Gangs Of The Americas
Crime & Cruelty From The Barrio To The White House
Since last I posted here, I’ve spent a lot of time escaping the stresses of 2025 so far. I’m not sure which January event has brought more instability and confusion. The wildfires that left me homeless and without the tools and equipment that lend a sense of solvability to the problems of my life. Or the new administration’s weird mix of indecision and brute force.
I welcomed having to prepare for the event we put on last Saturday at The Urban Homestead in Pasadena. This provided the familiar arc of of planning and preparation, and finally performance, that marks each of the hundreds of shows that I’ve produced with and without my longtime partner Alexia.
I’ve mentioned the motto I default to when I’m adrift. “Something to look forward to, and something to live up to.” As always, getting into harness focused me on something DOABLE. At a time when so much of my life and all of our lives seems out of our own control.
First the winds … and now the whims. Both of them capricious, destructive, and merciless.
The event went off as planned. I have no pictures to show you, but it was a full and joyful house. So engaged were we all with one another that we forgot to take pictures. This is a modern conundrum. The truest sharing of moments goes undocumented, because who stops to think about posting evidence of connection, when actual connection is happening. I’ll hire a photographer next time.
Through all of the promotion and rehearsals and cooking and singing, though, a sad story was playing out in the Americas. Both North and Central. The shipping of immigrants to the Salvadoran mega-prison. CECOT. What is known to that country as a Terrorist Confinement Center.
As I prepped and readied for our event, I often had news playing, and heard quite a lot about two men who’d been ‘disappeared’ into the concrete bowels of this monster prison. First being the gay Venezuelan makeup-artist, Andry Hernandez Romero. And then the Maryland husband and father, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Our gathering was Saturday, and harmony reigned, both onstage and off. The next day was Easter Sunday, and Alexia and I joined friends for dinner. John and Julie, our hosts, had cannily selected the guests. An even ten of us. All of whom are informed, politically engaged, and reasonable. They’d set two 4’ x 8’ tables side by side and touching, to create one large table, eight by eight feet square. Everybody could see each other and face each other as we laid into the feast.
And then, we talked about politics.
There were a few fraught moments. Some of us were/are quite angry at the Trump administration. Others spoke of family members who are tirelessly committed to The President. It’s known in that square circle that I often defended Trump during his first term, but washed my hands of him when he refused to concede his loss in 2020, and instead institutionalized his lies about a stolen crown.
But I remain more conservative than most at that table. Others are more ‘progressive’ than ever. The challenge we all accepted that day was to listen actively, speak civilly, and respect one another willfully.
We may not have been looking forward to it. But we did live up to it.
It seemed almost like a grace-note that Pope Francis died just one day later. Donald Trump’s Easter Message on the hilariously-named ‘Truth Social’, showed once again the depths of his shallowness.
Compared to the humble Argentine prelate, whose austerity and focus on mercy made even his fellow priests look grandiose, Trump seems the very picture of greedy self-worship.
It’s this internal tangle of thoughts and observations that clouded my mind as I sat down Monday morning, and again Tuesday, to write about Hernandez Romero and Abrego Garcia. Is it any wonder that I flailed the hours away? My most profound insight was that I was utterly unqualified to weigh in. I simply hadn’t done the research. Emotions I had. Information? Not so much.
So Wednesday I surrounded myself with articles and documentaries and exhaustive entries on Wikipedia. Hours and hours spent absorbing the crime and the cruelty, and wondering how on God’s Earth there are men who will kill over the slightest perceived insult or most meager monetary gain. And how on Earth are there cages to contain tens of thousands of them, sometimes for years without due process.
I began here: This short video featuring photojournalist Philip Holsinger, who witnessed the arrival of Venezuelans from the US, including Andry Hernandez Romero.
The above video is an addendum to this longer piece that also focuses primarily on Venezuelans who’ve been shipped to the Gulag Tropicale. It’s worth a look. The irony is not lost on me that since doing this story, Bill Owens, executive producer of the weekly CBS institution resigned, saying that his independence was being threatened. Seemingly the latest casualty of Trump’s war on legacy media. ‘The Enemy Of The People’, to his way of thinking.
The Venezuelans covered by 60 Minutes look like they are desperately trying to wake up from a bad dream. But I’d be lying if I said that the heavily tattooed gangsters from both MS-13 and hated rival Barrio-18, look out of place in the cages built to house them. They look like animals. They WANTED to look like animals, when they were on the loose.
