In this testimony narrated in the first person, Marta* tells how she fell in love and had a child with a retail dealer in the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil.
*He asked to keep his real identity anonymous for security.
After a long history of mistreatment and poverty, she abandoned him to prevent her son from being exposed to his father’s activities.
“When I was 13 or 14 years old, I hesitated with a boy who was very tough on gang members. When you have a boyfriend who is a king (gang leader), you gain respect from people. Everyone respected me. I was a teenager and I thought hanging out with the baddest would make me popular.”
“Were you the bride of a king?” which king? —Interrupts her 12-year-old son— He was a thief.
Marta and her family celebrate the event with laughter in the living room of their house in Durán, one of the most violent cantons of Guayaquil, in southwestern Ecuador.
“It’s that they go up in rank. First they join the gang…” Marta resumes.
“They’re beginners,” corrects his son.
“They are beginners, they are going up, they are going up and they are king. The king gives talks to those who have just entered.
When I was with him I met many gang members. I had very close friends who were not so batrachians (criminals). I liked to rap, and some of those people would sometimes improvise. I stayed there listening to them. I never liked that they talked about guns and killing. I like rap that talks about life, about what happened to them.
They even told me to be a gang member, but I don’t like those things because in the gang there are rules: you have to meet at 8:00 at night, you have to talk about certain things. And I didn’t have time because I was studying, my dad wouldn’t let me go out.
This boy said that he was my boyfriend because he gave me pricks. But it’s not like I was going to bed with him.
He was the king of the Latin King here, he was 18 or 19 years old. In fact, I never knew what the gang was, I only listened. And from one moment to the next, women began to join as well.
Over time I got angry. Once I even went crying to ask them to return the shoes that they stole from my school friend. I told them: ‘Why do you steal their things if you are people who study?’
I went away because they had some stupid rules. That he had no friends here, there. They go to hell with me because I am going to have friends, I am very friendly. I don’t like being told what to do.
I did not consume, and that is one of the things for which I admire myself, for being a thinking person. At that time I did not hear of the H (heroin). In 2009 there was no H at my school, they only talked about marijuana. In my teens I didn’t try any kind of stuff.”
mom at 16
“I had already separated from this boy when I met my son’s father. I was leaving school and saw him outside on a bicycle. He is very handsome and I fell in love with him. He looked like Daddy Yankee.
A friend tells me: ‘This guy wants to ask you for your number.’ There I turned red, and the next day I gave it to him. From there we talked, he called me conventionally. He even came with his dad to the house.
I gave myself to him, he was my first man. At the age of 16 I lost my virginity. He was 21 and belonged to another gang, he was a ñeta (from the Los Ñetas band).
I am lucky to hang out with gang members.
Everyone found out that I was pregnant, even the gang members. I was a mom at 16 years old. I dropped out of school and focused. He didn’t go out anymore and he couldn’t stay here because some people wanted to hit him. He was a ñeta and this was Latin King territory.”
“Why God?”
“As soon as I became a wife to this boy and became a mother, I saw the reality of life. When I went aside, I realized that I entered a different world.
My husband’s mom was an alcoholic, and then she became a Christian. She is not a bad person, she has four children from different husbands. She is very humble, with a good heart, but she has marked her past.
My son’s father was drunk. Where I grew up, in general, nobody made noise, the way they raised me was different from how they raised him.
It was like 2:00 in the morning and the jukeboxes were blaring. People sucking (drinking) in the living room, and me with my little son upstairs, in a loft so low that it touched the ceiling.
She was overwhelmed, she cried and said: Why, God? She lived in a house with a dirt floor and with the child, very far from here. Pure mud, the bathroom wasn’t even a bathroom, it was a hole, I couldn’t even relieve myself. Every weekend they ended up in bottles and I was stuck there.
He was an irresponsible man, I had a bad timehe. But I said, ‘This is what I came for and I have to accept it.'”
steal to eat
“There was a time when we had nothing to eat and one day he told me: ‘Marta, I have to go steal’, and he went with a brother who was super addicted.
They left at 5:00 in the morning on a motorcycle and robbed people who left early in the morning, that there are many people. They arrived with lots of wallets, money, cards, telephones, perfumes, and then they resold it for food. They did that for almost a week.
I told him: ‘And are we going to live like this all our lives or what? One day they’re going to catch you.’ And he said: ‘Yeah, yeah’.
There was a time when we had nothing, but he no longer went out to steal. And he said to me: ‘And now what do we do?’. That day we went to one of those stores that has bars on the door. We asked for a chicken, oil, a pound of rice, eggs, like any customer… The motorcycle was on and we started out of despair at not having food.
