Mortal Doubt. Anthony W. Fontes
of the Violent Peace
Like the decomposing landscape where the Guatemala City cemetery meets the city dump, mara history makes for treacherous terrain. Telling the story of the maras’ rise means reckoning with the breathtaking mortality rates among gang-involved youth. Death’s specter materializes in the symbols with which maras and mareros mark their bodies and neighborhoods. Take, for example, the tres puntos (three points) tattoo, once a trademark of Southern California Latino gangs. Composed of three dots in the shape of an ellipsis or an equilateral triangle, it is usually tattooed on the back of the hand or at the corner of an eye.1 For some it references the Holy Trinity. For others it is a trifecta of sex, mourning, and death. Among the maras of Central America, the tres puntos has taken on another meaning as well. It is said to stand for the only three certainties in la vida loca: the hospital, the prison, and the cemetery. Over the years, as violent death has steadily become more certain than survival, the cemetery has come to loom larger than life among the maras.
Today, relatively few gang members, it seems, survive their twenties. For example, José, a former Barrio18 member, claimed that of the ninety homies he saw initiated into the gang between 1998 and 2000, only three are alive today. Little Fat of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS) believed that he was among five men who survived out of the sixty he ran with in the early 2000s. El Cholo Cifuentes may be the last man alive from his Barrio18 crew that was active in the mid-1990s. They are survivors of peacetime war zones in which thousands of youths kill and die each year in the name of imported symbols tattooed on their bodies and graffitied on neighborhood walls, only to be replaced by others too brash, too ignorant, or too vulnerable to resist the maras’ allure. In recent years, if official statistics are to be trusted at all, the killing has only accelerated.2
How did this happen? How did the maras come to influence the lives and deaths of so many urban youths growing up in postwar Guatemala City?3 And how did groups of youths fighting in the name of symbols imported from US street gangs become such central figures in the making and mooring of peacetime terror? In this chapter I piece together a few key elements of mara history that set the arc of the maras’ dystopian evolution and made them into harbingers of a new age of violence. Drawing from the stories of former gang members and gang associates, as well as journalists’ and scholars’ accounts, I map the political and social ferment of Guatemala City when the maras first took root; how decades of US involvement in Guatemala gave the maras’ “made in America” style an irresistible magnetism for some urban youth; and finally, the ways that this “new way of being a gang” seemed, for a moment, to structure and regulate internecine gang violence before it too fell apart.
Exploring the rise of the gangs in Guatemala means linking irrefutable historical phenomena—US imperialism and Cold War atrocities, transnational migrations and deportations, and so forth—with the multiple and contradictory ways people remember and make meaning out of the past. That is, this chapter tacks back and forth between documented material history and how people remember and symbolically render the past in the present. The point is to provide a relatively clear context and background to contemporary struggles for order, but also to show how in the end, material and symbolic histories are absolutely inseparable. Neither should be valued over the other.4 What actually happened in the past only gains power and meaning through how it is imagined in the present, and such memories are always uncertain and under contestation.5
To put it another way, making history is a process of creative destruction, of remembering and forgetting.6 Many of the stories in this chapter were recounted to me by former gang members and gang associates stuck in prison or struggling to survive on the street. They came filtered—consciously or not—through memories twisted by time and trauma. Some have been passed down from generation to generation, tweaked and embellished countless times before reaching me. Some are fragments of memory that fit, like rough-hewn puzzle pieces, more or less awkwardly with the mishmash of newspaper and scholarly reports that pass for the “historical record.” These stories of the gang past, like any historical account, should not be taken as “merely” history. The maras’ evolution in Guatemala has been concomitant with the rise of out-of-control crime, and these stories reflect collective efforts—made by myriad actors besides the maras—to stabilize the present by pinning down the past. As the harbinger of a dystopian present and future, gang history reflects collective anxieties over Guatemala’s descent into peacetime chaos. This history of the ever-receding past conjures forth dreams and nightmares animating contemporary struggles with severe insecurity.7 Indeed, one of the only certainties to emerge in these stories is that the past was more orderly and secure than the present, mirroring the widespread sense of nostalgia at work in Guatemala City (and elsewhere) for long-lost orders of violence. Whether these stories tell the truth about the past is an open and unanswerable question. But even if the old ways of ordering violence never existed as they are remembered, such memories provide a foundation, shaky as it may appear, upon which to construct a sense of order.8
NOSTALGIA FOR A FAILED REVOLUTION
Among large swathes of the urban population today, out-of-control violence and insecurity have given rise to an odd sort of nostalgia for the ordered violence of civil war.9 That such nostalgia exists at all is disturbing, given that the endgame of Cold War conflict was state-perpetrated massacres, disappearances, and genocide. But in the late 1980s, when the signs and symbols associated with the maras are purported to have first appeared in Central America, the armed conflict that had simmered and periodically erupted for more than thirty years was grinding to a close. The threat of state violence was still very much on people’s minds, though armed confrontation between the military and what was left of the guerrilla forces was rare, and the nation was groping hesitantly toward peace and the return of nominal democracy. During this period several robbery and kidnapping rings developed in Guatemala City, including Los Pasacos, the Kangooroos, Agosto Negro, and the AR15s, to name a few. The AR15s became famous for using high-caliber weapons in shootouts with urban police; its rank and file were probably deserters from the army. Youth gangs also existed but were for the most part scattered, unaffiliated, and isolated from one another. There were brekeros (break-dancers), decked out in Michael Jackson-esque glitz, tight pants, and jean jackets, dancing to US funk and hip-hop. There were (and still are) the niños de la calle (street children)—orphans and runaways living together for companionship and protection, huffing glue and gasoline, panhandling, snatching purses, and picking pockets. Military police are said to have targeted them for social cleansing.10 Stories still circulate of el panal blanco (the white van), into which police hustled street children and common thugs. Some claim these people were sent into compulsory military duty, others that they were simply killed.
El Cholo Cifuentes—who would eventually become the leader of a Barrio18 clique in zone 1 of Guatemala City—came of age in the late 1980s. He also claimed to have served a stint transporting cocaine for Guatemalan middlemen involved in the Colombian trade. For more than a decade he has made his home in Granja Penitenciaria Pavón, Guatemala’s oldest prison, known to inmates simply as Pavón. This is where I made his acquaintance.
At first, he said, he resided with the general population, commingling with other Barrio18 members and paisas (non-gang prisoners). However, toward the end of his sentence he requested a transfer to an isolation block. The young gangsters entering the prison were getting too crazy, he said, too out of control, and he didn’t want to risk getting caught up in their bad trouble. In mid-2012, when we spoke in his private cell, he was sick with hepatitis, patches of skin yellow and inflamed, wearing a grease-stained, secondhand Izod golf shirt. I asked him how he first became involved in the maras.
“Ah, yes,” he said, flashing stained yellow teeth. “I was waiting for that question. We were a banda (band or group), not yet a gang. We called ourselves los Guerreros (the Warriors). This was before the maras had become the maras. We got a group together of ten, fifteen guys. And when we saw a man acting dishonorably, like abusing a woman on the street, we shut him up.” He held up a swollen finger in righteous admonition. “‘Calm down, man. Women are not to be touched.’ And we were young, but that’s how we were. Doing the work of heroes.”
Like other aging gangsters, Cholo’s stories are sticky