Gerardo Lopez on the History of MS-13 and His Experience as a Former Member (Full Interview)

Alright, here we go, we have Gerardo López,

former

member

of the notorious MS-13 gang. This is the first time we've

interview

ed anyone from MS-13, so I just want to go into the

history

of the gang first because not only are MS-13 known for extreme violence, but they're also known for being selected by Donald Trump for deporting South Americans in general and children in particular without due process, so let's go ahead and get into the whole story, so ms- 13 started in the 1980s, right, okay, and we talk about the situations that caused that The group will be formed initially.

Well, I guess to talk about Emerson's team, we first have to understand the

history

of what happened in Salvador, which was the white people who decided uh. from ms-13 or intrepid, even before the civil war began in the hall, it was a right-wing government that was fighting against taking land from the compensators, from the farmers if you wanted in Salvador and they got tired of that, so they started to unionize. and they began to form their own groups and fight against the government and this happened for several years and as time went on there were other uprisings that emerged in Latin America also fighting against their government because they also felt oppressed and during this time it was just chaos and El Salvador and the United States intervened because they were afraid that these Latin American countries would become communist or that during that time the Soviet Union influenced the scenario for them to become communist countries, so they started financing this war civil and After this award, there were hundreds of thousands of deaths when children went to school or when they were in the neighborhood they saw these war bombs exploding walking down the street seeing decapitated bodies it could have been their friends, their family.

member

s or people that they just didn't know but they saw all this violence all together and late at night, government military soldiers would go into people's homes and try to take their children away from them so they could join the army so these were children who They were 10 11 12 years old who were now being taught all these things that the government was trained by the school of the Americas in the United States that all this training reached El Salvador which was a brutal training so to speak, so The parents had no choice but to move on and flee to Salvador to a safer country, so they were refugees and they came to the United States and some of these children were sent alone to go to their aunts or their uncles and many of their children, their parents. had already died, so they went to a neighborhood in practically the city of Pico Union Korea in Los Angeles, where there was already violence, there were already gangs and there were already drugs and there weren't many opportunities for a young man to be able to survive all of those things that were happening, so when the gang formed, these kids started going to school, so to speak, and when they started going to sleep before the gang, excuse me, these kids started going to school and was being done to them. funny that's why their dialect now the dialect of salvador is very different from the dialect of mexico if a child from el salvador says to someone hey to a mexican the mexican is going to be very offended in the same way if a mexican child says to a Salvadoran The Salvadoran kid is going to move on and be offended and then there's the American Chicano kid who speaks both languages ​​and the Chicano is going to move on and be the kid who was born in the United States but his parents are from some Latin American country. so there is harassment because of the way they spoke and it was a strange culture for the people who lived in the neighborhood, not only the Chicanos were Mexican but also children from other different countries, it was a kind of kind of culture, so to speak, and over there.

It was a group of kids, not all Salvadoran kids, there are a lot of Salvadoran kids that didn't join MS, but the way it started was the Sierra recording. The children began to form their own group called MSS, which was the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners and gang. It started out as a protection against bullying, so to speak, against other people within the schools and these kids started fighting back, but it consisted of a rock, it was more of a heavy metal gang where they went to these concerts like the light likes uh black . sabbath acdc and when they went to the concerts they saw people who had their jeans torn, their shirts with their tongues hanging out their long hair headbanging and doing what it was like the ms sign so they adapted that heavy metal poster which turned out to be the famous ms sign um, so to speak, when they were on the street, now they need it, now you have this group and they started hanging out on the street and other gangs realized that they were rising up, so to speak. smoking weed to heavy metal now they were being assaulted by these other gang members, so to speak, so they started fighting back, they started getting locked up now, when they started getting locked up, they were still made fun of because they said they were in a gang , so to speak, but they look like heavy metal people, people who went to those concerts and right there, this is the movie, this is the moment when the colors of the movie came out, you just saw the dress, the Nike shoes Cuts, the cock and the pants, the Pendleton shirts, the tattoos, the shaved heads, so from there they began to adapt this style and the tattoos as well and they also began to learn the language, if you want English, because many of these children They came when they were 10, 11 or 12.

And when they were deported back to El Salvador, when they got off that plane from Salvador, it was like they were rock stars coming off that plane and the kids started seeing them because they were dressed like cholos. from the movies, they had tattoos and they also spoke English, so of course the girls there, you know, flocked to them. The boys saw the other girls approaching them and wanted to move on and be like them, so when they landed in El Salvador it was a completely different culture for them because many of them had already been in the United States for several years, that It was their home and Salvador was now a strange country for them because their family ties were not as deep as if they wanted it because many members of their family had died in the civil war, so they had children and then they had their life in the United States.

