ZeroZeroZero (38 page)

What does one risk by reading? A lot. It’s a dangerous thing to open a book and leaf through the pages. Once you’ve opened a work by Émile Zola or Varlam Šalamov, there’s no turning back. I truly believe this. But often the reader is unaware of the risk involved in coming to know these stories; he doesn’t realize the impact they’ll have. If I could truly quantify the damage that knowing eyes, the damage that people who want to understand, can inflict on the powerful, I’d try to diagram it. For the mafiosi the risk of being arrested, put on trial, and sent to prison is nothing compared to the danger that comes from people knowing the truth, understanding how things actually work—the facts.

If you choose to talk about criminal power, if you choose to stare its secrets in the face, to keep your eyes on the road and on the money, well then, there are two ways to go about it: a right way and a wrong way. Christian Poveda knew them both. He knew the differences—and above all the consequences—of each way. He knew that if you decide to be the extension of your work—a pen, a computer, a lens—then you don’t run any risks: You will finish your assignment and come home with the loot. But Christian knew something else as well: If you decide
that the extension of your work—a pen, a computer, a lens—is a means rather than the end, then everything changes. Suddenly what you’re looking for—and what you find—is no longer a dark dead end but a door that opens onto other rooms, that leads to more doors.

“He went looking for it.” “What was he expecting?” “Like he didn’t know beforehand?” Callous, cruel questions, yet also legitimate. Cynical maybe, but all things considered, correct. Unfortunately there’s no answer. There’s only guilt, because you knew the consequences would be terrible, for you and your family. You knew, but you did it anyway. Why? There’s no answer to that question either. You see something and behind it you see a hundred other things. You can’t simply stop dead in your tracks; you have to keep going, to dig deeper. Maybe you know what awaits you, maybe you know perfectly well, but you’re neither reckless nor crazy. You smile at your friends, at your colleagues too, and maybe you share your worries with them, but your outer image doesn’t correspond in the least with your inner torment. It’s as if two opposing forces were pulling you in different directions. A struggle over where to stand, and the battlefield is your own stomach, because that’s where you feel the push and pull, an endless tug-of-war that ties your innards in knots.

Christian Poveda knew this feeling well. He was born to Spanish Republican parents who took refuge in Algiers during the Franco regime, and when he was six he moved with his family to Paris. Curious, questioning, he embraced early on his life profession: journalism. With its extensions—pen, computer, lens—he travels in Algeria, the Caribbean, Argentina, Chile. He covers the war in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon. His reports are different from the sorts of stories you have to file for the TV news. A different quality, you could say, as if he didn’t have a job to do. Behind every photo, between the lines of every article there’s always a human story that breathes, demanding more oxygen and space.

Christian decides to focus on making documentaries, a new extension of his curiosity, an extension that unites all the existing ones—pen, computer, and lens—and that finally allows him to observe the animal
in the wild. He makes his first documentary in 1986,
Shadow Warriors,
about the Chilean rebel group Mapu Lautaro, which opposed Pinochet’s fascist regime. But it’s when he goes to El Salvador that he seems to find the land he’d been looking for. The place where he was really needed, where everything he’d wanted and all he had trained himself to be converged. El Salvador. A country tormented by a lengthy civil war that Christian himself first documented in 1980, together with the journalist Jean-Michel Caradec’h. He was the first photojournalist to cover El Salvador’s guerrilla warfare from the inside. “He went looking for it.” “It was his fault.” “If you play with fire, you’ll get burned.” The same remarks, still fair, still pertinent.

Years go by, you accumulate experiences, you build up a protective shell, but the knot in your gut is still there. Christian feels them inside him now, those stories he tells on film. They bite and claw at him from within. And when a story moves inside you it’s like your soul is in labor, restless nights, not a moment of peace until you manage to give birth.

