The Women of the Mara: Isabel
She met her gang member boyfriend "Shorty" through Facebook when he was already in prison. Shorty had joined the gang when he was nine years old was wanted for murder by the time he was 11.
Since “NARCAS: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America’s Cartels,” was released, the cartel side of the book has gotten a lot of press. But I also did a substantial amount of reporting around the women of Central America’s brutal Mara Salvatrucha street gangs. I’m going to serialize that chapter here over the next few weeks.
Isabel
The groaning and panting of people having sex at such a close proximity to her shocked Isabel. The gasping and cries were distracting as she tried to have sex with her own boyfriend.
“We used to do it on champas,” Isabel told me when we met in a fast-food chicken restaurant, an hour’s drive from central San Salvador, El Salvador. Champas are mattresses covered by sheets to improvise a tent, designed to conceal the two people lying inside, as well as what they are doing.
Such measures are necessary during conjugal visits on the patio of the Izalco high security men’s prison, when hundreds of women come to visit their gang men. Conjugal visits inevitably meant trying for a discreet fuck, hence the champas, which made the prison patio look like a tiny, improvised refugee camp.
Isabel first met her boyfriend—let’s call him Shorty—on Facebook when she was just nineteen years old. “I liked the way he treated me day to day,” she said. “He had a lot of attention to detail and is the only man who has ever given me roses.”1
Looking at Isabel, I found that hard to believe. She met me wearing a short, tight brown jersey dress that only just covered the top of her upper thighs. Her long black hair fell down her back, and her face resembled one out of a Botticelli painting. The decision to start a relationship with a guy who was already serving time in prison for murder blew my mind. Shorty was a member of a Barrio 18 gang, which promised he would spend more time inside than outside prison for the rest of his short, violent life—a fact Isabel understood. Shorty had joined the gang when he was nine years old, she told me, and was wanted for murder by the time he was eleven.
After getting her mother’s permission, Isabel went to the Izalco prison, a seventy-kilometer (forty-three-mile) drive from San Salvador, to meet Shorty for the first time after corresponding via Facebook for months. He had gone back to studying on the inside and invited her to his high school graduation ceremony.
“It was the first time I had been in a prison,” she remembered.
Every week for the next few years, she would visit Shorty and undergo a “full revision” as part of the process of getting into the penitentiary.
That meant first stripping naked in a small cubicle. Then she would get up on a chair to squat so that a female prison guard could insert her fingers inside Isabel to make sure she hadn’t stashed any drugs or contraband in her vagina or anus. Apparently, this is one of the common methods for sneaking prohibited items into El Salvador’s jails.
“You get used to it—it becomes routine,” Isabel said. “At first it was humiliating, but afterwards you forget about it. You can get used to anything.”
The things you do for love, I thought. I couldn’t think of any other reason she would keep going back to the hellholes of Latin America’s prisons.
Over the past few decades, the Mara Salvatrucha gangs have metastasized across the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, with as many as seventy thousand MS-13 members scattered across those nations alone. Formed on the streets of Los Angeles, California, in the late 1970s, the gang began life as a social organization that provided a sense of belonging to marginalized immigrant youths—mostly Salvadoran refugees running from a civil war back home.
“The MS13 is a complex phenomenon. The gang is not about generating revenue as much as it is about creating a collective identity that is constructed and reinforced by shared, often criminal experiences, especially acts of violence and expressions of social control,” write Steven Dudley, Héctor Silva Ávalos, and Juan José Martínez, who have studied the gangs extensively. 2
Violence is at the center of the gang’s culture and modus operandi, which is why it has long been a focus of law enforcement in both the US and Central America. In the mid-1990s and into the 2000s, thousands of foreign-born gang members convicted of crimes in the US were deported home to Central America, where they formed new cells. They arrived in El Salvador in the wake of a brutal civil war. Of the nearly 130,000 convicted criminals deported to Central America between 2001 and 2010, over 90 percent were sent to El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) figures quoted by Dudley, Silva Ávalos, and Martínez.3
Today, overcrowded and poorly resourced prisons in El Salvador are tightly packed with gang members, essentially serving as the criminal headquarters of the MS-13 and Barrio 18.
