At the End of the Maras

This episode of Central America in Minutes shares an audio column by El Faro special investigations reporter Carlos Martínez, with snapshots from our November 2025 photo essay, Twenty-Five Years of Horror. Escuchar en español.

I met this man in 2011 when I was reporting on the excavation of graves in a clandestine cemetery in Lourdes. The authorities had information that in the middle of that cornfield the gangs had buried a girl.

One of her killers had even come as a protected witness to relate how they strangled her while another gang member punched her stomach, so it would be easier to take the life out of her body.

Then, they buried her, perhaps already dead. That campesino had arrived with the hopes of discovering whether that girl was his daughter.

I repeat, with the hope.

We did not discover the cadaver of a girl, but that of many.

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I remember one in particular, whose job, I learned later, was to sell lollipops on the bus. When I met her, she was a skeleton with an open jaw, as if screaming, with a blue rope wrapped over what was once her neck.

Attached to the skull, she had locks of blond hair, a sign of adolescent flirtatiousness and, at her side, a cooler of colorful lollipops buried next to her bones.

A young man, a member of the Mara Salvatrucha-13, had become her boyfriend and had convinced her to steal her grandmother’s savings so they could flee together towards love.

But when she arrived at the predetermined location in the middle of the night, underneath a large amate tree, the guy was not alone. They robbed her, they killed her, and they buried her next to the colorful sweets she sold on the bus.

Later, we learned there were many other girls and young women and young men fertilizing those lush parcels of land.

Whenever the coroner discovered a body, as a skeleton or transformed into a white paste something like soap, the man repeated to the coroner that her daughter was like that, that that is the way she did her hair, and the clothes that she had matched. That she had a little necklace.

Then, he would return to squat down on the floor, the way campesinos squat with the soles of their feet firmly planted on the earth and the hands together over his knees.

With a heaviness, he silenced himself, as if he was hibernating, as if he was gone, and he swayed with the trees, waiting in vain.

I will never understand the immense darkness and endless emptiness behind the eyes of that man, who never thought to bother to ask the state, “I deserve a dignified job with which to educate and feed my family, right?”

Nor, “I at least deserve the certainty of a roof over my head or of not starving to death, right?”

Neither, “at least nobody will kill my loved ones, right?”

Neither, “at least when someone kills them, they will tell me who it was and why and they will pay for what they did, right?”

Right then, he only asked the state, made flesh through a coroner and a cop, “have you by chance seen my daughter, who is now just bone or soap?”

And the response was “no.”

I always imagined the end of the maras playing out differently. Since I am a pathological romantic, I imagined people in the street in some sort of march with drums and tears of joy. Or going to leave flowers at a monument for the victims of so much darkness.

Maybe the end of the maras could be, I thought, the moment when someone would have responded “yes” to the first questions of that campesino.

Yes, there is work for him.

Yes, there are things for you and yours to eat, and a school and a hospital and not just a hole in the ground.

But no.

At the end of the maras, there was a dictator. And two of every hundred of my countrymen ended up incarcerated without a trial, crammed, suffocated, starved, tortured, humiliated, killed.

At the end of the maras, we have the same country as always, in which we don’t all fit, in which some receive everything, and others nothing.

But there is something different. There was consensus that those girls buried in that cornfield were victims of something horrendous and incorrect. There was once consensus that the cruel needed to be pursued and punished.

Instead, today you can hear in the background that unbearable applause from the majority of Salvadorans who kneel before a golden calf who promises and lies while thousands of innocents are turned into bones and other mothers and other fathers tell me about the new holes in the homeland, searching for their children.

I am Carlos Martínez. I am still waiting for that march with drums and bliss.

This audio column was written by El Faro special investigations reporter Carlos Martínez, translated by William Palomo from Alma de Izote, and narrated by Roman Gressier. Sound design by Omnionn.