MS-13: The Making of America's Most Notorious Gang

The MS-13 was born from war.

In the 1980s, El Salvador was enmeshed in a bloody civil conflict. To escape the guerrilla assaults and death squads, many fled to the US and settled in Los Angeles. Among them were Alex and his brother.

There, as a means of survival, Alex and a small number of Salvadoran immigrants formed a group called the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners, a relatively harmless social network bound by heavy metal music and a shared identity. But later, as they brushed against established local gangs, the group took on a harder edge, selling drugs, stealing cars and killing rivals. As authorities cracked down, gang members like Alex were incarcerated and deported. But in the prison system, the group only grew stronger.

Today, MS-13 is one of the most infamous street gangs on earth, linked to thousands of grisly murders each year. But it is also misunderstood—less a drug cartel and more a hand-to-mouth organization whose criminal economy is based mostly on small-time extortion schemes and petty drug dealing.

Journalist and longtime organized crime investigator Steven Dudley brings readers inside the nefarious group to tell a larger story of how flawed US and Central American policies and exploitative and unequal economic systems helped foster the gang and sustain it. Ultimately, MS-13 is the story of the modern immigrant and the perennial battle to escape a vortex of poverty and crime, as well as the repressive, unequal systems that feed these problems.

A remarkable feat of reporting; the ways in which the United States is complicit in the creation and preservation of MS-13 might well keep you awake deep into the night, as it did me. I can’t shake this book, or the feeling that we have doomed so many young men to a life of violence. We have to do better for them, for our children, and for our collective future.

—Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

Steven Dudley’s great contribution in this landmark account of MS-13 is to take a subject that has been sensationalized and mythologized and politicized beyond recognition and, through painstaking reporting and clear-eyed analysis, capture a truth that is less exotic—but more fascinating—than the headlines. Rather than default to easy alarmism or xenophobic caricatures, Dudley captures the origins of the gang as a human story of migration and migrant communities, and a policy story, about the unintended consequences of U.S. policy. By detailing the experiences of gang members and victims alike, he anatomizes the complex, fluid dynamics of this elusive transnational network. A startling book.

—Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

"Ripped straight from the headlines, MS-13 is one of the year’s most important books, a gripping, meticulously reported account of the rise of one of the world’s most notorious street gangs. With his remarkable access, Steven Dudley skillfully weaves in the story

of gang members to show how MS-13 grew from a social network to a criminal enterprise that President Trump has blamed for the rise of violent attacks in communities across the United States. But Dudley does more than chronicle the history of the gang. He uses

MS-13 to tell a larger story of flawed U.S. policy that has helped the gang flourish."

—Mitch Weiss, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Broken Faith and Tiger Force

Steven Dudley’s latest book is a historical treatise moved forward by a series of captivating narratives that present a wholistic, unifying perspective on the Mara Salvatrucha. Dudley’s research presses deeper into the past, and walks farther into the countryside of El Salvador and neighborhoods of Los Angeles to bring to the conversation a thoroughly researched and reported body of work.

—Samuel Logan, author of This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha

Steven Dudley is the cofounder of InSight Crime, a think tank devoted to investigating organized crime and corruption in the Americas. As a journalist in Latin America, he spent the past two decades writing for the Washington Post, NPR, the BBC and the Miami Herald. MS-13 is the winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Award.

@stevensdudley

Also by Steven Dudley

Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia

MS-13

The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang

Steven Dudley

To my mother, the pillar of the family; my father, my inspiration;

and Juli, for everything since.

Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Part II

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Part III

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Acknowledgments

Methodology and Notes

Notes on Chapters

Bibliography

Glossary of Major Gang Terms used in the book

Index

Author’s Note

This book is about the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, the ruthless forty-year-old street gang that has spread across a half-dozen countries and two continents. It follows a number of characters—most notably a gang leader, whom I call Norman, and his family. These stories allow us to trace the history of the gang from its beginnings in Los Angeles to its export to El Salvador and other Central American nations, and back again.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part recounts the gang’s origins; the second, its process of maturation; the third, the various efforts by those involved to leave the gang or mitigate its influence. Broadly speaking, the three parts mirror most gang members’ experiences as well: you are enveloped, become serious, then try to leave.

The gang has been compared by Donald Trump to Al-Qaeda and is considered the US government’s number one target as it continues its nationwide effort to rid the US of criminal aliens. Indeed, the MS-13 is a threat that trades on its reputation for brutal murders, which has helped make Central America one of the most violent regions in the world and has devastated many US communities.

