For each week, you will have a choice of which forums to participate in.（Answer one of three questions below. Do not answer all the question） 1 What makes a "prison gang" different from a street gang

The Iron Fist In the decade of international stewardship following the end of the c ivil war, El Salvador was frequently covered as a success story, of sorts. The country ’s two warring factions —the left -wing FMLN and the right -wing ARENA —evolved into established political parties, contending fiercely but peaceably for power. Civil society organizations flowered along with human rights reforms. The U.S. set to work building up a new civilian police force, the PNC, which had been a key sticking point in the negotiations that produced the peace accord. This force was de -linked from military a nd intelligence functions, no longer allowed to use torture for forced confessions or extrajudicial killing as modus operandi. Legal reforms followed that established protections for juvenile offenders and assurances of due process. This anti -hardline, human rights -oriented approach, which dominated Salvadoran law enforcement from 1992 to 2003, was never without its critics. In El Salvador, the dynamic between security and justice is often viewed as a competitive one. 8399_State of Wa r_1P.indd 44 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS According to a 1998 poll from the Jesuit -run University of Cen - 45 tral America, 45 percent of the country backs “social cleansing ” of those responsible for the mounting crime rates. By that time, the ghosts of the civil war had reemerged in the form of death squads, like La Sombra Negra (The Black Shadow), this time targeting gang members instead of guerillas. So how much can the U.S. be blamed for the onset of Latin America ’s gang crisis? It ’s a fraught question, especially since Salvadoran authorities and gang members alike have an incentive to point the finger elsewhere, promoting a narrative that muckraking journalists can too easi ly accept. A recent analysis from the International Crisis Group tried to answer the question by comparing murder rates in Salvadoran areas of high and low gang presence against the number of Salvadorans with a criminal record deported each year, from 1995 to 2010. (The first MS -13 and Barrio 18 deportees began to arrive in El Salvador as early as 1989, but it wasn ’t until Clinton -era policies came into effect in the mid -1990s that the era of “mass deportations ” began.) Plotted on a graph, the three sets of numbers do seem to track with each other closely for the first seven years. It was during this time that Sanchez ’s generation —tattooed and muscle -bound from prison with freshly creased Dickie ’s and Nike Cortez, the detritus of their brush with the American dream —landed as big fish in El Salvador ’s pond. They recruited “a generation of adolescents and teens for whom the Cold War had no relevance and the future held no promise, ” as Salvadoran journalis t Carlos Martinez writes, and “put down deep roots among those already marginalized by society. ” On the graph, the trend lines rise together like a ramp so that by the year 2000: annual criminal deportations roughly 8399_State of War_1P.indd 45 9/17/19 10: 58 AM Chapter Two – The Iron Fist 46 STATE OF WAR double to around 2,000 people; the murder rate in areas with low gang presence doubles to roughly 30 per 100,000 people; and in high gang presence areas it doubles to around 50 murders per 100,000 people (a murder rate ten times as high as that in the U.S.). Over the next two years, they all decline slightly. Then, in 2003, they diverge. The trend line of the murders in low gang presence areas stays relatively flat, meandering like a goat path through the fo othills. Meanwhile, as the impacts of the U.S. Homeland Security Act begin to take effect and unprecedented levels of funding are channeled to U.S. immigration enforcement, deportations begin to rise to heights not seen since the Great Depression. Annual c riminal deportations chart a steep ascent, doubling by 2006, then doubling again by 2010 to more than 8,000 people per year. In areas of high gang presence the effect seems to pull the trend line upward along a parallel path of cascading peaks, doubling ag ain by 2006 to more than 70 murders per 100,000 people. “This strong correlation between U.S. deportations and homicide rates in the receiving country suggests some sort of causal link between the two, ” the report concludes. “Although U.S. policies sought to curb criminal activity by breaking up Los Angeles gangs, the long -term effect was an increase in violence across Central America and particularly El Salvador. ” Perhaps. The number of actual gang members deported was relativ ely small, according to Al Valdez, who secured from an ICE contact a thumb drive containing ten years of immigration data that he had been told didn ’t exist: deportation records sorted by gang affiliation. During the first three years, some 5,600 of the de portees were known gang members. Immigrants 8399_State of War_1P.indd 46 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS don ’t engage in crime any more than the general population, 47 his work has shown —“the immigrant community was scapegoated bec ause of the actions of a few. ” The effect of the deportations was like putting a bacterial culture in a petri