El Salvador: Killing to Belong
January 2003 25 minutes
The capital of El Salvador is a battlefield fought over by warring street gangs.
A third of the citys population have been robbed at gun point, beaten or raped.
Sandra: Someones been wounded by gang members. Were on our way to the scene
The victim was a policeman, shot in the leg
There are up to fifty thousand gang members, a new army of the disaffected, youngsters who feel our modern, westernised world has passed them by and left them outsiders.
Theyve decided its time to strike back. To live their lives according to their own rules.
TITLE: Killing to Belong
In San Salvador the two biggest gangs are the 18th Street gang and their deadly rivals the MS gang.
Theyre offshoots of the American gangs that go by the same name. Gangs rooted in the Salvadorian community in Los Angeles
PTC: This place is full of gang members. They keep bringing them in. There are 13 people in that one cell of 18th Street gang members .
The police took four men out of the cell. Theyd been arrested for killing a bus conductor that very morning.
They denied theyd shot the man. But theyve now been charged and are awaiting trial.
A policewoman briefed me on the latest murders and robberies
Id asked to meet the family of the murdered bus conductor.
SANDRA ACTUALITY: So weve got 18th street gang here and MS here and weve got a local gang called Mao Mao.
They lived in a dangerous part of town.
I was given an escort
We were in the territory of the MS gang
Each year, one in every thousand Salvadoreans is murdered.
The gangs arent responsible for all the deaths. But theyre a major culprit.
The murdered mans family were praying for his soul.
In the eighties the civil war here between left wing guerillas and an American backed dictatorship cost 80,000 lives.
Theres democracy now , but still no peace.
Rodolfo Lopez was murdered for five dollars
SYNC Wife: This is the wife of the dead man. What shes been telling me is he wasnt a gang member. He was 24 years old, she is 22, she has this 2 year old child, well he'll be 2 in another month and she's pregnant with another. About two weeks ago her husband was threatened by gang members who got his today. they shot him in the chest and then the second bullet got him in the head. So he didnt have a chance.
It was early morning when I visited ..
39th Avenue near the centre of San Salvador, is one of the front lines.
Actuality: This area here is all the 18th gang and that main road there is what separates them from the MS who live on the other side of the road. So thats sort of the dmz or the no mans land, but anything can happen there and thats often where people get killed.
It was early morning as I walked along La Linea, a disused railway line running right through no mans land. Thats the safest time of day because the gangs are sleeping.
Police helicopters circled the city
This is a country mired in poverty and unemployment.
One fifth of Salvadoreans have emigrated.
To most of the six million who remain it seems our globalised world has passed them by.
Thats why youngsters join the gangs - Its a way of telling that world to go to hell, of dancing to their own tune instead of someone elses.
Nearby I met some 18th Street Gang members preparing for the new day.
SANDRA PTC
He said we are in this gang until death.
And when you get into a gang you know what you are getting into, and we give our lives for our family. This is our family and our neighbourhood.
He says we sell drugs we can rob. We have enough
This is a tribal world of secret signs, where allegiances are branded onto bodies, where killing pushes you up the hierarchy.
his signifies the eighteenth group.
Spanish
And this is the leader of this gang. Who was twenty eight when he died
They expect to die young.
Chances are they will
He says its a tit for tat war. Its a rival gang who shot him. They shoot back. It goes on like that.
NO COMM
Night visit to house
Having made contact, that night I visited the house where the gang members live
22 year old Alex was calculating whether the gangs youngsters needed to go onto the streets that night to sell drugs
SANDRA PTC
So hes working out house hold expenses.
At the top he got how much food its costing
And their bills and this is how much they brought into today. Its fifty dollars or so. And this include the proceeds of robberies or selling things they have stolen as well as the drugs they have sold.
Actuality re household accounts
Gasparin is 13. His parents are working illegally in the United States and hes run away from his aunts home.
SANDRA
So this rock of crack, you smoke it makes you high
one hit.
So thats about one dollar .And this is about fifty cence or so thats grass, marujuana.
SANDRA
The guys are about to go out and do some more business, they got of a bag of marujuana there some rocks as well. They are about to go out and start selling.
El Salvadors on one the supply routes that traffickers use to move drugs from Colombia to America.
