Warning. This episode contains references to extreme violence. Please use discretion when listening.
Okay, wait to hear others.
Please join an audio.
White Fine, Sorry, I'm a millennial.
What are you?
You're gen x No, I'm not you are Okay, new recording. Okay, it's on.
Hi. Wendy, Hie. That's my older sister, Wendy. She got up extra early one morning so that she could drop off her three kids at school before getting on a zoom with me. For the record, she is technically a millennial, but I think she acts more like a gen xer. I wanted to talk to Wendy because we finally got into a part of the story that I kind of remember. Wendy and I are eight years apart, but we both grew up in La My parents left El Salvador in nineteen eighty one, a year when the Civil War was
at its worst. They ended up in Los Angeles, along with thousands of other Salvadorans who were fleeing the war. They slept on kitchen floors and couches until they could get on their feet. Eventually, they scraped together enough money to buy an old rundown house, the one that me and my sister Wendy grew up in But do you remember how often we would get rats from the park.
Oh, my god, that was the most disgusting part. Yeah, the rats and the.
I think you got bit by one one time.
Yeah.
I tried to pet it, but I was scared to pet it with my hands, so I pet it with my.
Foot and bit my toe.
It bit your I didn't even know what it did, but I just remember, like, yeah, you got bit by it.
Oh.
My family spent the nineties trying to survive in that beat up old house. It was in south central LA on a street that had an hourly motel on one corner and a crack house on the other. It was dangerous in more ways than one. My parents had very strict rules for me and my sisters. No playing outside after dark, no walking anywhere alone, go straight to school and come straight home. Honestly, it sucked. We ended up
staying inside and playing Super Mario a lot. But there was only so much that they could protect us from because the reality of living in the hood was inescapable. Like, at what point did you become aware that there were gangs in the area that we were living in? Right awayway gangs, mostly divided by race, were everywhere in our neighborhood.
The Crips and the Bloods, which were mostly black gangs, and the Mexican mafia were fighting it out for control of the streets of La and in response to the gang violence, thousands of Salvadoran refugees that had come fleeing the war would start to create gangs of their own.
I had like a little boyfriend I remember if it was like seventh grade or eighth grade. I think probably eighth grade. It was the one that gave me the teddy bear that my dad like ripped up to shreds the second I got home. But he, unfortunately, I ended up learning like months later like that he had gotten like shot and killed because he was like a little gang member and howen was he was probably thirteen.
Gang violence that started out in our neighborhood in LA would transform life for Salvadorans, and not just the ones in Los Angeles, but in El Salvador too. While the war in El Salvador was ending, Salvadoran gangs in La were forming MS thirteen and Barriodicioccho, two of the most notorious gangs in the world, were born in my backyard in La These gangs would rule the next thirty years of Salvador in life and cause more death than the entire Civil War put together.
Tonight we take you inside one of the most dangerous countries on Earth, a place where criminal gangs control entire neighborhoods, and these gangs from El Salvador are now operating in nearly every corner of America.
I'm Jasmine Romero and this is Sacred Scandal, Nation of Saints, Episode nine, The Gangs. We'll be right back after the break. If you ask the average American what they know about El Salvador, they will probably answer you with one of two things, either one ubusas and to be fair, they are delicious, or two gangs. Since the end of the Civil War, Al Salvador's gang problem has been the number one news item about the country.
El Salvador has long been plagued by stratospheric levels of gang violence.
Like tens of thousands of people who grew up in the shadow of the Civil War perpetuated the cycle of violence by joining the street gangs. In twenty fifteen, there were more than six and a half thousand murders in El Salvadore the worst murder rates in the world. But these gangs, they didn't just spring up out of nowhere. They came out of the US, specifically California, from families like mine who came fleeing the war and found that California wasn't the peaceful paradise they were hoping for.
They started off as young stoner kids who, out of immigrant lowliness, would come together to smoke pot listen to Ronnie James, Dio, Metallica and Cumbia's and other music on their boomboxes.
That's He's a Salvadoran American journalist, professor, and writer who grew up in California. He was one of those lonely immigrant kids. In the late eighties, while the war in El Salvador was at its peak, he was in California working with an outreach group for recent migrants and he started noticing some strange patterns.
But they started going to schools like in the San Fernando Valley and other places in Sherman Oaks, and they were facing crips, bloods, and Mexican kids who were linked to the Mexican mafia.
