Miguel Ángel Tobar was a hired murderer in the service of the cruelest gang in the world – Mara Salvatrucha 13. His activities cost the lives of dozens of people in the Salvadoran province. The Young’s dark “career” was influenced by global processes and mechanisms set in motion by officials in the United States and El Salvador throughout the 20th century. His imagination was ruled by pop culture myths. His fate and hundreds like him were doomed long before their births.
The Martínez brothers wonder in their report why gangs are a way of life for many Salvadorans, what is the source of violence, and finally – what role the United States played in the destruction of the Salvadoran state.
On January 26, 2022, the report will be published by Wydawnictwo Filtry, translated from Spanish by Tomasz Pindel. We are publishing a fragment of the book before the premiere.
Juan José Martinez, Óscar Martínez “Young from Hollywood” – excerpt:
Miguel Ángel Tobar will not find peace even after death.
Seven men try to bury him on Sunday, December 23, 2014. Twelve noon, Atiquizaya cemetery in western El Salvador, a small Central American country. The sun is shining right on top of your head and you don’t even have to move to pour sweat.
Miguel Ángel Tobar’s mother, a petite gray-haired old woman, stood still as the deceased’s brother-in-law and brothers dug the grave. Now, when her son is lowered into the pit in the teak coffin, he kneels on the ground, screams, asks why, why so young. Why again. Why another son. Why another homicide.
The coffin, paid for by the city authorities, has no window. It is often not made out of respect for families who do not want to remember the sight of a massacred body. In the case of Miguel Ángel Tobar, the reason must be different. His murderers were not as skilled shooters as he was, and they emptied entire magazines to put only six bullets into him. Three that hit the head pierced less visible places, for example behind the ear. The bullets handled him well.
You could say that Miguel Ángel Tobar’s funeral lasted about five minutes.
It took the rest of the time to dig, analyze the depth of the pit, continue digging. The rest was not solemn. As if the family met to dig a well. Men, soaked in sweat, argued about the depth and width, like laborers building someone else’s house. Women whispered silent crying children and watched their husbands kicking.
But when seven of them lifted the coffin and then began to lower it, the banal scene turned into just this: the burial of someone they loved.
Mother screams for five minutes. She is close to fainting. Miguel Ángel Tobar’s wife, an eighteen-year-old girl whose life has not been kind to her, sheds one tear. Women sing evangelical songs as much as possible in their lungs. They shout out words that speak of a heavenly refuge, but also a lake of hell. Their voices drown out the crying of their children. Men who are sweaty don’t cry because tears are not masculine, but they stare at the ground.
Five graves away, four gang members are playing dice. The cemetery is controlled by Mara Salvatrucha 13 and it’s no secret. The gravedigger knows it, and now only watches as the others hide Miguel Ángel Tobar. The city guard responsible for this area knows about it, and when asked: “And who are they over there?”, He replies quite naturally: “Those who rule here”.
There is an unwritten truce at the funeral of a gang member – no matter what gang he belongs to. You give up on who you wanted to kill when it’s already dead. But today this uncertain truce has been forgotten.
Two more gangsters leave the alley between the houses built by the cemetery and join the four who play dice on the tombstone. They stop the game and get up to look at the burial. Another one shows up and starts walking a few meters from the mourners. He’s a skinny and pale boy, looks like he’s dressed in a gala gangster outfit today: a Chaplin hat, round and black, a white baggy shirt tucked into wide black pants tied with a rope, white sports shoes of some apocryphal brand disguised as Domba’s sneakers. The skinny man spits at the feet of those standing in the circle and defiantly searches for someone’s gaze. But no one is looking at his eyes.
Another gang member comes from the other side of the cemetery, from the ravine, and stops at the edge of the cemetery. The funeral parlors are now surrounded: houses on one side, dice players on the other, a thin man there, and a ravine further away.
Miguel Ángel Tobar’s relatives understand that they have been cornered. My father-in-law squints to the side and says, “It looks bad.” A few more flaps of the shovel. There is no time to tapping the mound. Tobar’s grave looks like a bulge on the ground. No tombstone, cross or plaque.
One of the men cuts with a machete a branch of a yucca flower – an izote, the national symbol of El Salvador – and sticks it into a mound on the grave.
A small procession of the poor leaves the cemetery in a hurry. From the houses, other gang members meet them and order them to stop. People are in a hurry. Everyone’s leaving. They scatter.
The farewell to Miguel Ángel Tobar, sicario of Mara Salvatrucha’s Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha gang – the mobster who betrayed his gang – was just like his life.
A man like Miguel Ángel Tobar, “Young from Hollywood”, will never find peace in a country like this.
***
Miguel Ángel Tobar was a member of Mara Salvatrucha 13. A member and assassin of the world’s most powerful and fearful gang – the only pandilla to be blacklisted by the US Treasury, along with the Mexican Zetas cartel and the Japanese yakuza. A gang that made El Salvador the country with the highest murder rate in the world in two years from 2015 to 2016. To give an idea of the scale: when Mexico, shaken by the actions of the Zetas and Chapo Guzmán’s cartel in 2015, were outraged that there were eighteen murders per 100,000 inhabitants, the figure in El Salvador was one hundred and three. And there is nothing to mention about the States: the local index hovers around five. More than ten people in a hundred thousand inhabitants is an epidemic, according to the United Nations.
The death epidemic in El Salvador has taken a frenetic proportions.
Probably Miguel Ángel Tobar would have become a ruthless killer anyway. Perhaps he had a grave without a tombstone, buried in a dusty cemetery somewhere in western El Salvador – with men who didn’t cry and women who were fainting. It is possible that all this would have happened to Miguel Ángel Tobar, even if he had not stumbled upon the MS-13. However, things turned out as they turned out.
They were as if made for each other. So similar …
Before he became a Young from Hollywood, Miguel Ángel Tobar was a lost child, a half-orphan born at the end of the Civil War who took everything from him. When this great massacre, which lasted more than twelve years, was over, and the bodies of the victims were still steaming, hundreds of people came from the United States with new proposals. The deported, these first Beast apostles – that was what Hollywood Young called his gang – offered Miguel Ángel Tobar and hundreds of thousands of others like him a new target. A new case. A new war. The war against “girls”, “bitches”, “eighteen”, that is, against the Barrio 18 gang. Miguel Ángel Tobar entered this family, which replaced him with an environment created by dysfunctional individuals with whom he had blood ties. He got involved with all of himself. This new family of people like him gave him a reason to live. That reason was death. War.
Except this war between such alike boys had started well before Miguel Ángel Tobar was born, thousands of kilometers from a dusty and forgotten cemetery in Atiquizaya.
Young from Hollywood – cover mat. press releases
Source: Gazeta
Tristin is an accomplished author and journalist, known for his in-depth and engaging writing on sports. He currently works as a writer at 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the sports industry.