His first documentary about El Salvador comes out in 1991. The name Poveda echoes throughout the country. Then the civil war ends; peace treaties are signed. These are years of renewed hope, years in which many El Salvadorans who had taken refuge abroad return home. During the war thousands of children had fled to the United States without their families—either their parents were murdered or their mothers preferred to have them safer far away from a poor land devastated by civil war. Deserters and ex-guerrillas flee as well. That is how the maras are born, the El Salvadoran gangs in Los Angeles that model themselves after all the other gangs there—African American, Asian, and Mexican. The maras are the new families for El Salvadoran kids that form on the streets of California. They start out as a form of self-defense, to protect themselves against the other gangs that target the new immigrants. Many of the people who organize gangs by gathering groups of kids are former guerrillas or paramilitaries: It’s not surprising that the structures and modes of operation of these groups resemble military practices. The Mexican gangs are soon defeated, and
shortly after, the Salvadoran gangs split into two large families of
mareros,
which distinguish themselves by their “street number”: Mara 13, better known as Mara Salvatrucha, and Mara 18, a dissident branch. Then the civil war in El Salvador ends. The country’s on its knees; poverty is rampant, creating an opportunity for the gangs to go home. For many of them it’s a choice; for others their return is decided by the U.S. government, which frees itself of the thugs who’d served time in American jails.

Today the maras have cells in the United States, Mexico, all over Central America, in Europe, and the Philippines; about 15,000 members in El Salvador, 14,000 in Guatemala, 35,000 in Honduras, 5,000 in Mexico. The highest concentration is in the United States, with 70,000 members. Mara 18 is considered to be the biggest criminal gang in Los Angeles. It was the first to accept ethnic diversity and to allow people from other countries to join. For the most part they’re kids between thirteen and seventeen years old. This army of children primarily pushes cocaine and marijuana on the streets. They don’t handle big orders, they aren’t rich, and they don’t corrupt institutions. But on the street they guarantee immediate money and power. They’re the retail drug cartel and are also involved in activities such as extortion, car theft, and murder. According to the FBI, the maras are the most dangerous street gangs in the world.

Everything is codified within the organization: hand signals, face tattoos, hierarchy. Everything they do is filtered through rules that create and control their identity. The result is a compact organization that knows how to move quickly. In El Salvador mara means group, or crowd. The word implies disorder, but in truth these groups—thanks to their rules, and to the punishments with which infractions are met—have been able to become reliable partners to global criminal organizations. The origin of the name Mara Salvatrucha is disputed. A “salvatrucho” is a young Salvadoran fighter, but the word is composed of “salva”—in homage to El Salvador—and “trucha,” which means cunning. You have to pass really challenging tests in order to become a
member: The boys have to endure thirteen seconds of brutal, uninterrupted beating—punches, kicks, slaps, and kneeings—which often leave the new recruits unconscious. The girls are often gang-raped as well. The recruits are getting younger and younger, and for them there is just one rule of life: the gang or death.

Christian Poveda wanted to make a feature film about the maras. He wanted to understand. To live with them. To discover why twelve-year-old kids become murderers willing to die before they turn twenty. And they welcomed him. As if they’d finally found the person who could tell about them, the maras. “Why couldn’t he just have stayed home?” “What did it get him?” “Doesn’t he care about the people close to him?” At a certain point these questions don’t bother you anymore; they’re as annoying as a mosquito bite. They itch for a while, and then they fade away, gone for good.

Filming for
La vida loca
takes sixteen months. For nearly a year and a half Christian follows the criminal bands in search of answers to his questions. He attends initiation rites, studies their facial tattoos, is at their side while members—male and female—get high on crack and cocaine, plan a murder, attend a friend’s funeral. Every mara operates differently, depending on the country it’s in. “It’s not the same thing selling drugs in the central market of San Salvador as it is selling drugs on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles,” Christian says. Theirs are lives of shootouts, homicides, reprisals, police checks, funerals, and prison. Lives that Christian describes without being morbid in the least. He tells the story of “Little One,” a nineteen-year-old mother with an enormous 18 tattooed on her face, from her eyebrows to her chin. He tells the story of Moreno, twenty-five, who wanted to change his life and started working in a bakery set up by a nonprofit called Homies Unidos. But the bakery closes when its owner is arrested and sentenced to sixteen years for homicide. He tells of La Maga, another young mother, she too a gang member who lost an eye in a fight. Christian follows her to her doctor’s appointments, to her surgery to replace the
damaged eye with a glass one. A pointless operation, though, because she’s shot dead before he finishes shooting the movie, one of many Mara 18 members killed while he worked on the documentary.

