This is that account — attributed as his, examined against what the experts have been able to verify, and told with the respect that a story of this magnitude deserves.
## Who José Salvador Alvarenga Was Before the Drift
He was born around 1975 in Garita Palmera, a coastal municipality in the department of Ahuachapán, El Salvador, in the westernmost part of the country near the Guatemalan border. The community sits close to the Pacific coast, and the sea was not an abstraction for the people who grew up there. His grandfather, by Alvarenga’s own account, taught him to tell time by watching the moon — a skill that would become one of the essential tools of his survival.
He came to Mexico not through a planned career move but through the kind of circumstance that sends people across borders under pressure. After a bar fight left him seriously injured — multiple stab wounds, by the account gathered by journalist Jonathan Franklin for the 2015 book 438 Days — he fled El Salvador, moved first to Guatemala, and eventually made his way to the Pacific coast of Mexico. He settled in Costa Azul, a small fishing village located near Pijijiapan in the state of Chiapas, roughly two-thirds of the way down the Mexican Pacific coast toward the Guatemalan border.
In Costa Azul, Alvarenga joined a group of fishermen known informally as Los Tiburoneros — the shark hunters. These were experienced deep-water fishermen who went out beyond the sight of land, targeting sharks, marlins, and sailfish in waters that most recreational boaters would never see. The work was hard and the pay was based on what you caught. Alvarenga became an experienced captain in this operation, trusted to take a boat out, manage the gear, bring back a load of fish.