During an interview in 2014, Miguel Ángel Tobar, an assassin for the Mara Salvatrucha gang, asked Salvadoran brothers Óscar and Juan José Martínez—a journalist and an anthropologist, respectively—why they wanted to tell his story:
“‘Because,’ we answered, ashamed, ‘we believe that your story, unfortunately, is more important than your life.’”
Tobar, a.k.a. “the Kid” of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha clique of MS-13 in El Salvador, would be killed that same year, but his story now lives on in the Martínez brothers’ masterful The Hollywood Kid: The Violent Life and Violent Death of an MS-13 Hitman, translated from the Spanish by John B. Washington and Daniela Ugaz. The book is based on years of interviews with Tobar when he was a “protected” (read: conspicuously unprotected) witness of the state after a falling out with fellow gang members who had killed his brother.
Tobar was born in the dusty town of Las Pozas in rural western El Salvador in 1983, in the middle of the country’s brutal civil war. At the age of 11, he attempted his first murder: the coffee plantation foreman whom his crippled father had permitted to repeatedly rape Tobar’s sister. At age 12, in order to seal his pact with MS-13, he killed and decapitated another youth, a baker from a small village who had pledged allegiance to the rival Barrio 18 gang. “They said the guy was a witch,” he told the Martínez brothers, 17 years later. “So that’s why I cut the dude’s head off, because they say that witches can put their brains back together.” It was all downhill from there, until he “fulfilled his own prophecy by getting murdered” as he was heading home from registering the birth of his second daughter.
The authors use the trajectory of this individual gangster—who killed more than 50 people over the course of his career, even removing one victim’s heart with his bare hands—as a vehicle to recount the country’s violent history. The book is nonlinear, an effective format for piecing together Tobar’s life alongside the national one. The timeline begins in the late 1800s, at “the moment we all went crazy in El Salvador”: when the government decided that the country would become fixated on growing for-export coffee on the backs of Indigenous folks performing slave labor after their lands had been stolen for the project.
The book extends through to the present day, with El Salvador’s intermittent distinction as the most murderous place on the planet and Donald Trump’s apoplexy over MS-13, a gang the U.S. created in the first place. Trumpian hysteria has sent the elite of Long Island scurrying to weaponize their wine cellars, while also giving a toxic boost to general xenophobia and justifying manic U.S. border fortification and deportation schemes.
In El Salvador, to be sure, life is cheap—and even more so, perhaps, if you belong to a demographic widely seen as uniquely evil, subhuman, and in need of extermination. That’s why, among other reasons, the Martínez brothers’ undertaking is so important. Not only do they humanize the Kid, they also show him to be a product of history and of “a long series of violent acts.” They depict him as a man whose “personal agency…had always been limited, always tied to distant decisions made by US and Salvadoran politicians.” As Tobar himself observed: “We were born of the war. We lived the war, and it was the people of the war that made these gangs.” Ultimately, when it came to joining the ranks of MS-13, he said, “They didn’t give me no other choice.” READ MORE AT NACLA.