“He’s crazy!” “Reckless!” “Out of his mind!” Words thrown to the wind, which Christian Poveda fights with other words. “Most maras members are victims of society, of our society,” Poveda says. Because society and the state find it easier to point a finger at their violence, which is so recognizable, rather than to offer opportunities. Maras members look like the dregs of society, like trash; they’re revolting. It’s easy to consider them public enemy number one. Easy to underestimate them. But Poveda’s work dismantles such attitudes.

This is the ultimate meaning of Christian’s work. Behind the door of the violence flaunted by the gangs he saw an inaccessible path that leads right to the root of the problem. To get a byline in the newspapers or his name on the opening credits of a documentary it would have been enough simply to affix evil to celluloid, and to speculate a bit. But Christian decides to get to the bottom of things. He wants to truly understand.

On September 2, 2009, Christian Poveda’s body is found next to his car, between Soyapango and Tonacatepeque, a rural area north of the capital of El Salvador, with four bullets to the head. His film equipment is lying next to him; it has not been touched. “I told him.” “He got what he deserved.” “At any rate, he went too far.” So say the same old voices over his dead body.

In 2011, eleven people, all Mara 18 members, are arrested and convicted of the murder of Christian Poveda. José Alejandro Melara and Luis Roberto Vásquez Romero are sentenced to thirty years for planning and carrying out the homicide; a third person, a woman, is sentenced to twenty years as an accomplice. Other gang members have to spend four years behind bars for covering up the crime. In August 2013 three more
mareros
are sentenced to ten years for conspiracy to commit murder: They took part in the meeting at which Poveda’s death was planned.

Christian was sure he wasn’t taking any risks. He had entered into the community of the maras, into their lives. He felt he’d found a sure, safe way in and thought he’d made friends with many of them. But it’s a fantasy to think you’re ever safe when you’re covering a criminal organization.

In Christian’s story, bad luck plays a role as well. It seems, in fact, that Juan Napoleón Espinoza Pérez, a former police officer, met a Mara 18 member while under the influence of alcohol and told him that Poveda was an informer, that he had turned his videos over to the Soyapango police. So the gang gathers, and after three long meetings in the El Arbejal farm in Tonacatepeque, decides to condemn Poveda to death.

There are lots of rumors about those meetings, whole orchestras of whispers, symphonies of accusations. Some mara members defend Christian, saying he is honest, that he did a good thing telling about the maras from their point of view. Others are envious: He’ll get rich by looking like the good guy against us bad guys. The women defend him. A lot. Or so it seems. The most authoritative members, those who had agreed to be filmed, are frightened by the documentary’s success. Too many people are talking about it. It makes its way to the web. So maybe that cop Espinoza wasn’t lying, maybe Christian did sell the video to the police. But the sense is that anyone who says too much about the maras, anyone who has in a certain sense taken advantage of them, has to be punished.

On August 30, 2009, the group decides to kill Christian. At the time he’s acting as an intermediary for a French journalist who writes for
Elle
magazine and wants to interview some of the girls in the gang. For the first time his contacts ask him for a fee, ten thousand dollars. Even though Christian doesn’t like it, he accepts. The magazine has the money and can afford to pay. Christian meets Vásquez Romero in El Rosario. But a little after noon Vásquez Romero gets behind the wheel of a gray Nissan Pathfinder 4 x 4 and drives Christian onto the bridge
over the Las Cañas River. That’s where they kill him. I can’t imagine those final seconds. I’ve tried. Did Christian realize, even for a moment, that it was a trap? Did he try to defend himself, to explain that killing him was unjust? Or did they shoot him in the back of the head, like cowards? A moment. They must have pretended to be getting out of the car, and in that moment when Christian lifts the handle to open the door they must have fired. I don’t know; I’ll never know. But I can’t keep from asking myself these things.