Mortal Doubt. Anthony W. Fontes
One of the messages left around the city by the Mara Salvatrucha
25. One of the four heads placed around Guatemala City
26. Newspaper article on the murder of an alleged marero
MAPS
1. Northern Triangle of Central America
Introduction
Conocereis la verdad y la verdad os hara libres.
(You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.)
—graffiti, isolation block, Pavón prison, Guatemala City
Maras, transnational gangs, took root in Central America in the early 1990s, just as the region’s Cold War conflicts were ending. At the time they were little more than disorganized groups of youths imitating Latino gangs born in Los Angeles, vying for turf in cities struggling to recover from authoritarian rule. Over the years, however, they have evolved into brutal organizations engaged in extortion, contract killings, and the drug trade. Feuds between Barrio18 and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS), the two most powerful maras in Central America, have helped to turn the region into the deadliest noncombat zone in the world.1 At the same time, maras and mareros (gangsters), with their penchant for conspicuous tattoos and audacious violence, have become archetypal symbols of all that has gone wrong in Central America.
I arrived in Guatemala City in 2010 to begin field research that I hoped would penetrate the haze of fear and fantasy swirling about the maras.2 Along with other cities in the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras), this metropolis of some seven million citizens has suffered from the gang phenomenon, in its poor neighborhoods and sprawling suburbs, as well as in the nation’s overcrowded prison system.3 And in this city—as in other cities across the region—the rise of the maras has been concomitant with the onset of a new kind of insecurity. This is not the overtly political and ethnic violence of prior epochs. Today, Guatemala City is a time and place dominated by both the fact and the fear of out-of-control crime.4
Following the signing of peace accords in 1996, the nation’s homicide rate climbed to 40 per 100,000, the fifth highest in the world, and between 2000 and 2008 Guatemala City’s homicide rate doubled, with the numbers climbing to as high as 60 per 100,000.5 In the city’s “red zones”—poor, insecure neighborhoods often dominated by gangs or other criminal groups—security officials claim that homicide rates have shot up to over 190 per 100,000.
But in a sense, such body counts obscure more than they reveal. As hard and fast as these numbers may seem, what makes this violence so terrifying for so many is its profound uncertainty. Fewer than 5 percent of violent crimes ever make it to trial, making Guatemala a great place to commit murder.6 Forces of order and disorder often make distorted reflections of each other.7 At best the law appears helpless and at worst complicit, making the list of usual suspects in every murder, extortion, and robbery long and poorly defined. Police regularly exchange places with the narco-traffickers, kidnapping rings, gangs, and other criminal groups they are meant to arrest. Massacre, torture, and dismemberment are also popular techniques to make murder register far and wide. The cacophony of public reaction—sensationalist media reporting, politicians’ grandstanding, the rumors coursing through violence-stricken communities—warps the fear into every realm of public life.
With so many murders left unsolved and unpunished, overwhelming doubt haunts collective perceptions of danger and mires every avenue of investigation.8 As a veteran homicide investigator with the National Civil Police told me, “A death may occur for a failure to pay extortion. A death, well, may occur because of a drug-related settling of accounts and have nothing to do with the gangs. And that’s all one can say.” From behind his cluttered desk, he fixed me with an incongruous grin. “You might die because your brother got caught up with the maras. Who can say with more specificity? There are many acts that have such consequences.”
Such extreme levels of violence, arising from such inscrutable sources, cast long shadows over Guatemala City. Violence and its terror dictate how city residents think and live. People cast about for ways of understanding what has become a “war without sense.”9 These struggles to make sense of senselessness, to draw meaning and certainty out of cycles of violence that refuse to be fixed in time and place, converge upon the figure of the marero. Actors of all kinds draw on him to make meaning in political discourse, newspaper and TV headlines, casual conversation and rumors, and daydreams and nightmares. For Guatemalans from all walks of life, this figure has come to personify all the wounds and illnesses of the struggling social body. Thrust into the public imagination, the symbolic power of the marero fuses everyday violence taking place in gang territories and other insecure spaces to the making of social and political perspectives dictating life across the city, the nation, and beyond.10
These brash vehicles of violence and emissaries of peacetime chaos have become absolutely essential to the making of a certain kind of order. Maras form a vital node, a flashpoint, in which overwhelming violence and fear circulating throughout the social body come into stark relief.11 They are, in a sense, a way for people to know violence and its terror, or at least a way of providing a discernible form to the endless unknowns that make life under such conditions so terrifying. They have become a means of rendering the illegible legible, of imposing a sense of finitude and control on out-of-control insecurity. They have become the answer when no answers are enough. In a world that always appears to be coming undone, the maras play a pivotal role in holding it together. What’s more, such meaning making is by no means isolated from the ongoing destruction of bodies, lives, and communities it is meant to keep at bay.12 Efforts to explain and make sense of this kind of violence have knock-on effects that are absolutely pivotal to its perpetual cycles.
Tracing the maras’ footsteps, this book tracks the deadly play among out-of-control predation, overwhelming uncertainty, and desperate struggles to carve a sense of certainty back into the world. Through stories and perspectives collected from Guatemalan gangsters and ex-gangsters, police and prisoners, journalists and taxi drivers, judges, human rights activists, and narco-traffickers, among many others, this book explores the histories, spaces, businesses, and violent spectacles through which the mara phenomenon has evolved. Of course the maras are not the problem, and the problem does not begin or end with them. They have been forged through relationships of exchange that collapse the deceptive divides between the local and the global, the state and its underworld, the innocent and the guilty, and so forth. By tracing the endless enmeshing of the imagining and the making of the world, I show how the maras’ flesh and blood violence is indissoluble from their symbolic power in social imaginaries and how they provide cover for a host of actors feeding and feeding off peacetime insecurity.13 To this end, the marero who walks the streets and the marero infesting strung-out imaginations blend and merge in ways that cannot be drawn apart. This doubled figure, in turn, provides a lens through which to witness the making and mooring of collective terror in Guatemala City and beyond.
ORDERS OF VIOLENCE, PAST AND PRESENT
How deep must one dig to uncover the roots of Guatemala’s extreme peacetime violence, or for that matter, the roots of any contemporary catastrophe? The question begs an answer of infinite breadth and complexity far beyond the scope of any single book. But a story has to start somewhere, and in understanding how the maras were made and what they mean, the legacies of Cold War atrocities are both crucial and inescapable.14 This history is particularly visible in the historic zone of Guatemala City, where activists continue to struggle to keep memories of the military’s atrocities alive. They have posted images of the civil war dead and disappeared everywhere. These black-and-white portraits are plastered on car park walls, facades of buildings, and above the bars of certain cantinas. Many of them are Mayan villagers—men, women, and children—massacred in the highlands during military scorched-earth campaigns. Today they are called victims of genocide.15 They are also trade unionists, students,