His life for the documentary

In El Salvador, more than 14.000 young people profess strong devotion to criminal gangs that replace what would be their natural family. In them, violence is more than their regular environment; it’s eminently what vertebrates their daily life. Since their childhood, these people living among poverty conditions were taught that survival was only possible by committing crimes such as theft, extortion, arms sell, drugs traffic or kidnapping. In spite of the crudity of all these events the members of the gang keep on acting like this. They don’t know another kind of life, they got used to pain, to crime as a way of subsistence.

Most of these bands were created in the eighties. The inhabitants of El Salvador had to escape from the civil war and found shelter in the ghettos of Los Angeles. The bands were created there, and they got stronger when the refugees and illegal immigrants were deported back to Centre America. Nowadays the bands are transnational -El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala-, and are defined by different kind of visual codes -clothes, tattoos-, including a specific sign language for each band. Some of them are faced one to each other: that’s the case of Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha.

Seven years ago, the Hispanic-French photographer and filmmaker Christian Poveda spent 16 months among ‘Mara 18’. He convinced them to let their voice be heard so as to stop being stigmatized. Poveda got a documentary that brings us in the situation of these young people running their own bakery, which becomes a symbol of hope in a hostile surrounding. Poveda really approached to the core of their life: in the documentary we can see extremely though and intimate moments of the protagonists, like arguments or bawls after the death of members of the gang. 

In fact, the filmmaker went so deep that had to pay the experience with his own life: a year after the official release of the documentary he was murdered by 4 members of the gang. It’s not clear if they killed him because they felt too exposed or because after those months Poveda had enough information to be considered ‘dangerous’. Anyway, Mara 18 killed the wrong person. Poveda was definitely trying to help them -as we can see, the documentary shows the human face of this people-. He fought to reconcile Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha, perhaps even more than any official institution has ever done. His body was found inert in the street, as many others had been found, as many others will be found, as long as they don’t come out of this hole.