But the MS-13 is also greatly misunderstood. Its capacity is erroneously likened to much more sophisticated groups such as the Zetas in Mexico and the Yakuza in Japan. While the MS-13 does have an international presence, it is a hand-to-mouth organization whose criminal economy is based mostly on small-time extortion schemes and petty drug dealing, not international drug trafficking or sophisticated corruption.

In fact, the gang is perhaps better described as a loosely knit social and criminal community that reinforces its bonds via extreme versions of individual and collective violence. And it is as much the result of bad individual decisions as it is the result of flawed US and Central American policy, and the exploitative and unequal economic systems they foster.

Norman’s family, for example, was devastated by the US-backed war in El Salvador, which included widespread human rights abuses that led directly to the massive migration that Norman’s family experienced. Politics and war followed these refugees to the US, where they were treated differently depending on their nationality, then deported back to their countries of origin in disproportionate numbers, especially as it relates to criminal deportations. These deportations of ex-convicts are what led to the surge of gangs in Central America. Now, ironically, this surge in gang activity in Central America has led to another flood of refugees and, with the advent of the Donald Trump administration, the hyper-politicization of immigration as a catchall for every US problem.

At the ground level—Norman’s level—the reality obliterates any moral clarity and political platitudes. He is the first to admit that he is no angel and neither are his fellow gang members. He and several brothers and half brothers entered the gang, pledging allegiance to something they call la bestia, the beast. But the gang is also a surrogate family, one that replaced his real family, which, by the time he was a teenager, was spread across a thousand miles. This surrogate family is what the MS-13 calls el barrio, roughly translated in this context as community. This is the gang’s central paradox: the MS-13 is a surrogate family and a vicious criminal organization.

My experience with gangs has been through a journalistic, policy-oriented and academic lens. After spending the previous fifteen years in Latin America working for major news outlets, I cofounded InSight Crime in 2010, a think tank focused on organized crime in the Americas. Part of my job is to cover the gangs in Central America, specifically those operating in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. I am also a senior fellow at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, where I recently codirected a three-year study funded by the US Justice Department on the MS-13 in El Salvador, the Greater Washington, DC, and Los Angeles areas.

I mention these projects only because they have led to numerous and regular interactions with gang members, communities and families hit hard by gang violence, law enforcement corralling the gangs and policymakers trying to deal with them. This book is a distillation of these interactions, a history of the MS-13 as told through the human lives they’ve made and destroyed: the victims and victimizers; the undocumented migrants and those who deport them; the gangs and the police who fight them.

The story of the MS-13 is difficult to fit into one book. I believe the characters in this book are representative of the issues I wanted to cover, and they allowed me to tell the history of the gang. But there are gaps in research in this work that will be obvious to the specialist and general reader alike. Honduras and Guatemala, two vital hubs of MS-13 activity, are absent, for example. My treatment and understanding of the role of women as well as the role that notions of masculinity play in recruitment, cohesion and violence of the gang are also largely superficial. These are all potential books on their own, and I would encourage more work on this subject.

That is because the MS-13 is not just a gang problem. It is a manifestation of our collective failures across a huge geographic expanse. Gang members need to take personal responsibility for what they do, but we are playing an active role in perpetuating this violent, antisocial community. As a very smart person once said to me about marginalized criminal groups: they will stop biting us when we stop treating them like dogs.

December 2019

Introduction

Judging Norman

1.

Sir, please state your...name for the record.

Norman...1

Where were you born?

En... El Salvador.

It was July 2017. Norman was dressed in an orange jumpsuit, sitting at a table in a dimly lit US immigration court. He was forty-two, but he spoke with the tired cadence of an elderly man. A judge, flanked by an interpreter, scrutinized him from the podium. Norman’s legal representative continued his questions.

Tell me, sir, why are you afraid of returning to El Salvador?

Este, me quieren quitar la vida, me quieren matar.

They want to take my life, they want to kill me, the interpreter said.

The este was a tic. It doesn’t translate. The interpreter rightfully ignored it, but the rhythm it gave Norman’s speech betrayed his gang origins. Most gang members talk to outsiders in a low voice, almost a mumble with frequent pauses that are punctuated with words like este, an equivalent to um. The effect is that of an unhurried person, someone who does not need to overstate his case or yell to get his point across. This way of speech reflects the narrative gang members perpetuate—that they are not in a hurry to live, or to die. In reality they’re running toward both at full speed.

And who is it that wants to kill you? his legal representative—a tall, thin man dressed in a dark suit and tie—asked.

