One Prison, Two Gangs

Steven: [00:00:01] The video begins with a plume of dark gray smoke rising through the sky behind a sun-drenched concrete wall. Almost immediately, you can hear the sounds of gunfire in the distance, probably from a handgun. The radio station that published the video on its social media platform bleeps out some of the commentary, which includes someone making a joke. Then comes the unmistakable sound of an automatic rifle. At least six shots are fired by my count. And then more bleeping. Then an eerie silence. Then more commentary that’s hard to understand, and then a gasp. Finally, a cold observation. I hope they shot a few of those women, a voice says.

The date was June 20, 2023. The site: Tamara, Honduras, home to the only female prison in the country. The result was not funny — it was tragic.

Forty-six women, or about 5% of the prison’s total population, were dead. It was part of a years-long tit-for-tat between the country’s most prominent gangs, the MS13 and the 18th Street. That war had begun in Los Angeles in the early 1990s between the male factions of the gangs but had since spread to parts of Central America and had infected the female factions of the gangs and made its way into the prison.

A couple of weeks before the massacre, InSight Crime investigators spent a week going in and out of the prison, where they interviewed about 30 prisoners. Some of them had survived a similar incident three years earlier and were warning authorities that another attack on them was imminent. And in the end, they were right.

Welcome to InSight Crime’s Podcast, where we’ll take you to the furthest reaches of the Americas in order to help you understand how organized crime works. I’m your host, Steven Dudley, InSight Crime’s co-director. I’ve been investigating gangs in Central America for over a decade and wrote a book on the MS13. The gang is captivating, not just for its heavy metal music origins and its members’ penchant to get tattoos on their entire bodies, but also its endless multi-country rivalry with the 18th Street gang. 

In this episode, with the help of one of our investigators and two inmates from these rival gangs, we’ll explore gang dynamics inside the prison and how gender influences the experiences of inmates and their captors — specifically how authorities underestimated the potential for violence for years, and how this paved the way for one of the worst massacres ever recorded in a Latin American prison.

Victoria: [00:03:39] So the prison we visited is called the Female Center for Social Adaptation, and it’s a prison that is located in the town of Tamara, which is about 40 minutes away from the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa.

Steven: [00:03:51] That’s Victoria Dittmar. We call her Vic, for short. She was the lead investigator on the story.

Victoria: [00:03:57] To get access to the prison, we had to get permission from every single top official at the Ministry of Security in Honduras and the National Penitentiary Institute. And this process took us about six months.

Steven: [00:04:08] The prison was designed to rehabilitate inmates, so there are lots of open spaces and extra rooms.

Victoria: [00:04:16] When you walk into the prison, what you see is an open space. Once you get in through the first security filter, you are led into what is called the main yard, and the main yard is surrounded by the different sections. There are about 12 sections in total, including a maternity ward. What you see is that these sections are pretty much open. We don’t see high walls with no windows, no metal doors, and stuff like that.

Steven: [00:04:41] Still, it’s gang affiliation that ultimately determines how the prison is organized.

Victoria: [00:04:46] The prison is divided in three big groups. They consider inmates who are associated with the 18th Street gang, which are actually the majority of the inmates at this prison. So when we visited, for example, there were around 900 inmates, and almost half of them were linked, even loosely, to the 18th Street gang. 

The second category that authorities use is, all women, again, even loosely associated with the MS13, which is the rival gang. And everyone else is part of what they call the general population. So, it’s not really divided among the different offenses you can commit, it’s divided according to who you’re related to, even if it’s loosely related.

Steven: [00:05:28] But the prison wasn’t always divided by gang affiliation. For years, prison authorities mixed everyone into the various wings. To be sure, there were some beatings, and threats, and some skirmishes between gangs, but nothing that raised red flags for authorities. 

Victoria: [00:05:44] And what the inmates told us – and they all agreed on — is that the tension was continuously accumulating until it reached a point where it exploded. And this is what happened in May 2020, when members of the 18th Street gang somehow left their cells in the middle of the night and killed six women allegedly linked to the MS13 using knives, ropes, even just by beating them up.

Steven: [00:06:13] The massacre shocked authorities, who nonetheless never revealed how members of the 18th Street had committed the murders. And although they separated the two gangs, they didn’t address the fact that the 18th Street remained the dominant force. 

