Filmmaker slain in El Salvador was worried about growing violence

Christian Poveda was dismayed by the increasing viciousness of the gangs he had chronicled. ‘Government authorities have no idea of the monster facing them,’ he said a day before his death.

The day before he was killed this week, Christian Poveda, veteran photojournalist and documentary filmmaker, said he was worried. The Salvadoran street gangs whose lives Poveda had chronicled in recent years were turning uglier than ever.

A brief glimmer of hope — gang leaders speaking of a truce and ending the daily, deadly violence that has terrorized tiny El Salvador for years — had vanished. A new crop of leaders was emerging who seemed more vicious and less inclined to negotiate or moderate their criminal actions, including extortion, carjacking and killing.

“Government authorities have no idea of the monster facing them,” said the French-born journalist, 54, whose recent documentary, “La Vida Loca,” portrayed the desperate, brutal lives of gangs that have their roots in Los Angeles.

A day after Poveda made these comments to The Times, he was dead.

Police said Poveda was shot to death Wednesday, with four bullets in the face, as he drove home from another day of taking pictures and making contacts in a piece of territory controlled by the Mara 18 street gang but disputed by other gangs.

Police said they believed Poveda was killed by Mara 18 gangsters who were part of the new generation he had alluded to, young thugs who either did not know him or, if they did, resented his work.

Poveda’s body was found alongside his car north of the capital, San Salvador, none of his expensive cameras or equipment missing.

Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes, a former journalist who knew Poveda, said he was shocked by the slaying and has ordered a full investigation.

Roots in L.A.

Street gangs in Los Angeles formed by Salvadorans have long been among its most ruthless. In the early 1990s, as El Salvador’s lengthy civil war came to a conclusion, members of various gangs in Los Angeles returned here, either of their own volition or through the stepped-up deportation of those serving time for crimes committed in the United States. They replicated their U.S. organizations in the Central American country, recruited members, spread and now number in the tens of thousands.

In large part because of the burgeoning street gangs, El Salvador has one of the highest homicide rates in the world.

“Let’s not confuse ourselves,” photographer Edu Ponces wrote in the Salvadoran online newspaper El Faro. “Christian is just one of the 10 who will die today. On Sunday, he will be one of 70. And on Sept. 30, one of 300 for the month. . . .

“If you look long enough down the throat of the lion, he will eat you.”

Poveda’s Spanish Republican parents fled to France during the Franco dictatorship, and he grew up in poverty.

He came to El Salvador in the early 1980s as a news photographer covering the civil war. When it ended a decade later, and most foreign journalists departed, Poveda remained and turned his attention to the gangs.

Speaking to The Times’ La Plaza blog in April, Poveda said he had spent 16 months with members of Mara 18, establishing a relationship, gaining their trust and filming the documentary, which won cinematographic awards internationally. He said he recognized the brutality of the gangsters’ violence, but also saw the young men and women as victims of a repressive society, crippling poverty and broken homes.

“My proposal was at least one year of filming, and I explained my plan to them, which essentially was to show the human aspect of the gangs, to show who they are, these youngsters. And that really interested them,” Poveda said. “And I was present for everything that might happen, the good things and the bad, and that established a relationship of trust.”

‘Never been afraid’

The documentary contained disturbing images of gang girls with tattoo-covered faces, funerals of slain teenagers, and young kids enduring beatings as an initiation ritual.

“As savage as they can be, they are people of their word. They’re very well-structured organizations, and the decision of a gang is the last word,” Poveda said in April.

“So from the moment that I understood that well, I never had any problems. I’ve never been afraid.”

This week, however, when he spoke to The Times, he sounded a far less hopeful note. It may be that Poveda was tripped up by the reality of today’s ever more ruthless criminal syndicates that traffic in drugs, weapons and people: Whatever relationship an outsider establishes with them, they are trustworthy only until they are not.

He said he was especially dismayed to see 11-year-olds, the children of jailed gang members, preparing to be initiated. Any hope for dialogue and a calming of the bloodshed was lost, Poveda added.

“The leadership that was fairly political-minded has been substituted for some extremely violent gangsters who believe only in guns,” he said. “Now the 18 is full of crazy people. I am very worried . . . and sad.”

Independance Day El Salvador

El Salvador Independence Day

El Salvador’s Funes marks

Mauricio Funes on Tuesday reaches his 100th day as president of El Salvador with a more than 80 percent approval rating, in spite of attempts by the opposition to paint his administration as a “government of deception.”

Funes, a former TV journalist who ran as a reformed leftist on the ticket of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), took office June 1 from conservative President Tony Saca, starting a new chapter in El Salvador’s history by leading the first left-leaning government after a long line of right-wingers (NT, May 29).

A July CID-Gallup poll ranked Funes and fellow newly-elected president, Ricardo Martinelli of Panama, the most popular Central American leaders, both with an 86 percent favorability rating.

