La Mami

La Vida Loca

• Christian Poveda
• 2008

The Salvadorian street gangs are, first and foremost, an image, a handbook of contemporary history, a picture of the local put together in a world that's become global. It's a memory of the gang, the fundamental myth of organized crime. Children of the Bloods and Crisp, made famous by the Dennis Hopper film "Colors", these gangs sprang up in the Hispanic ghetto of L.A. Now traditional enemies, they are engaged in an all-out suburban war. It started in the streets of Los Angeles then spread to numerous North American cities and prisons, in which thousands of gang members are now incarcerated. Serving long, if not life sentences for homicide, robbery with violence, drug trafficking and weapons carrying, the gangs took possession and control of the prisons. Originally from all over Central America, over a ten year period of confused teenagers, economic and political immigrants and, especially the offspring of thousands of Salvadorians escaping the civil war, they formed themselves into well-structured criminal organizations, killing their enemies both "inside" and "outside" the gangs. The gangs were called maras, after the marabuntas, the carnivorous ants of Central America, which destroy all life in their path. And so was born the Mara Salvatrucha (literally, "Salvadorian ant"), also known as the MS-13, based on 13th Street in South Central Los Angeles. Another mara followed hot on its heels, the formidable M-18, which took its name from 18th Street where it ran wild. The national maras in the southern States are sub-divided into pandillas (sets) at a regional level and cliquas (cliques) on a neighborhood level. These local "chapters" sometimes serve a single street. Tattooed from head to foot, the gang members, are called pandilleros or homeboys. The tattoos not only serve as identifiers but provide a visible sign of their voluntary exclusion from society. How can you get a job with the number 13 or 18 tattooed on your forehead and your cheeks adorned with teardrops signifying the number of enemies you've killed? Writing a new chapter in the history of gang warfare in Los Angeles, the story might have been contained within the United States of America. But that was reckoning without governmental policies... In 1996, the American government simultaneously enacted the Illegal Immigration Reform and the Immigrant Responsibility Act, in other words the adoption of a ferocious "double sentence" legislation allowing the authorities to send more than 100,000 gang members detained in the United States straight back to Central America. With terrifying consequences. The order, social stability and economy of Panama, Honduras, Salvador, Guatemala, Costa-Rica, and Nicaragua, the countries to which this flood of delinquents returned, was corrupted, triggering intense paranoia about security. In one decade, the United States succeeded where it had failed before, in keeping the local dictators in power and financing civil wars and Coups d'Etat!…