I mean … the absolute commitment of these guys to their gangs is staggering. In San Salvador, simply being caught in a rival gang’s territory can be a death sentence. And yet, they cover themselves in their own gang’s images and initials. They are walking billboards of provocation. Both to their murderous gangland counterparts, and to the militarized police who are now rounding them up into mass cells where they sleep on mattress-less steel shelves. Where they aren’t allowed so much as a book for entertainment. Where they share a single toilet with 80 other men.
Perhaps for the rest of their lives.
A week ago, I’d have told you that Trump calling these gangsters ‘terrorists’ was just a ruse to enable draconian wartime measures from bygone centuries. But in the several hours of documentaries I’ve now watched, it’s clear that both Mara Salvatrucha - MS-13 - and their foes in Barrio 18, had terrorized El Salvador for decades. These guys are not as driven by money as the Colombian and Sinaloan cartels. Most are poor, and many work menial jobs. No, they are driven by territory and honor.
Most of their daily criminal activity has to do with grubby extortion.
It’s the same thing that small time Mafiosos have lived on in our own big cities. What’s called ‘a protection racket’. Demanding payments from merchants and shopkeepers to be shielded from the opposition gangs. When really it’s those demanding street-taxes, who will kill you if you stop ponying up.
This documentary shows how terrorized the Salvadoran people felt before the new hipster dictator started rounding up the clearly marked bad guys.
The filmmakers also show, however, how the system of arrest quotas, has caused countless innocents to be imprisoned based only on an accusation. Terror hasn’t gone away, it’s merely shifted it’s origins.
Here’s how Oxford defines terrorism:
The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
How does one define violence and intimidation? We know that these gangs hacking off a son’s limbs to punish his father for failing to pay off his ‘protection’ debt, is both violence and intimidation. We know that locking a young scholar up for 18 months without trial is violence and intimidation … aimed at scaring all young Salvadoran men away from gang recruiters.
But how do we define ‘political aims’?
What is it when appointees of the most powerful man on Earth round up workers at a hiring drop, or grab a guy at church? Are these not state-sanctioned acts of terror in pursuit of a political aim? Certainly these targeted arrests are tailor made for the media outrage that will increase fear at ground level.
And it’s working. Border apprehensions are at their lowest ebb in decades.
Is it a cheap shot for me to imply that ICE is employing terror tactics? Maybe. But these things happen on a sliding scale. Central American immigrants without proper documentation are now walking on eggshells as they do our dirty work for cheap. And hundreds of them are sitting in silence on hard steel bunks wondering what ever happened to the America of their dreams.
It’s worth noting that both MS-13 and Barrio-18 originated not in San Salvador, but rather in another city with a Spanish name draped with religious meaning. That would be ‘El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles’. Yep. L.A.. The city that I can hear waking up as I write this on Friday morning April 25.
Both of these brutal gangs were born right here at the very epicenter of unbridled ambition. Originally to protect Salvadoran immigrants from our own home-grown criminals. Both gangs were carried back to El Salvador during an earlier purge. This was in the early nineties as the Salvadoran civil war abated.
Los Angeles is still home to both gangs.
It’s thought that the never-ending blood feud between these two ‘maras’ began as a fight over a girl in Los Angeles way back when. Tens of thousands have died horribly because hatred feels like purpose to young frustrated men with no other options.
Mara Salvatrucha accounts for approximately 1% of the estimated 1.4 million gang members active in the United States. And their share of the gang-murder rate is just about the same.
So why is it that Donald Trump has focused on them specifically? I’d guess that it has a lot to do with how insane they look with their faces covered in ink. When you’re scapegoating, you need some scary pics.
I’d guess that it also has much to do with El Presidente, Nayib Bukele.
By now, it’s pretty obvious that Trump just digs dictators. I imagine that Stephen Miller called his attention to Bukele’s authoritarian reboot of El Salvador a few years back. Bukele, a former advertising exec, knows the power of imagery. That’s obvious. He and Trump have a lot in common. Right down to their belief in beauty pageants as cultural uplift.
As Trump’s own numbers continue to slouch downhill, Bukele’s are in Gold Medal territory. Roughly 90% of Salvadorans love the guy. Trump wants in on the magic.
We’ve all learned, haven’t we, that humans are not naturally democratic. Really, we want an Alpha Ape to follow. That’s an easy lift for a bright ad-man in a country the size of Massachusetts where the population suffers from generational trauma.
Harder to do in the United States.
The triumph of this country has been a triumph over our baser selves. The question is - will that hold? Will we preserve the institutions by which we distribute power to the many, following constitutional guidelines? Or will we shit-can all of that to follow a strong-man wherever he wants to take us?