United States of America, so their plan was always to try to move on and come back, but at the same time there were people who started. to jump people in Salvador and that's how the gang continued to grow and grow, so the name ms13, uh, what does it mean?, so ms is m is mara and the s is salvatrucha and 13 is obviously the thirteenth letter of the alphabet . for the letter m, okay, does that have anything to do with army ants? Well you see what I'm saying, there is a marabunta, also known as an army ant that is considered one of the deadliest animals in nature, it will basically eat anything, attack anything and just go through anything, meat, You know, plants, whatever to get to what they wanted, is there some kind of connection to that?

You know, if you continue to look at the history of what else Stanford or MS, I remember sitting on couches like this right here and people go ahead and talk and try to make pictures of something and try to portray it even more and more, you know , go Go. spicier to whatever it was, but there was a little talk about those ants too, um too, but mata in general is a slang word in El Salvador like saying where you're going where the mara is like where the group is, like that that mara was even Before the prize that's a Salvadoran war that was even formed before MS started that's how they got the mara and salvatrucha is slang for Salvadoran okay so to join the gang there is something called rhythm on the right and lasts 13 seconds in the right place.

Basically, everyone else in the gang will beat you up and after 13 seconds you will be considered part of the gang. Okay, now you know you talked about hand signals. I guess I called the devil's head. Well, again, it consisted of the hand signal. It was copied from the heavy metal rock concerts that were there in Salvador, so no one knew what it really was. They just saw everyone doing like that and in some Metallica stuff, that was the time when Metallica music was considered satanic, very diabolical, yeah. mostly smorgasbord team crap, shout out the devil, all that, like yeah satanic imagery and heavy metal went together in the 80s so remember all that so when you do this it's like that too and then it works good. with within the game because if they consist of those times with the devil's horns and then it consists of if you put the hand sign backwards it is also an m, ah, I understood you now along with the hand signs came the tattoos now Even in 2020 seeing a rapper with a lot of tattoos on his face is considered normal, but back then you never saw him well and the ms-13 boys were like the first ones I saw with very heavy face tattoos, eddie ballet.

I remember being in youth facilities in In early 1991, when I was locked up in the Los Ballerinos Silmar juvenile facility, I went to the camp and there were a lot of people there since those face tattoos there were some Easter gangs that already had them . a lot of the people who were actually known for face tattoos with the 18th street crowd as well, and again, that was just another step that ms-13 started to imitate, if you will, from other gangs to try to go ahead and fit in. because again, the gang didn't start in El Salvador, the gang started with the cultural influence in the United States and if you remember, I mean back in the day, you know we're talking about the '60s or something, the first one.

A gang member's tattoo was probably like a tear or a smile, now cry later or brown pride, so they started copying the tattoos from there, but yeah, absolutely, MS-13 took it to the top, so say it, face to face, yes. I mean, you see, you know, more covering the face of the right person, you see the horns right on the head, right, you see the 13, uh, you know, the entire faces of tattooed people, that's considered a normal thing with more -13, while it's not as common when you see like the Mexican mafia or the crips and bloods and so on, well I would say regardless of the horns, but there, but you, I mean, you make a great point because yeah I see that, but going into the things that I was seeing, let's say in Los Angeles, there are some people that you see and know with MS tattoos, but when you go to El Salvador now we're talking about MS-13 and Salado, so yes, absolutely There are all, almost a lot of people there, have those MS tattoos on their faces.

Well, these kids come to the US, get in trouble, and then get deported back to El Salvador. Now, before MS-13, there was nothing significant. the gangs in el salvador are correct, from what i understand, but then once MS-13 starts coming back, they were the rock stars, right, they had all this cool American stuff about them and everyone started copying them, ya you know, and not copy them. but I want to participate in what you are doing now during this time. It's an interesting time in El Salvador because I guess there's something called the epic chapel peace accords.

Did I say that right? Basically, after the revolution was over, you know, the Salvadoran government was required to stop using the standing army standard as a police force and form a new national police service, but the ruling party, uh arena, was kind of descendant of wartime military government. So there was actually a delay in creating the national police force and when it was finally formed, there was sort of a lack of police in El Salvador, so while the MS-13 guys were amassing power, there was no presence. real police, right, really going against them is that accurate in terms of what's going on, yes, well, absolutely, the thing is also that they were just trying to recover from a civil war, so to speak, we faced to poverty.

Um, a lot of murders of developers trying to even reconnect families or someone trying to even survive a day of what they're going to eat or where they're going to move on and live and now with all these deportations happening now Mrs. has this um, now the company started right now and it's an uprising and they don't know how to move forward and deal with or manage the culture of the clan, so absolutely the members of the company took advantage of that to continue starting that uprising there in Salvador due to lack of resources on their law enforcement rights as well, um too, but they also started to figure out how to move forward in the fight, they started to create these government groups that were like the black shadow that we have now. the military groups that are called elimination means that they are there mainly to hunt down members of ms-13, so if you go, there was a time when they deported people and the united savior said we can't handle it this, how are we going to handle these problems, so if you were from MS and you weregetting off that plane, the Sombra Nega militants would go ahead and disappear you as soon as you got off that plane and they would go ahead and kill you. and if you were with your family, they would kill them too.