To find out more, Vic met with one member of the gang, who, for security reasons, didn’t want to be identified. So we’re going to call her Raquel.

Victoria: [00:06:40] Raquel is a 21-year-old woman who is incarcerated in the maternity ward along with her one-year-old son. She is part of the 18th Street gang, and she was arrested for extortion and drug peddling and was given a sentence of 20 years.

Steven: [00:06:54] So she was incarcerated with her child — how does that work?

Victoria: [00:06:59] In theory, all women who are either incarcerated while pregnant or who are incarcerated while they have children younger than four years old, these children can live in the prison with them. Or, the women who are pregnant can live in the maternity ward. When we visited the prison, there were about 20 children who were also incarcerated with their mothers. Most of them were younger than one year old.

Steven: [00:07:21] What was Raquel’s role in the gang?

Victoria: [00:07:24] Raquel’s role in the gang is what she calls a paisa. This means she’s someone who works for the gang, considers herself an active member, receives a salary, but she never reported being initiated. So, in practical terms, we can consider her a collaborator of the gang.

Steven: [00:07:45] Vic spoke to Raquel in what was a noisy maternity ward, so the audio is not the best. Raquel explained to her that she joined the gang when she was 14, just after giving birth to her first child. The father of the child, who was a member of the gang, died.

Raquel: [00:08:02] El papá de mi hijo, que falleció, él era miembro.Yo, cuando mi hijo murió, yo como que me descontrolé.

Steven: [00:08:10] Then her child died too. These deaths sent her into a tailspin. She used to go to church, she said, but after that, she isolated herself from that community.

Raquel: [00:08:22] Yo me encerré, y estaba enojada con Dios.

Steven: [00:08:23] The object of her ire, she said, was God. But she seemed to take it out on the rest of the world.

Raquel: [00:08:31] Sé que lo hice mal porque solo él sabe que …

Steven: [00:08:34] She hit the streets hard. Raquel told Vic, for instance, that she became more active in the gang and used to help collect the extortion payments from small shops and other businesses.

Raquel: [00:08:45] Porque tal vez el de la moto va manejando y uno va atrás.

Steven: [00:08:50] This meant riding around on the back of a motorcycle trying to keep an eye on one another, as well as striking an intimidating stance while collecting what was euphemistically called a “war tax.”

Raquel: [00:09:02] … y cuidar a las personas que también van a hacer lo que vamos a hacer.

Victoria: [00:09:11] Women in the 18th Street gang have a much more prominent role than women in the MS13 — they are in charge of extortion, they are in charge of contract killings, but that doesn’t mean that they can rise to the ranks of leadership. They will always be subordinates of male leadership. Raquel, for example, even though she was very much appreciated by the gang, and she was able to conduct all these activities that required a lot of responsibility, she would never be able to rise to a leadership position.

Steven: [00:09:41] Raquel was 20 when the police caught her and found $1,800 in cash on her. It was probably money from extortion, although she wouldn’t admit it. But Raquel had a bigger problem than the money.

Victoria: [00:09:53] When Raquel was arrested, she knew she was pregnant, but she said she didn’t mention that to authorities.

Raquel: [00:09:58] Me llevaron para la dirección de extorsión. Ahí estuve casi todo el día.

Victoria: [00:10:03] And they actually started to torture her, and she mentioned, for example, that they didn’t hit her, but they did try to asphyxiate her with a black plastic bag. She didn’t mention how long this torture lasted, but she did mention suffering a lot.

Raquel: [00:10:17] No me golpearon, pero sí intentaron ahogarme.

Victoria: [00:10:21] Raquel told us about her first days in prison. She said she got there, and she was immediately isolated for a couple of days. And once they opened the actual door to the prison, she was so scared that her thoughts were like, “Oh my God, what am I doing here? This is so scary.”

Raquel: [00:10:38] Cuando iban abriendo el primer portón, solo pensaba, “Dios mío santo.”

Victoria: [00:10:44] But once she got in, she quickly learned that by being part of the 18th Street gang, the dominant gang in the prison, it wasn’t going to be as difficult as she thought.

Raquel: [00:10:54] Aquí somos unidas.

