By Matthew D. LaPlante
Los Angeles Daily News
Sept 12, 2015
SAN SALVADOR — In a narrow
space between rows of gleaming steel refrigerators, the dance of the dead has
begun.
The slender body of a
14-year-old boy, not yet stiff with death, is dragged from the back of a
coroner’s van onto a metal gurney, still wet with the fluids of its last
passenger.
Medics shuffle the other body
carts, left then right then left again, lifting and rolling the plastic-wrapped
corpses from one gurney to another to make room for the next body.
It is early in the afternoon at
the Institute of Legal Medicine in El Salvador’s volatile capital city, on what
will become one of the most violent days of the most violent year in the most
violent nation in the Western Hemisphere.
Not since El Salvador’s 12-year
civil war, which ended in 1992, has the death toll been this high.
At least 42 people were killed
on Aug. 27 in Central America’s smallest nation. That morbid mark for a day of
killing thrust the number of dead above 800 in August — a record in a year in
which more than 4,000 people have been killed so far.
These grim tallies are the
result of a perfect storm of failed economic policies, broken truces with two
Los Angeles-born gangs and a steady demand for narcotics in the United States
and beyond.
Social and political scientists
say the recent violence also stems from El Salvador’s civil war, which raged
from 1979 to 1992 and left more than 70,000 dead. Many Savadorans fleeing the
violence emigrated to Los Angeles, where they perfected street gang warfare
before returning home.
In the eye of that storm are
the three rows of cinder-block buildings that form this compact medical
compound. Here, a wearied team of medical examiners is desperately trying not
to collapse under the churn of corpses that arrive each day riddled with
bullets, covered in stab wounds, or — so frequently that it no longer seems out
of place — missing heads.
“Decapitations do complicate
our job, because it’s quite difficult to identify a body without a head,” Dr.
Yanira Silvana Martinez said. “That’s the real problem we face. It’s not just
the frequency of the killings, it’s the complexity.”
When bodies arrive without
heads, burnt beyond recognition or strafed by gunfire, she notes, the autopsies
take a lot more time — anywhere from two hours to more than 10.
With just 15 doctors on staff
to handle the corpses that come into the office nearly every hour of every day,
Martinez said, “the danger is that we deal in quantity, not quality.” That, she
said, leaves police and prosecutors less equipped to convict murderers, which
leaves more killers on the streets, which means more deaths.
The U.S. State Department
blames “inefficiency, corruption, political infighting and insufficient
resources” for a criminal conviction rate that was less than 5 percent even
before the recent spike in violence.
When police officers arrive at
the scene of a homicide, they often find witnesses who are unwilling to talk —
even if they are related to the victim. Without eyewitnesses, the medical
examiners are left to piece together what happened by the injuries alone.
Like almost everyone else in
the institute, Martinez is at first stoic about the damage this impossible
situation is having on her own psyche. “We are professionals and this is a job
that we simply must do,” she said.
But as she thumbs through a
6-inch stack of autopsy reports that she says prosecutors sometimes don’t even
have time to look at, her voice breaks.
“We are working here as a
maquila,” she said, using the Spanish word for sweatshop. “We are witnesses to
carnage. We are overwhelmed.”
Even for people used to dealing
with death, it is impossible to remain unaffected, said Dr. Alfredo Adolfo
Romero Diaz. The killers, he said, seem to have gotten more and more nihilistic
in recent years. “You can kill a person with only one, two or three stabs,” he
said, “but we have seen corpses with hundreds of stabs wounds — not random but
very meticulously placed.”
The victims often are gang
members but certainly not always. Among the bodies brought in today is that of
Jose Alfredo Alexander, a 45-year-old worker at a plastics factory, killed with
15 shots, most of them in the face.
“I have no clues for why he was
murdered,” said Alexander’s grieving brother, Daniel Alexander. “Maybe he was
mistaken for another person? He has never been in trouble. All he did was get
up and go to work.”
About a third of the dead are
women. Others are business owners who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay protection money
to the gangs. Many are children; the doctors speak in hushed tones about a baby
whose throat was slashed in front of its mother, who then was also killed —
allegedly over a matter of 25 cents.
Romero sometimes looks down at
the corpses before him and realizes they could be his own family members.
“I’ve changed my habits. I stay
at home and won’t take my family downtown,” he said. “We’re not going paranoid.
We see the reality of what is happening, and it is truly terrifying.”
The official homicide count is
likely just a part of the actual death toll. Every day, from early in the
morning to late in the afternoon, a parade of blank-faced Salvadorans arrives
from across the country looking for family members who have gone missing — and
who officials say are most likely dead.
Among the searchers is Misael
Martinez, who has been looking for his brother-in-law since Aug. 3.
“We have gone repeatedly to the
hospitals and to all of the morgues across the country, but we haven’t found
him,” he said. “He was just a normal guy. He wasn’t in a gang. He was 42 years
old and had gone to work every day for more than 20 years. Then suddenly he was
gone, and we go looking each day hopeful that we will at least know his fate.”
Even back in late 2013 — when
the homicide numbers fell to about seven per day across El Salvador following a
government deal with gang leaders to provide better prison conditions and
reduced prosecutions in exchange for fewer murders — the forensic
anthropologists who work alongside the medical examiners were always busy.
For many years, they have been
working to identify the remains of people buried in unmarked graves during the
civil war. After the truce failed and murders began to soar in 2014, the team
increasingly has been forced to turn its attention to identifying the remains
of victims of the most recent violence.
