Tatooed Destiny

The desire to belong. To belong to a pandilla, a mara, a barra brava. That is what drives Central American youths, as noted by filmmaker Marco Nicoletti while recently shooting a documentary for the NGO Interpeace, that works with building lasting peace in various conflicted areas around the world.

The film covers a number of programs for at risk youths in Central America, youths who are in danger of being drawn into criminal organizations or  who decided they want to leave. The way out, however, is infinitely more stringent than the way in.

Having finished shooting and back in France where he lives, Nicoletti gave Comunidad Segura an interview, giving us his realistic view of the growing phenomenon of the maras, pandillas and barras bravas in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. The brutal violence that is associated with the maras has been a topic of growing concern among the governments of the hemisphere. Continued deportations of 'mareros', or mara members from the United States back into El Salvador, and the 'Mano Dura' security policies applied by central american governments to suppress these groups have only exacerbated the problem.

Over the past few years these organizations have not only grown in size – currently with an estimated 100 thousand members – but they have connected to drug trafficking networks in Mexico, which gives them new importance.

Facing the lens

It is not the first time that Nicoletti visits the Central American youths that belong to maras and pandillas. In the documentary “Marcados de por vida” he had already approached the reality of those who belong to these groups, that originated among Salvadorean immigrants in Los Angeles who organized to defend themselves from other gangs.

Sociologists who study the phenomenon, psychologists, social workers who involved in programs for the youths,  even governments have yet to reach a complete understanding of the complex phenomenon, which is also a key part of the problem. Nicoletti (photo) also thinks it is a hard phenomenon to define, sheds some of his own light on ways to understand it.

How would you define the maras?

There is no definitive rule to define what is gong on. There are many particular traits that separate one from the other, one can't subsume them all under a single concept. The maras, are the most radical of them, in the sense that they require aspiring members to carry out tasks such as to comit murder or a particular crime, prior to acceptance. New members are tatood with mara layalty tatoos, and leaving them is extremely hard.

The most recent form of the maras are the barras bravas, that are rooting for a specific soccer team. They are similar to the hooligans, two of them are Ultra fiel and Revos. The latter is made of of fans of an Argentinian soccer player, and its emblem is Che Guevara, for having been a revolutionary. When I asked its members why Che was a revolutionary, they did not know exactly what to say. I then asked them to define revolutionary,  “It is when you are filled with hatred”, they told me.

Maras fight amongst themselves and also against the barras bravas. In certain neighborhoods, one barra is dominated by the Mara 18, while in other neighborhoods the same barra can be controled by the MS13 mara, so that a boy who belongs to a certain barra as he enters another neighborhood, could be killed by a rival mara even if he belongs to the same barra. It is a gradual process, but the maras are recovering their dominance in the barras, in other words, they tend to swallow them.

Your documentary shows programs that intend to stop youths from entering these groups and to help them leave them. How does it work?

One has to understand that the deeper issue is a search for identity. Adolescence is a difficult period in life. One leaves home and your parents are no longer close to you, and you have as your only model the maras, it is hard not to want to be like people in your age group. You can join in a barras very quickly: everyone goes to a soccer field, people share a common feeling, it is easy to join in the mentailty and do bad things together, if the family is not there to tell you as a teenager that it is wrong, and that there are better things to do in life, more constructive things.

The violence prevention program cares for these at risk youths. Interpace looks for them, talks to their families, and with people in the neighborhood, and tries to teach parents and the community how to treat their children. Apart from that, they bring boys and girls opportunities and activities. This part of the program we filmed in Honduras where not only maras but also barras bravas are in constant confrontation. In Honduras the repression against maras was much more brutal. There was a famous incident when the Minister of the Interior ordered a detailed search of all mareros in jail, and subsequently gave the weapons found to common criminals who killed, in one night, 165 mara members and commited crimes against humanity, such as to beheadings and using the heads in soccer games. Such is the current situation, a hotbed for new barras, bigger maras, more violence.