But. I've been watching a lot of documentaries about this and you know you see the guys who basically end up in El Salvador and say, "Hey, man." Uh my friend was deported six months ago and they killed him right away so they don't know what to do they may not want to join ms-13 again but they fear for their lives against the police so they end up joining the gang just to survive, so it's a no-win situation, it's so along with You know, the civil war had just ended in El Salvador, there were all these weapons all over the country and it wasn't really controlled at that time, so you had all these weapons, all this heavy ammunition, and basically the MS-13 became arms dealers.

During this time it is that exact. I have never heard anything to such an extent that they have access to some weapons. Absolutely, but I think we also have to understand where these weapons came from. They didn't come from El Salvador, they came from the United States, yes. and i'm going to get into that, it's really ironic how you know the united states has this problem with ms-13, but they created ms-13 indirectly, so a lot of it is like there's chaos in el salvador now. Now, who are we going to go ahead and blame these things?

MS-13 has the fault to some extent of absolutely starting the gang there, but also what was the chance for a kid to even do it? wanting to move on and get a gun and defend himself when he saw that there weren't any kind of youth activities or that there were people in sweatshop jobs or sweatshops who were paid too little to be able to move forward and survive now. Violence is one of the main attributes of MS-13, but not just violence, but violence involving minors seems to be a major issue since the victims are minors and the suspects in the actual murders are also minors.

Is there such a focus on children? Well, it's gang culture. I think when I was 15 or 16, the people we mugged or attacked were kids who killed kids, and when you start thinking about MS-13, sometimes you get this image. than you have been portrayed as the evil looking gang member with tattoos on his face and you will think that this person is in his 20s and 30s and kills these kids, but in reality he is a young man from a certain gang who fights children of ms 13 2, which Many times we forget that these children of these MS-13 people are also children as a whole and have committed some horrible crimes as well and the victims that they commit.

I see that the things that you're probably talking about recently on the east coast are kids that are having situations with other kids in some schools that are the same age and the way that these kids are letting out their aggression or The way that they saw the aftermath of the wars and El Salvador is through that degree of violence, well, MS-13 begins to spread to other South American and Central American countries, right, and the violence was really out of the ordinary. A situation in Honduras where I guess the Honduran government wanted to reinstate the death penalty and there was a situation in 2004 where an entire bus was sprayed, 28 people died, 14 were injured, most of the passengers were women and children , right?, six six. different people just sprayed the bus with guns and then another person got on the bus and started executing people, you know, a guy named juan batista jiménez, he was accused of planning the massacre and then when he got to prison he was actually murdered by others members of ms-13, you know, buses would be burned in broad daylight for going to the wrong neighborhoods, police would be targeted, government officials would be targeted, you know, it got to the point where the court Supreme Court of El Salvador actually classified them as a terrorist organization and there really were situations where there were presidents in El Salvador that would have to negotiate with MS-13 to try to reduce the murders and so on, so it really was as big as MS - 13 was in the US in El Salvador, it became a major entity and you're familiar with all this kind of stuff, but why do you think it became so big in El Salvador considering it started a lot in La Well?

This consists of the deportations that we had of immigrant people who were deported if they had any ties to uh, if they committed some type of crime like in 1995 or 1996, you would go ahead and be deported even if it was some type of misdemeanor and when you continue to have oppression to try to move on and solve a problem, one gang is famous for ms-13, but your thing is your strategy is to just go ahead and try to kill them or try to move on and kick them out of that town they're just going to go ahead and go to a nearby town but no one went ahead and focused on the rehabilitation of the gang member, no one went forward and focused on what is causing MS-13 to continue. to spread the word if there was any lack, the lack of opportunities for resources, jobs, even mental health, um social services in Salvador, there really was nothing like that, so so that we can prevent the ms-13 from continuing to form, we have move on and give opportunities to other kids who want to move on and join other gangs and give them opportunities to think about not joining that gang and say: you know what, here's this job, here's this, uh, easy, this facility youthful, here is this. mental health services or here is this um this curriculum for this program that will help you through the healing that you grew up seeing throughout your life or how you move on and um father or how you move on and be a good father or a Good citizen of society, if you will, we have to move forward and start focusing on rehabilitation and again in Salvador there was and there was none of that, so it will continue to form, whether it be MS-13 or other gangs.

