This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha (10 page)

B
renda’s continued separation from the gang reduced her craving for street life. Her already weak loyalty to the MS waned, gradually allowing Brenda to focus more on her own future and less on her gang. The cloud in her mind formed by the intoxicating feeling of respect and power receded enough for her to remember that she wanted to eventually get back to California. She began to dismantle her mask and act like the bright and curious teenage girl she was before she had learned to fear Veto.

Policemen she met while in custody told her she could make a great detective. Brenda began to feel real hope for a future beyond her gang. She thought someday she could get through this process and maybe even take care of her mom. Maybe she could get her mom from Honduras, move to Puerto Rico, and take care of her there. That fantasy and the appealing reality of a future away from the Mara Salvatrucha excited her enough to tell Greg and the cops more than she had originally thought prudent.

Greg’s first few weeks with Brenda crawled forward, but he did make progress. He slowly opened her mind to the possibilities of finishing high school and attending college, and he gave her intellectually stimulating books to read from his personal library.
Crime and Punishment, Catcher in the Rye,
and
Don Quixote
were her favorites. Greg’s continual attempts to make Brenda focus on her future was a steady
process that moved Brenda forward into the role she began to play as one of the most important and charismatic MS informants run by U.S. law enforcement.

As the summer passed, Brenda’s notoriety grew. Greg fielded calls from law enforcement in various states. Interview after interview ensued. They all occurred in a controlled environment. Greg and Jason always secured the necessary assurances that no cops would file an arrest warrant for Brenda, and none ever did. Her information was specific and highly detailed. The detectives who met Brenda immediately liked her and couldn’t believe that she knew what she told them. Most of the information checked out. Sometimes Brenda spoke for less than fifteen minutes. Other meetings went on for hours.

Greg learned more about the MS as Brenda distanced herself from gang life and grew comfortable with talking to the police. She still didn’t talk about details of her relationship with Denis and the Normandie Locos, her clique. Nor did she talk about Veto and the night he killed Javier Calzada. Veto terrified her. So did the other men present that rainy, cold night in Grand Prairie. But she knew so much about the MS and could remember so many names, places, and dates that most of the cops who interviewed Brenda could not know she was still holding back.

Greg observed and listened to Brenda as she slowly evolved into a storyteller. She wasn’t recounting tall tales about boys, hanging out at the mall, or the pair of shoes she just bought. Her stories were about pain and death, especially when she spoke to him in private. The first time Brenda really opened up to Greg, just before Independence Day, he took a call from her on his cell phone while driving to pick up party supplies. Greg had to pull over to focus on the conversation. Brenda was clearly upset and prepared to get some heavy information off her chest.

She told Greg about Veto, her relationship with this old-school gang member, and how he had physically abused her. She told him Veto took her to Meridian, Idaho, once to dispose of the bodies of two prostitutes he had killed.

Brenda explained more about her gang’s disciplinary action, called yellow-lighting. Gang members who required some discipline but had not been marked for death were beaten by a group, then stabbed and dumped in front of a hospital. She recalled for Greg a time when someone in Texas was yellow-lighted and stabbed in the neck.

“Blood was everywhere,” Brenda said, obviously disturbed by the memory. They dumped the kid at the hospital. Brenda wasn’t sure if he even lived.

Greg watched traffic fly by on the road as Brenda described the night Veto killed Javier Calzada, and how Veto shot him in the head. She could still hear the sound the pistol had made in the rain. She told Greg about when Denis described what it felt like to cut out Joaquin Diaz’s throat. Greg listened to Brenda tell him about the evil she had encountered.

As Brenda continued telling Greg about her life with the MS, he became more worried about her safety. Her characters were real, and what she revealed about the MS was horrifying. When Brenda finished her monologue, Greg said he would see her soon, and she quickly hung up. Greg stayed in his car for a few moments, still absorbing what she had told him. He spent that Fourth of July distracted and concerned.