Its easy for the gangs to buy drugs from the traffickers, both to sell on the streets and to use.
Gang life give these youngsters the family they crave, but drugs and violence then destroy them.
Gangs arent a male preserve
These girls are also members of the 18th street gang. The eldest is 17, the youngest 13.
Death is always with them
SANDRA: She had that cross tattoed on her back when one of her friends in the nieghbourhood was killed by the MS.
Do you kill people?
GIRL says si yes
Helen said shed tell me the story.
But first she fetched what she said was the murder weapon.
Helens parents work in New York. Shes run away from her relatives.
SANDRA PTC
She said they saw a member of MS. They chased him. They stabbed him in the back He fell down to the ground.They got a brick and crushed his head in and then threw the body into a ditch and then they came back here and washed their hands because they were covered in blood and she said revenge is sweet.
Theres absolutely no logic to what they are saying. They are saying the other gang the enemy they are frauds they are not real Salvadorians. The 18th street were the original. Its what it means to be El Salvadorean.
The gangs arrived from America.
Every week for the last ten years the US has returned illegal immigrants to El Salvador.
Of the 35,000 thousand now deported, a third have been criminals, many of them members of the big Los Angeles gangs.
Its these men whove brought the 18th street gang and the MS gang to El Salvador.
SANDRA: Thousands of people are deported back here very year . And although we have only been here a few days at this stage we probably know San Salvador better than most of the people getting off this plane.
Many of the deported men were children when their parents took them to Los Angeles.
The returnees are free men but the police still want to know who is or has been a member of the 18th street gang and the MS gang in America.
SANDRA PTC
They have asked to pull up his shirt and they are just checking his tattoos.
25 year old Manuel Rodriguez used to be in the MS gang in Los Angeles.
Hed been deported for car theft.
Why did you go to the United States in the first place?
MAN
My mum and died left when I was four years old and my brother was two I think. And it was because of the war that was happening back then. Then mum and my dad decided for me to leave over there with them.
We gave Manuel a lift to the bus station
Manuel whats going through your mind at the moment?
I don't remember none of this.
I can see the poverty, you know
Hed been born here, but it was a foreign country
Arrives
At the bus station hed arranged to meet a cousin.
Walk with box
The plan was to travel into the countryside.
Greets cousin
Manuel was desperate not to become part of San Salvadors gang wars.
Ellie
But San Salvadors full of people who cant escape the gangs.
Ellie Rosales Garcia and her husband Tony were brought up in Los Angeles. Their children even have American names Brian and Jenny.
In Los Angeles Tony was a member of the 18th Street gang. He was deported here in 1998, after being involved in a drive by shooting.
This year he managed to get work in a factory.
It was meant to be a new start .
When did you last see him?
Fifteen days ago. That was the last time I saw him.
Hes with the gangs I think. Hes on the streets again. Hes smoking crack. Hes so skinny. But at this time I dont know if hes dead or alive.
Are your children worried?
Every time they ask me : is my dad coming tonight I dont have an answer [Cries]
That night we helped Ellie and some friends search for her husband.
But none of the 18thstreet gang lookouts would admit to having seen him.
Neither was he among the crack addicts that littered the streets.
We continued searching. Ellie was convinced he was with the gang somewhere, that the certainties of gang life had won out over the grind of a badly paid job.
We never found him. Ellie went to the police station to report him missing.
The gangs are destroying family life.
And therell be a whole new generation of fatherless children to recruit from.
Since we filmed, Tony has contacted Ellie. He;s told her hes staying with the gang.
Travelling to countryside
Gang culture is spreading far outside San Salvador.
We were two hundred miles from the capital, in Oriente, the Eastern province,
PTC: Were on a police patrol and were about to go to a rural area where the violence is so intense that half the families have abandoned their homes.
The culprits are local gangs modelled on the 18th street and MS gangs.
The police were constantly on guard against ambush
Our destination was the village of El Changuite. For ten miles around we hadnt seen a single person.
This is a former family homestead. But a little boy was killed here and thats why this whole area is so deserted. After his murder people just fled to the nearest villages. They just couldnt cope any more.
