As he lay there, he contemplated the strange and winding journey of his life. He remembered his childhood in the city of San Salvador, the orphan of a slaughter carried out by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front—the FMNLF—which invaded the city in 1989 and took control of the poorest quarters of the capital. Suarez still had no idea whether his parents were active participants on either side of the years-long brutal conflict; he was only three at the time. All he knew was that all of a sudden, their bodies lay before him, shredded by automatic gunfire, and there was no one left to care for him.

He survived in the war-torn country by begging and digging in trash for morsels of food until 1992, when the armistice was signed. The FMNLF members who killed his parents were pardoned, and the organization was christened as one of the country’s major political parties. Only then did the government turn its attention to the plight of the children of the war. He was taken into an orphanage, which was only slightly better than the streets. Food was still scarce, and now his tormentors had legal custody and government sanction to do as they pleased with him. He would never speak of the manner in which he was abused in that place.

At the age of thirteen, he was released from the orphanage, coarsened by his experience and impervious to pain—both his pain and the pain of those around him. Crime became his occupation and his salvation. Even at that tender age he was an accomplished thief, and his willingness to dispatch victims with the flick of a knife at the first sign of resistance earned him a reputation for ruthlessness on the streets. It was that reputation that brought him to the attention of a group of former left-wing guerillas who had been forcefully repatriated from the United States when the war had ended and their amnesty was no longer recognized. In the United States, the guerillas had adapted their military skills to the gang wars that raged in Los Angeles. Confined to a small community in the violent city, they had banded together to protect the Salvadoran community from the black and Latino gangs, and to exploit that same community for the service. Because of their small numbers, they employed the most brutal tactics to instill fear in their rivals. That strategy had drawn the most sadistic members of the dispossessed to their ranks, and the group had grown dramatically in the 1990s and early 2000s. They took the name Mara Salvatrucha 13, or MS-13, for their gang—a nod to their native land and to the neighborhood where they started—and covered their bodies in tattoos as evidence of their lifelong commitment.