Steven: [00:11:00] The rivalry between el Barrio 18, or the 18th Street and la Mara Salvatrucha, or MS13 began in Los Angeles, California, some 4,000 kilometers from the Tamara prison. Its origins are murky and, at this point, largely unimportant. The results, however, have been devastating.

Newscasts 1: [00:11:24] Central America’s gangs are some of the most notorious in the world, having long terrorized countries …

Newscasts 2: [00:11:30] La rivalidad entre Barrio 18 y la Mara Salvatrucha 13 fue creciendo hasta puntos insostenibles. Los asesinatos diarios se multiplicaron durante los 90.

Newscasts 3: [00:11:40] MS13 and its rivals, like the 18th Street gang, cause chaos and violence across Central America, sometimes at levels similar to active war zones.

Steven: [00:11:51] Since the early 1990s, thousands have been killed across the United States, Central America, and Mexico. At various points, the homicide rates of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala have been some of the highest in the world due to gang violence and the governments’ responses to that violence. To each gang, killing the other is a badge of honor, even when you have no idea why you’re fighting in the first place. There are, however, some practical reasons to fight: control of territory or criminal economies, for instance. And for prisoners like Raquel, being on the winning side had benefits.

Victoria: [00:12:30] For example, she would receive constant support from the gang outside. The gang would send her food, they would send her medical supplies. The support would also go to her child. This is, for example, something that many inmates don’t have access to because these products can be very expensive, and they’re not necessarily available in the prison.

Steven: [00:12:47] But with privileges came responsibility. The 18th Street controlled the prison in part because people like Raquel formed a vast intelligence network.

Victoria: [00:12:57] This meant that every single member of the gang had to be constantly gathering information about what they saw — constantly collecting this information and giving it back to their leaders. Some women — for example, Raquel was one of them — were also in charge of basically sitting at the entrance of their sections and keeping an eye on the halls and noting down everything they saw. This meant keeping an eye on every food item, keeping an eye in case their rivals from the MS13 were moving around the prison, and also keeping an eye on the general population in order to detect if there was anyone who was supporting the rival gang.

Steven: [00:13:34] Vic said that although there were restrictions on the movement of prisoners between the various sections of the prison, it was clear that the 18th Street had come to some kind of an arrangement with prison authorities that allowed their members to move more freely.

Victoria: [00:13:47] We saw that at least a group of 10 to 15 women were constantly walking through the halls, gathering in specific areas of the prison, for example in the central yard or in certain security filters.

Steven: [00:14:00] But for Raquel and the other 18th Street members, this was cold comfort.

Victoria: [00:14:05] It didn’t mean that her and the rest of the inmates could be at ease because they were always in constant threat because their rivals from the MS13 were also in this prison, and although they were a minority, they were still considered a threat.

Steven: [00:14:22] While Raquel was in the maternity ward and enjoying certain privileges, another woman, who we´re calling Adriana, was incarcerated in module one a few hundred meters away, in an overcrowded space with another 120 women, who authorities say are part of the MS13.

Victoria: [00:14:39] Adriana is 30 years old, and she is a former MS13 gang member. She has been incarcerated for almost seven years and still has 21 years to go. And she was arrested for extortion and for illicit association with criminal groups.

Steven: [00:14:54] So when did she decide to join the gang?

Victoria: [00:14:57] Adriana decided to join the gang from a very young age because, for her, it has always been a no-brainer to be somehow involved with the gang. She grew up in an environment where she always had some sort of contact with the gang, and in her case specifically, at least how she describes it, the gang was a safe place for her because she had a very aggressive personality.

Raquel: [00:15:16] Yo era muy peleona — demasiado agresiva.

Victoria: [00:15:20] She was very violent, and that was normally rejected in other spaces. But in the gang, it was appreciated.

Raquel: [00:15:26] Yo me golpeaba con la que sea porque era bien respondona.

Victoria: [00:15:31] So after a whole life of collaborating with the gang, at the age of 23, she made the change from just being a collaborator to actually being an active member, and she actually married a gang member as well.

Steven: [00:15:42] Did she talk about what her role was in the gang once she did join?

Victoria: [00:15:47] After she joined the gang, she was supposed to be in charge of extortion and go around town, threatening shop owners and other members of society to give her money.

Steven: [00:15:57] But she never got a chance to actually do that because she was captured only two weeks after her initiation.

Adriana: [00:16:05] La verdad que pertenecer así, tenía solo dos semanas.

Steven: [00:16:16] Adriana arrived at the prison in September 2016, and although the 18th Street was already running it, authorities had not yet segregated the prison by gang affiliation.

Adriana: [00:16:27] Era tan horrible al principio porque golpeaban a la gente. Caminaban ahí viendo por qué caía cada quien y le hacían la vida imposible, si no la golpeaban.

Steven: [00:16:37] “It was terrible,” Adriana says, “they would beat up everyone and in general just make life impossible.” At first, Adriana kept a low profile, avoiding the beatings and violence. But this didn’t last long.

Victoria: [00:16:49] So at some point, she said, she couldn’t take it anymore, and she assumed her identity as an MS13 member and got closer to the veteran gang members. And they were very impressed with her violent personality and her skills, so they gave her several responsibility-roles, and she started to rise within the prison ranks.

Steven: [00:17:07] What leadership roles did she take on?

Victoria: [00:17:10] The main role that Adriana assumed was being a coordinator — not for her section specifically, but she was a coordinator for every single gang member associated to the MS13, or even women loosely associated to the MS13.

Adriana: [00:17:24] Primero, fui líder de las MS.

Victoria: [00:17:27] What this meant is that she was responsible for receiving any new inmates, accommodating them, helping with logistics …

Adriana: [00:17:36] Como la coordinadora de todas las MS, empezaba a repartir ayuda.

Victoria: [00:17:41] … But she was also in charge of maintaining cohesion and structure within the different gang members. So, she was both someone who brought everyone together, but she was also an enforcer of violence.

Steven: [00:17:53] And pretty soon the 18th Street prisoners noticed and began to target Adriana with threats and violence, saying things like, you have little time to live.

Adriana: [00:18:03] Que ya me faltaba poco para morirme.

Steven: [00:18:05] But Adriana was defiant. She laughed in their faces and told them, MS13 women do not fear death, and that she was ready to die for her gang.

Adriana: [00:18:17] Decía que para la muerte somos, y que por mi barrio vivía, y que por la mara moría.

Steven: [00:18:22] The fights continued — small fights and big fights. After a particularly brutal one, however, she was thrown into isolation for eight months.

Adriana: [00:18:31] Fue horrible, como no teníamos luz, no había agua, y estábamos encerradas en las jaulitas, en las chiquitas.

Steven: [00:18:38] There they were five to a cell. The only light came through the small window points. There was no running water.

Adriana: [00:18:45] Tuvimos cinco personas en cada jaulita, y el espacio es tan reducido que solo cabe la cama y un espacio para que usted se pare a cambiarse, y el baño, y una ventanita. Y es tan caliente, es tan feo ese lugar.

Steven: [00:18:58] The heat was stifling and constant, giving rise to the area’s nickname, la plancha, or the clothing iron.

Adriana: [00:19:07] No recibíamos aire, no recibíamos nada.

Steven: [00:19:10] Caught beneath la plancha, Adriana sought comfort and solace in a more spiritual life. The Evangelical church is one of the few escape hatches for gang members, and by the end of her turn in la plancha, Adriana was more God-fearing Christian than MS13. 

But while she was different, the prison was still the same.

Victoria: [00:19:34] When Adriana left the cell, she found that the tension between both gangs was still accumulating, and this was only a few weeks before one of the most tragic episodes in the prison was about to unfold.

Steven: [00:19:45] That tragic incident was the first of the two massacres, the one I mentioned earlier.

Victoria: [00:19:56] It was the end of May 2020 when, according to authorities, a group of inmates set fire to the administrative offices of the prison, which served as a distraction for the prison guards, who went to put it out. And while they were putting it out, a group of inmates from the 18th Street gang were able to somehow break out of their cells. They left their cells armed with baseball bats, with ropes, with knives. And they were looking for six women who had just entered the prison and who were allegedly linked to the MS13. 

They started to run around the prison halls, looking into every section of the prison for these women. They eventually found them, and they took three of them to the prison gym, where they beat them to death. They found another one in the maternity ward, where they stabbed her to death. And they found the last one in section one of the prison, where they also beat her to death.

