Marked targets

El Salvador: Central American authorities—and U.S. officials—have had enough of tattoo-laden gangbangers, but is their crackdown enough? | Clint Rainey

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador— If every tattoo were a statement, the dermal layer of José de Cabrea's skin would never shut up.

He smiles sheepishly. A clown smiles back from his right forearm. A haloed Virgin Mary looks on ethereally from the other. In the San Salvador tattoo parlor where he spends most afternoons, a silver crucifix necklace swings as he shifts his weight on a counter.

He shrugs. He spins and pulls up his shirt. A pair of baseball-sized dice, frozen in mid-tumble on snake eyes, wrap around his lumbar and obliques. A tribal thorn design spans the skin between his shoulder blades.

And the 23-year-old hates them all. The calligraphy etched on the nape of his neck is particularly odious. He says he is not in a gang. But the tattoo's location and flourished letters—"CHEO," a Puerto Rican nickname for José—are similar to the marks worn by members of Mara Salvatrucha, the most feared and tattooed gang in El Salvador, whose violent cells now stretch from here to Long Island ("Criminals next door," June 18, 2005).