dish. “It’s germ food, the perfect environment, ” he said. “When we started changing our deportation laws, we were taking little germs and putting them in a petri dish in the countries we call Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries. And conditions were ripe for these gangs to grow. And that ’s exactly what happened. ” But the numbers tell another story as well, one that coincides with the spike in the murder rate and constitutes the first of the gangs ’ two major transformations: the divergence between life in the poor, marginalized communities where most deportees settle and the gangs commit the vast majority of their killing, and the middle and upper class communities who live in relative safety yet continue to support an exclusively military and mass -incarceration response. This approach was modeled after zero -tolerance policing in American cities, encouraged by U.S. law enforcement agencies, and funded with American aid (despite complicity in extrajudicial killings and death squad activity by some within units receiving the funding). Until recently, it was the only approach to the problem the U.S. sanctioned, despite its acknowledgement that the tactics previously backfired disastrously across the Northern Triangle. The resurgence of the repressive approach came, in 2003, in the form of President Francisco Flores ’s Plan Mano Dura, or iron fist. His ARENA party had just suffered its first major defeat at the polls, giving up a majority in the legislature for the first time since the civil war, and presidential elections were looming 8399_State of War_1P.indd 47 9/17/19 10:58 AM Chapter Two – The Iron Fist 48 STATE OF WAR the following year. “All the world blamed Francisco Flores, ” said Carlos Martinez, whose online newspaper El Faro has done some of the most consistent work on the gang beat in Latin America. As a result, Flores needed to shift the discourse from his gover nment ’s lack of investment in social programs and the fact he had “put millionaire businessmen at the head of a political party that pretends to govern a poor country, ” Martinez said. “And the response that he found, which in practice was very intelligent, was converting the gangs that up until then had been a marginal problem into the enemy. The common enemy. The perfect enemy. The perfect evil. ” He was helped by the emergence of a cellphone video that depicted a brutal murder by U.S. criminal deportees —the first in a series of gruesome mutilations and decapitations attributed to Barrio 18. A public campaign followed that spotlighted gangs as publi c enemy number one. Then one night in June, Flores faced the television cameras, wearing a black leather jacket and standing in front of a wall tagged with Barrio 18 graffiti, and announced a sweep of mass arrests, calling for tough new laws to combat the gang menace. The rollout of Plan Mano Dura came accompanied by with telegenic scenes of soldiers and helicopters. “It made him look like a very strong president, ” said Martinez. It gave police probable cause to arrest suspected gang members, who were swept up for petty infractions and funneled into the justice system. Supporting legislation increased prison sentences for minors and outlawed tattoos and gang membership, along with a host of other activities. According to UCSD professor Elana Zilberg, this re flects the “transnationalization ” of zero -tolerance gang abatement strategies most senior police officers had already 8399_State of War_1P.indd 48 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS been exposed to in U.S. embassy –sponsored visits to police 49 departments in Los Angeles, Houston, Boston, Chicago, and New York. (Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former New York City police chief William Bratton would go on to champion these strategies as highly paid security consultants across Latin America.) “Mano Dura and the anti -gang laws draw upon U.S. legislation such as the Street Terrorism Enforcement Prevention Act (STEP) and anti -loitering laws, which were designed to retake command of the politically marked space of the street and to prohibit or make ‘illicit ’ all forms of association and communication between two or more presumed ‘gang members ’—be they standing, sitting, walking, driving, gathering, appearing, whistling, or gesturing —anywhere in public view, which is to say, in the streets of the barrio .” In legal terms, this had three effects. “To ban gangs. To ban being a gang member. And it also allowed police to arrest people for their appearance, ” said Martinez. “The gangs already had to deal with similar laws in California .” So they adapted. In reality, the plan was “a big bluff. ” But while the provisions of Plan Mano Dura were struck down by the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds, the plan was a great political success. When Flores ’s successor, Antonio Saca, took offi ce the next year, he introduced a slightly tweaked version of the plan. “It’s a publicity exercise that isn ’t very creative. His plan was called Super Mano Dura, ” said Martinez. “These two presidents lost years they could have spent trying to understand th e phenomenon, understand why it generated roots so deep, so quickly. Who were they? Why did they fight? What is their socioeconomic profile? Their educational profile? Their family profile? They didn ’t ask