But when I came to my grandparents’ house to eat, my grandmother told me: ‘Even if he hits or kills, he is a husband'”.
coke blocks
“Over time we built a small, cement house. The brother lived with us, but he was too lost because he was a consumer. Sometimes his eyes widened and he said to me: ‘Look, look, the man who is standing there.’ And no one was there.I was hallucinating, going up the stairs, going down the stairs.
And my son’s father couldn’t get a job. One day I told him that he couldn’t take it anymore because he didn’t change. He even sold drugs, he was a micro-dealer. What he thought was: ‘My son grows up and he is seeing that example of the father’.
I don’t know what he did with the money. I think I didn’t have it because I used too. Once she told me her to try that. She had a big table where she cooked that. But me, zero drugs.
When I went to the bathroom, I would lift the lid of the tank (of the sink) and find covers, white blocks, coke blocks. He sold by quantity, he sold a lot. He already saw guns.
The man made the covers, he weighed them.”
New job, new mindset
“I got a job at KFC and when you work, you start to hang out with other kinds of people and your mentality changes. I always thought big.
I began to meet other types of people, people who were studying at the university, and I liked that environment more than continuing in that life with him. With them I talked about interesting things, with him I didn’t talk at all.
When I was 13 years old, I worked with animations for children’s parties, with a clown, as a hobby. But then I took it back and I had my contracts. He saw that I was doing things well and he could not change.
‘How long?’, I told him. ‘You see that I get my mother off working and you, nothing’. I was going to my animations, I invested in a speaker.
I was very hysterical. She yelled at him and he slapped me. He never swelled me in the face, but he did hit me in the body. I told him: ‘Don’t go, don’t go to the street’. And he told me: ‘Now, shut up, you motherfucker’. He cursed, he insulted me a lot.
‘Understand me that I’m working’, he told me. ‘If I go out at night it’s to bring money home.’ She would leave at night and come back the next day, allegedly selling her drugs. And she left me alone with my son.
He didn’t consume much, he didn’t walk down the street dirty like his brother.”
dirty silver
“The straw that broke the camel’s back was one day when I was in bed and they knocked on the door. They knocked at 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 in the morning.
They were people who brought him clothes and he gave them drugs. I had no peace. One time I went out pissed off and told them: ‘You have fed me up, get out of my house! If I see them here again, I’ll throw water at them.’ They were addicted people.
At that time, my brother started using. And I cried, he told him: ‘Don’t you understand? Realize that my brother does the same shit. You are hurting so many people.’ He was silent.
He gave me watches and I returned them because it was dirty money. I was not going to wear something that came from something that had been taken from someone else.
I had my money, I have been working at KFC for almost 10 years. He was very stingy. If he ever took me out to eat, he would measure every penny.
When I went to work, I brought women into the house because the neighbors told me. I didn’t want him to touch me, it disgusted me. She came from the street with an ugly smell, she smelled of drugs.
When he didn’t want to have sex, he would get angry.. Once he made me. And I left myself, I did not put force. But my love faded.”
“I’ll hold you up to here”
“Little by little I opened my eyes.
I got home from work at 11:00. One night my son was not there. I asked my mother-in-law, that at that time she was already a little sister, and she told me: ‘She took him over there.’
I walked to a house where there were some trendy women, men smoking, and my son inside. He was with another child who had no example of a mother and father, he was rude, spoiled.
I grabbed my son and told him in front of all his friends: ‘Look, if you want to lose yourself, lose yourself. But don’t bring my son to this crap. You are a bad example, you disgust me’.
That’s when I understood that I didn’t want to be with a man who wasn’t going to give me a good future.
After spending 8 years with him, I left him. It was a big fight, he insulted me horribly, but I told him: ‘I’ll put up with you up to here.’ I left him everything we had, which I had bought.
And in these 4 years that we are apart, he only looked for me when he found out that I was with someone else. Now I am with someone who is a worker, he loves my son, he does not drink, he does not go out, he is loving.
My son’s father was recently shot three times and went to Chile. He started out as a gang member, but now he’s a mafia, he’s a drug.
He has a good relationship with my son. I never say anything bad about him. He is his father and he loves his son. But since we got away from that life, I feel better.
Now I am paying the monthly fee to finish school because I want to go to university. I’m going to study to be a teacher.
And I want the whole world to know what I experienced. I don’t cry anymore because I have self-love and I got over myself.”
Now you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate them so you don’t miss out on our best content.
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-63530923, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-11-10 13:40:05
VALENTINA OROPEZA COLMENARES
@OROVALENTI
SPECIAL ENVOY TO GUAYAQUIL
#entered #world #harsh #testimony #gang #members #partner