A foundation of trust was built between Brenda and Greg after that phone call. Greg was more convinced than ever that Brenda could take a step forward and away from her gang life. She now trusted him to guide her through the painfully long process.

In private with Greg, Brenda let her guard down and allowed herself to become more vulnerable. She trusted Greg as a friend and even as a father figure. He was her new anchor in this world of courts, judges, lawyers, and cops. While talking to the cops, she showed pride and confidence and took the opportunity to recount her days with the MS. She would speak with animation, sometimes adding to her story by displaying gang signs with her hands. Brenda was clearly proud of the MS. It was the toughest gang on the street.

She had seen enough to know the gang was serious and well entrenched in a number of money-making endeavors. Extortion, prostitution, and fencing stolen cars were the most common criminal activities across the nation. But human smuggling was on the rise, and by the time Brenda began speaking to the police about her gang, the Mara Salvatrucha had earned a reputation as a reliable group of assassins, prepared to kill targets in the United States or Mexico. Brenda had only been a member for a short time, but she knew enough to tell Greg about the roots of the gang, going back as far as the early 1980s. What she told him was enough to spur him on to many days’ worth of research and investigation into the history of the Mara Salvatrucha.

Brenda told him that long before the gang grew to the strength and
stature it enjoyed in 2002, it had struggled for survival on the streets of Los Angeles. In the early 1980s, the Mara Salvatrucha was a group of Salvadoran males looking for a social space where they could express their own culture and manner of speaking in a world where many Latino cultures were forced to live in close proximity. They initially called themselves the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners, wore long hair, listened to heavy metal, and wore Ozzy Osbourne T-shirts. These were little-known facts. Greg realized that the gang had come a long way from sitting around and head banging, moving on to extortion, fencing, stealing cars, and even killing people.

As the MS gained numbers, Brenda explained, its presence in Los Angeles pushed against other local cliques in the Pico Union area of Los Angeles. Sometimes there were street fights, Brenda had heard. Members used bats and chains against their neighborhood rivals. They would beat them into submission, stripping their rivals of their shirt as trophies. But when a Mara Salvatrucha founder named Black Sabbath died in the mid-1980s, the nature of the gang changed. This was a turning point for the gang: what could have been a peaceful group of friends turned into something much more sinister.

Black Sabbath’s death might have been forgiven. But then another member, Rockie, was killed with a shotgun after a woman had lured him into an ambush. His attackers left him to bleed out on the street. The Mara Salvatrucha Stoners declared war. They asked some of the other men in the Salvadoran community for help. These men were war veterans who considered gangbanging to be child’s play. But the murders of their countrymen represented a level of disrespect that was far beyond street fighting and stealing T-shirts for trophies. It was a knock against their pride in their country in a world where pride was one of the few things they had.

They were the ones who brought the machete to the streets. As Brenda explained to Greg, in Central America, the machete was a tool of daily life used to harvest fruit, cut weeds, or maintain paths that snaked through the jungle. It was common to see men playing dominos with their machetes leaning against one leg. Greg surmised that the men who had joined the MS Stoners to avenge the death of Black Sabbath and Rockie had learned to use machetes to kill their enemies in El Salvador. A little research confirmed that they didn’t think twice about using their machetes to kill their enemies on the streets of Los Angeles.

The war veterans’ violent tactics helped the Mara Salvatrucha capture turf in the area of Los Angeles near MacArthur Park and Pico Union, where many Salvadorans lived. Brenda told Greg how some of these communities were literally carved out with pure violence within miles of downtown Los Angeles and the palm tree–lined boulevards of Hollywood.

But well-established Latino gangs in the same area were not about to be pushed around by the Salvadorans. Greg talked to cops about the early days of the Mara Salvatrucha and learned that in the mid-1980s, a call went out among all the allied Latino gangs in Los Angeles to target and kill anyone in the Mara Salvatrucha. It was an order, Greg considered, that extended beyond gang members and deep into the Salvadoran community.