13 year old Gabriel Gruaudos was kidnapped from this house, held for ransom and then murdered. It was the final straw for people already living in terror of the gangs.
A childs shoes abandoned like everything else here when the parents fled with their other children..and theres a teddy bear.
No Comm
This is the areas school. But as you can see there are no children.
Most of the villagers have fled to the slums of San Salvador. The price paid on the world market for their coffee crops has collapsed so theres little to stay for.
We found Gabriels parents hiding on the outskirts of a nearby town. They wont let their surviving child out of their sight.
He said his son was stabbed to death. He was then covered in petrol and burned. And this is after theyd sold all their possessions to raise a ransom of $1000 but that didnt matter because he was killed anyway. And they found him three days after hed been killed and burned. And at that stage the crows were eating his body
He said this is a completely new phenomenon kidnapping children of working class families, but its going to spread. Because there is no justice here on this earth. What we believe in is divine justice. That's the only justice for us.
I knew that the nearby town of Usulutan was where Manuel Enrique, the deportee Id met at the airport was sheltering.
Does she know you were deported
He was in his grandmothers house. Shes away, working in America.
Now Im just thinking about going back
Manuel was scared. The MS and 18th Street gangs were fighting to control the town. Even here in the countryside the violence was more intense than anything hed known.
I dont want to get into any trouble
He told me he wore bandages on his arms to hide his MS tatoos.
Do you think you can get into trouble without looking for it?
yeah
There was constant gun fire.
Whos got the gun?
I dont know
Everyone in this country has a gun
Except us. I roll these around my hand all the time
And what do people think?
They look at me like Im crazy. I tell them Ive burned myself on the kitchen that we have.
So even your friends dont know?
They dont know that I got tattoo's on my hands.
Manuel, as a former ms gang member was in more danger than he knew.
In the morning, not far from Manuels house, we encountered a member of the rival 18th street gang.
Its safe here?
He helped run a weapons factory , he told me. And he could prove it.
This is a model that they make in the house. Its manufactured with widely available pipes. Theyre welded together. This is a 38 calibre bullet.
He says MS havent come to our house but down there thats their territory so they have to be able to defend themselves.
A few miles away in San Miguel, the local capital, the local schools were protesting against gang violence.
Will Salgado, the local mayor, has been accused of using more robust methods.
A few years back he was cleared by the El Salvadorean courts of funding a death squad called the Black Shadow. Its purpose: to execute gang members.
This is the mayor when he was younger, when he was in the army.
Hes been elected because people around here respect his hard line views.
Is it true that Black Shadow killed gang members?
Yes it existed, I was accused of killing 30 gang members here in San Miguel.
People are coming here looking for someone with enough courage and guts to continue with extrajudicial killings.
His message was simple
He said if the gangs were an epidemic then the black shadow was a cure
A bullet in the head is a traditional Salvadorian cure.
But in the capital the authorities are trying some alternative medicine.
This is Mariona, the high security prison where many gang members convicted of violent crimes are held.
It was built for 800. There are 3,000 crammed into it. El Salvador cant build prisons fast enough
The Prison Governor said there was one absolute rule.
This says In Mariona prison Jesus is the boss.
And he meant it.
Preachers roamed the exercise yard calling on prisoners to turn to the lord, competing to save souls.
Everywhere I turned there seemed to be a church.
This is the Catholic Church
What the governors latched onto is that religion offers gang members a family, a home in a hostile world, just what they seek from the gangs.
The prison had the air of a revivalist mission.
Theres no similarity in the moral values of Christianity and the gangs.But both offer people who think theyre nobodies the chance to become somebodies.
This prisoner, a deportee from America, told me God now gave him everything his gang had - without the downside
You were a gang member were you?
I used to be from 18th street
But not anymore
Not anymore. I got tattos on my body and my head I got nothing good from the gangs.
I dont know how many gang members turn to religion.
But visiting there made me realise that everything Id seen in El Salvador was the cry of people looking for an identity to stop them feeling outsiders in their own world.
Outside I went on patrol with the police again.
It might seem as if all this is unique to El Salvador and up to a point it is.
But across the world many others are also searching for identities that offer a sense of belonging in an indifferent world.
Thats why as the 21st century begins, so many countries face unrest, revolt, and civil war.
