Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun by Iain Overton Read Free Book Online Page B

shit.’
    I looked at five of those tight words and realised I had been expecting them all along. Some guys from the hood – because you can’t travel into the closed world of the gun without meeting the gangs who run the city’s night streets.
    There are an estimated ten million criminal gang members in the world, and it was clear I had to meet some of them. 1 To really understand the world of the gun I had to cross over into the criminal badlands. 2 The question was: where?
    Considering this, my eye had fallen back on Latin America, becauseone in seven of all homicide victims globally happens to be a young man aged between fifteen and twenty-nine and living in the Americas. 3 And in Latin America 30 per cent of all homicides are linked to organised gangs. 4
    At first, Mexico seemed a good choice. Mexican cartels’ firearms of choice include .50-calibre sniper rifles and a Belgian bulletproof vest-piercing pistol they call the ‘cop-killer’. 5 But I had once reported on just how badly the gangs there tortured people, and I feared them. Nothing is worth being skinned alive for.
    Then I read how El Salvador had 60,000 gang members in a country with a police force of just 25,000. About 80 per cent of all murders are with firearms; there were over 3,000 gang-related deaths in 2009 alone. 6 This worked out at a thousand more gang-related deaths in one year in El Salvador than in the whole of the US, a country fifty times its size. My curiosity was piqued.
    I learned that El Salvador has two main gangs. There’s the 18th Street Gang, or the 18. Having originated in California, the 18 had grown to become an international gang with 65,000 members in 120 cities. They are renowned for rituals like having large tattoos of the number 18 inked across their faces, or initiating gang members with a vicious ‘18 seconds’ beating’. Their rivals are the Mara Salvatruchas, the Maras, or the MS-13. They have over 70,000 members worldwide and are heavily involved in black-market gun sales, human trafficking and homicides, especially of law enforcement officers.
    On 8 March 2012, the leaders of these two gangs in El Salvador had called a truce to the bitter war they had been fighting. In exchange for peace on the streets, they wanted a promise from the state for an improvement in the living conditions of their gang members in jail. The government, in an unprecedented act, was said to have negotiated with the gangs and come to a deal. 7 Whatever the reason, a truce was struck. Almost immediately, homicide rates dropped off a cliff; the usual seventeen killings a day fell to an average of just over five a day. 8
    It was a laying-down of arms that created an opportunity I felt I could seize. Often gangs can be so caught up in a vortex of theirown violence that even talking to them drags you into their chaos, but in El Salvador things seemed to have calmed down enough to get a glimpse of gang life close up. So it was that I decided to travel there to see what gangs and their guns can really do to a country.

    The country was preparing for elections, and the humid streets had taken on a festive air. Banners fell from windows, and vibrant flags in red stars and blue stripes fluttered in the sporadic breeze. The occasional political advertising car drove past, loudhailers promising a better future – at least a better one than this. All the parties were running on the same ticket: security. But political promises had been broken so often in this Central American country it was hard not to shake your head at the cars passing.
    I was not here to report on politics, though, at least not directly. I wanted to meet gang members and had asked for the worst my American-Salvadoran fixer could manage. He said he would not disappoint.
    He arranged for two to come to my hotel in a crumbling northern district of the languid capital of San Salvador because the alternative was for me to travel to them. He knew I wanted to talk to them about guns and