And how does one approach a youth that belongs to amara, how can one help someone leave it?
First one tries to enter their enviornment, there is an attempt to prevent them from being completely marginalized, to recover a role in society. This part we filmed in El Salvador in a bakery where there is a place for these kids to work and earn their own money. But it is far from simple. In El Salvador where the so called Mano Dura and Super Mano Dura policies have been applied, anyone caught with a mara tatoo was sent to jail. The hardest part of the bakery program was that maras would turn up at the bakery looking for former members trying to persuade them to go back. If they don't they are killed by death squads known as “sombras negras” (black shadows). In other words, they don't let these youths leave the maras and and reintegrate to society.

What other strategies have been used to help youths leave the maras and stay alive?

When they are arrested and are very young, sometimes youth court judges sentence them to social work in which they learn a trade, as electricians, mechanics, etc. Their tatoos are erased and this is very important, since a tatoo can send you back to jail, and is such a stigma that you cannot go to school or get a job with one.

It is much easier to leave a barra. On the one hand because you don't have a tatoo and they will not discriminate against you and your children as they do against mara members, but neighbors know you, and there is always some risk. The problem with maras is that one cannot even move to another neighborhood because they will kill you. You cannot even leave Central America because it is very expensive. I only know the case of one youth who did, he lives in Spain and nowadays works with prevention, but it is a very rare case.

Are these youth groups connected in any way to the drug trade?

They are being more and more manipulated by people who are higher up and connected to the Mexican mafia, who receive orders from criminals in US jails. The mafia uses them to instill fear in the population. These are countries located in the drug route from Colombia to Mexico, the drug does not stop there because there is not enough money to buy them, although it is an area used for money laundering. The drug trade needs youths to act as hired killers, for drug sales, and for them to make noise, generate fear and divert attention. There is another very important aspect that we should add to what we mentioned previously that is the industry of fear that has invested millions of dolars in private security, in guns, in cctv cameras, and in anything that people will buy to feel safer.

After spending some time with these youths, what conclusions have you reached about why they join these groups knowing that they will end up in jail or dead?

I am no expert, but from what I see, the situation is different from what happens in Colombia or in Brazil, where there is drug money. In Central America people are very poor. These kids they don't just join groups to become pandilleros or gangsters. In Los Angeles or in Rio de Janeiro, the strongest motivation is drug money. In the Rio de Janeiro favelas the desire for money is an important factor: people who live in poverty and sell drugs in order to get money, to buy a motorcycle, clothes, get girlfriends, etc. In Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, they do it for identity, to define who they are based on belonging to a group.

I know so many examples of that, but one such case was the Mara 18 boss, Cholo Cifuentes, who I interviewed in a prison in Guatemala. He left his home for the streets still a boy at age 8 because his father used to beat his mother. Almost all of them talk about boundless love for their mothers and they tatoo sentences on their bodies that say things like “mom forgive me for my crazy life”or images of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Since they cannot live in a functional family, they go live in the streets at a very young age. The maras go to them, give them a sense of belonging, they protect them, they give them food and marijuana, (they don't use other drugs or trash like glue, solvents and  crack). In a way, the mara gives them love, there is mutual respect and they share things and their lives. After that the jobs begin: kids are asked to kill someone from an enemy mara, and the kid, looking for the love of this family does the task for this very reason... Analysing this phenomenon, psichologist Juan Carlos Molinas who works in many of Guatemala's prisons say that in a certain way, they are “killing for love”.

How did you approach them, how did they react to being filmed?

They are very wary of journalists since that recent incident, Christian Poveda made a documentary about them, and they killed him, because, according to them, he passed information on to the police. They are wary and, in El Salvador, it is very hard to approach them, but when you finally reach them and do so respectfully, they feel it and treat you with respect. These are people who die very young, so they like to tell their stories, they have this dream that one day their lives will turn into a holiwood movie. When they are photographed, listened to, filmed, they feel their lives are valuable. They know they will die soon, and in general they don't make it past age 23. But those who do get to being 30, they realize that life goes on, that it can go on, and they no longer want to die.

Many journalists treat them like dangerous animals, they are sharp with them, provoque them to talk about shocking things with them. Ultimately these kids want to talk and want to learn and communicate what they feel. They could even be nice people. When to get closer to their stories, you see the other person as the human being that he is.

Photos: Marco Nicoletti

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Interpeace

Marco Nicoletti