The Far Away Brothers by Lauren Markham

Author:Lauren Markham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

“Politicians claim that the majority of those killed are gangsters, but I know for a fact that’s not true,” says the director of the Instituto de Medicina Legal, Dr. Fortín Magaña. His office is like that of an eccentric movie mortician: tile floors, classical music keening through speakers, an immaculate desk bearing a neat stack of papers, a snakeskin letter opener and matching magnifying glass. He turns to his computer. “Look at this,” he orders, fiddling with the mouse. He pulls up a photograph of two young women dressed in blue medical scrubs, smiling against a backdrop of greenery.

“These two girls were about to graduate from nursing school. This was taken the day before they were killed.” He shows another picture—a rotting hand, skin swollen against a thin silver ring. He switches back again to the original image. “See that? Same ring, same hand.” He points to a picture of scraps of muddy blue cloth—the scrubs—found beside her naked body.

“Do these look like gangsters? No. These were young women, innocent young people who would have been absolutely valuable to this society. And they killed them.”

In 2012, El Salvador had the highest rate of femicide—the gender-motivated killing of women—in the world. High femicide rates persist and reports of rape and domestic violence are also on the rise. The vast majority of victims are poor young women living in rural areas or urban slums, like the girls from the doctor’s pictures. In 2015 the government registered 575 femicides, nearly twice the number of femicides in 2014, and the highest since 2011, right before the gang truce. In 2016, there were 524.

Is it so surprising that more and more girls are joining the gangs, wresting a tiny hunk of power from the male-dominated world—of gangs, of police, of the trials and tribulations of their own families—around them?

During the weekly visitors’ day in El Salvador’s Centro de Inserción Social Femenino, the young inmates—minors convicted of gang-related crimes, including robbery, extortion, prostitution, drug trafficking, and murder—are dressed in their best clothes. A U.S. church group is rumored to be coming by today. Two girls drape themselves against the bars on the MS-13 side of the prison. One of them, tall and thin with dirty blond hair, smooths her locks with one hand as though to increase their shine, holding the bar with the other.

“Are they coming?” she asks.

“Will there be boys?” her friend says. They fall over laughing, each with a fist still gripping one of the metal bars.

The girls lower in the gang pecking order congregate in the overgrown courtyard while the higher-ups remain upstairs in the dingy, eighty-bed dormitory, keeping watch on the activity below.

Carmelina, a chubby seventeen-year-old wearing hot pink spandex shorts, pink Converse, pigtails, and heavy eyeliner, sits hunched on a cement bench and texts on the contraband cellphone she only half-conceals between her knees. None of the guards seem to notice.

“I’m in for extortion,” she says, licking a blue ice cream cone, the special treat handed out by the missionary group.

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