The author of the book, Oscar Martinez, is a journalist from El Salvador. He runs Sala Negra, a crime investigations unit for El Faro, the investigative Central American online magazine based in El Salvador.
He has given a graphic and moving account of the violence in Central America based on his direct interaction with criminal gangs, assassins, security forces, prison authorities, judges, prosecutors, police detectives, informants, government functionaries, political leaders, priests and the victims. He has taken enormous personal risk in visiting the areas controlled by gangs in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. He himself has faced several death threats.
Martinez traces the roots of the violence to the civil wars in the eighties and the role of US. He says, “The violent gangs weren’t born in Guatemala or Honduras or El Salvador. They came from the United States, Southern California, to be precise. They began with migrants fleeing a US-sponsored civil wars in Central America. The US supported brutal dictatorships, trained security forces and armed right-wing militias and death squads. This had caused hundreds of thousands of Central Americans fleeing from the violence and seeking refuge in US. Some of the young refugees found themselves living in an ecosystem of gangs already established in California. And so they came together to defend themselves and survive by forming their own gangs called as Mara Salvatrucha (Maras) and Barrio 18. The US government deported about 4,000 of these gang members back to Central America. Those 4,000 have expanded to about 70,000, just in El Salvador.
Besides the two main gangs, there are numerous smaller gangs called as Mara Gauchos Locos 13, the Crazy Cowboys 13, Los Valerios, Mirada Lokotes 13, Los Meli 33, the Twins 33, Los Chancletas (the Sandals) and Los Uvas (the Grapes). These gangs terrorise neighborhoods, extort businessmen, traffic in drugs and recruit teenagers and train them in crime. They corrupt the political leaders and security forces and issue death threats to judges, prosecutors and police. They control the prisons and continue their criminal operations from inside the jails. The gangs overrun the police stations and outgun the police with more deadly weapons. Martinez narrates a case in which the helpless police officer calls on the families threatened by gangs to join him in prayers, as a last resort.
This has caused a second wave of fleeing of the Central Americans to US as illegal emigrants. But their journey from Central America through Mexico into US is perilous. They are abused by the human and drug traffickers. Martinez has written another book "The Beast: Riding the tails and dodging Narcos on the migrant trail". He himself took the freight train in Mexico called as "the beast" in which many migrants hitch a ride.