It's just going to continue to grow, as well as without those resources, well, ms-13 was growing but it was kind of disorganized, I guess it was clicks, you know, friends doing various things, but then in 1990, a guy named Ernesto Deras came along. Are you familiar with it? Maybe you've heard of him, so he was actually a

former

member of the Salvadoran special forces and he was trained in Panama by the United States Green Berets mm-hmm and once he joined MS-13 and started becoming a leader, he actually used the military training he learned from the US to organize MS-13 into a more organized gang, no, no, I don't know about this, I haven't heard of it, so I don't know .

I think one person will have that group to go ahead and organize things like that. You always hear about MS-13 about militants joining the gang. Yeah, when I grew up I would probably say one to two percent, maybe where they had some kind of militant influence, but there wouldn't be a single person who would go ahead and say, well, now this is a whole military operation because if that were started in Salvador then it probably would have come to the US and, well, this was actually in the US. From what I understand in the United States, I think so, no, no, no, no, okay, so maybe I'm wrong about that, although it's very ironic that the Green Berets taught a guy who ended up using that in ms-13 how good The school of the Americas taught a lot, excuse me, Beef inaudib street gang 18 started well, started, there are different stories right there, they are like folktales, so to speak, and the one that is probably the most accurate for me. and like gang things, sometimes it starts with a girl, you took my girl, that's what she's messing with, right, because at one time 18th Street and MS-13 were really friendly between yeah, right, and then a situation with a girl, a situation with a A girl happened at a party and I think it was a member of 18th Street that got shot and went ahead and started the war between MS and 18th Streets. and that has now spread to other countries as well, so in El Salvador you have 18th street and then you start with everything, you have 18 streets, you have 18 streets and yes, in different parts, different parts of the world and different parts of the world, um also, and this war, um, probably about nine or ten years ago there was peace. treaty in El Salvador where the government of Salvador was negotiating with Mrs. 13 members and 18 members of the street right there and they were starting to do it and what they were asking was what I just said now about mental health services, better food or power for both of them to see their families and also some kind of better clothes and when you are in Salvador, I mean, you wear what you wear for weeks and months, so as soon as the United States found out about that the government was trying or negotiating with the gang members the government and el salvador went ahead and got scared and said no we are not dealing with them and that's when the talks stopped and in salvador I think the homicide rate there was um they were around 15 a day when the peace treaty started, you had um one or two a day, which I mean, that's still bad, I mean, someone being killed is still bad, but you could see that the demographics you know changed as well. , I mean, it's just It's interesting how these wars will start with a girl like, for example, in the war between the 60s and the hra gangsters, and that started with a girl that the girl was dating, you meet a guy From each of these teams, a fight broke out. someone was killed, then the other side retaliated and then 30 years later you have literally hundreds of people killed by a couple of teenagers fighting over a girl who, as you know, probably messed with someone else right after, uh, and a Sometimes I even tried to understand what that girl was going through.

You know her. Why was she there? What was the pain she was also going through? Yeah, well, in 2004, the FBI created a national MS-13 gang task force. So they started working with law enforcement in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, and they actually had an office in El Salvador to deal with this. In 2008, they set up a series of arrests and crackdowns around the world that involved about 6,000 police officers in five different countries, uh, 650 people were detained, so you started to see these raids around the world that were coordinated, so it became something very serious. Do you remember this time?

I remember this time and I remember, let me give you a little bit you know, just to talk a little bit about the story that I remember when I got out of the California youth authority in 1997. I was about 18 or 19 years old and I was walking down my street in a city in Korea . old neighborhood and any time before I got locked up, you would see five, you know, 10 ms, 13 members late at night hanging on certain blocks and during this time, when I came out, I was wondering: where did it happen to all of them my friends?

It was a turf war between MS-13 and MS-13 in 1996 over a certain street that was drug dealing and a lot of people wanted to be in that and a lot of people didn't want to go ahead with drug dealing. and say you know what this is, click art, go to your click, sway, ms and ms started fighting, there were deaths, there were murders and some people from ms didn't want to be a part of it so a lot of them They moved, some of them just calmed down, stopped hitting and a lot of them got locked up too and I remember the wall accident officers would come up and stop me and say, damn, my nickname, so to speak, what happened to MS-13, that turf war continued. and I killed you guys and I was like wow and you're only going to see a few friends so as time went on a few years later the FBI waged war on the gangs so you need a perfect villain for that many times. the immigrant community is the one that gets the short end of the stick from generation to generation, so this villain they created from the gang was the person who had the ms tattoo, so they started showing the person of ms-13 the tattoos on the on television just covering this person's face everywhere thinking that this person lived right next to you when many times these members of ms these tattoos were people who were in prison and in the savior who never They had set foot in the United States. um states, but of course there were also violent members of ms-13 in the united states, so now when they continue to plaster ms's crimes, they started putting him on a pedestal and then national geographic came out with the biggest one in the world. and the most dangerous gang with tattoos on their faces too and the kids who wanted to be in a gang, they say, wow, well, let's go ahead and join a gang that we want to be the biggest one and that was being portrayed in the wrong way. worst way.