Este, la policía y la pandilla.

The police and gangs.

And when you say the gangs, what gangs are you referring to?

A la MS y a la 18.

The MS was the Mara Salvatrucha 13, or MS-13, as it is more popularly known. They had been Norman’s gang—until they weren’t, and he had to flee to save himself from them. The 18th Street was the gang’s eternal rival.

The MS-13 was, by then, the most notorious street gang in the Americas. What began in Los Angeles as a casual group of Salvadoran émigrés some forty years earlier had expanded coast to coast, down to El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and beyond.

The gang was more of a loose social and criminal network than a top-down mafia, but one that inspired fierce loyalty and offered few ways of escape. Tattoos marked them. Violence bonded them. They had grown by coming at their enemies in waves, like a marabunta, or army of ants, as the street gangs were baptized so many years before in El Salvador. Using machetes, they’d hacked their victims into butcher-sized chunks of flesh, often passing the long-bladed tool from member to member so each could take their turn. It had become their signature kill and, perversely, their most formidable recruiting tool.

Sitting shyly in front of the judge, Norman did not betray his violent tendencies. He was five foot four, but sturdy and noticeably strong for his size. He kept his arms to his sides, careful to cover as much of his body art as he could. Beneath his jumpsuit lurked numerous tattoos, including one of a hand folded like horns—a nod to the devil, and a classic sign of the gang.

Tell me, why are you afraid the police will kill you? his legal representative asked.

Temo porque, este, me andaban buscando.

I’m afraid because they were looking for me, to kill me.

Norman did not use the phrase to kill me. The translator added it. Norman, he’d surmised, was pleading for his life.

2.

Norman was both victim and victimizer, a product of a family that embodied all the complexity and contradictions that make up the story of the MS-13.

He grew up in El Salvador, the youngest of seven. When he was a boy, the army came to his house, took two of his brothers to their barracks, and forced his mother to choose which one to leave in the army and which one to take home.

Norman and his family had lived through gun battles. Death squads interrupted dinner. People in his neighborhood disappeared, and rebels executed a soldier on leave right in front of him.

His home life was equally turbulent. His father left his mother for one of Norman’s maternal cousins when Norman was just a toddler, creating a parallel family that competed with his. Norman’s mother plunged into depression, attempting suicide on at least one occasion.

The tumult led to a family exodus. By the time Norman was sixteen, the civil war in El Salvador was over, but all of his brothers and sisters had fled to the United States.

Norman and his family sought stability within the gang. Its brash leaders—most of whom had been deported from the US—became his stand-in guardians. Two of his brothers joined the MS-13 in Los Angeles; two of his half brothers would later become members in El Salvador. Norman joined in El Salvador after his most beloved brother—who’d long acted as a surrogate father—had been murdered in the US.

The MS-13, he decided, would be his family, his community. Together they partied, break dancing and drinking in the streets. They robbed, extorted and murdered together. As the gang evolved from a public nuisance to a national menace in his home country, Norman rose through the ranks. By the early 2000s, law enforcement took action, rounding up gang members in dramatic crackdowns. Norman was convicted for two murders and spent more than a decade in prison, where he had a front row seat to the continued evolution of the gang amidst an upheaval in the prison system. Norman survived this period—which included earthquakes, rape, abuse and bloody riots—with a combination of cunning, gall and luck.

His release from prison in 2012 preceded yet another crackdown on gangs in El Salvador. By then, Norman had five kids and a wife who’d stayed by his side through his transgressions. Out of prison, he says he steered clear of gang life. Salvadoran authorities tell a different story. They say Norman was involved in several more murders. In one case, they said he ordered a hit from jail. In another, he allegedly oversaw a killing on the street. In a third, he purportedly ran into a rival at a repair shop and called in a hit.

During the immigration process, Norman admitted he was a gang leader but denied these accusations. He said he’d been slowly trying to leave the MS-13. He claimed he was trying to work honestly, selling farm-fresh vegetables and fruit at the market with his wife and living near his mother and other family members in El Salvador. In court, he said that when MS-13 leaders asked him to join the leadership council and he refused, they’d issued an order to assassinate him. He described how he’d fled to the US after evading the hit, which was organized by his half brother. His wife and three of his children followed him to the states.

Because in the gang, there was only one way to enter, and I already knew how the departure was, he said through the interpreter.

What do you mean when you say that you already knew how the departure was? his legal representative asked.

That there is no departure, but rather they assassinate you.

3.