Now migrants coming into low income areas were easy targets for the more established gangs that already existed. So these Salvadoran migrant kids, they start banding together and creating little gangs of their own.
So these Savadorin kids found themselves being threatened by crip gang and Mexican mafia, and so to defend themselves, they started taking on machettis that I would see them buy at a store like at Liborios in Pico Union. Turns out that we're using them to defend themselves against heavily armed gangs.
Barrio Disiocho and MS thirteen get their start as small street gangs, but as the violence in La escalated, more and more of these on immigrant gang members started being sent to California prisons, prisons where long established gangs were in charge. And these little disorganized Salvadorn gangs, when they start taking notes, they begin to transform.
And so that's where MS thirteen starts taking on the structures and culture and practices like jumping in for thirteen seconds, getting beat up to join the gang for thirteen seconds, right, And so then the language, the tattoos, the violence, and the very structured nature of these gangs comes from California.
La Maras a ra Drucha, also known as MS thirteen becomes the hardened and sophisticated gang we know today. Within those California prisons, they learn how to run extortion rings, how to exert control over territory using violence and fear, how to turn a gang into a business. And in the early nineties, the US decides that it doesn't really
want to deal with these gangs anymore. Just as the salvador In Civil War is coming to an end, the US starts deporting thousands of migrants, especially those with criminal records.
We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders.
More.
We will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes.
The mass deportations really get started in nineteen eighty six under President Bill Clinton. His administration passed a law that made it easier to deport immigrants with criminal records.
And pretty soon this country that's just coming out of the war in the early nine nineties has all kinds of guns everywhere because they were left over. Nobody not all of them were destroyed. So these kids, who are already exposed to Mexican gang cultures and structures, start implanting where the violence gets put on steroids. Because of the availability of guns.
It was like an infection meeting an open wound. Not only was Alsavador still full of guns left over from the war, it was also full of people who had been in that war. Children who had grown up traumatized by extreme levels of violence, kids who had one or both parents killed in the war, or kids that were left behind by parents who had immigrated to the US, kids looking for a family. By the late nineties, alsavor
was one of the poorest countries in the world. The economy never truly recovered after the war, and young people had very few opportunities to advance. So these newly deported gangs move in and they solve two societal problems for thousands of angry young people. They provide a sense of family of community, and they provide a job by charging rent to regular Salvadorans a fee for living within gang territory.
By the mid two thousands, what had started as little cliques in La had become one of the world's most deadly and organized criminal organizations, and it became the only story that the world knew about Ol Salvador.
In l Salvador, these days, there's one murder an hour for a pretty small country, only six million people. It doesn't take long when you're, you know, going out at night to stumble upon a scene like this with a body laying dead in the streets. And that's that's pretty much what people here are living with. These just constant shootings and murders. Right now, El Salvador is on track to be the nation with the highest homicide rate in the world.
The gangs were the warnings of the murdered Jesuits come to life. Father Ignacio Martin Barot had theorized that the trauma of war would leave the Salvadoran society with a militarized mind, that violence would become the default solution for all of society's problems, and that was true not just for the gangs, but also for the government. Over the years, the Salvadoran government has tried to handle the gang problem
by meeting violence with violence. In two thousand and three, the Arena led government put in place it's blan Manodura Plan iron Fist, a police crackdown on these gangs followed in two thousand and four by the creatively named Blan super Manodura sup Iron Fist, and these crackdowns led to the rise of an old tactic death squads, police officers going out in the dead of night to kidnap, torture
and kill, but this time targeting the gangs. And though there have been attempts to rehabilitate gang members too, overwhelmingly the plans that have received the most funding and support in El Salvador were ones led by the military and police. For most of my life, the gangs have been the only story told about Al Salvador, and it's one that I know really well because my family has lived at firsthand. We've had people in the gangs, and we've had people
killed by the gangs. It's a cycle that's best explained by someone you've heard from before.
Mitievilma Mala mala poor ky Lo loke.
Ma fel.
I've known a lot of people in the gangs, she says, like the ones who killed my son. That's after the break.
Me nores Will says, so the Salvador San Miguel Oriente.
Ute yo sooi and relations and so dia, so you Natiya.
That's my Tavilma. You might remember her from previous episode. She's the aunt that takes no ship. She's little, about five four, but I've seen her cuss out men that are twice her size, which is why it was always so strange that her son, Tulio, my cousin, was such a sweet kid.
Bienko to para black.