January 2003 25 minutes
The capital of El Salvador is a battlefield fought over by warring street gangs.
A third of the citys population have been robbed at gun point, beaten or raped.
Sandra: Someones been wounded by gang members. Were on our way to the scene
The victim was a policeman, shot in the leg
There are up to fifty thousand gang members, a new army of the disaffected, youngsters who feel our modern, westernised world has passed them by and left them outsiders.
Theyve decided its time to strike back. To live their lives according to their own rules.
TITLE: Killing to Belong
In San Salvador the two biggest gangs are the 18th Street gang and their deadly rivals the MS gang.
Theyre offshoots of the American gangs that go by the same name. Gangs rooted in the Salvadorian community in Los Angeles
PTC: This place is full of gang members. They keep bringing them in. There are 13 people in that one cell of 18th Street gang members .
The police took four men out of the cell. Theyd been arrested for killing a bus conductor that very morning.
They denied theyd shot the man. But theyve now been charged and are awaiting trial.
A policewoman briefed me on the latest murders and robberies
Id asked to meet the family of the murdered bus conductor.
SANDRA ACTUALITY: So weve got 18th street gang here and MS here and weve got a local gang called Mao Mao.
They lived in a dangerous part of town.
I was given an escort
We were in the territory of the MS gang
Each year, one in every thousand Salvadoreans is murdered.
The gangs arent responsible for all the deaths. But theyre a major culprit.
The murdered mans family were praying for his soul.
In the eighties the civil war here between left wing guerillas and an American backed dictatorship cost 80,000 lives.
Theres democracy now , but still no peace.
Rodolfo Lopez was murdered for five dollars
SYNC Wife: This is the wife of the dead man. What shes been telling me is he wasnt a gang member. He was 24 years old, she is 22, she has this 2 year old child, well he'll be 2 in another month and she's pregnant with another. About two weeks ago her husband was threatened by gang members who got his today. they shot him in the chest and then the second bullet got him in the head. So he didnt have a chance.
It was early morning when I visited ..
39th Avenue near the centre of San Salvador, is one of the front lines.
Actuality: This area here is all the 18th gang and that main road there is what separates them from the MS who live on the other side of the road. So thats sort of the dmz or the no mans land, but anything can happen there and thats often where people get killed.
It was early morning as I walked along La Linea, a disused railway line running right through no mans land. Thats the safest time of day because the gangs are sleeping.
Police helicopters circled the city
This is a country mired in poverty and unemployment.
One fifth of Salvadoreans have emigrated.
To most of the six million who remain it seems our globalised world has passed them by.
Thats why youngsters join the gangs - Its a way of telling that world to go to hell, of dancing to their own tune instead of someone elses.
Nearby I met some 18th Street Gang members preparing for the new day.
SANDRA PTC
He said we are in this gang until death.
And when you get into a gang you know what you are getting into, and we give our lives for our family. This is our family and our neighbourhood.
He says we sell drugs we can rob. We have enough
This is a tribal world of secret signs, where allegiances are branded onto bodies, where killing pushes you up the hierarchy.
his signifies the eighteenth group.
Spanish
And this is the leader of this gang. Who was twenty eight when he died
They expect to die young.
Chances are they will
He says its a tit for tat war. Its a rival gang who shot him. They shoot back. It goes on like that.
NO COMM
Night visit to house
Having made contact, that night I visited the house where the gang members live
22 year old Alex was calculating whether the gangs youngsters needed to go onto the streets that night to sell drugs
SANDRA PTC
So hes working out house hold expenses.
At the top he got how much food its costing
And their bills and this is how much they brought into today. Its fifty dollars or so. And this include the proceeds of robberies or selling things they have stolen as well as the drugs they have sold.
Actuality re household accounts
Gasparin is 13. His parents are working illegally in the United States and hes run away from his aunts home.
SANDRA
So this rock of crack, you smoke it makes you high
one hit.
So thats about one dollar .And this is about fifty cence or so thats grass, marujuana.
SANDRA
The guys are about to go out and do some more business, they got of a bag of marujuana there some rocks as well. They are about to go out and start selling.
El Salvadors on one the supply routes that traffickers use to move drugs from Colombia to America.
