The invisible exile of MS-13 in Mexico

On a hot afternoon in mid-March, Largo walks with a small black bag in his hands. His tall, slender figure sways with the joy of a child carrying a new toy. But Largo is no child. He’s a 30-year-old member of the Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) gang. And what he’s carrying isn’t a toy, but new needles and tattoo ink. Largo is a fugitive from justice in El Salvador and has been hiding for several years in the city of Tapachula, in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico. He has left his gang life behind and now tries to pass unnoticed as a tattoo artist.

Largo has found in this inhospitable border city a place to survive, hide, and rebuild his life far from the Salvadoran prisons that claim his name. Like him, hundreds of MS-13 and Barrio 18 gang members have arrived here in the last three years, after Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s administration launched a crackdown on gangs after invoking a state of emergency.

Although MS-13 and Barrio 18 have been present in Mexico for more than two decades, Bukele’s repression, which began in 2022, caused an exodus to this country, as well as to Honduras, Guatemala, the United States, and even Europe. The gang members used the same routes already established by the Salvadoran diaspora who had fled them for decades and took advantage of the same paths.

That’s why Largo is happy now. He has found raw material to make a living while keeping a low profile. Gone are the days when he was a powerful man who made a living extorting small business owners in his neighborhood in San Salvador. Here, he lives in a criminal ecosystem with much bigger players than his gang. Here, drug cartels rule. Specifically, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. And Largo knows it.

“With this, I’ll be able to earn about 500 pesos [around $25] with a tattoo. Don’t you want me to do one for you?” Largo asks.

The state of emergency began on March 27, 2022, when Bukele had already been in power for almost three years. What was intended as an exceptional measure has now been renewed 36 times and has become the norm. The measure began after a massacre that left 87 people dead in a single weekend, following the breakdown of secret negotiations between the government and the gangs that had kept homicide rates at historically low levels.

Since then, Bukele has ordered the police and army to be deployed to capture anyone who even smacked of gang activity. And he has succeeded: to date, he has imprisoned more than 85,000 people, including thousands of innocent citizens whose only crime was living in a community under criminal control, according to complaints from civil society organizations and the international community.

“Don’t chicken out”

Eight months ago, Largo wasn’t tattooing. He was working as a waiter at a beachside restaurant in Puerto Madero, one of Tapachula’s main beaches. He arrived at the end of 2022. There, he served customers quickly and, in addition to his daily salary of 200 pesos (around $10), earned the occasional tip.

He was such a good waiter that, he says, a customer offered him a new job. He remembers him as a fat man with a bald head and a Mexican norteño accent. He told him he looked young and energetic, and offered him the chance to take care of his ranch a few miles away. For two months, Largo kept it clean, and every time the owner arrived with his friends, he made sure their glasses were overflowing and ice-cold.

But one night he saw boats arriving, from which men were unloading packages and hiding them in the beach house. The boss approached him and said: “You know what we’re up to here, so don’t chicken out.” At dawn, Largo escaped from the ranch and went to live in the city center.

“The problem is that if I mess with them, they’ll either kill me or catch me. And I don’t want either of those. If they catch me, they’ll send me to El Salvador, to CECOT [Bukele’s mega-prison]. And if they kill me, well, it’s all over,” he says.

Most gang members who fled El Salvador, like Largo, now live in shantytowns, undocumented and hiding their tattoos. Largo has covered his own and says he’s helped others conceal theirs with artistic designs.

“Before, carrying the letters [MS] was a source of great pride. Now, it’s best to cover them up so as not to cause trouble,” he says.

But not all of them give up their lives of crime. Many turn to drug dealing or contract killing for cartels. Nowadays, there are gang members in Mexico, not gangs. But it wasn’t always like that.

The “Mexico Program”

The presence of MS-13 in Mexico is not new. They have been present along the migrant route, primarily in Tapachula, since at least the early 2000s. For several years, they controlled a section of the train route known as La Bestia (The Beast), on whose back thousands of migrants travel in their quest to reach the United States.

Activists, residents of Tapachula, and veteran gang members claim that MS-13 extorted migrants while they were on the train, and those who didn’t pay were thrown onto the tracks. Many were maimed, and others died. This power lasted at least until 2005, when Hurricane Stan destroyed part of the train tracks in the Tapachula area.

However, during the second decade of this century, MS-13 strengthened its presence by creating the so-called “Mexico Program,” a group of gang cells under common control. The creation of this program was no coincidence.

According to four intelligence reports from the Salvadoran National Civil Police (PNC) obtained by EL PAÍS, in 2013, MS-13 decided to create the program as a sort of headquarters to exile several of its leaders in anticipation of the imminent breakdown of the truce they maintained with the government of former president Mauricio Funes. The reports detail that, in addition to extending its power beyond its territory, the gang sought to increase drugs and arms trafficking by establishing connections with Mexican cartels such as Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel.

The same reports indicate that by then several gang members had been sent to lead the program, with Francisco Javier Román Bardales, alias “Veterano de Tribus,” being appointed as its head, and Jorge Alexander de la Cruz, alias “Cruguer de Peatonales,” and Marlon Antonio Menjívar Portillo, alias “Mary Jane,” as his main lieutenants. Over time, the leadership in Mexico expanded, as did its number of soldiers.

One of the confidential documents, prepared by the Intelligence Analysis and Production Division in 2019, contains a series of documented events about the gang’s activities related to other criminal structures in the region. For example, between June 2015 and May 2018, the gang received military training and sniper courses from Guatemalan special forces linked to crime, as well as former military personnel belonging to the Los Zetas cartel. They also allocated $600,000 to purchase weapons from the latter.

A fiscal operation called Operation Jaque, carried out in 2016, also documents at least one meeting between MS-13 leaders of the Mexico Program and representatives of the Sinaloa Cartel, allegedly including Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, now imprisoned in the United States.

Another report from the Transnational Anti-Gang Center (CAT) indicates that, by 2022, MS-13 had a presence in seven Mexican states: Chiapas, Tabasco, Veracruz, Tamaulipas, the State of Mexico, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potosí. The same authorities detail that MS-13 decided to hide in Mexico because the main problem in the country is the cartels, while the gangs are a lesser evil.

In recent years, however, Mexican authorities have increased the arrests of gang members. Between March 2022 and March 2025 alone, 42 MS-13 gang members were arrested in Mexico, according to a tally compiled by EL PAÍS.

Among those arrested are heavyweights such as Élmer Canales Rivera, alias “El Crook de Hollywood.” Rivera had been wanted by the United States since 2022 because he was supposed to be serving a prison sentence in El Salvador. However, he was arrested on November 9, 2023, allegedly in Tapachula. A journalistic investigation by El Faro indicated that the gang leader was released by the Bukele government as part of a pact prior to establishing the state of emergency.

Other members of the MS-13 leadership recently arrested in Mexico include José Wilfredo Ayala, alias “El Indio de Hollywood” — also wanted for extradition by the United States and captured on April 19, 2023 — and Francisco Javier Román Bardales, “El Veterano,” the leader of the Mexico Program, detained on March 17 of this year.

There is no exact figure for how many gang members have entered Mexico since the start of the state of emergency in El Salvador. In mid-2022, authorities in Tapachula only warned of an increase, without providing further details. While cleaning his old tattoo machine, Largo recalls the days when he was a powerful gang member.

“Before, I’m telling you, we controlled the entire country,” says Largo. “People were terrified of us, you know what I mean? But now, here, we have to know how to live life. All that’s in the past. Now the municipal police extort me. I went from being the extortioner to the extorted.”

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