The Hollywood Kid - The Violent Life and Death of an MS-13 Hitman

The compelling story of the life and death of a Salvadoran gangster
As a boy, Miguel Ángel Tobar's small town in El Salvador was torn apart by guerrillas and US- backed death squads. Still a preteen, he joined a different kind of death squad—the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha—a clique of the Mara Salvatruchas, better known as MS-13. This international criminal organization began on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s, as Salvadoran children, whose families had fled their country's civil war, banded together to defend themselves from LA gangs. Denied refugee status, the Salvadorans found themselves pushed into the shadows and besieged by violence, and MS-13 itself mutated into a gang. When large-scale US deportations began, violence was exported from the United States to El Salvador, helping make it one of the world's deadliest countries and in turn propelling new waves of refugees northward.
The Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martinez and his...