This Monday, local TV channel Telecorporación Salvadoreña released a public opinion poll by Mitofsky that shows his approval rating remains high at 85 percent.

Roy Campos, president of Mitofsky, said Funes is still in his “honeymoon” period. “The hope for changes (and) for a better life with the Funes win remains,” Campos said. His poll surveyed 1,200 Salvadorans at the end of August.

A recent Universidad Centroamericana survey gave Funes high marks too. The university’s president, José María Tojeira, said the Funes administration started off on the right foot. “It’s a government that began with a quite solid position because it gave stability to a country following an electoral period in which stability was in question,” said Tojeira, who is also a priest. The university president added that he considers the administration is “a kind of moderate-leftist government.”

Faced with the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression, Funes scored points when he proposed a $587 million investment to build 25,000 homes and other social programs.

The opposition, the National Republican Alliance (ARENA), which governed the country for about two decades, said the FMLN-led administration “is headed toward becoming the ‘government of deception.’”
“100 days is a brief time period that’s being used to criticize us,” Funes said at an event in Acajutla, southeast of San Salvador, in which the government handed over land to small farmers.

The Gangs of El Salvador: A Growing Industry

The two most famous exports of El Salvador are rivals. Unfortunately, they are also ferocious gangs: Mara 18 and the Mara Salvatrucha. They have exported their gang culture — learned by expatriates returned from undocumented existence in the big cities of the United States — to other countries in Central and South America, re-exporting their influence back to the U.S., moving beyond petty thievery, flashy tattoos and thuggish violence, to drug-trafficking and large-scale extortion.

For the last three decades, successive Salvadoran governments have tried to curtail the two Maras. In the 1990s the Salvadoran government instituted a policy that became known as the Mano Duro (Strong Hand), that saw thousands of gang members jailed. But Mano Duro has not stopped the gangs. Corruption at the highest levels of government has allowed many leaders to go free or conduct business from behind bars. Saul Turcios Angel, also known as the “Pitbull,” ran a kidnapping and extortion ring as part of Mara Salvatrucha. He escaped from a Salvadoran prison last year and was apprehended in Nicaragua earlier this week. Turcios faces possible extradition to the U.S. to face charges that, while behind bars, he phoned fellow gang members in a Maryland suburb, ordering them to commit murders and other crimes.
Earlier this week as well, gang members are suspected of killing the photographer and documentary filmmaker Christian Poveda, who spent years chronicling their activity and evolution. Poveda was shot in the head, killed, say police, by the very gang members he had been filming earlier in the day. Gang related deaths average about 10 a day throughout the country, according to local newspaper accounts, which splash news of the mayhem across their front pages daily.

While some gang members say they are virtual prisoners of their poor neighborhoods, unable to leave the slums because of police crackdowns and threats from rival gangs, gang culture continues to spread. It has moved well beyond its original bases in the impoverished suburbs of the capital like Apopa and Soyapango. It has now taken root in San Miguel, the country’s second-largest city, and the port of La Union, which they now utilize for trafficking drugs abroad. Nowadays, gangs threaten businesses large and small, demanding kickbacks for not shutting them down. They are even said to force the country’s public transportation system to pay millions of dollars annually in protection money.

Many observers believe that newly elected Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes will ease the Mano Duro policy and, instead, implement social programs aimed at dissuading the country’s youth into joining gangs. But, says Samuel Logan, an expert on Latin American gang culture, “The current administration still has not made an effort to to adopt a less punitive position in dealing with the gangs.” Ironically, one of the loudest advocates for rolling back Mano Duro ways Poveda, who photographed the El Salvaor civil war for TIME in the 1980s. Poveda said in a recent interview that El Salvador’s political corruption and abject poverty made most gang members “victims of society.”

But social programs are expensive for a country that depends for survival largely on remittances from citizens who work abroad, from relatives and friends in the United States. El Salvador’s local economy has been hit particularly hard in recent months due to the global economic downturn and slumping U.S. economy, says Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, creating “a society unable to fulfill expectations of a large portion of the population.” Says Birns, “El Salvador simply can’t afford a full-scale war on crime and gangs.” And so the Maras will continue to grow and export themselves.

El Salvador finds boat with Bangladeshi migrants

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — The Salvadoran navy says it has found 76 migrants from as far away as Bangladesh, Nepal and Eritrea aboard a boat in the Pacific.

Navy Capt. Maximiliano Corado says the boat was detected about 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the coast, and “without doubt the final destination was to arrive in the United States.”

The migrants include 25 Bangladeshis, 25 Nepalese, 21 Eritreans and five Ecuadoreans.

Corado said Sunday that the boat set sail a week ago from the Ecuadorean port of Manta.

He said all the migrants appeared to be undocumented, and all except the Ecuadoreans are to be deported.

The Ecuadoreans were turned over to police for investigation of possible migrant trafficking.