GUATEMALA CITY — To join one of Central America’s fierce street gangs,
Benky, a tiny young woman with heavy mascara and tattoos running up and down
her arms, had to have sex with a dozen or so of her homeboys one night. She
recalls sobbing uncontrollably when the last young man climbed off her and
everyone gathered around to congratulate her on becoming a full-fledged member
of the Mara Salvatrucha.
The gang leader ordered Benky, then 14, to rob buses, grab chains off
people’s necks and even kill a girl from a rival gang. She always complied,
although Benky said she was not completely sure if her rival had lived or died
from the bullet she fired into her back.
“I thought it would be like my family,” Benky said of her reason for joining
the gang, asking that her full name not be used. “I thought I’d get the love I
was missing. But they’d hit me. They ordered me around. They told me I had to
rob someone or kill someone, and I did it.”
When she tried to leave the gang five years later, her fellow gang members
shot her six times. The scars still visible on her body vouch for her story, as
do social workers who visited her during the nine months she spent in a
hospital.
Horrible as it is, Benky’s story is not unusual. Her lament is one heard
from young women in gangs across the region, and in interviews many told
similar tales of sexual initiation, beatings and being made to rob and kill to
earn their place.
New evidence suggests that girls like Benky, most 18 or younger, may make up
a larger share of Central America’s street gangs’ ranks than previously
suspected, many of them straddling the line between victims and victimizers.
“There are a lot more women and girls than anyone imagined,” said Ewa
Werner-Dahlin, the Swedish ambassador to Guatemala. “It’s a surprise to the
experts and it shows that authorities have been reacting to gangs without
really understanding them.”
Her government recently helped finance a study that included interviews with
more than 1,000 past and present gang members, male and female, across Central
America. It found that women might account for as much as 40 percent of the
region’s gang membership. Other gang experts put the percentage lower.
The street gangs of Central America, which have spun a web of violence
through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and even the United States, are
estimated to have as many as 100,000 members. Among them are only a small
number of girl-only gangs led by girls, experts say. Far more common was
Benky’s reality — a few young women in a sea of tough, sexually charged young
men.
It is abuse in their home lives that often propels them into the gangs in
the first place, and those gangs often continue the abuse under the veil of
protection. The gang is their adopted family, the women say, offering what
proves to be an unpredictable mix of affection and aggression.
“If a girl is getting abused by her father, the gang will step in and end
it,” said Gustavo Cifuentes, a streetwise former gang member with an extensive
criminal record who now works for Guatemala’s government trying to lure gang members
into leading better, law-abiding lives.
If the girls do not follow the directions of the leader, Mr. Cifuentes
acknowledged, a beating or even worse will be the result.
Male gang members say the girls play an essential role and not just as
sexual partners. They are able to move more freely on the streets when the
police are around, transporting drugs or guns. And bus robberies are best done,
veteran gangsters say, with a team of two males and two females, confusing
passengers about who is involved.
With four jail stints behind her, Benky, now 23, is experiencing a new phase
of life, but one that is proving almost as rough as all she has endured before.
Her wounds have left her limping through life, selling candy on the buses she
used to rob because her gang tattoos disqualify her from most other forms of
employment.
Most of those who made up her gang have died in shootouts with the police,
she said, but one of the few still living spotted her recently on the street
and yelled out a threat on her life. He had been surprised that she had
survived the attempt to kill her.
“It looks so good from the outside,” Benky said about why she had joined the
gang. To understand her sentiment, it helps to know that her childhood, like
those of many other girls in gangs, was grim.
She began living on the streets at the age of 6 with an older brother. She
is not sure what happened to her mother, but she recalls that her father had no
interest in taking care of them. Her brother was shot by a member of the 18th
Street gang, which prompted her to join the other giant gang in the region, the
Mara Salvatrucha, she said, looking for love and acceptance.
Benky had begun hanging around the gang and knew a few other girls who had
joined. They told her that all she had to do was talk to the leader and he
would induct her as well. Before she knew what was happening, though, her new
family members were disrobing and lining up to have sex with her.
The abuse ebbed when she began dating a gang member and he protected her
from the rest.
“He was very kind,” she said. “Sometimes, he’d go out and rob buses just to
get me what I wanted.”
Other girls in gangs, who also insisted on being identified only by their
first names or nicknames, also complained of lives ruined, close calls with
death, and nightmares about all the awful things they did for their gangs and
neighborhoods. It often begins, the girls say, with group sex, their minds
usually dulled with alcohol and marijuana.
Ana, 21, who spent four years as a member of the 18th Street gang, said she
was given a choice between group sex and a group beating when she joined
because she was friends with the gang leader’s girlfriend. “Other girls didn’t
get to choose,” she said. “I thought the beating was better. I’d have a black
eye and I’d be hurt but at least I wouldn’t get pregnant or get a disease.”
Her gang days were intense ones, she recalls, full of assaults and robberies
and other behavior she now regards as deviant.
“I learned to use a gun more or less but I was better with a knife,” she
said.
Her gang had a separate leader for the girls, and that tough young woman one
day ordered Ana to beat up a neighborhood girl whom the leader found annoying.
The girl happened to be a friend of Ana, but Ana said she did what she had to
do.
Another former gang member, a 17-year-old called Moncha, broke down as she
described how someone in her gang had shot her friend to death. “I lost my best
friend, and my own gang killed her,” she said. “That’s when I realized that if
they killed her, they could kill me, too. I got tired of living this life where
they might say, ‘Let’s go kill someone,’ and you had to go along.”
Ana had a somewhat easier time than others did putting her gang life behind
her. Her mother was dying from cancer, and that prompted her to move back home
and care for her around the clock. Her mother’s long illness allowed Ana to
make a break.
Her path was a little easier than Benky’s because she never got any tattoos
to identify herself as a gang member. Eschewing tattoos is becoming more and
more common as Central American governments crack down on gangs with “mano
dura,” or firm hand, policies, gang experts say.
At Santa Teresa prison, a sprawling detention center for women in Guatemala
City, signs of both hope and despair can be found. Bianca, 24, a tough member
of the 18th Street gang who is locked up on drug charges, showed off her bold
gang tattoos and spoke of protecting her neighborhood. She stood on the
sideline during the jailyard soccer game put on by Guatemala’s Ministry of
Culture and Sports.
But another inmate, 25, who goes by the nickname Happy, said she intended to
leave the gang when she finished her sentence for robbing buses. In her first
years behind bars, members of the gang would come by to visit, she said. But that
eventually faded. Nowadays, five years in, it is only her mother who brings her
food and clothes.
“She’s family,” Happy said. “It took years but I finally learned that.”