It’s fortunate for us that Trump has no vision beyond that of himself bathed in golden light. He’s not made from super-villain stuff. He’s intellectually lazy. Largely ignorant of history and the philosophical tenets that underpin it’s most successful societies. Including ours.
His constant mis-steps and walk-backs have so destabilized the nation that he’s now polling as ‘underwater’ even in Fox News surveys … his ‘approval’ numbers lower than his ‘disapproval’ numbers across every vector except ‘border security’ specifically. Look where he stands on the economic issues. He’s tanking.
But I digress. One question vexes me. Are Latin American men just more ruthless?
I grew up in San Gabriel. At it’s southern end it butts up against Monterey Park. There were gangs in each of these towns that were blood rivals. ‘Sangra’ in San Gabriel, and ‘Lomas’ in the hills of Monterey Park. Neither of these gangs ever rose to national prominence, but there were a lot of nasty fights, and a few killings.
I myself was harassed and threatened as a kid if unlucky enough to encounter Chicano kids on my way to the local plunge. Pushed around. Slapped. Relieved of my money.
This petty criminality clashed with the experience I’ve had ever since. The humble, hardworking men and women I worked alongside during my 35 years in the home trades.
It was a situation that I think I figured out. It seemed that these Mexican-American kids, whose fathers mowed lawns and hauled trash, were embarrassed by that fact. They were bitter at having inherited a perceived low-class status. Many of them probably had no fathers present at all, maybe off working in the fields.
So they took it out on kids like me. Low individual self-esteem, finding a more powerful group identity.
Perhaps some of them were led by boys whose older brothers rolled with Sangra.
I think that same energy explains gangs at every level. Adolescents need young adult men to pattern after. Gangs fill in that dynamic where no dominant father is on hand.
The tragedy of tattooing, as I said in one of my biggest videos, is that tattoos tend to lock a person in place.
If you are passing through that phase where you desperately need the belonging and purpose promised by a charismatic gang leader, and you then tattoo yourself with symbols cementing that relationship, you are liable to get really stuck. Before you know it, you have status in the tribe, and there’s no going back.
Even if Andry and Kilmar did belong to a gang at one time in their home countries, they ought to be able to escape their past. Surely, every kid whose fallen for that macho schtick is not culpable for life, even after they’ve distanced themselves and re-applied their energies.
What is Easter other than the promise of earned redemption? What is a country if not the structures within which its people can become their best selves? Be they native or naturalized.
It’s tragic how we’ve turned immigration at our southern border, on and off like a spigot. Playing to whichever ideology currently has the upper hand. Heedless of the suffering that sloppy and opaque immigration policy visits upon those who might be fleeing only poverty. But might also be running from their own immature mistakes.
Yes, there are criminals in every population. Yes, it is appropriate to deport irretrievable miscreants to their countries of origin. But it’s just flat-out unAmerican to hand people randomly into the soul-killing confines of a human storage warehouse, where a stylish dictator is trying hard to reach his 40,000 man capacity.
And to do so without giving them the chance to face their accusers in a court of law? Well that’s Anti-American.
Thanks for reading. And thanks especially to those of you who support my efforts here. A ‘like’ is greatly appreciated, as is sharing these columns with friends and family.
As always, I look forward to your comments.
-Dave
Hmmm, I guess the right place to start is with the fact that these gang members never should have crossed the border, password (amnesty) or not. “Someone” else exasperated the problem by a factor of 10,000 times or higher!. And now people get angry at the fix. How easy to “just be angry” but not fix. And doing nothing is wrong. With millions to handle, are we to just say “okay?” That is so unfair to me. Don’t I matter? Aren’t my tax dollars flying over to them instead of back to me and other citizens? And since when do non-citizens gain the rights of citizens?
That said, here is where we can agree. Each undocumented (illegal) should have some type of process, but it should not take months or years to intentionally delay and delay. That’s why we have this ENORMOUS problem; no one was doing anything reasonable. If they are a citizen that’s easy to prove. Can a mistake be made? Of course, since absolutely nothing is perfect – nothing. This is headline news because for the past 16, 12, 8 and especially the last 4 years, no one in power cared. They shoved it forward to purposely let it be someone else’s headache. Well, that’s changed, now it is getting done. And let’s not forget, any gang member can leave right now on their own, on their own terms. Stay and get caught, oh well, you were warned.
Sorry, I don’t need to be right, just heard.
As always, thought provoking and beautifully written.