Julio was small like his mom, but with a big mouth. I remember hanging out with him when I was a kid on our yearly trips to Olsavador. He was about my sister's age, eight years older than me, with cocoa brown skin and dark eyes that were crowded with thick eyelashes, and he always had this sly smile on his face.
Into into in pre.
Yeah, yeah, just like with my Tia Margarita, my Tia Vilma had a real soft spot for Tulio. Tulio was always the one telling her not to be so loud or crass, chastising her with a mommy. Toulu grew up in San Miguel, and because he was small for his age, he was able to get through most of his childhood unscathed. But when he turned fifteen, he finally arrived at a right of passage for suv Orn boys, and.
Marie Juel del Piero be.
Did he He was jumped beat up by some boys at school, boys that wanted him to join their gang. This was pretty typical. Once the boy was of a certain age, he was expected to join the gang that controlled the territory that he lived in, and for Tulio that meant Ms thirteen. When he came home from school covered in bruises, Matia Vilma got her machete off the wall and told Tulio to point out the kids that
had beat him up. Matia Vilma whooped their asses. She went straight over to those kids' houses and in front of their moms, whooped their asses with the flat side of her machete. And she told them that the next time they jumped her kid, they wouldn't be dealing with her, they'd be dealing with his father, a colonel in the military, which is totally not true, but the lie worked.
They left Julio.
Alone for a while, but when he turned seventeen, the beating started again. But worse, Mila, these weren't just kids jumping him in anymore. These were grown men sending Tulio a message. Mitia realized that if Tulio stayed in San Miguel, he'd either end up in one of the gangs or dead. She had watched my other cousin, Chico, join m S thirteen and watched him slowly cover himself with tattoos. Eventually,
Chico landed in a salvador In prison for life. It was a future that she didn't want for her son. Mitiavilma decided to send Tulio north to the US. Another one of my aunts was planning on crossing over, and Vilma asked if she would bring Tullia along. Tulio crossed the border in nineteen ninety nine. For a while, he stayed with an aunt in La Then he stayed with another cousin. But there's a saying in Spanish about guests and the dead that they both start to stink after
three days. After CouchSurfing with various family members, Duliu had to find his own way. He ended up working odd jobs, delivering newspapers, packing boxes at a juice factory, and sending money back to mythea whenever he got a chance.
Almes Conlin Tamamil Lobi.
And my Tia Vilma needed a lot of help because back in San Miguel, m S. Thirteen was extorting everyone, charging rent for living in their territory, even someone like Vilma who didn't have a lot of money and was still loading baskets full of chilate to sell in the market. She came home one day to find that her neighbor had a message for her.
Mediela vecina a.
Yo a Manila envelope. The neighbor said that she didn't know who it was from. Inside the envelope was a flip phone and a note.
Yela Senora senoras e Liz Damoselando di la.
The note said, miss Vilma, greetings from MS. Thirteen. At first, my Thea thought it was a joke or something, but she quickly realized that this was serious. The note was full of details about my Tia Vilma's life Don.
De Villa Familia doos.
The note warned her that if she wanted to stay alive, she would have to start hang rent to the gang. Within minutes of her opening the envelope, the flip phone that was inside started ringing capasom it was a gang member calling to get her response to the note. As my Thea was telling me this story, I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. If it was me, I probably would have lost it. But my Dea, well, she's made of tougher stuff.
Quin Quin gris.
She got on the phone and she told him, listen up, you little ship. I don't know who you think you are, but I'm not paying you a dime. I've got two sons who are higher rank than you and the gangs, and if you don't leave me alone, I'll have them take care of you, which was completely not true, but she did have my cousin, Chico, the one who was in prison. She called the prison that my cousin was in and asked him if he would back her up
and get the gangs to leave her alone. She said the whole time that she was on the phone, her legs were shaking so hard that it rattled the table.
The relationship with my cousin Chico is complicated. He had lent his name to the family before offering them protection through his connection with the gangs, but we also suspect that he's responsible for some shootings that have happened around my family, including one that killed my uncle Chico agreed to cover Mathia, and after that phone call, the gangs left Mathia alone for the most part. But that's just how it was in Alsavador. There was no escaping the gangs.
They were a part of everyday life, and every day Mythia was thankful that my cousin Thulia was in the US, far away from that life. But about eight years after Thulil left to live in California, he suddenly appeared on her doorstep back in San Miguel.
Iporkiseviotulio dess no Stella el medj Here.