Its easy for the gangs to buy drugs from the traffickers, both to sell on the streets and to use.
Gang life give these youngsters the family they crave, but drugs and violence then destroy them.
Gangs arent a male preserve
These girls are also members of the 18th street gang. The eldest is 17, the youngest 13.
Death is always with them
SANDRA: She had that cross tattoed on her back when one of her friends in the nieghbourhood was killed by the MS.
Do you kill people?
GIRL says si yes
Helen said shed tell me the story.
But first she fetched what she said was the murder weapon.
Helens parents work in New York. Shes run away from her relatives.
SANDRA PTC
She said they saw a member of MS. They chased him. They stabbed him in the back He fell down to the ground.They got a brick and crushed his head in and then threw the body into a ditch and then they came back here and washed their hands because they were covered in blood and she said revenge is sweet.
Theres absolutely no logic to what they are saying. They are saying the other gang the enemy they are frauds they are not real Salvadorians. The 18th street were the original. Its what it means to be El Salvadorean.
The gangs arrived from America.
Every week for the last ten years the US has returned illegal immigrants to El Salvador.
Of the 35,000 thousand now deported, a third have been criminals, many of them members of the big Los Angeles gangs.
Its these men whove brought the 18th street gang and the MS gang to El Salvador.
SANDRA: Thousands of people are deported back here very year . And although we have only been here a few days at this stage we probably know San Salvador better than most of the people getting off this plane.
Many of the deported men were children when their parents took them to Los Angeles.
The returnees are free men but the police still want to know who is or has been a member of the 18th street gang and the MS gang in America.
SANDRA PTC
They have asked to pull up his shirt and they are just checking his tattoos.
25 year old Manuel Rodriguez used to be in the MS gang in Los Angeles.
Hed been deported for car theft.
Why did you go to the United States in the first place?
MAN
My mum and died left when I was four years old and my brother was two I think. And it was because of the war that was happening back then. Then mum and my dad decided for me to leave over there with them.
We gave Manuel a lift to the bus station
Manuel whats going through your mind at the moment?
I don't remember none of this.
I can see the poverty, you know
Hed been born here, but it was a foreign country
Arrives
At the bus station hed arranged to meet a cousin.
Walk with box
The plan was to travel into the countryside.
Greets cousin
Manuel was desperate not to become part of San Salvadors gang wars.
Ellie
But San Salvadors full of people who cant escape the gangs.
Ellie Rosales Garcia and her husband Tony were brought up in Los Angeles. Their children even have American names Brian and Jenny.
In Los Angeles Tony was a member of the 18th Street gang. He was deported here in 1998, after being involved in a drive by shooting.
This year he managed to get work in a factory.
It was meant to be a new start .
When did you last see him?
Fifteen days ago. That was the last time I saw him.
Hes with the gangs I think. Hes on the streets again. Hes smoking crack. Hes so skinny. But at this time I dont know if hes dead or alive.
Are your children worried?
Every time they ask me : is my dad coming tonight I dont have an answer [Cries]
That night we helped Ellie and some friends search for her husband.
But none of the 18thstreet gang lookouts would admit to having seen him.
Neither was he among the crack addicts that littered the streets.
We continued searching. Ellie was convinced he was with the gang somewhere, that the certainties of gang life had won out over the grind of a badly paid job.
We never found him. Ellie went to the police station to report him missing.
The gangs are destroying family life.
And therell be a whole new generation of fatherless children to recruit from.
Since we filmed, Tony has contacted Ellie. He;s told her hes staying with the gang.
Travelling to countryside
Gang culture is spreading far outside San Salvador.
We were two hundred miles from the capital, in Oriente, the Eastern province,
PTC: Were on a police patrol and were about to go to a rural area where the violence is so intense that half the families have abandoned their homes.
The culprits are local gangs modelled on the 18th street and MS gangs.
The police were constantly on guard against ambush
Our destination was the village of El Changuite. For ten miles around we hadnt seen a single person.
This is a former family homestead. But a little boy was killed here and thats why this whole area is so deserted. After his murder people just fled to the nearest villages. They just couldnt cope any more.
