Erasing Evidence of Life in a Gang

She was holding what looked like a plastic pen with a metal tip attached by a long wire to an electrocauterizing machine.

Soon the cramped treatment room was filled with the smell of singed flesh as the tool burned away the skin above the pigment in Orellana's tattoo. As each stretch of pigment was exposed, Morales would scrub it out with a wad of gauze or a metal scraper.

The clinic uses this method because it cannot afford the equipment needed for the far less invasive laser treatments that pass harmlessly through the skin to break down the pigment underneath. Even so, the project, which is partly funded by a Belgian aid group, can cover only half of the $50 it costs to remove most tattoos. Patients must pay the rest, a substantial challenge in a nation where 40 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day.

The electrocauterizing technique also doesn't always work on gang tattoos, which are generally done by amateurs using improvised tools that can inject the ink too unevenly or deeply under the skin.

Orellana's tattoo, at least, was coming out fairly easily.

"You know, the guy who did this for you didn't do such a bad job," Morales said with a chuckle.

"I think he's dead," Orellana answered in a tiny, childish voice. "I heard they killed him in prison."

Morales's smile faded. "Imagine that," she muttered. "Was he very young?"

Although Morales's male patients tend to remain silent during treatments, the women often seem eager to open up about their past, she said afterward. Morales does not discourage them. "It seems like it's a relief, a therapy, for them to talk," she said.

Sure enough, Orellana began to pour out her story with little further prompting. She had never intended to join Eighteen, she said. But when she was 12, gang members who had a feud with her mother retaliated by kidnapping her. They forced her to undergo the initiation ritual, which included multiple rapes in addition to the tattoo, she said. Two days later, she managed to escape and flag down a police car. But because it was no longer safe for her to live in her mother's house, authorities kept her in an orphanage for nearly three years until they could track down her father, who had been in prison for murder.

Now Orellana lives with her father's relatives in a village five hours north of the capital. But the gang's shadow still trails her. She often wakes up at night shaking and sweating from a nightmare, she said. And a few months ago, she was expelled from school when administrators learned of her tattoo during a routine health exam.

"It's for that more than anything that I want to take this thing off," she said, her voice choking with emotion for the first time during her tale. "It's like a stain on me."