He told Mitya Avilma that he'd come back to visit her, but the truth was he'd been deported. While in the US, he and a bunch of friends had started an illegal street racing ring. He was one of the organizers, and he got arrested in two thousand and seven for his part in it. When he got back to Olsavador, he told Matievilma that he was only going to stay for six months until May tenth, Mother's Day so that he
could celebrate with her. Then he'd figure out a way to get back across the border and get back to work.
Gestavarresim Benilo Taos. He saw Louja Pasarda de la madreco mio querl dias de mayu.
Yeah, there is de Mayo il dia de la Cruzieki.
On the afternoon of May third, he went out to play soccer with some other guys in the neighborhood.
I mean, memo, beat you a ya mami javengko you know, he said.
My tia told him not to go out for too long because she was making him lunch, his favorite tomato stew. A few minutes later, a kid from the neighborhood came running up to my aunt's door.
Mammy, Mammy, mammy, miss yo, you can't see.
She thought they were kidding. At first, the words didn't even register, but they kept yelling at her. They killed, they killed. She ran to the playground where he'd been playing, and she found her son crumpled on the floor Guano.
Lanco to.
What startled her most was the color, the bright white color of Tulio's skull. He'd been shot three times, once in the chest, once in the back, and once in the back of his head. She knelt down beside his body and cradled her son in her arms.
You gotta the moment the vaster.
She prayed over him, told him how much she loved him. She asked God to take care of him. She doesn't know how much time passed. The next thing she remembers as a policeman asking her to step away from the body.
Carr Porte.
The details around Tulio's death are uncertain. I spoke to a lot of family and people who knew at the time, and they all have different theories about why he was killed. Some say that a couple of days before his death, he'd gotten into an argument with a security guard who had connections to the gangs. Others say that Tulio had witnessed a gang murder and that's why they came after him.
But the thing that everyone I spoke to agreed on was that Tulio wasn't in a gang himself, and that he was killed by m s thirteen.
Mi vinti sulo mataro hey turo is doro solo cannos have it unserqurido de la manu to.
Pandias.
In the aftermath of Tulio's murder, Matia Vilma was asked to go to the police station to look at mugshots and try to identify his killers, but she never did. The fact is everyone in the neighborhood knew who had done it. MS thirteen did little to hide their responsibility for Tulio's murder, but to identify them would have been a death sentence. They just come and kill you next, and your family too, just to prove a point.
USI the local, I l lay de la lay de la.
You have.
I don't believe in man's justice, she says, it's corrupt, but you don't play with God's justice. Whoever did this, they'll have to answer to the Lord. I don't know if they'll ever answer to the Lord or not. All I know is the suffering that I see on my aunt's face, the loss first of a sister to the death squads, then of a son to the gangs. As of this recording, seven of my family members are in prison for gang related crimes and six have been killed
in gang related violence. I'll be honest here. For most of my life, Al Salvador felt like a place beyond saving. My parents have always talked about it with a love and affection that I didn't understand, like Al Salvador was the one that got away when they would talk about wanting to go back there to attire. My first thought was always why, what for? But in twenty nineteen something happened that changed the way that my parents thought about
Ol Salvador. They changed the way that the whole world thought about Ol Salvador.
Yes, it is Alotoria, he almost excavated. Juntos nostra pais is common in your fermo, no stock cala todos quarlo no stock coloratos, tom poco, and is in a marga no stock aloratoos so freedom poco, no stock aloratos and lord as to miRNA starts comermandos saka Atlanta oestra Familia and nostro pas.
Salvador President Nai Buke, the self proclaimed world's coolest dictator and the future of El Salvador. That's on the next episode of Nation of Saints Sacred Scandal. Nation of Saints is a production of AJA Podcasts in partnership with Iheart's Michaultura podcast network, and is hosted and written by me Jasmine Romero, produced by Jazmin Romero with help from Alvaro Espelees. Research and reporting by Jasmine Romero, edited by Sayre Kevelo. Nation of Saints was recorded in New York City at
the Relic Room, with engineering by Brett Tugan. Mixing and sound designed by Paciquinones. Original music by Golden Mindes, Darko and Aaeme based on Patrick Hart's original composition, fact checking by Erendira Aquino Ayala. Executive producers are Carman geratol Isaac Lee rose Red, and Nando Villa. Our executive producers at iHeart are Giselle Fansis and Arlene Santana. Sacred Scandal was
created by Melanie Bartley and Baulavadro's. For more podcasts, go to the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts