Before the trial, I’d spoken with Edgar Martinez, the lawyer for the prosecution. He is a tall, balding man, amiable and ready to talk. “This is the most spectacular and frightening gang case I have been involved with,” he said. “This was a political act. They wanted to terrify the populace and intimidate the government so they would get better treatment in the prisons. It’s the first case I’ve worked on that has had such political overtones. It’s like terrorism.”
For nearly two years the crimes remained unsolved. Maras are notoriously difficult to infiltrate. “They have their own language, their own style,” said an eager young Guatemalan gang expert working with an FBI task force. “It is their subculture that makes them harder to infiltrate than even organized crime or drug traffickers (narcos).” Besides, as they have admitted to me time and again, Guatemalan security officials have very little experience in undercover operations. Martinez told me that the case broke open with the testimony of a secret witness, another MS member who, for reasons he did not explain, confessed and turned on his compatriots. This witness, I would learn later, was Andy.
“He’s really something. He’s a real marero,” exclaimed Martinez, his eyes wide with excitement, while we were sitting over fried chicken, his bodyguards sitting stolidly beside us. “And a good witness. A fine witness.”
The only reason Andy seemed to matter to Martinez and nearly everyone else with whom he worked was his utility. For the government prosecutors reveling in his authenticity, he made possible a deeper understanding of the MS than they had ever had. Guatemalan investigators are often woefully ignorant regarding the criminal structures they face, making a “real marero” witness like Andy a rare treasure indeed. A paranoic state and terrified society have long targeted poor young men who happen to have tattoos, wear baggy pants, or use certain slang as potential mareros.7 And the illicit businesses in which gangs are involved—extortion, drug dealing, hired assassinations—incorporate people and networks far beyond the gangs themselves.8 The maras are not a discrete “thing” separable from structures of violence linking, among others, organized crime, poor urban communities, and corrupt state officials. Distinguishing living, breathing mareros from their brutal public image reproduced in the media and everyday conversation is also difficult.9 Gangsters and gangster wannabes alike work hard to mirror the monstrous figure the marero cuts in the collective consciousness. Yet more often than not, both the victims and alleged perpetrators of “gang violence” are not even gang members.10 Andy, however, was. He also had a remarkable memory for detail and was able to provide an accurate insider’s perspective on how the MS operates.
The gleam of excitement in Martinez’s eyes when he touted Andy to me—“a real marero!”—spoke volumes. By giving the government the case of the four heads, Andy offered prosecutors a chance to show they were not the corrupt, incompetent bureaucrats most Guatemalans believe them to be.
But even as Andy helped prosecutors take apart the Mara Salvatrucha’s most powerful clique, the government failed to give him cover. Andy’s murder only months after helping investigators break open one of the most sensational mara cases in history epitomizes the state of justice in Guatemala today. As part of the witness protection program, officials locked Andy and three other gang associates who had followed him into exile in a room for three days with little food. The stipend money they were promised never materialized. When the boys complained, no one listened, and when they complained more loudly, officials kicked them out of the program. After Andy’s death, Federico, a young, earnest investigator who had taken Andy under his wing, waved a sheaf of papers in my face. “These are applications to get him back in the safe house,” he said, shaking his head. “All rejected. He hadn’t even begun to give us 1 percent of what he knew.”
When I met Andy, he had already been kicked out of the witness protection program and was seeking his own security by joining a Barrio18 clique. From our very first encounter, I did not need to cajole Andy into telling me about his life—he readily agreed to my using a voice recorder in each of our interviews—but that does not absolve me from having used him as well. I am using him now. When Martinez mentioned the possibility of meeting him, I jumped at the opportunity. “A real marero!” While my reasons for wanting to meet Andy were distinct from the government’s, I shared a similar dilemma. Reliable informants were hard to come by and harder to keep. Throughout my fieldwork, my network of people involved in criminal groups was in constant flux. Friends and contacts were transferred into maximum security prisons, were killed, or simply disappeared. I was careful to keep my correspondence with Andy—and his situation—secret from my networks in prison. I confided only in Calavera and gave him no details. He warned me in no uncertain terms that Andy’s cooperation with the government would get him killed. Still, although I pursued Andy, at the time I did not realize just how short-lived our relationship would be. It took a couple of weeks of repeated phone calls to Federico to finally set up an interview.
Federico introduced me to Andy as an American (gavacho) scholar who wanted to learn about gang life. I emphasized that I was not a cop, nor did I have any connections to law enforcement, but was merely a researcher and writer with no stake in the struggle between the Guatemalan government and the gangs. Careful not to promise more than I could fulfill, I never pledged more than to write his story. In retrospect, however, even this paltry promise may have shaped how he chose to represent himself. Did he improvise and edit his tale to match what he imagined would keep me coming back for more? He already knew that his usefulness to the government was all that kept him out of prison. He was used to being used. Before I used him for my research, before the government used him to take apart the Mara Salvatrucha, gang leaders used him to commit many, many murders. Children who kill do not risk the same legal consequences as adults. For years his usefulness kept him alive when everyone about him was dying. And a week before his death, Andy fantasized that he was using the government to wipe out his enemies.
“More than anything . . . look, I’ll explain,” he said. “What I want is that they catch all those assholes so that I remain as the commander. To govern, you understand! Once I’m in charge it’s gonna be another deal, loco (dude). No more extortions. . . . Well, there will be extortions, but you won’t see any deaths. We’ll go to the homes and tell them, ‘Look, we’re going to take care of you, but we don’t want the violence.’ To reach an accord without the violence.”
At the time, I shrugged off this declaration as so much brash naïveté, the foolish musings of a young man. In retrospect, I was blind to just how skilled Andy had become in bending his words to manipulate those around him, including me.
FINDING AND LOSING ANDY
I did not fully comprehend while he was alive just how precarious a position Andy was struggling to maintain, nor all the roles he was playing at once. He was a protected witness against the MS while undergoing initiation with their rival, the Little Psychos, a powerful Barrio18 clique, in another part of the city. He was saving his skin from prosecution for quartered corpses dumped in front of his house while claiming revenge against the MS for killing his family, who were Barrio18 members.11 Andy would brag about killing enemies and innocents and in the next breath be cursing his old clique for hurting children. The complexities and contradictions of his life only came into focus as I pieced together what I could from our recorded interviews and the transcripts from his court testimony.
Take, for example, the constellation of aliases he used in his short life. Andy, aka El Fish, aka El Niño, aka El Reaper, aka José Luis Velasquez-Cuellar. Each of his names addressed an aspect of his self and his history. He said that before she died, “my mother called me Andy,” and that’s how he introduced himself to me. When he was a toddler his neighbors and family called him El Fish because of a funny hairstyle he wore for a time. “They called me El Niño because I was the youngest ‘homito.’” Homitos are little gangbangers, who emulated the Barrio18 members who controlled his neighborhood before MS killed them all. When he was a gang wannabe trying