Steven: [00:21:05] For her part, Adrianna thought that if they saw her, she too might get killed. She survived by hiding under a pile of blankets in her cell. “They took over the entire prison,” she said. “It went on all night.”

Adriana: [00:21:18] Toda la noche. Toda la noche, aquí nadie entraba.

Steven: [00:21:22] “It was horrible,” she said. “You have no idea how horrible blood smells.”

Adriana: [00:21:29] Pasó tantas cosas aquí, que esto era horrible. Usted no sabe cómo se sentía el olor a sangre.

Steven: [00:21:35] When the names of the dead were announced, the hairs on Adriana’s arms stood up. She had spent countless hours with them, eating meals, getting tattoos. They had shared a life together.

Adriana: [00:21:47] Cuando salen los nombres se me pararon los pelos porque eran con las cipotas que yo había comido, las cipotas que me tatuaron, las cipotas con las que yo vivía todo con ellas.

Steven: [00:22:03] Vic, how did this impact Adriana?

Victoria: [00:22:06] Adriana says the massacre was one of the worst nights in her life, not only because she was a target of the massacre, but also because she heard how six of her friends died in a very brutal way. What happened is that this event, once again, changed how she related to the gang. She didn’t want to be a part of the gang anymore. But she felt she had to protect them because these people, who once were her family and who took her in, were still suffering attacks from the 18th Street gang.

Steven: [00:22:35] Still, Adriana remained a target.

Adriana: [00:22:38] Al día siguiente estaban afilando unas dagas así de grandes, mire que le meten, y sacan con todo y las tripas.

Victoria: [00:22:44] The day after the massacre, Adriana remembers walking around the halls of the prison and seeing a member of the 18th Street gang who was filing a knife, and this woman showed it to Adriana and told her, “We’re going to kill you with this. But not now. Later.”

Adriana: [00:22:59] Con este te voy a picar, pero más tarde, ahorita no, y yo así solo me quedaba bien.

Steven: [00:23:08] The 2020 prison massacre took prison authorities by surprise, and they separated the gangs. The 18th Street was housed in sections six, seven, and eight, while the MS13 was assigned to section one. The tensions continued to mount, in part because it was clear that the 18th Street still had control of the prison.

Victoria: [00:23:30] Adriana never felt quite safe in this new space and neither did the other women associated with the MS13 because the trauma was still there, and the threat was very much present. As we saw with Raquel’s story, the women related to the 18th Street gang still had many privileges in the prison, which included, for example, walking around the halls and getting close to the different sections of the prison. On the contrary, the women associated with MS13 weren’t able to leave, and they were constantly receiving threats from the rivals.

Steven: [00:23:58] It was during this period that Vic and another InSight Crime investigator visited the prison. After talking to prisoners like Adriana, they asked prison authorities about the potential for more violence, but prison officials seemed blind to the possibility.

Victoria: [00:24:16] The general sense when we spoke to them was, they’re separated now. One of the gangs is isolated, and this is enough to avoid further violence.

Steven: [00:24:25] There’s a bit of a stereotype at play here as well, I mean, this idea that women are not capable of the type of violence of male inmates.

Victoria: [00:24:34] Gender stereotypes were very much present among the authorities. The general sense was that women weren’t really violent, that violent episodes such as a massacre were not possible. After the first massacre happened, the stereotype was, this is a one-time thing, it’s not going to happen again, and basically just separating the gangs and avoiding spaces where they could encounter each other is enough to avoid further violence. But they were ignoring that gang dynamics were still very much present, that constant episodes of violence were still going on, that threats were still going on, and that, for example, one of the gangs was still accumulating a lot of power.

Steven: [00:25:16] The gang was of course the 18th Street, which was accumulating not just knives, but assault rifles and ammunition. The weapons would become further evidence of how much control the 18th Street wielded inside the prison and how corrupted the guards and prison officials were. As the 18th Street built up its arsenal, Adriana settled into a new cell block with her old gang mates.

Adriana: [00:25:42] La familia sí, ¿verdad? Pero como yo les dije a ellos, “la cosa es que yo ya no voy a trabajar más con ustedes”.

