A members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang displays his tattoos inside the Chelatenango prison in El Salvador. Moisen Saman/Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Twenty year-old Dennis Martínez never knew what hit him, or why. He died instantly after being shot execution style inside the little shack where he lived in the San Blas coffee plantation in a semi-rural area, a short drive south of El Salvador´s capital city. Dennis was not a gang member. Instead, he worked in the farm as a book keeper and served fervently in a nearby evangelical church. He was, in his mother own words, “every mom’s dream son.”
According to what investigative journalists have been able to piece together from crime scene photos, forensic reports and witness accounts, including his own mother’s, Dennis was shot in the back of the head after a heavily armed police commando stormed the farm one late night back in March 2015. The cops had being tipped off that a small group of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang members had sought refuge in the farm in recent days fleeing police raids in their own local barrios.