On an examination table before
Dr. Saul Quijada on this bloody Thursday in August is a cardboard box
containing the charred bones of a young man who appears to have been recently
murdered. Today’s goal, Quijada said, will be to lay out the bones in skeletal
order — then try to determine whether the victim was set on fire before or
after he was killed.
“Every year there are more and
more victims,” Quijada said. “And every year the age is less and less. It used
to be that the murder victims were 25 to 30; now the average is much lower and
we are seeing children of 12, 13 and 14 years old.”
And sometimes much younger.
In a refrigerated storage
facility next to his office are shelves upon shelves of cardboard boxes filled
with human bones. One box contains the palm-size skull of an infant who was
determined to have been strangled, along with the blue-and-green football
jersey the boy was wearing when his body was found.
“You can’t do this every day
and not feel the impact,” Quijada said. “Every day we are so tired.”
Dr. Jose Miguel Fortin, the
director of the institute — and a practicing clinical psychiatrist — is worried
for his staff members. Their exposure to such harsh violence has become their
new baseline — “it is a normal thing,” he said. He frets that his employees are
becoming “more aggressive” and worries that arguments, infighting and even
violence might result among members of the team. Such responses, he said, are
the rational psychological consequence of being exposed to such barbarity for
so long.
Fortin worries about his own
ability to deal with the violence, too.
“To be truthful,” the 53-year-old
father of three said, “I truly am tired. I don’t think I can handle it much
longer.”
But Fortin insists he isn’t
angry at the gangs that have done this to him, to his people and to his
country. He wants them stopped, but even as the nation’s supreme court has
recently declared the gangs to be terrorists, Fortin tends to see the gangsters
as victims, too.
He is not alone in that point
of view. Michael Allison, a specialist in the politics of Central America at
University of Scranton who was last in El Salvador in July, points out that the
two largest gangs both began when Salvadoran immigrants — many of whom had been
witnesses to the brutality of a war in their home country that pitted the
U.S.-backed government against communist revolutionaries — arrived in Los
Angeles in the 1980s.
In El Salvador, Allison notes,
“many witnessed unspeakable violence … then they ended up in California, where
you had a war between the Crips and the Blood going on.”
For protection, Allison said,
some young Salvadorans responded by forming gangs of their own, like Mara
Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, from Pico-Union. Others integrated into
fledgling multiracial gangs like 18th Street from the Rampart District.
Unlike those homegrown gangs,
though, U.S. leaders had a mechanism to deal with MS-13 and 18th Street members
from El Salvador. Over the next few decades many were deported back to a
country still reeling from civil war, facing mounting debt and suffering from
diminished foreign investment.
It is their children and
grandchildren who are the gang’s newest foot soldiers.
“This has been how all these
kids have learned the way,” said Dr. Marcelino Diaz Menjivar, a forensic
psychologist who evaluates victims and victimizers for the court system. “At 5,
6 or 7 years old, these children want to be gang members.”
By the time the children have
become adults, Fortin and Diaz both note, they have lived lives saturated by
violence. It is not surprising, Fortin said, that they are violent when they
grow up.
And these days, he said, it’s
not just the children of gangsters who are mired in such depravity.
“We have reached a level in
which the abnormal has become normal,” Fortin said. “People walk by a body and
it’s a normal thing.”
On the streets of Apopa, just
north of San Salvador, people hardly seem to notice as a truck, emblazoned with
the skulls-and-scales logo of the medical examiner’s office, parks behind a
public bus on the side of the road.
Inside the bus, a woman’s body
lies in a pool of blood. It has been more than five hours since a man entered
the vehicle and began shooting the woman. The coroner’s office received the
call almost immediately after the shooting, but there were no trucks available
— they were spread out across the city gathering other bodies.
Neighbors say the woman was the
owner of a local flour mill who had been unable to pay protection money to a
brutal 18th Street clique — a barrio-level gang subdivision. Even as she
convulsed and slumped into her seat, witnesses say, the shooter stood in the
aisle and methodically blasted away at her body.
“It was not to kill her,” said
a man who lives a few doors down from the spot of this murder, which is just a
few doors from where the last neighborhood killing occurred, “it was to kill
the rest of us.”
The man said he will not talk
to investigating officers, though he has joined a growing number of people in
Apopa who have asked police to set up a substation in their neighborhood. He
acknowledges, though, this might simply turn his block “into a different kind
of war zone.”
The sun is setting as coroner
Juan Carlos Torres Salazar arrives in Apopa. As shadows fall across the
neighborhood, the masked police officers who have been on the scene since the
early afternoon encourage him to hurry. It has been just a day since police and
coroners were ambushed in a San Salvador neighborhood and they are eager to
leave this place, where neighbors say the 18th Street gangsters have recently
consolidated power after exterminating members of a rival gang called The
Machine.
Torres takes his time. He is
not beyond fear, he said, but these days the more gripping emotion is
exhaustion.
“I’m not talking about being
physically tired. Physically we can manage, but it’s the mental tiredness,” the
55-year-old coroner says. “I’m starting to feel my age now.”
Roberto Valdizon, the evening
shift supervisor for the institute’s coroners, said morale in his department is
very low.
“You could say, ‘I am used to
it,’ but that is not true, Valdizon said. “You never get used to this. If you
want to be mentally healthy, this is the worst place to be. All we see is pain,
injustice, sacrifice and violence.”
When Torres’ truck arrives at
the institute with the body of the woman who was killed on the bus, the medics
scramble once again to clear a path in the receiving area. The gurneys are
pushed this way and that. Bodies are slid into and out of refrigerators to make
room. The corpses are lifted, shifted, rolled and dragged. The dance of the
dead goes on.
