The Hollywood Kid: The Violent Life and Violent Death of an Ms-13 Hitman

The compelling story of the life and death of a Salvadoran gangster

As a boy, Miguel ngel Tobar's small town in El Salvador was torn apart by guerrillas and US- backed death squads. Still a preteen, he joined a different kind of death squad--the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha--a clique of the Mara Salvatruchas, better known as MS-13. This international criminal organization began on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s, as Salvadoran children, whose families had fled their country's civil war, banded together to defend themselves from LA gangs. Denied refugee status, the Salvadorans found themselves pushed into the shadows and besieged by violence, and MS-13 itself mutated into a gang. When large-scale US deportations began, violence was exported from the United States to El Salvador, helping make it one of the world's deadliest countries and in turn propelling new waves of refugees northward.

The Salvadoran journalist scar Martinez and his anthropologist brother Juan Jos Mart nez got to know the Hollywood Kid when he informed on MS-13. In his hideaway shack, he recounted a life of killing--a death toll of more than fifty rival gang members--until his own murder ended the story. Vivid and violent, The Hollywood Kid brings a brutal world to life, illustrating the geopolitical forces propelling a country toward ever more vicious extremes.

Author: Oscar Martinez, Juan Martinez
Publisher: Verso
Published: 10/01/2019
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.60w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781786634931


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 09/01/2019

About the Author
Óscar Martínez is an award-winning Salvadoran investigative journalist and writer for elfaro.net, the first online newspaper in Latin America providing in-depth coverage of migration, violence, and organized crime in Central America. In 2008, he won Mexico's Fernando Benítez National Journalism Award; in 2009, he was awarded the Human Rights Prize at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University in El Salvador; in 2016, the Committee to Protect Journalists awarded him an International Press Freedom Award. In the same year, he was also awarded the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, which honors journalists for their outstanding coverage of the Americas. He is the author of The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (for which he was awarded the WOLA-Duke Book Award in 2014) and A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America.

Juan José Martínez is a sociocultural anthropologist from Universidad Nacional de El Salvador. He has studied violence and gangs since 2008. He has been a lecturer at Universidad Mónica Herrera and has worked as a consultant for several institutions, such as Action on Armed Violence, UNICEF, Soleterre, and American University.


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