SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR—Spanish priest Antonio Rodriguez talks to the 18th Street gang’s most violent and highest-ranking members as though they are some of his oldest, closest friends.

He teases them, praises their wives, complains to them about his health. When they call, he drops his native accent for a harder Salvadoran one, and leaves his clerical decorum behind, peppering his speech with curses like “puta.”

“How are you, payasito loco (crazy little clown),” he greets Douglas Geovany Velasquez, a gangster serving 35 years for aggravated homicide. In calls secretly recorded by Salvadoran authorities, Rodriguez promises that he will try to have Velasquez transferred to a lower-security prison on a “strategic day” when “there are marches.”

Velasquez was moved on April 30, a day before El Salvador’s labour day.

Officials recorded the calls as part of an investigation that found Rodriguez to have sought favours for gang members and smuggled contraband into prisons. In one conversation, the priest informs a gangster that the attorney general has recordings of him ordering killings. Gangsters also ask “Padre Tono,” as Rodriguez is known in El Salvador, to bring them cellphones and chips, using what seems to be code. Chips are called “children” and phones, “babies.”

In September, after weeks of protesting his innocence, Rodriguez finally confessed to smuggling phones into a prison, receiving two years’ probation in lieu of jail time. He was allowed to leave for Spain, where supporters and family members greeted him as a victim of political persecution.

But the conversations make clear that Rodriguez had converted, over his decade and a half here, from a promoter of rehabilitation programs for gangsters to an ally and collaborator of the gangs. And there is little question that the priest knew what he was doing was wrong. “Speak freely,” he told Velasquez in one conversation. “This phone isn’t pinched.”

Gang crackdown

Rodriguez, a native of Daimiel, Spain, arrived in San Salvador in 2000 to work at a parish in Mejicanos, a sprawling neighbourhood of pupusa stands, tire repair shops, and crumbling brick buildings on the edge of a volcano. Mejicanos’s streets have long been home to both the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and 18th Street gangs.

In 2010, the 18th Street gang — named after its birthplace in Los Angeles — launched one of the cruelest attacks in its history just a block from Rodriguez’s church. Gangsters torched a public bus, and 17 passengers burned to death.

The bus killings became a rallying cry, and then-President Mauricio Funes vowed to crack down. El Salvador criminalized gang membership, and unleashed police and military forces to repress and root out gangsters in neighbourhoods like Mejicanos. Amid the furor, the soft-spoken young priest — at the time largely unknown — went on television and read a statement signed by both gangs. He asked the government to listen to and speak with the “muchachos,” or boys.

The statement got Rodriguez booted from at least one government commission for seeming to side with criminals. But he also gained notice as a voice of the gangs, or “maras,” and his outreach programs began to draw attention from non-governmental organizations and media.

In March 2012, the rival maras announced an unprecedented nationwide truce. The agreement had been mediated in the prisons by outside negotiators, with the government strategically denying any role. Though criticized for being opaque and for empowering the gangs, the truce slashed homicides in half for more than a year before starting to come apart. Early this year, Rodriguez offered to act as mediator in a new series of negotiations.

Investigators secretly recorded Rodriguez between December 2013 and May of this year, months in which killings rose to 12 daily as one faction of 18th Street, the Revolucionarios, entered into open warfare with its other half, the Surenos, as well as against its longtime rival, MS-13.

In the recordings, some of which were leaked by the online news site El Faro, Rodriguez repeatedly speaks with three jailed leaders of the Surenos, including Carlos Mojica Lechuga, or El Viejo Lin, 18th Street’s longtime leader. The Spanish priest is heard gossiping with Lin about politics and filling him in on news about the truce.

In mediating between gangs and their communities, Rodriguez filled a role thrust upon many priests and pastors here.

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“In every community,” says Juan Carlos Carcamo, spokesperson for the Evangelical Alliance of El Salvador, “there’s a religious leader that has some type of contact, because there’s no other option.” If a church doesn’t get involved, Carcamo says, “society would call it indifferent. When it does, it’s accused of being complicit.”

Rodriguez, though, seems to have crossed a line that few religious leaders would, appearing to relish his ties to some of the world’s most dangerous men. He even jokes, in one conversation, that he is seen as a “palabrero” — a gang boss.