For the past five years, the GANGS project, a European Research Council-funded project led by Dennis Rodgers, has been studying global gang dynamics in a comparative perspective. When understood in a nuanced manner that goes beyond the usual stereotypes and Manichean representations, gangs and gangsters constitute fundamental lenses through which to think about and understand the world we live in.
Ellen Van Damme offers us a portrait of Hondura’s first female gang leader. In the interest of her safety, her name has been changed and details of her location and gang affiliations, kept to a minimum. Her story illustrates the frequently gendered nature of gangs, and the way that machismo and patriarchy constrain Jennifer’s life, even as a gang leader.
I’m sitting in a plastic armchair, looking from a 90° angle at Jennifer as she sits on a small two-seater sofa without armrests. The living room has another single-person sofa, a TV, and a kitchen without a dining table. We are in 2021 and for the first time in 25 years, Jennifer, age 38, has a house of her own.
She said she was lucky to have found a two-bed house she could afford, despite its being close to several gang territories. Jennifer is not very tall, but her firm posture and stern look give her an aura of authority. It’s hot inside, the rotating fan barely cooling us down. Jennifer is wearing a tight-fitting pink dress. She keeps her phone next to her crossed legs and looks up at me.
Two years had passed since Jennifer and I had first met in 2019. I was doing research on women and gangs in Honduras from 2017 to 2020 in two major cities, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. The role of women in gangs had only been described by men up until that point, so I wanted to challenge that male-dominated narrative by asking women to share their own experiences in the gangs.
A lifetime in a gang
The first time I met Jennifer was at a social worker’s house who had supported her when she had just left the gang in 2007 by giving her a job in an NGO helping former gang members reintegrate society. She had been very clear with me from the start:
“Look, the only reason why I’m here is because other people have vouched for you, but I can only talk about the things I can talk about.”
The Jennifer facing me now, with whom I’ve maintained contact over the past couple of years, was much more relaxed and spoke with far less hesitation. She knew I wasn’t just interested in a one-time interview and that I wouldn’t leak her name to the police.
Jennifer is now the matriarch in her household, taking care of her three children and her boyfriend. She finally seemed to have gained more control over her life.
Shattered dreams
The first time we met, Jennifer stated how important it was for her to feel a sense of power and dominance, just like men do. As a little girl she loved Barbies, but as soon as her parents separated, she wished she was born a man so she could be the head of the household. Jennifer became aware of her gendered position in life when her stepfather moved in the house and demanded that she and her siblings obey his rules.
Jennifer ended up on the street at the age of 13, after she was raped by her stepfather. In less than 24 hours, her dreams of being a Barbie princess turned into the reality of joining the only people she could find on the streets: gangs.
Back in the ‘90s, Jennifer did not have to go through any gang ritual to integrate the group. But one thing was clear to her, she wanted to learn how to kill so she could take revenge on her stepfather.
Jennifer started as a member of one of the smaller local urban gangs in Honduras, which had been present since the civil wars and conflicts of 1960-1990 in Central America. During this period, many people had fled the region and were living in the United States, mostly in Los Angeles and New York.
Some of the Central American immigrants had found themselves forced to join one of the local Latino gangs: the Barrio 18 and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). Following the mass deportations of convicts from the United States back to Central America after the end of the civil war period, the Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha gang culture was also exported to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
The Barrio 18 and MS-13 were much stronger and much more organized than the local street gangs, so the local gang members had two options: join the Barrio 18 or MS-13 or be killed.
As soon as the Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha started to operate in Honduras, Jennifer did not hesitate a second and left her local gang to join the transnational gang. Even though gangs still traffic drugs on a local level today, it’s nothing compared to that of the cartels or transportista groups in the country.
Jumping into the gang
Jennifer jumped into the gang “the way a man jumps into the gang”, by being beaten up by several gang members for a certain number of times – 13 if it was the MS-13 and 18 if it was the Barrio 18. Given that there were barely any female gang members at the time, Jennifer received the beatings from male gang members. Despite reports of women being sexed-in to the gang, Jennifer did not have any sexual relations (forced or voluntary) with a male gang member as part of her initiation rite.
Jennifer wanted to climb up the hierarchy as fast as possible. She did not want to be told what to do, like when she lived with her stepfather. She did not want to be a drug mule, she wanted to be the one in charge of them.
But she felt very conflicted about that role. Women were deemed particularly useful for drug smuggling as they could smuggle more drugs in their body than men could, using both their vagina and anus. For 20-40 USD (500-1000 Honduran Lempiras,) girls would stuff as much drugs as they could in their body and tried to get it passed the prison guards.
Jennifer did not want to be an anonymous and replaceable low-level soldier, she wanted to be a leader.
“It cost me a lot of beatings to earn the respect of violent men; men with tattoos all over their body and face.”
But she made it.
A 15-year-old leader
She earned the respect of those men and soon became the first female gang leader. Jennifer oversaw the dealing of marijuana which was the main drug on the market then, she had over a dozen other women under her command, and soon moved from being a gang member to an organized crime leader. She was 15 years old.
“There is machismo in the gangs in the same way as that there is machismo outside of the gangs. Being a woman and belonging to a gang, means double discrimination.”
Machismo is the belief in male hegemony over women and other men, played out with physical force, control, and violence which is widespread in this particular context, as well as femicides. Femicide rates have indeed increased in the past two decades, making Honduras the country with the most femicides in Latin America).
In 2021, the emergency number 911 received 38,988 complaints of domestic violence, yet the impunity for these cases was as high as 95% in 2014.
