SAN SALVADOR — Father Antonio Rodriguez keeps the image on his cellphone. A 12-year-old boy. Headless. His killers probably boys not a whole lot older than him.
When Josue went missing, his frantic grandmother sought the priest's help. Rodriguez went looking for him and found the body. The crime chilled and disgusted him.
Somehow, he needed to document the loss of another young life in a dizzying spin of daily, casual death. And so the blurry photo, the thin, lifeless body in bluejeans and red shirt askew in a ravine, the head off to the side, remains on the priest's cellphone.
"It's the story of thousands," Rodriguez said.
Though Mexico grabs headlines for its horrific drug war body count, El Salvador suffers a far worse homicide rate, one of the highest in the world.
Two decades ago, it was a civil war, with soldiers, death squads and guerrillas spilling the blood. Now it's gangs (thousands of members originally from Los Angeles), drug-fueled crime, abusive police officers -- all the makings of a bloodletting that has terrified the population and contributed in recent elections to the unseating of the party that ruled for 20 years.
In the first three months of 2009, by official government count, an average of nearly 12 people a day were slain. This in a tiny, densely populated nation of nearly 7 million. (The homicide rate is roughly five times that of Mexico and 10 times that of the United States.)
Life is cheap in El Salvador. Throw in drugs and impunity, and a flawed judicial system whereby few if any killings are ever solved, and the death toll will continue to climb. With the lawless atmosphere, ordinary business disputes and personal vendettas are readily solved by physical attack.
Gun shops, which barely existed a decade ago, are common neighborhood features. You can hire someone to kill a rival for $50; for $100 if you want to see the body.
"It is an epidemic," Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez's parish is in the Mejicanos neighborhood of San Salvador, a jumbled working-class area where old women walk with live chickens tucked under their arms and pupusas stacked on their heads, and where guards with shotguns stand at pharmacies and bakeries.
The priest runs a violence-prevention program at his church. He's helped about 1,800 youths, most of them active or former gang members, giving them job-skills training, psychological counseling and perhaps most important, the chance to have their tattoos removed.