13 year old Gabriel Gruaudos was kidnapped from this house, held for ransom and then murdered. It was the final straw for people already living in terror of the gangs.
A childs shoes abandoned like everything else here when the parents fled with their other children..and theres a teddy bear.
No Comm
This is the areas school. But as you can see there are no children.
Most of the villagers have fled to the slums of San Salvador. The price paid on the world market for their coffee crops has collapsed so theres little to stay for.
We found Gabriels parents hiding on the outskirts of a nearby town. They wont let their surviving child out of their sight.
He said his son was stabbed to death. He was then covered in petrol and burned. And this is after theyd sold all their possessions to raise a ransom of $1000 but that didnt matter because he was killed anyway. And they found him three days after hed been killed and burned. And at that stage the crows were eating his body
He said this is a completely new phenomenon kidnapping children of working class families, but its going to spread. Because there is no justice here on this earth. What we believe in is divine justice. That's the only justice for us.
I knew that the nearby town of Usulutan was where Manuel Enrique, the deportee Id met at the airport was sheltering.
Does she know you were deported
He was in his grandmothers house. Shes away, working in America.
Now Im just thinking about going back
Manuel was scared. The MS and 18th Street gangs were fighting to control the town. Even here in the countryside the violence was more intense than anything hed known.
I dont want to get into any trouble
He told me he wore bandages on his arms to hide his MS tatoos.
Do you think you can get into trouble without looking for it?
yeah
There was constant gun fire.
Whos got the gun?
I dont know
Everyone in this country has a gun
Except us. I roll these around my hand all the time
And what do people think?
They look at me like Im crazy. I tell them Ive burned myself on the kitchen that we have.
So even your friends dont know?
They dont know that I got tattoo's on my hands.
Manuel, as a former ms gang member was in more danger than he knew.
In the morning, not far from Manuels house, we encountered a member of the rival 18th street gang.
Its safe here?
He helped run a weapons factory , he told me. And he could prove it.
This is a model that they make in the house. Its manufactured with widely available pipes. Theyre welded together. This is a 38 calibre bullet.
He says MS havent come to our house but down there thats their territory so they have to be able to defend themselves.
A few miles away in San Miguel, the local capital, the local schools were protesting against gang violence.
Will Salgado, the local mayor, has been accused of using more robust methods.
A few years back he was cleared by the El Salvadorean courts of funding a death squad called the Black Shadow. Its purpose: to execute gang members.
This is the mayor when he was younger, when he was in the army.
Hes been elected because people around here respect his hard line views.
Is it true that Black Shadow killed gang members?
Yes it existed, I was accused of killing 30 gang members here in San Miguel.
People are coming here looking for someone with enough courage and guts to continue with extrajudicial killings.
His message was simple
He said if the gangs were an epidemic then the black shadow was a cure
A bullet in the head is a traditional Salvadorian cure.
But in the capital the authorities are trying some alternative medicine.
This is Mariona, the high security prison where many gang members convicted of violent crimes are held.
It was built for 800. There are 3,000 crammed into it. El Salvador cant build prisons fast enough
The Prison Governor said there was one absolute rule.
This says In Mariona prison Jesus is the boss.
And he meant it.
Preachers roamed the exercise yard calling on prisoners to turn to the lord, competing to save souls.
Everywhere I turned there seemed to be a church.
This is the Catholic Church
What the governors latched onto is that religion offers gang members a family, a home in a hostile world, just what they seek from the gangs.
The prison had the air of a revivalist mission.
Theres no similarity in the moral values of Christianity and the gangs.But both offer people who think theyre nobodies the chance to become somebodies.
This prisoner, a deportee from America, told me God now gave him everything his gang had - without the downside
You were a gang member were you?
I used to be from 18th street
But not anymore
Not anymore. I got tattos on my body and my head I got nothing good from the gangs.
I dont know how many gang members turn to religion.
But visiting there made me realise that everything Id seen in El Salvador was the cry of people looking for an identity to stop them feeling outsiders in their own world.
Outside I went on patrol with the police again.
It might seem as if all this is unique to El Salvador and up to a point it is.
But across the world many others are also searching for identities that offer a sense of belonging in an indifferent world.
Thats why as the 21st century begins, so many countries face unrest, revolt, and civil war.