Informant38

Helen has not heard from her parents for two years since they left El Salvador to work illegally in the United States. She has run away from her aunt's house to live with a gang. 'My parents think I'm a little angel,' she says, making horns with her fingers above her head, 'but really I'm a little devil.' She is 13 and she has already killed a man.

It is Saturday afternoon in La Campanera, an overcrowded suburb of Soyapango, a satellite of San Salvador. It's another oppressively hot day in the rainy season and muddy children sway on rusty swings outside a rapturous congregation in a happy-clappy Baptist church.
By nightfall the residents of this barrio take refuge in their fortified houses. Being out after dark is asking for trouble in a suburb where children and teens from rival gangs kill each other and ordinary residents get caught in the crossfire

{there's a tone, it's hard to describe, it's like when you're talking to a kid and you know the kid is slanting the whole rap toward a point of persuasion. so whatever they're telling you is filtered out and you head for the subtext. this article has that taste. there's a lot of people now, of all kinds, many of them are not real bright, but they have access to media, both as perceptors and creators, so there's some really seriously clunky 'news' around. it's like poetry, sort of, you can't see what you're missing, it's hard for not-bright people to imagine what it's like to be brighter than they are, you can't see what you can't see, so people write the most awful garbage (happy-clappy?), and well that wasn't my point. my point was this article has an edge that I'm suspicious of, a gloss of emotionalism and luridity, but I think it's probably true. that was my point. that even when somebody telling you something is unsophisticated and trying to manipulate you and all that, they can still be telling you the truth.}