Time and again Jennifer was fighting against the daily machismo she had to deal with in the gang. Female gang members, even though they did not maintain any personal relationships with male gang members, were still expected to take care of household tasks, such as doing men’s laundry, cook them food, and so on.
Jennifer had suffered enough under the violent machismo of her stepfather and was in no way going to allow it in the gang.
“The killing is a never-ending story”
After demonstrating her fighting skills and the courage she had to stand up against other male gang members by resisting their attempts of pushing her into a traditional care-giving role and by joining fights along with male gang members, Jennifer was told that she was ready for her first tumba (grave). She was given the task to kill a member of the rival gang. But the only person she wanted to kill was her stepfather – he was the only reason she had learned to fight to begin with.
Her gang was not pleased to learn about this; they felt that Jennifer was not in the gang out of loyalty but solely to seek revenge on her stepfather. They refused because, at the time, non-gang members (paisas) were not considered legitimate targets.
With 31.1 murders per 100,000 people in 2023, Honduras has the highest homicide rate in Central America. This is nevertheless the lowest number in 20 years, contrasting with the highest figure of (86.5 murders per 100,000) in 2011. While the media as well as public discourse blame the gangs for these high homicide rates, almost 60% of the registered homicides in Honduras remain unclassified.
Nobody knows the exact number of gang members in the country, but estimates range from 5,000 to 40,000 active members. While Honduras, like El Salvador, is trying to crack down on gangs and gang violence through a state of emergency, the police in Honduras is still suffering from high levels of corruption, including collaboration with gang members.
Not being allowed to kill her stepfather, Jennifer focused on killing rivals of the gang when ordered to. After every killing, she would hide in a hotel and lay low for a while and numb the nerves with drugs. “The killing is a never-ending story,” Jennifer sighed, “when they killed two members of our gang, we would go and kill three members of the rival gang, and they would take their revenge again on us. It never stopped,” she recalled with a tired voice.
Recruiting women gang members
During Jennifer’s time as a rising gang leader, more women had to be recruited to replace the increasing number of male gang members being locked up under the repressive Mano Dura policies. The “Hard Hand” policies were implemented in Central America in the early 2000s in an attempt to crack down on gang violence. The policies included reforms to the penal code to allow law enforcement to arrest and detain anyone they suspected of being a gang member based on their appearance — such as wearing baggy clothes or having tattoos. However, instead of achieving the intended goal, these reforms led to gangs recruiting more members, including women and young children. The number of homicides rose.
During her time in the gang, Jennifer lost contact with her family. While male gang members often maintain contact with their biological family, including through visits from their mothers, wives and other family members when in prison, female gang leaders tend to be rejected because of double deviance – both against the law and against their traditional gendered role.
The women started out by smuggling drugs and weapons into the prisons, but soon they were also tasked with stealing weapons, trafficking drugs, collecting extortion money, and killing. In one of the many shootouts between the police and her clique of women, in an attempt to save one of her “chicks” from the police, Jennifer was caught and locked up. While in prison, she found out her stepfather had continued abusing her mother and that he had even stabbed her with a knife. Jennifer was furious, but there was nothing she could do about it in prison.
Leaving the gang
After going through the killings and violence within the gang, being raped by police officers while in prison, and losing her position as a gang leader because she was incarcerated, Jennifer decided she had had enough.
When she gave birth to her first son in prison, she began pleading with other gang leaders to let her leave. She knew the risks. Many women had already been killed because they were perceived to have failed the gang (according to male gang members) and only those who were most trusted could cease to be an active gang member. As Jennifer explained, in the end, «you’ll always belong to the gang family».
Luckily for Jennifer, she had gained that trust by being loyal to the gang all those years. After many months of pleading, she received permission to leave. When she did, she claimed that she “traded her gun for the bible.”
Jennifer’s stepfather was eventually sentenced to prison for having raped and mutilated a 13-year-old girl, several femicides and attempted murder on Jennifer’s mother.
Jennifer, now well into her 30s, has experienced many ups and downs since she left the gang, similar to most female gang members I have encountered during the course of my research. She continuously struggles with money and had to resist attempts from the gang to lure her back in with the promise of gaining large sums for dealing drugs.
Her body will always be identified with the gang
She relapsed into drugs and alcohol while enrolled in a reintegration program, and was subsequently kicked out of the program, a devastating outcome in light of the lack of rehabilitation or reintegration programs in Honduras available for women leaving gangs.
She was proud to say that she had been sober for seven years now and her biggest worry is her sons growing up and falling prey to gang recruitment.
Earlier this year, Jennifer texted me to say that the situation was getting worse without saying anything about the gangs. I knew she was referring to the increasing presence of gang members in her neighbourhood and she was thinking of fleeing the country with her two youngest sons. The Central American immigrant population in the US has grown exponentially over the past four decades: from 354,000 in 1980 to 3,820,000 in 2021. El Salvador (1,418,000), Guatemala (1,107,000) and Honduras (768,000) form the biggest populations of immigrants from Central America, with flight from gang violence cited as the first reason for migration, much like a war.
Jennifer straightens her back. Her short sleeved dress reveals lines of ink on her arm.
When she left the gang, she was allowed to cover up some of her gang-related tattoos, but not the ones that showed the gang’s name. No matter what, her body will always be associated with the gang until she dies.
Ellen Van Damme est membre de Leuven Institute of Criminology, KU Leuven. Elle a reçu des financements pour cet recherche du Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) et le project ERC 'Gangs, Gangsters, and Ganglands: Towards a global comparative ethnography, bourse AG no. 787935.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