any of this. Because when someone is bad, there is nothing interesting to 8399_State of War_1P.indd 49 9/17/19 10:58 AM Chapter Two – The Iron Fist 50 STATE OF WAR know about bad. Except that it belongs in prison for as long as possible. While thes e politicians pursued an electoral and publicity -oriented strategy to the phenomenon, the gangs went on mutating and evolving. ” Rodrigo Avila, a member of Congress and former Director General of the PNC who took part in the plan ’s conception, surprised me by agreeing with Martinez. “Mano Dura was not a plan, ” he said, struggling to find the words to define what it really was. “It was just PR. Not even PR. It was, like, ‘a plan ’ in quotes. ” We talked in a hotel restaurant near San Salvador ’s diplomatic quart er. Despite being stricken by a ghastly cold, Avila was enlivened by antipathy on the subject. “It was tailored to create a public perception of the government being hard on gangs, ” he said. “That ’s it. There was no plan. It never existed. ” Studies have sh own that Salvadoran voters will tip toward one or the other of the two largest parties depending on whether they are most immediately concerned with the economy or with crime. At the time, ARENA was bleeding votes in the face of Central America ’s lowest ec onomic growth rate when polling revealed that nearly half the population had come to view security as their overriding concern. A leaked memo from ARENA ’s executive committee around this time revealed the shift in calculus, as populist support for Mano Dur a gave the party a chance to capitalize on voters ’ fears. On the campaign trail, Saca, promised to get even tougher on the gangs. “So everybody applauded. ” The relief was short -lived. The police would round up suspected gang members only to see them releas ed within days for lack of evidence. During the first year of the plan, 19,275 gang -related detentions were recorded, and 95 percent of the 8399_State of War_1P.indd 50 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS cases were dismissed. For the gang members it became a badge 51 of honor. “Sometimes they would come and throw rocks at the police just to get arrested because they knew that in no time they were going to be released again anyway. ” Over the first year of Mano Dura, the murder rate actually rose, from 2,172 murders to 2,762, an increase of more than a murder a day. But Mano Dura had more lasting effects. According to Sonja Wolf, these transformations were the “unintend ed but, in some ways, inevitable consequences of a deeply flawed ideological plan. ” Both MS -13 and Barrio 18 raised the bar to entry, requiring riskier initiation rites. They also restricted drug use and became more disciplined. In response to new changes that made it easier for prosecutors to offer informants leniency, aspiring gang members now had to kill to join. Avila describes a proliferation of corpses turning up with fifty rounds in them or hacked into bloody bits, as prospective gang members took turns shooting their victims or passing around a machete so that all would be implicated equally. Prison officials and police units were ill -resourced to contain the surging violence in the streets or in the country ’s jails. The same week that Saca announced “Super Mano Dura, ” overshadowed by its fanfare, prison officials quietly implemented a policy that would radically alter the course of the country ’s violence: They gave the gangs their own prisons. For years the deplorable conditions in El Salvador ’s overcrowded jails had been a visible symptom of neglect, a symbol of the official lack of capacity or commitment to contain the surging bloodshed. El Salvador ’s penitentiary system had been built to hold 8,000 inmates , the was straining with a population of 12,000 (a number that would triple to 36,000 over the next twelve years). 8399_State of War_1P.indd 51 9/17/19 10:58 AM Chapter Two – The Iron Fist 52 STATE OF WAR On the heels of an August 2004 riot that killed thi rty -two prisoners in La Esperanza, authorities who were desperate to maintain some measure of control finally conceded to one of Mara Salvatrucha ’s demands. On September 2, they transferred more than a thousand inmates between four prisons, each of which would become the exclusive domain of one of the two warring gangs. Chaletenango prison became the headquarters of Barrio 18, while Mara Salvatrucha set up shop in Ciudad Barrios prison. Both were less like a hermetically sealed penitentiary system than “a m arket where everything is bought and sold, ” as Martinez wrote of Ciudad Barrios, where “the prisoners shut themselves in the cells at night because they wish to, as a courtesy to the system. ” Thrown together into such an environment and handed the keys, ea ch gang developed a pecking order that allowed them to govern with a new coherence. Mara Salvatrucha, having learned from the Mexican Mafia how to rule the streets from behind prison walls, created a leadership called the ranfla that still rules today. The obedience they commanded from their new headquarters was based on the inevitability of a prison stint in the life of a Salvadoran gangster. “All gang members assume that sooner or later they will serve time in prison, and once inside it is better to be surrounded by friends than enemies, ” as Martinez wrote. “Moreover, if a gang member disobeys a ranfla