When I asked about the risks he faces, Martínez told me that reporters like this young man—who lived in a barrio saturated with gangs—have it much harder than he and his colleagues do. Martínez knows how to tourniquet a bullet wound, but he probably won’t ever need to do so because he avoids situations where he could be a target. At the end of the day, he sleeps in a house with private security. “If I get shot and bleed to death, it’s my own fault,” he said.

I understood. I first started reporting in El Salvador as an undergraduate. Over the years, as my ignorance about the gangs pushed me to read and ask questions, as the monster under the bed has become a network of sources, and as my skittishness has slowly dissipated, I’ve come to realize that whatever fear I experience can’t compare to the relentless terror of living in a gang-controlled neighborhood, unable to leave.

Martínez has reported in much more dangerous places than I have. So far his instincts have served him well, and El Faro has sent him out of the country when he has received threats. Still, the unspoken rules of reporting in El Salvador—drive with the windows up, call the gang leader before arriving so he’s not taken by surprise—are a constant negotiation of fear and trust with one’s sources and with oneself. Martínez has been called reckless for getting too close to gangsters. I worry less about his body and more about his spirit.

Martínez sees a widening gulf between the gangs and the rest of the population, and he’s trying to build a bridge before it’s too late. By publishing in English, he confronts an additional challenge: How do you make insulated Americans care about far-off El Salvador? How do you nudge the needle from apathy to action? At his least effective, Martínez’s explanation of why we should care, comes across as saccharine moralizing: “My proposal is that you know what is going on. … This book is about the lives of the people who serve you coffee every morning.” He’s right—but guilt doesn’t change policy, or sell books.

More effective are the parts in which Martínez marvels at the “logic of an ape” that led U.S. politicians to deport 4,000 gang members from Los Angeles back to El Salvador in the ’90s. The gangs spread like poison: Authorities now estimate there are 60,000 active members in El Salvador, with half a million more—relatives, business partners—dependent on the gangs. The problem has come full circle, Martínez insists, mentioning the exodus of Central American migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border. Whoever dreamed up the mass deportation of gangsters, he writes, “spat straight up into the sky.”

In the first two sections of the book, “Emptiness” and “Madness,” Martínez aims to debunk the notion that the Salvadoran government is united against the gangs. It’s not. By the early 2000s, Chepe Furia and his murderous youth group had finagled their way into the political echelons of Atiquizaya, a town of 30,000 near the border with Guatemala. The gangster was renting his white Isuzu dump truck to the mayor for trash collection, snagging $2,500 a month, and using his connections—--a spokesman for the mayor moonlighted as Furia’s treasurer—to operate a slew of businesses, legal and illegal, from car dealerships to a drug distribution network. To make matters worse, every time a dogged police inspector captured Furia and sent him to jail, a circuit court judge went out of his way to get the gangster released. Finally, in 2012, with the help of El Niño’s testimony, police and prosecutors succeeded in locking up Furia for murder. The crooked judge remained on the bench.



Mind-boggling corruption is the norm in Central America, and it offers one explanation as to why governments here have failed so miserably at defeating the gangs. Policemen and politicians are rendered powerless by the gangster hydra: Slay or imprison one top leader and another emerges to take his place, fattened and shielded by the corrupt officials who should be wielding the sword.

This impotence would be laughable if it weren’t so devastating. Salvadoran President Sánchez Cerén declared war on the gangs in January 2015, backing shoot-to-kill policing and a Supreme Court ruling that classifies gang members as terrorists. Violence in El Salvador soared: 6,657 people were murdered last year, among them 63 police officers and 90 children. El Salvador’s homicide rate, 103 murders per 100,000 residents, is more than 25 times that of the United States and a hundred times that of England.

A History of Violence also documents Martínez’s search for a narrative form to suit his message. The collection’s strength lies in his ability to write the hell out of his material, a skill he picked up by reading old stacks of The New Yorker and observing how writers like Alma Guillermoprieto and Jon Lee Anderson, who wrote the introduction to the book, used the tools of novelists to make true stories come alive. This kind of journalism is sorely needed in Central America, where the mainstream press refers to gang members as “delinquents” and “terrorists.” A History of Violence lets them speak for themselves. Like Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family, it skimps on statistics and analysis, instead relying on description alone to create a world that captures the reader and doesn’t let her go.

One of the stories, “El Niño Hollywood’s Death Foretold,” evokes Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Like the beloved Colombian writer, Martínez pens scenes that are suspenseful, moving, and vivid. Sometimes they lack context, jumping around in time and place, weaving in and out of the minds of different characters—an unfamiliar reader may feel parachuted into gangland. Without Martínez’s skilled storytelling we might never read about these gangs in the first place. But by showing us violence up close, Martínez skirts the danger that his brutal narratives will be read as fiction.

I read the last section, “Fleeing,” while on a plane from San Salvador to New York. I’d spent the night with coroners, driving from murder scene to murder scene, lifting bodies into big black trash bags, and shoving the bags into the back of a pickup. One young woman had been shot in the chest so many times I thought the bullet holes were a pattern on her shirt.

As the plane lifted off the ground, I put down the book. It occurred to me that most Americans will never understand what it means to flee. Unlike the men and women for whom violence is everyday life in Central America, we can simply leave.