SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — In a room set apart from the scrubbed surfaces and autopsy tables of this city’s medical examiner’s office, two technicians in white coveralls are sifting through sacks of mud and death.
One technician carefully extracts a human vertebra. He brushes off the bone with what looks like a toothbrush, and then places the bone into a water basin.
The technicians “leave nothing untouched,” says Saul Quijada, the forensic anthropologist in charge. “Even the smallest item can be important.”
The sacks were trucked in from a mass grave discovered last December in the fields of Lourdes, a working-class district on this city’s outskirts. Authorities accuse the Barrio 18 street gang of digging the burial site in the remote and rugged fields to hide the remains of 44 people who’d been killed and dismembered elsewhere.
A March 2012 truce between Barrio 18 and its powerful rival, the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, has been credited with slashing El Salvador’s homicides from more than 4,000 in 2011 to about 2,500 over the past two years.
But the discovery of the mass grave — the largest found since this country's 12-year civil war — has given ammunition to truce skeptics. They’ve noted that while murders were supposedly declining, disappearances were rising, to more than 1,000 last year. Crimes and killings, critics say, continued clandestinely all along.
And with only days to go before El Salvador’s presidential election on Sunday, politicians have seized on the truce as a potent wedge issue in a nation terrorized by violence.
“All these people were murdered during the so-called truce,” says Miguel Fortin Magana, director of the medical examiner’s office in San Salvador.
And these gang issues matter well beyond Salvadoran borders.
Both Barrio 18 and MS-13 formed in Latino migrant communities in Southern California. Mass deportations by the United States pushed them into Central America
