Mortal Doubt. Anthony W. Fontes
by two-faced politicians in the present, and by the postwar order itself.61 These analyses focus on the production of and struggle with uncertainty through discourse, anchored in what Michael Taussig might call the “epistemic murk”62 of life in the midst of extreme violence and precarity.63
By honing in on the synthesis of symbolic meanings and their expressions in the physical world, I go through and beyond the discursive and epistemic to draw out the destabilizing psychological, emotional, and visceral impacts of living with the specter of extreme peacetime violence. My approach begins with the observation that the doubt at work here is not merely cognitive, but a structure of feeling that is woven into the built environment and etched upon the body.64 It is as concrete as the prison walls that fail to quarantine criminals, as sharp as the razor wire slicing through city space, and as visceral as a palpitating heart. And since death is a daily risk, the doubt I am talking about cuts to the quick. This is mortal doubt. I mean mortal in two distinct senses. First, it is corporeal and embedded in the flesh; second, it holds within it questions that run the gamut between life and death and thus open onto crises of existential proportions. Such doubt sets the conditions for the confused traffic between terror and the array of reactions people employ to metabolize, confront, and make sense of it. Living with relentless encounters, both real and imagined, with the specter of violent pain and death means engaging in constant calculations and using vague variables to assess the risks of walking out one’s door each day. The stakes are ultimately life itself, but they are also the existential and ethical foundations we use to order, make sense of, and live with what counts as reality. These foundations are physical and psychological: the sanctity of the human body, for example, or the perception of certain spaces as safe and others as unsafe. They are institutional: the state and its underworld, the prison walls that separate the incarcerated from the free. And they are ethical and existential, organizing how we think and act: truth and fiction, good and evil, structure and agency, guilt and innocence, life and death. Even under the most secure circumstances, such distinctions are far less clear-cut than common sense would have them be. After all, order and certainty are always built on shaky foundations, always falling apart and being built back up again. And life lived with profound doubt over the terms of everyday survival exposes just how false and fading these apparent foundations can be.
Given these circumstances, one is tempted to deride the certainties derived through the marero as fraudulent and deceitful, mere symptoms of “false consciousness” obscuring the relations of domination and exploitation defining contemporary social orders.65 Indeed, one of the reasons I wrote this book was to expose the clumsy charades that hide the physical and structural violence of Guatemalan (and global) society behind the tattooed mask of the marero.66 The point, however, is not to label the ways people make sense of violence and insecurity as either true or false, accurate or mistaken. The point is that in this never-ending search for certainty, truth and falsehood matter far less than how the meanings made of the maras induce individuals, communities, and institutions to act in certain ways. That is, symbolic renderings of the marero have material effects that impact the making of the world, which in turn feed into how people imagine the maras and the violence they represent, and so forth. Caught up in the loops and feedback effects that synthesize the material and symbolic in the messy construction of reality, this meaning making weaves through the social fabric, becomes embedded in the urban landscape, and is pressed into the struggle for power and profit in myriad ways.67 In this sense, the maras form a key site upon which competing projects to control, order, and dominate Guatemalan society are exposed in all their violent contradictions.
The structure of the book reflects how the promiscuous play between the material and symbolic shapes the struggle for certainty at multiple scales and in divers spaces. Part 1, “Truths and Fictions,” maps the synthesis of material and symbolic histories in shaping mareros’ lives and collective history. Part 2, “Worlds and Underworlds,” expands out from the maras into the prison system and the city to show how myriad actors—the state, private businesses, and military men, among others—feed and feed off the struggle to impose order on peacetime violence. Finally, part 3, “Spectacle, Structure, and Agency,” explores how the spectacle of gang violence is produced and consumed on national and global scales, making accomplices of distant bystanders and undermining the very possibility of innocence for any of us.
I have written the helter-skelter chains of meaning and material effects into the arc of each chapter. Fantasy and reality weave together in ways that cannot always be pulled apart. However, since giving up on explanation altogether would only lead to losing the thread, I have tried to strike a precarious balance. The chapters conscientiously frame key aspects of the mara phenomenon and peacetime violence in order to guide readers along. These are the bones of the book. In between are the sinews and ligaments. These are short narrative fragments that offer neither analytical frameworks nor attempts at explanation. These narratives perform the entanglement of truths and fictions that is so integral to how meaning is made from and by the maras. They are meant to draw readers directly into the spaces, relationships, and acts of meaning making upon which this book is based.68 One cannot carry out such research and expect to get out clean, so they also expose the destabilizing ethical encounters that define ethnographic research in the midst of so much violent uncertainty. Altogether, this structure is meant to guide readers into the confused struggle to draw order out of chaos, wherein readers are free to get lost.
RUMOR’S REACH
In 2010, when I first landed in Guatemala City, I thought I had come to seek out the “real” marero. That is, I was determined to get as deep as I could into gang networks and tell “authentic” stories from the perspective of gang-involved youth.69 I dreamed of embedding myself in a gang, as the anthropologist Dennis Rodgers had done in Managua, Nicaragua, a decade earlier.70 In retrospect, my naïveté and oh-so-gringo hubris were breathtaking. I did, however, manage to make inroads toward my initial goal by linking up with evangelical and secular gang rehabilitation programs based around Guatemala City. Through these groups I became acquainted with a coterie of ex-gang peace workers—former gang members and gang associates cum social workers and pastors—who leveraged their experience in the streets into efforts at “rescuing” gang youth. My relationships with these men and women gave me access to prisons and a few neighborhoods where gangs operated.
Very quickly, however, I gave up on the fantasy of becoming embedded in a gang clique. The situation on the street was far more volatile than I had expected. One tell-tale sign was the failure of gang rehab programs to “save” more than a tiny fraction of the youth they served. For example, in one job-skills training program, funded partly by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), nine out of ten participants dropped out or disappeared before completion, many of them killed by police, rivals, or even their old gangs.
What’s more, while I could gain permission from gang leaders to enter this or that neighborhood on an ad hoc basis, establishing a working relationship with an active gang clique seemed riskier than was worthwhile. The year before I arrived in Guatemala, Christian Poveda, a French filmmaker who had made a documentary about Barrio18 in El Salvador, was gunned down under mysterious circumstances.71 He had lived and worked with a Barrio18 clique in San Salvador for more than a year and clearly believed he had earned the trust of the very mareros blamed for his murder. His death made international headlines, but typically, no firm explanation ever surfaced. There were plenty of rumors, however.
My friend Gato, a former gang member and social worker in Guatemala City, had worked with Poveda. He told me the filmmaker was murdered for having betrayed the gang by failing to follow through on promises to provide a portion of the proceeds garnered from the film. “You don’t make promises to the mara that you’re not sure you can keep,” he said. A Salvadoran journalist claimed that pirated copies of the film had made it to El Salvador, exposing the clique to police scrutiny, and that was why they killed Poveda. Others were convinced it was in fact Salvadoran security forces that killed the filmmaker, in order to further demonize the maras.
MAP 2.