and is later arrested, he knows that in El Salvador he will not be sent to just any prison, but one controlled by the very gang leadership he crossed. And he will pay for his transgression. ” These gang -run prisons became the site of nonstop meetings in which the new crop of leaders could communicate orders —via visitors and ce ll phones —to a network that now reached across 8399_State of War_1P.indd 52 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS the entire country. In the case of Barrio 18, a brutal new leader, 53 Viejo Lin, murdered the rivals who opposed his centra lization of power, splitting the gang in two. With a national leadership came national policies and financial strategies, most notably extortion. But extortion required killing to enforce it. And the killing beget more killing —a cycle in which the country remains trapped. Killing came easily enough for Cesar the first time —to say otherwise would be a lie. He had grown up in a family of five that seemed no different from most of the other families on the block. His father worked the graveyard shift as a car lot security guard, splitting his time between two families, while his mother washed clothes in other people ’s homes. They both worked hard to provide what they could. But something was missing, and Cesar went looking for it in the streets. Where he lived, there wasn ’t much to do —the lone, trash -strewn soccer field was unusable. He wanted to be part of something. In his neighborhood, the only thing he could think to be a part of was a gang. The neighborhood then was still dominated by the Mara Salvatrucha thugs who would abuse Cesar on his way to school, smacking him in the head and taking his money. By his early teens, however, a clique from Barrio 18 had expanded to the borders of the neigh borhood and was looking for recruits to help eliminate their rivals. In 2002, when gang members approached him about collaborating as a lookout, a poste, Cesar agreed. For the next couple years, his main job was to spot any MS members who were drunk or alo ne, with their guard down. Then he would tip off the shot -caller, the palabrero, who would send someone to kill them. Along the way, the gang drew him in closer. The appeal 8399_State of War_1P.indd 53 9/17/19 10:58 AM Chapter Two – The Iron Fist 54 STATE OF WAR was undeniable. The palabrero had money. He had women. He had drugs. He smoked and drank and no one told him what to do. The other veteranos groomed Cesar as well, telling him they were going to be his brothers, his family. They would look out for h im. When Cesar was seventeen, he and the other lookouts were offered the chance to become full -fledged mareros . No one had to think twice. In the last few years, they had helped kill nearly twenty MS members; refusing the offer would make one a liability. But that never even entered into Cesar ’s calculation. He wanted in, whatever the price. A few years earlier, the only cost of initiation was the swarm of fists he ’d endure in the ritual eighteen -second beatdown. But times were changing. The firm hand of the state was around everyone ’s throat. Too many were turning informant, and those without blood on their hands were always the first to talk. Now everyone first had to kill to join the ga ng. The palabrero gave Cesar a gun, named the MS member that he should kill and the time to strike. Then he dispatched him to their enemy ’s territory. When the hour came, Cesar spotted his target loitering on the corner, and paused to study him from a dist ance. He had known the young man casually across the divide of the neighborhood ’s shifting boundaries. But Cesar ’s own gang affiliation was still a secret. He scanned the faces on the street, worried he might be recognized, and watched for any passing poli ce patrols. When the street was clear, he approached his victim and greeted him warmly. The young man was waiting for his girlfriend, he said. Cesar nodded, chatting him up for a brief moment. Then, in a flash, he pulled out the pistol. The other boy bolte d, trying to run. But Cesar was at nearly 8399_State of War_1P.indd 54 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS point -blank range, and squeezed off a round that caught the boy 55 in the head. Then, for good measure, he emptied the revolver into his victim ’s body on the pavement. Cesar fled, making his way quickly through the startled streets. Once home, he took a shower. Killing was easy, he realized. When the moment came, he had acted on instinct and adrenaline. Nothing more. Afterward, he felt no guilt or sense of any unseen boundary crossed. He felt nothing. So Cesar changed his clothes and returned to the crime scene, blending into the crowd milling around the body. Another gang member would later tell him that, in Los Angeles, the police had such training and technical resources that they nearly always got to the bottom of a murder. Here, an hour after his first kill, the polic e hadn ’t even arrived to take note of the corpse. As soon as Cesar was jumped in, he realized he ’d been lied to. The gang was supposed to be a tribe of equals. But once he became a homeboy, the façade of egalitarianism fell away. There was a hierarchy. The shot -caller had value. And the killer had value. The rest had no voice. Cesar wanted to become the most violent of them all, like everyone else. So for respect