Mortal Doubt. Anthony W. Fontes

FIGURE 1. Portraits of the disappeared plastered around zone 1 of Guatemala City.

      More than thirty years later, of the roughly forty-five-thousand men and women disappeared during the civil war, the bones of only a few have been identified and returned to their people.²¹ For the rest, it is the car park wall, the bar bathroom, the stained sidewalk, and empty reliquaries in the homes of their families.

      The legions of desaparecidos haunt the postwar order.²² Lingering uncertainty over their fate steals the possibility of peace for those they left behind. “Disappearance is even more cruel than public assassination,” writes Edelberto Torres Rivas, “since it raises the perception of danger by placing it in an imaginary world, unsure but probable, created by the possibility that the disappeared person is alive. While one suspects that the disappeared person may be dead, nobody knows the truth. Doubt, prolonged over time, is a highly productive way of sowing fear.”²³ During the Cold War, counterinsurgent terror provoked and preserved collective doubt through the “sacred currency” of silence.²⁴ Such strategies proved highly effective.²⁵ With political, logistical, and sometimes financial support from the United States, military-backed dictatorships across Latin America destroyed progressive social movements and armed groups struggling to reform their societies from below, virtually ensuring that the causes for which they fought would remain pipe dreams in the era of so-called peace.²⁶

      Today, doubt about violence is still a basic fact of everyday life in Guatemala City. However, something has changed radically. Violence and its suffering move through the social body in ways altogether different from civil war atrocities. The most obvious distinction is this: in place of silence, a dissonant chorus greets peacetime brutality, screaming accusation, seeking to blame, determined to name the source of so much murder and suffering. Each act of violence that infiltrates the public sphere is immediately embroiled in the chaos of postwar political maneuvering for power and influence. Guatemalan politicians from across the spectrum blame their adversaries’ policies for creating the conditions giving rise to so much murder. Researchers, activists, analysts, and journalists seek to describe, often in minute detail, how and why this violence is happening. International donors and organizations—the United States, the United Nations—make endless prescriptions for diminishing it.²⁷ The litany of voices rising up in response to contemporary violence creates a distinct kind of confusion. But these voices are no less paralyzing than was the past’s profuse silence.

      Such intense and fearful uncertainties about criminal violence help to push concerns over past injustices, no matter how grievous, into the background. In Guatemala City, the collective experience of living with violent crime has given rise to widespread nostalgia for what is remembered as the ordered violence of civil war. This nostalgia is certainly not universal. “Things are certainly better now,” said Mario Polanco, longtime human rights activist and executive director of Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM), when I asked him to compare the terror of the past with that of the present. “Back then, you could be disappeared simply for owning a copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude. I had a copy that I would have to cover with newspaper so it wouldn’t be seen on the bus. Now you have the freedom to think and say what you want.”²⁸

      For most residents of Guatemala City, however, the freedom of thought and expression they have gained does not appear as important as the sense of security they sense they have lost. Today, among urban residents the dominant sentiment regarding the wartime past is that “in those days at least you knew if you stayed out of politics you could avoid trouble.” Without the ideological, class, and ethnic categories defining who might be a likely target of counterinsurgent state brutality, the logic goes, the violence of Guatemalan society has become unhinged. Even if nostalgia for wartime terror is driven by distorted reckonings of the ever-receding golden past (as so much nostalgia is), such longing still exposes how unstable the present has become.²⁹ Peacetime violence has been freed from the narrow constraints of revolution and counterrevolution, making potential prey out of those who once imagined themselves safe, and every new murder becomes a hotbed for rumor and supposition, another reason to feel vulnerable.

      What Maras Mean

      The institutional and existential chaos of Guatemala’s postwar order requires a standard-bearer capable of containing the collective confusion, rage, and despair. In their brash celebrations of brutality and the place they have come to occupy in the public imagination, the maras fit the bill.³⁰ Over the last thirty years, across the Northern Triangle of Central America they have become public enemy number 1, emerging as packed and contradictory symbols of violence driven by seemingly new faces and forces, yet still haunted by the ghosts of Cold War and even colonial atrocities.³¹ This role is spectacularly overdetermined. Playing so perfectly to such a wide array of collective fears, the maras have come to represent “an almost incomprehensibly dark reality,” emerging as the erstwhile emissaries of all the failures of peacetime progress to heal the wounds of war and find a path toward collective prosperity.³² And so, investigating the making of the maras is a means of probing the spaces, circuits, and discourses—the worlds—out of which they emerge and which they cannot help but forge.³³

      The maras have come to represent a world unhinged by fear and violence, both past and present. The gangs are symbolic figures through which politicians, scholars, and others link the revolutionary past with the insecure present, and their violence becomes coded as a legacy and inheritance of civil war. In this sense, the MS and Barrio18 replace the Marxist guerrillas of another age as foot soldiers of the “new urban insurgency”³⁴ fighting in the “slum wars of the 21st century.”³⁵ This rendering is dangerous in its own right, because it imputes a coherent politics to gang violence that it simply does not have, while opening the door to right-wing politicians’ calls to remilitarize society in defense against the insurgent threat.³⁶ In El Salvador, Elana Zilberg highlights this confused play between past and present, showing how a veritable “hall of mirrors” turns contemporary conceptions of the maras into “double faced” reflections of a host of Cold War killers.³⁷

      Some scholars have tied the rapid spread of gang culture to deep socioeconomic inequalities.³⁸ While absolute levels of urban poverty are not significantly greater than in prior epochs, widespread access to globalized media has made poor youths keenly aware of their position on the proverbial totem pole. Gang membership can