The baddest gang, that's why I often go ahead and say, when asked, MS-13, the biggest gang in the world and the most dangerous, no, and you also need to go and stop promoting and putting on a pedestal so because then you have tothese children who come from broken families who do want to move on and giants who end up want to move on and do that, but in 2003 there was also an informant from ms where there were other uprisings there. He was an FBI informant and there were other uprisings in different states in the United States and there was no connection between them and California or El Salvador, it was Central American people who were flocking to other countries.

Sorry, two different states. And now, again, not everyone got into MS, but when these kids did they also felt isolated and didn't have that culture shock like MSS started in the 1980s, they started raising them and said, oh yeah, so I didn't even They involved them. or nothing, they just claimed it because they were from El Salvador, so this informant from 2003 2004 played against the FBI.and paid for their plane tickets, they received an annual salary of 50 to 60 to go ahead and see what was happening with these others groups, so what did this guy do? He practically connected the dots from one state to the next and they undertook to connect the ultimate dog. to el salvador that line and that's how it started to get more organized, so to speak, by 2011, the task force had made 20,000 arrests by 2012, the US treasury department froze all assets with anything related with MS-13 and actually included MS-13 as a transnational criminal organization, which took it to the next level and then in 2015, El Salvador had the highest national homicide rate per capita in the world.

More people were being murdered in El Salvador. We're getting murdered in El Salvador than any other place on earth, yeah, horrible, uh, I mean, that's kind of mind-blowing when you think about it, there's a lot of countries out there, there's a lot of war-torn countries, there's a lot of gangs all over. the planet, each country has its own gang and so on, but el salvador in particular, ms-13 being the largest gang in el salvador, is contributing to more people being killed than anywhere else when you hear that, how does it make you feel good? It's horrible, you know?

And given all of that, it goes back to the pain of saying how do we fix this because I remember even in Los Angeles I saw those murders, I mean, there were years in Los Angeles where there were three four or 500. people a year being murdered you know a lot of my own friends and you know my enemies too, um too, but it all goes back to that, it's almost like an everyday thing, it doesn't look, it looks like the cool movie, uh, Groundhog Day is over. and over and over again and we go on and say the murders the murders the chaos but we don't need to start talking more and more and put more and more efforts into rehabilitation tactics and give people opportunities so they don't move on and and join a gang , but it feels like sometimes you know us as a country within the United States, we want our hand in different things and we try to fix something that's already broken and we end up destroying it, yeah, for the same reason.

The continued tactics that we have continued to use and from generation to generation in Latin America were the third, whether it was against MS-13 or just different uprisings that they feel like a threat or that we feel like a threat to overcome. or become a communist country, so to speak, we are starting to see how we are going to go ahead and fix a lot of things, the same tactics of oppression and oppression continue and they are the same tactics that we continue. to use in our own country here in the united states of oppression and oppression when it comes to the situation of how do we go ahead and get that guy out of a gang, let's go ahead and lock them up, let's go ahead and throw away the key. and when this person goes into prison to try to move on and find some form of rehabilitation, there is none, there is none right, so how are you going to move forward and get out of prison and be a functioning member of society, if Do you want it that way?

Aren't we focusing on the preventive part? We're just focusing on the insignificant punitive part, so to speak. Yeah, well, eventually MS-13 spread to New York and Long Island and there were a series of murders that happened and the weapon of choice was a machete, you know? The New York district attorney said the crimes you're talking about are brutal. The weapon of choice is a machete. You end up seeing people with injuries you've never seen before. You know, limbs. Cut up, those are the bodies, it looks like they were recovering, um, and these weren't adults, they were like girls, teenagers, they were being cut up and killed in the forest, right, uh, the guys that were captured would have been between 13 and 14 years, so it's basically kids hacking kids right when you hear about these stories, knowing that this is an organization that you were once connected to, how does that make you feel?

It's horrible if you do when you go ahead and hear something like that. In fact, I went to those high schools where it was like what happened that, oh, really yeah, then there was a New York police commissioner who found out that I was there doing work through my organization and they approached me and my my lifelong mentor alex sanchez was part of homie sunil he is also a former member of ms-13 and we went to school and talked to these kids and had a healing circle for them and many times strategy that right . many of the government officials went in there, caught the children and deported who they felt and who they felt were involved, many of them even consisted of someone who with a Salvadoran background there on facebook they were just showing pride in the Salvadoran flag um but it's horrible when you hear something like that not only in ms 13 but even when you hear these stories in general with other gangs or you hear stories like that That doesn't even have to do with gangs right, it's just a human being attacking another human being, but Let's even go to the history of the machete because the history of the machete is constantly portrayed in the news and media.