It was an inauspicious moment to appear in a US immigration court. President Donald Trump and an adjacent apparatus of political action committees, think tanks and media had by then closed ranks on the issue of immigration. The goal was to conflate migrants with crime, and the MS-13 seemed to be the perfect illustration. Many members of the gang were foreign-born, hailing from countries with some of the highest homicide rates in the world. The gang was widespread, operational in over a dozen US states. And they were terrifying, massacring rivals in a bloody, almost ritualistic fashion. In 2017, the MS-13 killed some forty people in the US, a record number for the gang nationally.

But the MS-13 was not a drug cartel or a terrorist organization, as Trump and his allies alleged. They had not invaded by the thousands, and they had not occupied towns. Other countries were not marshaling the MS-13 to the United States (though the US had been deporting them for years), and immigrant caravans making their way through Mexico were not full of gang members—the caravans were mostly women and children. To be sure, of the 527,000 people US border agents detained in 2017, only 228 were believed to be MS-13.

The MS-13 was not even the biggest domestic gang. As the Trump administration entered office, the 18th Street, as well as the Latin Kings, the Crips, and the Bloods, were all between three and five times larger by the US government’s own count. A Virginia Commonwealth University study counted 178 MS-13 murders between 2009 and 2018; during the same time period, the Anti-Defamation League claimed there were 427 domestic extremist-related murders.

Still, by the time Norman’s case was in front of the judge, the facts mattered little. The vast majority of MS-13 victims were not White supporters of Trump, but Latinos. Yet by 2018, 85 percent of Trump voters categorized the gang as a very serious or a somewhat serious threat to national security, and a majority feared they or someone in their family would become a victim of violence from MS-13.

They kidnap, they extort, they rape, and they rob. They prey on children, Trump told a group of law enforcement officers during a speech a few weeks after Norman appeared in court. They shouldn’t be here. They stomp on their victims, they beat them with clubs, they slash them with machetes and they stab them with knives. They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into blood-stained killing fields. They’re animals.

4.

Norman ignored Trump, telling me at one point in between court appearances that he didn’t think the president’s outbursts mattered since, I no longer feel like I’m part of the gang.

But the political atmosphere bent Norman’s trial toward the surreal. Outside, Trump was warning about an MS-13 invasion via migrant caravans, leveraging the trope to separate families and send children to detention centers. Meanwhile, Norman was pleading for mercy, asking a judge to allow him to make the US his home, at least temporarily.

In this, Norman had three options: asylum; withholding of removal; or deferral based on the Convention Against Torture (CAT), an international treaty the US signed years before Trump had become president. For Norman, asylum and withholding were not options because of his gang ties and criminal past. They also would have required he establish that he was persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

Instead, Norman’s legal representative was applying for deferral from deportation using CAT. For a CAT deferral to succeed, the alien must show that it is more likely than not they will face torture or death in the country to which they will be deported. The judge is especially considerate of state violence, which Norman also described to the court in detail that day: how he’d been stopped after his release from prison by the Salvadoran police and thrown into the bed of their truck; how they’d taken him to the edge of a sugarcane field where one officer told Norman he was trash, that he wasn’t worth anything, and started to beat him; how that same policeman reached toward his pocket and pulled out a revolver and told him, You know what, you’re going to die right now.

Norman always had good luck in situations like this. By my count, he dodged death at least five times. On this occasion, a man—and potential witness—drove by in a tractor trailer, at just the right time. The police told Norman to go hide in a ditch. To save himself, he fled into the sugarcane field.

The police gave chase and began to shoot. A river ran along the edge of the field, and Norman told the court he jumped in and let the current take him. After a few blocks, he emerged from the water and walked to his aunt’s house, where he found refuge. It was the beginning of an odyssey that would eventually land him in front of the judge.

5.

People enter the US without authorization to escape violence, threats, civil war, natural catastrophes and economic peril, as well as to reunite with family. But these migration patterns are also the result of a long-established colonial relationship between the United States and Latin America.

Few countries exemplify this history better than El Salvador. From cacao to coffee to cotton to textiles, the Salvadoran economy has long served foreign interests—first Spain and later the US—with devastating domestic consequences: near constant economic turmoil matched with massacres, war and gang violence. The US has had a strong hand in these events: supporting military dictatorships and unscrupulous politicians; training repressive army battalions and covering up for their atrocities; deporting gang members en masse to El Salvador and then washing its hands of the problems this creates.

