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The Hollywood Kid
The Violent Life and Violent Death of an MS-13 Hitman
1 of 1 copy available
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 anthropologist brother Juan José Martínez got to know the Hollywood Kid when he informed on MS-13. In his hideaway shack, he recounted a life of killing—a death toll of more than fifty rival gang members—until his own murder ended the story. Vivid and violent, The Hollywood Kid brings a brutal world to life, illustrating the geopolitical forces propelling a country toward ever more vicious extremes.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 1, 2019 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781786634924
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781786634924
- File size: 1256 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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September 1, 2019
An MS-13 hit man-turned-informer provides extraordinary access to the co-authors before meeting his fate. "This is a book about scraps," write journalist Óscar Martínez (A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America, 2016, etc.) and his ethnographer brother, Juan José Martínez. By "scraps," they don't mean the colloquial fights, though their narrative is filled with those, many of them lethal. They mean discards, "leftovers that the enormous machinery of the United States chucks across its borders." In a vicious cycle, the violence bred in Los Angeles, where gang warfare pits ethnicities against each other, returns home through deportation and spreads and increases through international networks to become a threat to governments in both countries. Though Miguel Ángel Tobar never left his native El Salvador or came close to the Hollywood that earned him his nickname, he was a murderer before his teens, ultimately responsible for so much of the bloodshed that would make his homeland "the most murderous country in the world." Yet this story is as much about the international forces that shaped the killer who operated below the international radar as the violence spread by U.S. policies that support the repressive regimes in the countries where gang members can recruit acolytes to form larger and deadlier gangs. Caught in this cycle, Tobar turned informer for the police, testifying at trials behind a mask, his voice doctored, though his identity apparently wasn't much in doubt. Between police corruption that spread to prisons that were controlled by the gangs and the brutal justice that gang loyalty demanded, the fate of the informer was never in doubt, either--it wasn't a matter of if, but when. The immediate narrative both begins and ends with Tobar's death, but in between, he shares his story of a life that offered few choices, none of them good. An account that makes it difficult for American readers to ignore their country's role in violence south of the border.COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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September 1, 2019
An MS-13 hit man-turned-informer provides extraordinary access to the co-authors before meeting his fate. "This is a book about scraps," write journalist �scar Mart�nez (A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America, 2016, etc.) and his ethnographer brother, Juan Jos� Mart�nez. By "scraps," they don't mean the colloquial fights, though their narrative is filled with those, many of them lethal. They mean discards, "leftovers that the enormous machinery of the United States chucks across its borders." In a vicious cycle, the violence bred in Los Angeles, where gang warfare pits ethnicities against each other, returns home through deportation and spreads and increases through international networks to become a threat to governments in both countries. Though Miguel �ngel Tobar never left his native El Salvador or came close to the Hollywood that earned him his nickname, he was a murderer before his teens, ultimately responsible for so much of the bloodshed that would make his homeland "the most murderous country in the world." Yet this story is as much about the international forces that shaped the killer who operated below the international radar as the violence spread by U.S. policies that support the repressive regimes in the countries where gang members can recruit acolytes to form larger and deadlier gangs. Caught in this cycle, Tobar turned informer for the police, testifying at trials behind a mask, his voice doctored, though his identity apparently wasn't much in doubt. Between police corruption that spread to prisons that were controlled by the gangs and the brutal justice that gang loyalty demanded, the fate of the informer was never in doubt, either--it wasn't a matter of if, but when. The immediate narrative both begins and ends with Tobar's death, but in between, he shares his story of a life that offered few choices, none of them good. An account that makes it difficult for American readers to ignore their country's role in violence south of the border.COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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