It consisted and in the days and this even before the civil war began, where it is a tool that the farmers used in Salvador to reach the forest of Florida so that they would not go ahead and scrape their hands and when that machete tool when the uprising, you know, the government came and did it, the farmers didn't have these weapons or guns, the way they knew how to defend me what was the easiest access to them, which was the machete, so to speak, and then the machete and The children remember the machete as when they were children in El Salvador and when they came here and the MS members saw that and now you have a gang that is rising up but you still don't have the resources to go ahead and buy the weapons.

Other gangs already had weapons and they went ahead and tried to attack and to defend themselves they remembered how these farmers do defend themselves and that was when they started to use the machete but if you go into the Even in the history of the machete, how it has been used , it has been used throughout Latin America, not only for killing, but it is a famous tool that has been used in our country for agriculture or for branches or for cutting things that don't necessarily mean um. people, but even to go a step further, the machete has always been glorified even when Jason had it in the movie, if you understand, probably the 13th, yeah, the 13th, if it was a, I mean, I was scared when he used to See Jason. that's a movie, this is absolutely, this is real life, but then it comes into play, but a lot of times in movies we have to move on and be careful what we move forward with and what people portray, remember when it came out the color film. with the gangster image, you know, people wanted to go ahead and copy that, um, that image too, but absolutely any murder, you know, that a kid does with everything, I mean it, it hurts you, right? , you know, it devastates you.

So much for someone actually going to go ahead and get to that level of attacking someone with a machete or any kind of way if, yeah, well, MS-13 reportedly comprises about one percent of the total gangs in the United States. US, but the Republicans took It was their turn to actually use MS-13 as a tool to try to change the laws that they wanted to change, so you know, the Republicans started accusing the Democrats of being responsible for the violence of MS-13, you know, and they started calling for stricter immigration policies because of MS-13, right, they started arguing that sanctuary cities, which are places that don't deport people, were contributing to MS-13 activity. -13, although you know they did studies on this and there is really no relationship between the two.

In fact, in the sanctuary cities there is less crime than what they found, but it started going with this whole narrative that Trump started getting up and running when he was actually trying to get elected and then once he became president, MS-13 became a leader. priority of the justice department, did you feel that when that started happening? Well, I remember watching it and I, you know, shook my head and thought I can't believe this is happening like history is starting to repeat itself. because that's the same thing I saw on TV when the MS-13 gang started to die out in Los Angeles and then the gang war started and now they were putting it on a pedestal, so to speak, so it's kind of a story that is repeated. in itself and not only are you using that image of ms-13 but, as you say, it is being portrayed to go ahead and say this is what all immigrants look like, this is what all Salvadorans look like if we go ahead and um, don't do it. whether or not we build the wall, all these people are going to come and make you feel like they're in your backyard or right next to you, absolutely like I said, it's been a tool to use immigrants, um. people of color as scapegoats, but this time they were um, you know, they took it to a whole different level and said, you know what, let's just go ahead and paint this face too and say this is the immigrant face if you will. and then we put in the tattoos of ms-13, who was a real person, right, yeah, I mean, in the process you started to see some very disturbing things, so the Trump organization started using this ms-13, uh, reason to start. locking up the kids, you know, there was an interesting documentary I saw on PBS, there was a kid named Junior who was in New York, uh, on Long Island, someone accused him of being a member of MS-13, do you know when they happened?

In the investigation they discovered that he had written 503, which is the area code of El Salvador, and in his notebook one time, you know, they suspended him and told him, you know, look, just sign this little paper that says you're ms- 13 and you can come. We're going back to school next year, right, these are all undocumented immigrants, so no one really wants to go to the police, no one really wants to have the law involved, they just want to live quietly in the US and not be deported, so that with this with this. Here a teenager signed the document and before he knew it he was sent to a detention center for six months he just tried to commit suicide he tried to hang himself so then they stripped him naked and they did it he basically sat naked in his cell then he found a glass and tried to cut off his arm to bleed out, the ACLU came and filed a lawsuit on his behalf and one of the judges in California sided with Trump and then they started reviewing all the Actually, 26 children had their charges dropped and His charges were dropped, but this is someone who was just a good church-going kid who got caught up in the system and this started happening over and over again where kids were being separated from their families and being thrown into this gangsta pile of dangerous people for Trump to really get rid of what he felt were undesirables in this country, what's your take on that?

Well, have you heard stories like this? And I remember reading about that story too, um, also about kids from Central America, you know, let's say, let's say those kids in that school were obviously kids that also had that kind of culture right there and the people that they could identify with, um it was the Salvadoran kids sometimes we have culture clashes between the Mexican kids we had over here, the Salvadoran kids over here, the African Americans over here, the Chicano kids over here, so this kid automatically flocked to the Salvadoran kids and Unfortunately there was more influence, right? there and now, when you hear kids say I'm from ms um, i don't jump to the conclusion that it's this machete-wielding member of ms-13 who's going to go ahead and cut you multiple times, it's these kids who want to get that influence within the school, probably to look good to a girl or to go look at his classmates and say "oh yeah, by the way, I'm from school 13 too and these other kids will go and have that sense ". of belonging that says self-acceptance another part of a group where they feel that they move on and belong and then with these things she this boy said to a teacher at school if you will do it hey, I'm from ms and I'm from ms13 and that's how it happened that, but I have seen many stories where even when I go through athat happened.