he would kill again. And again. And again. In time, he learned another truth: He could also get respect by the method he used to kill. Cesar could kill with the gun. Or he could kill with the machete (a brutality normally reserved for traitors and informants). There was a logic to the macabre choice. To take a man apart with the machete, piece by pi ece, was to send a message —to his friends as well as his enemies. With the machete, Cesar wielded fear. Before Mano Dura, the clique was a neighborhood entity. The only homeboys one would know were the other members of his own clique (and rarely did he kno w anyone at all outside 8399_State of War_1P.indd 55 9/17/19 10:58 AM Chapter Two – The Iron Fist 56 STATE OF WAR that circle). But prison was a blender. As Cesar and his crew began getting scooped up and shuffled through dozens of jails, they mixed with other members of Barrio 18. Soon they were comparing notes, sharing strategies, and forging alliances: “if you need to kill someone in your neighborhood, call me and I ’ll send guys who won ’t be recognized to pull the trigger. ” The cliques w ere still autonomous, loosely affiliated cells. But they had begun to realize what they shared in common, and new hierarchies were forming amid the shuffling of ranks in gang -segregated prisons. In the process, they were becoming something bigger. With the se new lines of communication, an idea traveled quickly. The idea that would establish the gangs ’ stranglehold over the economy, escalate the war between them, and transform their raison d ’etre came down as an order from the gangs ’ ranks in prison in 2006. Prominent voices in Mara Salvatrucha, whose new cast of leaders was then coalescing, were also calling for extortion at a level of something like national policy to support members jailed in the government ’s ongoing campaign. At the micro -level of Cesar ’s block, however, he had first heard about la renta from an American he knew only as “Mr. Lonely. ” It was fitting. The Southern California gangbangers had given them their culture and criminal sophistication, like the baggy clothes and hand signals they use d to communicate. It was the Americans whose tattoos they had copied and the Americans again who convinced them to stop making tattoos mandatory — that ’s how the police were spotting them. For Cesar, extortion was the most important idea the Americans broug ht. Mr. Lonely came from Los Angeles —came and went, like a tourist. That ’s all Cesar knew about Mr. Lonely, except that 8399_State of War_1P.indd 56 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS he hadn ’t come to start cliques, only to share information. The 57 idea he shared that found the most traction was la renta . He described it like this: “Whoever comes to the street pays me, ” Mr. Lonely told Cesar. “I control this table. If someone wants to sit at the table, they have to pay me. ” For Salvadoran gangsters this was a revelation. They didn ’t have poppy or coca fields to fight for, like Mexico or Colombia did. Nor had they learn to profit from the transshipment of drugs through their backyard, as U.S. -led interdiction efforts in Mexico and the Caribbean shifted flows to Central America. What they did have was power over their neighbors, the coercive force to tax the sweat of their brows. Cesar realized how much money he was missing out on: He could take a cut of anything that came or went, was bought or sold, in the area he controlled. He could be taxing everything. Extortion gave the gang a new level of capacity and control. With money, the palabrero could buy cell phones so that everyone was in constant communication. If he landed in jail, he could hire a lawyer. With money, Cesar found, he could get away with anything in El Salvador. By the time he became a shot -caller, Cesar had murdered twenty people. In theory the spoils of th eir violence were supposed to be communal, but accounting was left to the palabrero . Gang members didn ’t receive a salary, relying instead on their leader to take care of their needs, which were often humble, like a place to live if their families kicked them out or money to buy a new pair of shoes. Because police were always confiscating their weapons, a big line item in his budget went to re -arming (most often, with the complicity of the five cops who lived in the area that he controlled and would confiscate guns from other cliques in the zones where they patrolled and sell them back to him in turn, perpetuating a cycle; 8399_State of War_1P.indd 57 9/17/19 10:58 AM Chapter Two – The I ron Fist 58 STATE OF WAR at other times, he would travel to the “blind spots ” along the Guatemalan border, where liberal American gun laws contributed a flow of new weapons to the thriving cross -border contraband trade). Even after accounting for such expe nses, however, a margin of opportunity remained. One driver paid Cesar $2,000 a month for the right to deliver beer to the neighborhood, and he could often take in as much as $10,000 each month —enough to embezzle a few thousand for himself. Just as the dru g trade had earlier monetized control of L.A. ’s inner -city streets, provoking the bloody gang wars of the 1980s and 1990s, extortion translated Salvadoran territory into wealth, making every block an asset to be acquired. Throughout the years following Man o Dura, the gangs waged vicious turf