Despite, or perhaps because of this dynamic, many Salvadorans revere the United States. They adorn themselves with US status symbols—tennis shoes, name-brand clothes, baseball hats. They adopt US sports. They integrate English into their everyday vernacular. They eat American food and purchase large, US-made vehicles. In 2001, the country even adopted the US dollar as its national currency. As the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton once wrote: The president of the United States is more president of my country than the president of my country.

Life as a neo-colony means watching US sitcoms because they are the only ones on TV, driving US cars because they are the only ones on the lot and wearing US clothes because they are the only ones on the racks. Salvadorans pay for it on both ends: accepting cheap wages to make US clothes, harvest US crops, and fight US wars. El Salvador did not so much adopt the US dollar as accept it as the best way to attract foreign investment from the same country that walks all over them.

Still, at this point, the bond is unbreakable. No other country has resettled in the US at the same rate relative to its population than El Salvador. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s during the country’s civil war, around a quarter of El Salvador’s population moved to the United States. Over 1.4 million first-generation Salvadorans still live in the US—or about 1 in every 5 Salvadoran-born people—a population nearly as large as the Chinese immigrant community in the US.

Salvadorans have settled in Los Angeles, Houston, Washington, DC, and other major Latino urban hubs. Half of all Salvadorans in the US live in California or Texas, and Los Angeles is the second largest Salvadoran city in the world behind the country’s capital, San Salvador. But they’ve also moved to smaller towns like Annapolis, Maryland, and parts of Suffolk County, Long Island.

Most come for the reasons stated above, and many have become US citizens or are US residents. A good portion work menial jobs with little security or benefits—the type of jobs US citizens shun. Some set up restaurants or construction businesses, and support their children through college. Salvadoran immigrants benefit from government services—the schools, the health care system, the police and social welfare agencies—but they also pay taxes, and still send what they can back home. Nearly 17 percent of El Salvador’s GDP comes from remittances.

Many Salvadorans I have spoken to think of their country constantly, often longing to return in spite of its troubles. To them, it’s not a shithole, as Trump once famously described El Salvador and numerous other developing nations, it’s a postcard. This strong sense of national identity helps sustain families through adversity. There is no easy way to fix the relationship between a mother and a son who have been separated for a decade, no magic renovation when five families are piled into a two-bedroom apartment. There’s no extra money for tutors or babysitters while guardians go to their second or third job of the day.

Those that are left behind in El Salvador are sometimes saddled with worse problems. Endemic corruption and grinding poverty. Impunity and rampant violence. Broken schools and filthy hospitals. But while it is clear that a major part of their problem is the neo-colonial system the US helped to establish and maintain, many still dream of America, long for it, want to experience it themselves. The US is at once repressor and liberator.

6.

It is from this tumultuous love-hate relationship that the MS-13 was born. The gang is the bastard child that no one wants to acknowledge from an affair that most choose to ignore. Lost in this unhealthy relationship are the children, many of whom are victims of circumstance, caught in a system that marginalizes, vilifies and tries to destroy them.

The MS-13 began in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, in part because the Reagan administration’s proxy wars in Central America led to mass displacement. As violence spiked domestically, California passed special laws to arrest suspected members en masse, ensuring convictions and lengthening sentences. In response the gangs got more sophisticated, learning how to operate from within the prison system.

Eventually, violence and crime abated, but by then cities and states across the US were beginning to replicate LA’s anti-crime model. What’s more, Clinton, in his 1997 state of the union, declared his own war on gangs, implementing draconian measures that increased incarceration rates.

The administration also doubled down on laws to accelerate deportations of ex-convicts, which in turn precipitated the spread of US-style gangs in Central America like the one Norman would join. In response, the George W. Bush administration eventually set up a special antigang task force in El Salvador where they repeated the process: Los Angeles–type policies that led to mass incarceration, which in turn consolidated gang power from within the prisons.

Frustrated, police in El Salvador began to target gang members in the way Norman was describing that day in court. El Salvador began to look like it did during the 1980s, at the height of its civil war.

The violence forced Central American families to flee to the US as refugees, which culminated in a surge of unaccompanied minors during the Obama administration. Obama reacted by increasing deportations yet again, this time to the highest levels in US history, thus starting the process all over again.

After nearly forty years, the MS-13 is more widespread than ever.

7.

It was this vicious cycle that had led Norman to the immigration court that July day, pleading for his life.

The judge—who acts as both judge and jury in immigration proceedings—was noticeably moved by the case. He intervened frequently, clarifying details about how Norman escaped from his half brother’s grasp, and questioning Norman at length about prison guards and their penchant for torture, their ability to facilitate murders inside the prisons.

He