The Women of the Mara: Brenda
The history of the street gangs in the US has been marked by spikes of atrocious violence, but one murder stands out for our purposes: the killing of Brenda Paz in 2003. Originally from Honduras, Brenda was only thirteen when she was “jumped” or initiated into MS-13 in Dallas. Her actions and subsequent murder would change the history of women in the gang forever, observers told me.
Brenda, who was known in the gang as Smiley “was different from the other girls,” wrote reporter Jamie Stockwell, who covered her murder trial for the Washington Post. “She came as close to being a leader as a female could.” But that power and standing wasn’t enough to protect her.
Her crime, as far as the gang was concerned, was unforgivable.
Brenda was cooperating with law enforcement that was investigating the gang. Research and reporting on her life suggests that Brenda wasn’t terribly discreet about her cooperation. She was placed in but eventually left the US Witness Security Program because she felt isolated and lonely. At one point she was helping officers from at least six different states investigate a number of crimes she had witnessed, including beating, murder, and theft. She had also committed to testifying for prosecutors in gang murder trials, a fact that could have put the final nail in her coffin.
Despite that, she then sought out her former homies, people she thought were still her friends. On July 13, 2003, fellow gang members lured her into a national park in Virginia, where they set upon her. One of her assailants tied a rope around her neck to hold her in place while the others stabbed her sixteen times all over her body. She was four months pregnant at the time.
“There’s a baby involved. I mean, you have to be sick to actually hold a rope around somebody’s neck, hear her screaming and fighting, being tortured and stabbed multiple times in the stomach, legs, and just dying,” her friend told CBS News.
Samuel Logan, author of a book about Brenda’s murder, spoke about her in an interview with Immigration Daily: Brenda was the first teenager in the history of the US Witness Protection program to enter without adult supervision. The program, which was designed for middle-aged mob informants, not pregnant teenage girls, failed to provide Brenda with the love and attention she so needed. She was alone too often, and eventually, at the deepest moment of her loneliness, the only person she thought to call was her boyfriend, an MS-13 member. He eventually betrayed her, which is ultimately what led to her death.
Brenda’s collaboration with law enforcement established an idea that took strong hold within MS-13 and endures to this day: women are more likely to turn into state witnesses than men. A couple of years later, her murder contributed to a decision made by the gang leadership during a 2005 meeting in San Salvador. During the meeting, which had been called to discuss the future of MS-13, the role of women came up. Leaders dictated that women were not to be initiated into the gang anymore. They would take on no new female members, and the current female members would be demoted.
As MS-13 cells grew across El Salvador, a nationalist movement took hold within the gang, during which members ceased to name their cliques after streets in the United States, as they had done previously, and started to embrace their local environment more. The banning of women from the gang, according to experts, was a sign that the men in power were also embracing the misogynist cultures of their new home bases.
“Women had been prestigious members of the gang in the US, and that was completely extinguished,” says Juan José Martínez, an anthropologist who has studied El Salvador gangs for years. He and fellow researchers Steven Dudley and Héctor Silva Ávalos write, “In the simplest terms, women are not considered human [by the gang]. They are routinely referred to as ‘bichas’ or ‘hainas,’ which, roughly translated, means animals.”
Another reason for excluding them is that women tend to be the source of romantic and sexual disputes and rivalries within gangs. Details contained in reporting from court documents for cases against members of MS-13 describe a use of violence against women— disgraced girlfriends and wives and collaborators—that can only be described as medieval.19 In 2007, local media in El Salvador reported a murder similarly violent and disturbing as Brenda’s. The prosecutors described how an MS-13 member known as “El Crimen” (which means “crime”), asked for permission to kill a woman who had left her boyfriend, a gang member, when he was in jail. It was an insult to the entire gang, El Crimen reasoned. He was given the green light to kill her.
The woman in question didn’t know what was coming until El Crimen took her to a local house and pulled a gun on her. He told her, “Today you’re going to show love to all us homeboys, you daughter of a whore.” She was raped by at least ten gang members, penetrated in the vagina, the anus, and the mouth, according to the report. El Crimen, still not satisfied that she had suffered enough, then grabbed a small axe and slit her throat, finally decapitating her.
The violence, exclusion, and treatment of women by Central American gangs goes far beyond the supposition that they may turn state’s witness. It is cultural. Violence toward women is common and widely accepted. The Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have some of the worst femicide rates in the world. El Salvador and Honduras are in the global top five nations for deadly hate crimes against women, and Guatemala isn’t far behind.
Femicide and domestic violence are some of the main drivers of the migration of women and children from the Northern Triangle, and gang members are major perpetrators. Yet women are woefully under-protected. A 2017 national survey found that 67 percent of Salvadoran women report suffering violence, be it domestic abuse or sexual assault outside the home. Yet only 6 percent of victims had reported abuse or assault to the government, with others saying that they were told under threat not to do so, or that they doubted the police would believe their accusations, or that they didn’t know where to turn for help.
But in the gang, there are exceptions to all rules. Next week, we meet a female homie from the Barrio 18 in El Salvador.
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