has never occurred to them.
Belonging to the 18th Street gang has given these youngsters the sense of belonging they crave; but it condemns them to a blood feud with the MS — which also originated in LA — and is essentially a mirror image of the 18th Street gang. The girls call their enemies the Mierda Seca, the ‘Dry Shit’.
Armed with knives and homemade guns, the 18th Street and the Mara Salvatrucha gangs have carved up El Salvador; they kill each other for honour, territory and crack. Which gang you belong to depends on your barrio — graffiti tells you who is in charge. The youngest gang members are the most dangerous — they have the most to prove.
I am in El Salvador with cameraman-director Rodrigo Vazquez, making a film about gangs for Channel 4’s Unreported World. Helen (13) Melda (17) and Cristabel (16) sit on their bed, putting on make-up for the camera. They are coy about drugs and robbery.
Then I ask if they have ever killed, and we are back on comfortable territory. Helen, who is holding an Uncle Sam teddy bear, gets a large kitchen knife. A murder weapon.
‘I was with my homies and we saw one of the MS scum who had killed my homegirl,’ Helen recalls. ‘I stuck this knife into his back and he fell. We kicked him and crushed his head with a brick. Then we pushed his body into a ditch. I was covered in blood. Revenge is sweet,’ she said. Her friends smiled.
Melda dreams of becoming a beautician. But the year-long course costs $20 a month, a fortune. She says she has killed too: ‘I was on the bus in Soyapango. A girl got on and made an MS sign to me. I plunged a knife into her heart.’
Children as young as seven join the gangs; some, like baby Franklin, are being born into the culture. Police estimate there are at least 25 000 gang members in El Salvador, perhaps twice that. In this country of six million people, there are half a million guns and no jobs. One in three people is a victim of violent crime.
The 12-year war between left-wing guerrillas and a US-backed military dictatorship cost 80 000 lives. Around half a million refugees fled to the US. Most settled in the ghettos of Los Angeles.
Since 1992, almost 35 000 Salvadoran migrants have been deported from the US, 40% for committing crimes. It was deportees who brought the LA gang culture to El Salvador.
Young people join the gangs to find a sense of identity, says social psychologist Miguel Cruz. ‘Our country doesn’t give them opportunities,’ he says, ‘and when they join the gangs they get a power that society denies them.’
One tiny NGO, Homies Unidos, or Homies United, is trying to help gang members with apprenticeships and scholarships. Run by former LA gang members, Homies is about to go bust; reliant on donations, it only has money to last until the end of the year.
‘Our work is vital,’ says director William ‘Weazrock’ Huezo, ‘but we’re sinking fast’. Without government or international funding they are powerless to improve life for any of El Salvador’s gang members, youngsters who are, literally, dying to belong. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001