The reason that judge started denying all emotions is so people wouldn't, oh, might as well be one. So that people wouldn't be like that, touching something similar, so that they wouldn't be able to use my jurisprudence as well and you know, thousands of people would have been free, I mean, this court thing had all kinds of different precedents. spaces oh man, there were all kinds of different things that people who did, you know, life sentences for something they didn't do, they could go ahead and use and it was also try to go ahead and block my uh my civil suit like um like Well you know so I go out and then I'm trying to find a lawyer to get the civil lawsuit and they all told me the same thing.

Anyway, lawyers look, we could sue the police, but I'm not going to pursue. the feds because then they are going to go ahead and come after us or I will have this case and I don't want to make the feds angry about this client here, so many times I was blackballed for having the suit and finally I got a lawyer and he presented it as a page, you know, I mean, it was great that he had the courage to come forward with something, but it was like a page and the government came back with like a 30 or 40 page rebuttal to all the lawyers and FBI agents, the government appoints them a lawyer and then they had their own lawyers too, yeah, so you get out of that jail cell, you're not married anymore, right?

They're your kids. Still in the area or moved away. I have no idea. I haven't had contact with them for about a year. My friend picked me up. Oh, and before I waited, before I left, I said, "It's okay, I'm free." you know I'm going out they didn't take me to court the judge signed they didn't have the audacity you know the decency to take me to court and apologize you know it's almost like you wanted the super bowl and there was no one there to go ahead and see what yeah, right, so they try to shut it down. they left, then they signed the document to free me, the CEO stepped forward from his clay, his case is over, the Denver mail was dismissed, I go out, I have my, you know, all the legal documents I go out and the people there.

If they like you, no, everyone starts cheering, right, everyone starts cheering. I leave and before I leave, the CEO says oh hello, we have a problem. I ask him: what's wrong? He's like there's a bill for about 500 dollars. He is stopping you as if you really did it for 48 years and I was in a fight, he was a lawyer, just another prison lawyer and I thought that the reason I couldn't pay that fine was because they locked me up. and it built up to 500, so I called my friend here sitting next to me and he went ahead and paid the ticket for me, yeah, you know, and you know, I walked out and he was the one who did that. um she told me I was like hey, take me to my mom's house, I'm going to pick my wife's house, I'm going to see my kids and she's like, hey, man, um, you haven't heard, what's up?

Yes, she is engaged to someone else. you're going to come up you're going to come live with me you know I have an extra room and I was like man you know and everything is going through your head is this real it's happening this is really you know I just got over this case and you know you're going through all that and I was like "okay, let us know, let's go" and then it consisted of me being um, you know, coming out and you know even the pt is the one about that. Event, I started seeing cars following behind us, going to the place where I started watching the scenes thinking it was all just a wire tapped, so to speak, I remember my friends came out, you know, friends you know didn't. t gangbanger, they say, oh you know, people still copy because of their nicknames, where are you from the game like Claire is out, okay man, let's have a car and raid, I'm going to bring 20 pounds of car lo as soon as possible and They constantly know that we wait for the Dodgers to go to Coor Sphere Field plays against the Rockies and everyone was trying to take it away from their friends from time to time for Rocky games.

Hey, we have four tickets. Do you want to come with us? You mean tickets now we're going to sit in this hallway we're going to have fun so I'm going to go over the details after a while my phone never sorted like this fool was tripping aren't we going to go ahead and call him? Well, your friend Alex Sanchez, the one who really convinced you to leave the gang, was finally indicted in 2009 on extortion charges and investigators said he lived a double life and participated in the criminal side of gang life. Even though he publicly condemned him, right?

He's still locked up? No Alex beat his case. Oh, he actually filed his case. Did you think it was retaliation in the same way that it was okay during that time with the Rampart accident scandal since he was the the leader of the friends of nests the figure of the wall accident we get rid of alex um and the and and the we get him out of here deport him so that's the end of uh homie sunils that's when I stepped forward they became the face of homie sunils yes you I will, but yeah, they violated the LAPD's special ordinance 40 on violence, which It means they can't turn anyone over to the INS, so he was in INS custody and that's when all that is we have people like Senator Tom Hayden to back us up. has people, you know, even if celebrities say things of that nature, so it was retaliation for that, because he was the first former gang member to get political asylum here in the United States, so he was also going through for those things and It's very similar in your case to mine in the wiretapping thing, where they also started to twist their words and anything we said I couldn't say, even if you're playing with someone, to a friend because I have this ms. associate, I can't go ahead and say yeah man, like I need a real man to kick my ass, well you know what, damn, I hate that guy and all of a sudden they're after him, which all of a sudden means, a blow, but no, it's over.