In 2016, following a spike in homicides in El Salvador, the government imposed “extraordinary measures” in its prisons, designed to cow the gangs. At that time, El Salvador was one of the most homicidal countries in the world, with a murder rate of more than eighty-one per one hundred thousand people. Venezuela, another deeply violent nation in the grip of a social, economic, and humanitarian crisis didn’t even come close as the second-worst offender, with fifty-nine murders per one hundred thousand.4
Gangs, who were responsible for the majority of the murders, functioned as a parallel government with their leaders headquartered in the prisons.5 From there, leaders continued to control thousands of gang cells operating on the streets around the country and to manage extortion rackets and street-level drug sales. Using mobile phones, they terrorized and extorted those on the outside. In an attempt to limit this practice, the government confined many incarcerated gang members to their cells, shutting down the cell phone signal in areas around prisons. The government also eliminated conjugal visits between gang members and their partners: the champas disappeared. Isabel and Shorty’s amorous trysts in Izalco prison came to a sudden end.
The measures were supposed to be temporary, but they remain in place today. Most recently, they were renewed by the increasingly authoritarian government of the so-called hipster president, Nayib Bukele, a social media whiz who is often seen wearing a leather jacket and a backward baseball cap. In 2022, the Bukele government renewed its gang crackdown, rounding up and imprisoning thousands more gang members, an act that only worsened the levels of overcrowding in the country’s prison system.
Even before this gang crackdown, Shorty was never out of prison for more than a couple of months, according to Isabel. He would complete a sentence and then quickly reoffend. They rarely had more than a few months together on the outside before he was back behind bars.
It wasn’t just Shorty who had problems with the law. Isabel said she was constantly harassed by the police because they knew that she was Shorty’s girlfriend. “I couldn’t sleep in my house—it felt like the police were going to come for me at any moment.” On one occasion, she said a police officer arrested her and her brother and took them to the police station. He took her out back, and then he put a gun to her head, she remembered. “I began to cry really hard,” she said. “He told me he was going to shoot me and then my brother.”
He told her to get down on her knees. “No,” she said. “No, I’m not going to do that.”
“Was that your pride?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “I was terrified that if I did, he would shoot me in the head.”
My local colleague Bryan Avelar, who was also present for the interview, asked her, “What’s the good side of all this? What’s in it for you?”
“I’m respected because I’m his woman,” she answered, “because he is admired and respected in the neighborhood.”
But even that advantage was deeply limited. “I know if he dies that will all end,” she said. The security that she derived from being Shorty’s woman seemed utterly precarious, especially given the generally short lifespan of gang members. Isabel was vague about whether she had anything to do with the gang’s criminal enterprises, such as extortion or street-level drug sales, but observers and my own research told me that girlfriends, mothers, and sisters who are connected by blood or relationships to gang members are often involved in their criminal activities.
It is often women who take cell phones into the businesses or properties of victims to oblige them to listen to gang members who are calling to terrorize and threaten them from prison. Perhaps this is because they are less likely to draw attention or suspicion than the young men they’re working with. Women also frequently collect the extortion profits from the schemes run by the gangs, or lend them their bank accounts so that victims can deposit cash there. They also
often smuggle the cash into the prisons to their men. “In recent years, women have been known more as gang collaborators—useful to carry out certain criminal tasks for the group (transporting weapons, collecting extortion fees, etc.) as well as domestic responsibilities,” said Sonja Wolf, an assistant professor with the drug policy program at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) university in Mexico.
When I was reporting in Guatemala a few years back, I found that women there were very active in executing extortion schemes,7 a trend backed up by an Interpeace study on the role of women in Central American gangs.
But women weren’t always just the gang’s foot soldiers.
Next week, we will go back in time to meet Brenda Paz, and what her murder meant for the women of the gang in El Salvador.
Isabel, interview with the author, November 16, 2021.
Steven Dudley, Héctor Silva Ávalos, and Juan José Martínez, MS13 in the Americas: How the World’s Most Notorious Gang Defies Logic, Resists Destruction (Washington, DC: InSight Crime and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, American University, 2018).
Dudley, Silva Ávalos, and Martínez, MS13 in the Americas, 15.
David Gagne, “InSight Crime’s 2016 Homicide Round-Up,” Insight Crime, January 16, 2017.
Elijah Stevens, “El Salvador Attorney General: Two-Thirds of Homicides Gang-Related,” InSight Crime, December 2, 2015.