battles and explosive riots in the overcrowded prisons. A rough benchmark for the viral spread of the strategy can be found in the number of gang -related extortion cases investigated by the Attorney General ’s office in that time, which increased sevenfold between 2003 and 2006. The impact can also be measured in human lives: in 2002, the year before Mano Dura, the annual murder toll was 2,344; by 2006, it had nearly doubled to 4,380, despite the record number of suspecte d gang members now behind bars. But Cesar came to see that extortion had another hidden cost. It made the gangs parasites in their communities, exacerbating the cycle of residents informing and his clique murdering informants. This war -making on all fronts —in which each gang was now engaged against the state, its rival, and its neighbors — produced a period of internal consolidation that gave rise to a new lead ership. 8399_State of War_1P.indd 58 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS The waves of violence and repression escalated in the 59 summer of 2010 when a new faction of Barrio 18 gave the country a terrifying glimpse of what it had becom e. The plan, as Cesar understood it, had only been to kill the driver and the fare -collector —a warning to the bus company ’s owner to pay the extortion demanded for the route. Nothing more. But things got out of hand. On June 20, gang members machine -gunned a bus as it passed through the city center of Mejicanos, then doused it in gasoline and set it on fire. Seventeen passengers burned alive inside. No one seemed to know why it had happened. But it had. And it quickly ushered in a new reality. The year befo re, as El Salvador achieved the world ’s highest murder rate (71 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants), voters desperate for change handed power for the first time to the FMLN, electing Maurico Funes as president. Funes was a journalist and TV personality who had campaigned as a political outsider. But now, confronted with his first political test, he fell back on a familiar formula: a new rash of Mano Dura –style laws backed by a media blitz. By this time, however, the gangs had also learned something about the power of fear and publicity. The day after the new law was passed the imprisoned leadership of both MS -13 and Barrio 18 sent out word of a nationwide public transport s trike, threatening to kill any bus drivers who disobeyed the edict. Over two days, an estimated 60 percent of the country ’s public transit shut down and the Chamber of Commerce reported $24 million in lost business. The government, in turn, deployed an add itional 2,000 soldiers, along with tanks and heavy machine guns, to reinforce the 3,500 already in the streets. The gangs responded with a call for dialogue. But 8399_State of War_1P.indd 59 9/17/19 10:58 AM Chapter Two – The Iron Fist 60 STATE OF WAR Fune s’s new Defense Minister, David Munguia Payes, who said he had his own plan to reduce the homicide rate, scoffed at the gangs ’ proposal. “A democratic government like ours, ” he said, “cannot negotiate with criminal organizations. ” The government, Cesar tho ught, was acting like the gangs had taken aim at the state itself. And the state struck back with a vengeance. Shootouts multiplied. The weapons got bigger. Cesar received a phone call from prison with orders to start killing cops because cops were torturi ng and murdering their homies. Amid the escalating madness, Cesar landed in prison once more. The prospect of serious jail time had a way of clarifying things. Ever since he had killed enough people to call the shots himself, and all the older veterans wer e dead or in jail, Cesar had been in a position to betray those beneath him. By now, the leadership knew he had been stealing money and sleeping with other members ’ girlfriends —an abuse of power for which he might be killed or, at the very least, subjected to repeated brutalities in a prison the gang controlled. When police offered him a chance to become an informant, he accepted. In exchange for his continued cooperation building a case against his gang, Cesar was fre ed to fend for himself. He found refuge, ironically, in Mara Salvatrucha territory. Neither his neighbors nor co -workers in the civilian job he landed knew anything about his former ties or the twenty -six lives he had taken. His new life was to be a modest one, lived in constant fear of discovery. One day, he recognized two Barrio 18 members he knew on a public bus. Cesar got off quickly and slipped away. But it was a reminder that in El Salvador no one could hide forever; in time, it ’s likely he will meet the same end as his victims. And so be it. Cesar ’s sins, he knew, were his own. The kids he had 8399_State of War_1P.indd 60 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS grown up with had all come from poor, broken families like his, 61 and yet some became doctors and lawyers. Cesar had made his own choices. But still, as he watched the new left -wing government borrow straight from the right ’s playbook, he recognized something about the role of the gangs —they made an awfully convenient scapegoat . Who benefits? The drug dealer. The arms trafficker. The oligarch who cheats the tax system. In a society increasingly beset by secret iniquities, the gangs were the grimacing public face the rest could hide behind. 8399_