Steven: [00:25:47] She did not consider herself an MS13 member anymore, but she wasn’t going to abandon those who she considered family, either. So she told them she would help them in any way she could, making sure, for example, that the inmates didn’t skirmish over food.

Adriana: [00:26:03] Les ayudo a repartir la comida, que las mujeres no se anden peleando.

Steven: [00:26:07] But she could do nothing to slow the coming prison-wide violence. And on June 20, 2023, the 18th Street launched their second major attack in three years.

Victoria: [00:26:21] In this case, several women associated with the 18th Street gang were again able to leave their cells. They ran directly to section one, where all the women associated with the MS13 were held.

Steven: [00:26:33] At some point early on, someone started a fire. That was when a person on the outside noticed the plume of gray smoke that floated over the clear sky and began recording a video with their phone that would eventually make it onto the local radio station’s social media platform.

Victoria: [00:26:51] So women started to climb to the roofs and started to jump out of their section in order to escape the fire. Around 20 of them didn’t make it, and the rest of them started to run around the prison once they escaped the walls of their section, and that’s when the 18th Street gang members started to shoot at them.

Newscasts 4: [00:27:11] Anguish and anger in Honduras after government officials say a gang slaughtered at least 46 women inside a prison.

Newscasts 5: [00:27:19] Investigators say most of those killed were burned to death, with the remainder either shot or stabbed.

Newscasts 6: [00:27:25] Relatives of the inmates gathered outside the prison looking for answers.

Newscasts 7: [00:27:29] Como abuela que soy. Necesito saber el nombre de mi nieta, si está viva o ya está muerta. Por qué? Porque no sé nada.

Steven: [00:27:43] Do we know what was going on with Adriana and Raquel while this massacre was occurring?

Victoria: [00:27:50] We know that both Adriana and Raquel survived this episode. We could see from a TV report that Adriana was taken to the hospital. She had an injured leg, possibly from one of the gunshots. But she survived. Raquel, we didn’t really hear about her. She wasn’t included in the list of victims, and we are not sure if she was part of the perpetrators. However, we know that Raquel was part of the preparations leading up to this massacre because she was constantly collecting information for the leaders of the 18th Street gang in all the weeks leading up to the massacre.

Steven: [00:28:22] The violence had all unfolded practically in front of their eyes for years, yet once again, Honduran authorities acted like they were surprised. They simply couldn’t see beyond their own stereotypical notions of women.

Victoria: [00:28:35] One of our main findings through this investigative process was that security policies that failed to include a gender perspective can have devastating consequences. For example, in this case, authorities underestimated for years the potential of violence that existed within this prison.

Victoria: [00:28:56] But it’s also a story about how gender and power structures affect imprisoned women, especially those who are related to gangs. And even though, for example, some had an apparent privileged position. They were still subject to constant violence from their own gang and the general violence of the prison, and they were only seen as pawns in a larger structure of the gang, which has always been dictated by male leadership.

Steven: [00:29:20] The sad reality is that the male-dominated gang war has engulfed the female prison in Honduras with devastating consequences. There, women like Raquel and Adriana, who both come from poor, violent neighborhoods, are in a battle to the death in large part because of their association with one group or the other. And authorities are blind to it as it plays out right in front of them.

Steven: [00:29:54] This show is a co-production of InSight Crime and la No Ficción. This episode was produced by Elisa Roldán and written by me, Steven Dudley. Special thanks to our reporters, Victoria Dittmar and Helen Montoya, to Raquel and Adriana for sharing their stories, and of course to our team at InSight Crime. Our editors are Elisa Roldán and Thomas Uprimny. Our sound designer is Valentina Fonseca, and our graphic designer is Isabella Soto. 

The book I wrote on the gang is titled “MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang.” It was published by Harper Collins in 2020. There you’ll find the 40-year history of the gang. 

And don’t forget to visit insightcrime.org to learn more about these stories and our coverage on prisons gender and other organized crime related topics. 

If you think these stories are important, please consider making a donation. Every little bit helps and will go directly to reporting these types of stories. 

Join us in a few weeks, after Easter, when we go to the US-Mexico border and visit a migrant camp controlled by an international drug cartel. 

In the meantime, enjoy the belly laugh of one of the many kids in the maternity ward of the Tamara prison, a place that could use the occasional infusion of joy.

See you next time.