![]() ![]() Gradually, an oval silhouette appears, the result of soil that has been dug up, oxygenated and repacked. He draws the outline again and they dig a layer deeper. His men dig down a layer around its perimeter, then level the ground flat. With his fingers he traces the boundaries of what he sees in the dirt. He surveys the crust, looking for a patch of discoloured soil, a sign that something has been altered. Ticas and his team shovel out the topsoil until they reach hard-packed earth, then sweep away the dust with brooms. Israel Ticas in his office, standing in front of images of his team members at work and a map of El Salvador marking points of reported violent crimes. They removed her clothes and dragged her here, then began to chop her up. “She was in agony,” the informant says, but not dead. ![]() Ticas asks him if the victim died in her house or whether they finished her off at the burial ground. She wandered around the house in a stupor, like a zombie, smearing her blood on the walls. But one of the gang members rushed the job and struck her in the back of the head with a machete. His job, the informant was told, would be to cut off her head – “to prove you have balls”. Then she would be brought to the informant. A civilian was instructed to get the woman drunk in her home, just up the road from the burial site. Grief-stricken, the woman confronted them, screaming at them in the street, threatening to tell the police. After an “investigation”, the gang “disappeared” her partner. The woman and her partner had recently moved to town, and the gang suspected the couple had problems with MS-13 elsewhere. When he arrived, he was told to dig a hole: a woman would be killed. ![]() The night of the murder was his initiation, when he received a call and was summoned to the site. Ticas’s informant is a lanky young man who wears a balaclava to hide his face. He thinks he can find one more before his time is up and he has brought the informant here to help. The attorney general gave Ticas three months to work the location, and today is the deadline. Still, Ticas has managed to find 11 of the 21 bodies his informant says are buried here. So the topography has changed since the site was in use, several years ago, and his informant has struggled to remember where all the bodies are buried. After a few minutes, the convoy stops at a parched basin beside the fields, a spot where a river runs during the wetter months.Īs the river rises and falls in the jungle terrain, Ticas explains, the land swells and crumbles. The victims include civilians, rivals from the Barrio 18 gang, and their own members who break internal codes of discipline. Our destination is a site used by members of the local MS-13 gang to rape, torture and execute people. Our security detail piles into a Toyota Hilux, and we follow them zig-zagging out of town and into the surrounding sugar cane fields, the convoy kicking up a bright cloud of swirling dust. Instead, we stop outside a two-storey concrete building where men in blue-and-white camouflage uniforms armed with assault rifles are milling about. The victim, he says, was likely shot at that spot during the night.īut we aren’t here for the body by the roadside. “With clothes on.” It hasn’t been stripped or dismembered. Before long, Ticas spots a body by the roadside. In 2015, homicides in El Salvador rivalled the most violent peak of the civil war, and it ranks consistently among the world’s most violent nations. In most ways, the country has never quite recovered since. The experience left him equally as distrustful of the rightwing generals he had served as of the guerrilla commanders who would join them among the political elite at war’s end. I srael Ticas is racing down the highway, drumming his hands on the wheel of “The Beast”, a tall, boxy police truck that he aims at the small, bustling town of San Luis Talpa, about 25 miles south of El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador.Ī decades-long veteran of the security forces, Ticas’s first job was as an artist in the counter-terrorism unit, sketching suspected guerillas during the country’s 1979–1992 civil war. ![]()
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