The Salvadorian street gangs are, first and foremost, an image, a handbook of contemporary history, a picture of the local put together in a world that's become global. It's a memory of the gang, the fundamental myth of organized crime. Children of the Bloods and Crisp, made famous by the Dennis Hopper film "Colors", these gangs sprang up in the Hispanic ghetto of L.A. Now traditional enemies, they are engaged in an all-out suburban war. It started in the streets of Los Angeles then spread to numerous North American cities and prisons, in which thousands of gang members are now incarcerated. Serving long, if not life sentences for homicide, robbery with violence, drug trafficking and weapons carrying, the gangs took possession and control of the prisons. Originally from all over Central America, over a ten year period of confused teenagers, economic and political immigrants and, especially the offspring of thousands of Salvadorians escaping the civil war, they formed themselves into well structured criminal organizations, killing their enemies both inside and outside the gangs.

The gangs were called maras, after the marabuntas, the carnivorous ants of Central America, which destroy all life in their path. And so was born the Mara Salvatrucha (literally, Salvadorian ant), also known as the MS-13, based on 13th Street in South Central Los Angeles. Another mara followed hot on its heels, the formidable M-18, which took its name from 18th Street where it ran wild. The national maras in the southern States are sub-divided into pandillas (sets) at a regional level and cliquas (cliques) on a neighborhood level. These local "chapters" sometimes serve a single street. Tattooed from head to foot, the gang members, are called pandilleros or homeboys. The tattoos not only serve as identifiers but provide a visible sign of their voluntary exclusion from society. How can you get a job with the number 13 or 18 tattooed on your forehead and your cheeks adorned with teardrops signifying the number of enemies you've killed?

Writing a new chapter in the history of gang warfare in Los Angeles, the story might have been contained within the United States of America. But that was reckoning without governmental policies... In 1996, the American government simultaneously enacted the Illegal Immigration Reform and the Immigrant Responsibility Act, in other words the adoption of a ferocious double sentence legislation allowing the authorities to send more than 100,000 gang members detained in the United States straight back to Central America. With terrifying consequences. The order, social stability and economy of Panama, Honduras, Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua, the countries to which this flood of delinquents returned, was corrupted, triggering intense paranoia about security. In one decade, the United States succeeded where it had failed before, in keeping the local dictators in power and financing civil wars and Coups d'Etat!

A SOCIAL THEATRE

The story of the maras is also that of the big cities, the world-suburbs, the megaconurbations, the incredible cobbling together of cities and countryside, the perfect illustration of "Planet of Slums", the latest best-seller by the social commentator, historian, political activist and urban theorist, Mike Davis.

The suburbs of San Salvador are like clones of shanty-towns and social policy programs on the edge of the big nothing that separates the capital from it's volcanic range. A no-man's land, the ideal topography of characterised violence. We are on the outskirts of the town of Soyapango. Two precipitous back-streets, la Campanera and San Ramon, form a dead end, a bus terminus at the bottom of a canyon. A dead end for the hopes and dreams of its inhabitants, trapped in the desperate struggle for survival.

For the young people here, divided between two rival gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha and the Mara 18, the future is either imprisonment or death. On January 6th 2007, for example, a riot broke out in one of the overcrowded prisons in the West of the country. Five hundred MI8 members confronted the rest of the inmates leaving 21 dismembered and decapitated bodies.

CAMERA POSITION

Filmed in close-up using a hand-held camera, this is La Vida Loca, The Crazy Life, as the pandilleros say. For a year, the camera will focus on daily life in a cell of one of these gigantic maras, composed of fifty or so teenagers and young adults with an average age of 16-18. This clica is an egalitarian community, a sort of self proclaimed brotherhood of outsiders, half street-kids, half child soldiers. In the background, the film will faithfully record the hopes and fears of the inhabitants of this new tropical suburb of Los Angeles: the outskirts of San Salvador. Twenty years after a revolutionary war that devastated the nation, a new civil war, just as terrible, is going on. A perfect globalization crime, as the philosopher Jean Baudrillard would say.

A story without a plot, wrote the black Jamaican novelist and Harlem Renaissance hero Claude McKay in his cult book, "Banjo". His novel relates the fortunes and misfortunes of a gang of Negro musicians, sailors and dockers in Marseille at the end of the 1920's. It was the height of the Great Depression and the blazing attacks by Komintern. The Marseille's pandilla decided, despite everything, to enjoy their bitch of a city and make the most of it.

This concept of a story without a plot might well be applied to Christian Poveda's film, the account of a gang of teenagers, for whom the only hope is to have a bit of fun before meeting an early death.