A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America by Martinez Oscar

Author:Martinez, Oscar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2016-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

8

El Niño Hollywood’s Death Foretold

November 2014

Miguel Ángel Tobar, known as El Niño Hollywood, ex-member of the Hollywood clique of the Mara Salvatrucha, was murdered on November 21, 2014. A key witness for the state, having helped send more than thirty gang members to prison, he was also a murderer. Even as they promised to protect him, state officials always knew that it was only a matter of time before he’d be murdered. This is the brief story of a man I knew was going to be killed.

Since 2009 Miguel Ángel Tobar knew that he was going to be murdered. Sometimes he thought it’d be the Salvadoran police. Other times he thought it’d be members of Barrio 18. Usually, though, when he thought of his impending death, he was convinced members of his old gang, the Mara Salvatrucha, would be the ones to kill him.

At thirty years old, Miguel Ángel Tobar was convinced he wasn’t going to die of a heart attack, from a fall or from old age—definitely not from old age. Sometimes, he thought he’d be gunned down on a dusty trail in the western Salvadoran state of Santa Ana, or maybe Ahuachapán. From 2012 on, as far as I know, he was always conscious of “the Beast” that followed him. He referred to the Beast as violent death that didn’t take you from this life, but tore you from it. He talked about it because he knew it, because he had been the one to execute it so many times. He talked about it all the time. Which is why, a year ago, he went to recover a 12-gauge shotgun from where he’d buried it on an empty plot of land. He’d stolen the gun from a gas station security guard during a robbery, which the police had ordered him to carry out, in a town called El Congo.

Tobar felt he needed more backup, and so he got his hands on another gun, a .357 pistol, though the police confiscated it when he was walking outside of his shack in the Las Pozas neighborhood of San Lorenzo, in Ahuachapán state. The Beast always close at his heels, he crossed undetected into Guatemala at the beginning of 2014 and paid $20 for a trabuco, a hand cannon—two tubes of metal that, when slammed together, shot out a 12-gauge shell. Though Tobar knew he’d someday be murdered, he wanted to avoid being cut up, tortured or hanged. He was hoping for a single gunshot.

He was so confident he’d be killed that he didn’t mind openly talking to me about it. Ever since I met him one January, two years previously, I’d been trying to stop by and see him at least once a month. I paid him a routine visit on Tuesday, March 14, 2014. That day in March he felt like he was closer to death than usual. The night before, someone had told him that a couple of young men had strolled into the neighborhood looking for “the gangster living around here.

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