I beat his case a few months after I beat my case, I was number one in my case in my indictment and when I beat my case number one in my indictment, everyone in my case, all of their charges were also dismissed and I think there It was a domino effect, yeah, it was a domino effect and I think there was one guy who, you know, was even tired of fighting the case where he pleaded guilty and they even withdrew his guilty plea. No, you guys just get out of there. Right here and after that when I was trying to talk to Dominique, who will want to talk to you when you are a former MS member?

Who the hell cares? You just wanted to stay a stereotype, a stereotype, a stereotype and you have to walk constantly. on these eggshells, so to speak, because all they have to say is that this guy is a former member of ms-13 and he really means what he said, we just said, hey, yeah, that guy needs me to tell him Kick your ass, it's 2020 now, right? your time in jail only to be found innocent uh you no longer consider yourself ms-13 at all but you still have the tattoos well there were tattoos like if you see the ones on my neck I had laser treatment so I went on I went ahead and took them. off so to speak it was about 15 sessions and they go away in about eight sessions but for the weather whatever the ink is you know it's probably hard ink so it goes away and every time you take these tattoos off I take kids who were in They join me to go through that process and they want to go ahead and remove the tattoos because it's not just about removing the tattoos if someone is stripping away their identity and what else are they going to go ahead and replace them, so they give me them did I remove all? the visible ones and the other ones, I'm making a collage from my chest to my stomach, I mean, the pain of going ahead and taking them off is too awful, but sometimes I've learned all the time when I'm in the Highlight that, um, it's okay , now she has removed her tattoos from ms 13.

Now what could we go ahead and find out? You know, look at the way he talks, look at the way he expresses himself, right? Is that still a part of it or do you know you start? going into it, stuff like that and then the real one started to get like well you know what, well he still you know in minor, then they start attacking your race, if you want, then it goes to the situation of okay So who am I? and that's when I tell the kids also when they remove their tattoos or people who join gangs that's why they join the dance because they are still oppressed they oppress the press many times because of the culture in general where they have they don't have they don't have sense of identity, so to speak, and they feel like they have to move on and join a gang because they're being oppressed like that, well, and I had heard that removing a tattoo is a lot more painful than getting one, no vlad.

It's like, man, it's like five, five, six, seven times more painful, man, it's hard and my skin is sensitive, so mine, mine, swells like a big time, there were kids that I took, that there was these hard totals and everything, and I took them and like as soon as they see how my skin gets covered up, uh, swells up, I look like hell, no, we're gone, you know, and then you have to go ahead and talk to them , hey, everything will be okay, I don't know, man, so it is. that, uh, it's that nature where it hurts and it's just not a treatment that you have to go to every six weeks, yeah, well, uh, Jurado López is a great story and uh, you went through a lot to get to this point, many times. losses, a lot of pain, but it seemed like you were still on good behavior in the whole thing, it seems like the US government was never broken, you know, and it is broken, a lot of people, right, a lot of people go into this prison system and uh.

You know, like that young child that tries to commit suicide, right, they can't, they can't go through that kind of hardship, huh, it seems like you overcame it and came out a stronger person, right? and not only. Did you give up the gang mentality but now you're leading an organization, uh, united friends, that's actually also helping other people follow in your footsteps, so you know I'm definitely proud of where you are in life right now and you know I'm expecting much better things for you in the future, thank you man, I appreciate you, Vlad, you know, for reaching out and wanting to have this

interview

, and you know, would you like to say, you know, I talk a lot of negativity because it consists of history speaking. about the police or the government, but you know, during this time I have done presidential presentations where I have met good police officers at this time, not all of them are bad.

I've known people who have gone to US attorneys and apologized. and they say they had nothing to do with my case. I have sat in courtrooms with federal judges talking about the law. I have been invited. I have done presentations for US attorneys who do for defense attorneys. about how to humanize your clients facing the death penalty so they don't go ahead and kill them so I understand it was in everyone and I can't go to the haters I can't hold on to hate and then teach someone a child to get out of a gang if you continue to have that hate and I've gotten to the point where I'm lucky enough to serve on the District Attorney's Law Enforcement and Community Relations Council in Denver to move forward and build more good in law enforcement. and a community as well about how to move forward and relate to each other more how to have that respect as well and I'm also a mayor appointed commissioner for the city of Denver so anything is possible when you continue to grow and you continue um to continue you know I love it. , man, I love hearing stories like this, man, I wish you all the best, thank you sir, I appreciate you, thank you for inviting me to absolutely appreciate it until next time. peace