Gangs had to represent. Latino machismo and pride bred violence, and natural gang rivalries were born. The early members of the Mara Salvatrucha were more violent and willing to deal more death. Their low-technology brutality could not be matched. Turf controlled by rival Latino gangs eroded under the Mara Salvatrucha’s widening footprint. They showed no mercy, and after too many lives were lost, an older, more established gang sought to bring about peace.

Greg already knew about the Mexican Mafia, a Mexican gang formed in California prisons in the 1950s. But he didn’t realize that it was at the top of the Latino gang pyramid in southern California. For decades, the Mexican Mafia had carved out a niche in the California prison system by treating its members with love and respect and its enemies with gruesome and unabashed death. By the late 1980s, the gang wielded unparalleled authority on the streets because it completely controlled the prisons in southern California. Like many prison gangs around the country, the leadership of the Mexican Mafia influenced activity outside the prison walls; any Latino gangster locked up in southern California had to answer to the Mexican Mafia once in prison.

A quick call to a police contact in Los Angeles confirmed for Greg that most Latino gangs in southern California were aligned with the Mexican Mafia. It was a system that primarily prevented infighting among Latino gangs. It also allowed for smooth business transactions, mostly drug smuggling and wholesale drug dealing, between Mexican organized crime operating south of the border, and the Latino street gangs that operated in southern California.

From Veto, Brenda had heard that the men who ran the Mexican
Mafia in the late 1980s decided the rivalry between the Latino gangs and the Mara Salvatrucha was bad for business. They sought to force a truce by offering the Mara Salvatrucha membership within the Mexican Mafia’s street gang network. It would afford members of the MS more protection in prison and on the streets and create space for a truce with other Latino gangs. But the Mara Salvatrucha had to provide a regular tribute of cash or some sort of other valuable commodity to maintain membership. It was the same deal the Mexican Mafia offered every street gang that operated under its fiefdom. The leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha were not willing to pay the price.

The Mexican Mafia knew it was better off with the MS as an ally, so the leaders made another offer. It was an offer focused on killing, something the members of the Mara Salvatrucha did better than most other gangs in the city. The MS could join the Mexican Mafia if they were willing to share their best hit men when the Mexican Mafia needed someone killed on the streets.

Wrapping up her story, Brenda revealed that when the Mara Salvatrucha leaders agreed, the MS became a
sureño
gang, part of the southern California alliance. It became La Mara Salvatrucha Trece, or MS-13. The number 13 was the position of the letter
m
in the alphabet, and was added to show respect for the Mexican Mafia, often referred to as simply The M, or
La Eme
in Spanish. That makes sense, Greg thought. He had always wondered where the number 13 had come from.

For a short while, the truce between the Mara Salvatrucha and the other Latino street gangs held, but old rivalries flared up, especially with a gang called the 18th Street. The bloodshed never reached previous levels, so the Mexican Mafia was content to let the rivalry continue with little oversight. Brenda said that so many MS members had been killed by 18th Street members, who in turn died at the hands of vengeful MS members, that a cycle of violence had become ingrained within the Mara Salvatrucha. Its violent posture toward any rival gang members in black, white, or Asian gangs extended to any rival MS members who were crossed.
Chavalas,
or members of rival gangs, were always ridiculed, beaten up if possible, or killed if necessary.

Unilateral aggression created cycles of hate that kept gangbanging violence alive as new generations of recruits learned to hate any rival, providing members with a well-founded and socially acceptable reason for what most would see as senseless violence.

As a
sureño
street gang, the MS-13 could rely on a solid foundation of authority and remain relatively safe within Los Angeles. From that foundation point the gang spread its influence throughout the United States, which is why Brenda first encountered the Mara Salvatrucha in Texas. By the time she met Greg, the Mara Salvatrucha counted over ten thousand members across the United States, with a presence in over forty states. Beyond the cities, the MS penetrated deep into rural towns and those one-blinking-light communities where local cops rarely patrolled in pairs and none spoke Spanish. The gang was as fluid as the labor market that attracted Latino immigrants. Wherever there was a Latino community, the MS burrowed in and thrived.