GREGORIO ORTEGA DID NOT MANAGE to benefit from his grandmother’s prayers or from the candles lit in the church in his name. Only a few months before he was due to be called for military service, he succeeded in being accepted into the MS-13, better known as the Mara Salvatrucha, the most vicious of Guatemala’s gangs. He had to take the blood oath: loyalty to his comrades above everything else—family, women, drugs, and money. He went through the tough initiation ceremony: a tremendous beating meted out by members of the gang to test his spirit, which left him more dead than alive. Several of his teeth were broken and he passed blood for two weeks, but once he had recovered he won the right to his first MS-13 gang tattoo. Over time, as he accumulated crimes and won respect, he hoped to end up like the most fanatical gang members, his entire body and face covered in tattoos. He had heard that in Pelican Bay prison in California there was a Salvadorean who was blind because he had had the whites of his eyes tattooed.
In its twenty-something years of existence, the MS-13, which had started out in Los Angeles, had spread its tentacles to the rest of the United States, Mexico, and Central America. The Mara Salvatrucha had more than sixty thousand members, all of them dedicated to killing, extortion, kidnapping, and the trafficking of arms, drugs, and human beings. They had such a brutal reputation that other gangs tended to use them to do their dirty work. In Central America, where they enjoyed greater impunity than in the United States or Mexico, the gang members marked their territory by leaving a trail of mangled dead bodies. Neither the police nor the army dared confront them. In the village, Concepcion Montoya’s neighbors knew that her eldest grandson had joined the MS-13, but only spoke of it in whispers behind closed doors, for fear of reprisals. At first they wanted nothing to do with the unfortunate grandmother and her other grandchildren. Nobody wanted any trouble. Ever since the years of repression they had grown accustomed to living in fear and found it hard to imagine things could be any different. The MS-13 was another plague, another punishment for the sin of existing, another reason to tread carefully. Concepcion faced their rejection with head held high, pretending not to notice the silence surrounding her in the street or at the market, where she went on Saturdays to sell her tamales and the secondhand clothes Miriam sent from Chicago. Gregorio soon left the region; for some time he was no longer to be seen, and so the fear he aroused in the village gradually subsided. They had more pressing problems. Concepcion forbade her grandchildren to mention their elder brother. Don’t go looking for trouble, she warned.
When a year later Gregorio returned for the first time, he had two gold teeth, a shaved head, and tattoos of barbed wire on his neck and numbers, letters, and skulls on his knuckles. He seemed to have grown several inches, and where before he’d had the build and skin of a youngster, now he sported a gang member’s muscles and scars. In the Salvatrucha he had found a family and an identity. He did not have to go around begging; he could have whatever he wanted—money, drugs, alcohol, guns, and women, all within easy reach. He could scarcely recall the days of his humiliation. Striding into his grandmother’s hut shouting that he was back, he found her shucking corn with Evelyn, while Andres, who had not grown much and looked young for his age, was doing his homework at the far end of the only table in the hut.
Andres leapt up, gawping with fear and admiration at his elder brother. Gregorio greeted him with an affectionate push, then shadowboxed him into a corner, showing off the tattoos on his fists. He approached Evelyn to give her a hug but stopped short. The gang had taught him to mistrust and be scornful of women in general, but his sister was an exception. Unlike the rest of them, she was good and pure, a girl who had not yet matured. When he thought of the dangers lying in wait for her simply because she had been born female, he was glad he would be able to protect her. No one would dare do her any harm, because they would have to face the gang and him.
His grandmother managed to find her voice and asked why he had reappeared. Gregorio studied her contemptuously, and after an overlong pause replied that he had come to ask for her blessing. “May God bless you,” she stammered, the words she said every night to her grandchildren before sleep, adding in a whisper: “and may God forgive you.” The boy took a bundle of quetzales out of the pocket of his loose jeans precariously slung around his hips and proudly handed it to his grandmother, his first contribution to the family income. Concepcion Montoya not only refused to accept the banknotes but asked him not to come again, as he set a bad example for his brother and sister. “You ungrateful old piece of shit!” cried Gregorio, flinging the money to the floor. He left muttering curses, and several months went by before he saw his family again. On the rare occasions when he was passing through the village he waited for his brother and sister hidden on a street corner to avoid being recognized, a victim of the same insecurity that had been the cross he’d had to bear in childhood. He had learned to hide this weakness; in the gang it was all boasting and machismo. He would intercept Andres and Evelyn in the throng of kids leaving school, grab them by the arm, and drag them into a dark alleyway to give them money and find out if they had heard anything from their mother. The rule in the gang was that they should reject affection, chop off all sentimentality: the family was a tie, something weighing them down. There should be no memories or nostalgia, for they were to become men, and men don’t cry, don’t complain; they don’t love, relying only on themselves. The only thing that counted was courage; honor was defended with blood, and respect was earned by blood. Yet despite himself, Gregorio was still linked to his brother and sister by the memory of the years they had spent together. He promised Evelyn a fifteenth-birthday party with no expense spared and gave Andres a bike. For several weeks, Andres hid it from his grandmother, until she heard about it and forced him to confess the truth. Concepcion boxed his ears for accepting money from someone who was a gang member, even if he was his brother, and sold the bike in the market the next day.