Asylum Ltd: A story of gangsters, kidnap and a broken system

While fleeing gangsters who had kidnapped and threatened to kill him, Eduardo was thrust into Britain’s Kafkaesque asylum system. He speaks to Miles Ellingham and Carl Klink about life on the inside

Life for an asylum seeker in the Penally camp in Wales is exceptionally degrading and stressful (Reuters/Rebecca Naden)

Nine years ago, on his way home from college in Santa Tecla, Eduardo was kidnapped by gangsters. They call them “las maras” and they’re endemic in El Salvador, born from the rubble of a ruinous US-funded civil war back in the 1980s. According to statistics, about one in 12 Salvadorians are reliant on gang activity in some way and in 2015 El Salvador saw nearly one murder an hour. There are a host of reasons for this (the unending torrent of arms pouring into the region from US manufacturers, the supranational war on drugs, the Salvadorian Supreme Court’s designation of major gangs as “terrorists”, as well as rampant government corruption) though none of them occurred to Eduardo as he was robbed, knocked unconscious, stuffed into the back of a car and driven to a safe house outside the city.

Eduardo was 18 at the time, he’d just begun studying for a marketing degree. Coming-to surrounded by drunk young men brandishing M16s, Eduardo began to pray because he knew he was going to die. First, they threw him into a dark room and demanded the pin for his phone and his parents’ mobile numbers. When Eduardo hesitated, they beat him savagely and one of the maras pushed a gun into his face, telling him to speak now or die right there in the dark. Eduardo finally gave in and watched as they called his parents in front of him. For some reason, none of the calls went through – after a few more tries, the gangsters got bored and took Eduardo outside to be shot at the edge of the forest.

Incredibly, Eduardo survived. Just as the maras were about to execute him, a firefight broke out back in the safe house. Eduardo took advantage of the ensuing chaos and fled into the forest, not stopping for breath until he reached an A-road. From that day forward, Eduardo’s life was forever changed; the gangs knew who he was, they knew his face, they even had his parents’ mobile numbers. Eduardo and his family tried moving house, moving city, but there was no escape – and, even if there was, he was too traumatised to even leave the flat. After two years of stasis, one failed attempt at Italian citizenship and even more gangland terror inflicted on his older brother, Eduardo eventually found his way to the UK. He’d wanted to become a brand manager, but instead spent his early-twenties subsumed by fear and weathering the Kafkaesque nightmare that we’ve come to call the asylum process.