A decades-long veteran of the security forces, Ticas’s first job was as an artist in the counter-terrorism unit, sketching suspected guerillas during the country’s 1979–1992 civil war. The experience left him equally as distrustful of the rightwing generals he had served as of the guerrilla commanders who would join them among the political elite at war’s end. In most ways, the country has never quite recovered since. In 2015, homicides in El Salvador rivalled the most violent peak of the civil war, and it ranks consistently among the world’s most violent nations. Before long, Ticas spots a body by the roadside. “It’s fresh,” he observes. “With clothes on.” It hasn’t been stripped or dismembered. The victim, he says, was likely shot at that spot during the night. [...]
The murders that occurred here happened in the middle of a truce that the government negotiated between the rival gangs, which was credited with halving the homicide rate. But the reality, the informant says, is that it taught them to hide their victims in clandestine graves such as these. Ticas was not formally trained in forensics, and many of the techniques he uses he discovered himself. But he is not the only one learning in the process. [...]
Rather than a problem to be deported away, however, the reality of the gang is considerably more complex. Born out of the ecology of Los Angeles’s fierce gang warfare, MS-13 was founded in the 1980s by Salvadoran refugees who had been hardened in a brutal civil war still raging at home. In time, the gang expanded to include other nationalities, and it spread to other American cities. Today, in the US, it numbers no more than 10,000 members and functions mostly – its penchant for sensational violence aside – like an average American street gang, fighting to control neighborhood turf and local drug sales.
No comments:
Post a Comment