said. He claimed they also called him El Enigma, because they could not fathom his true desires. To the legal system and the press, he was Jose Luis Velazquez-Cuellar.12
I have kept two pictures of Andy. The first I took at our initial meeting in the public ministry building. Federico had introduced us perhaps an hour earlier. In the photograph Andy looks into the camera without expression—no smile, nothing—as if he were looking through me. I had asked to see his tattoos, and he lifted his shirt up to his skinny shoulders, exposing his chest. There were two: a gaunt female face wreathed in flames and a roughly etched marijuana leaf. The latter I have seen many times. It is a popular “subversive” symbol among disaffected Central American youth.
“My first tattoo,” he said with pride. “I got it when I was eight.”
“And the other?”
“My mother. They shot her eight times.”
The second photo was taken about an hour after he was gunned down with five bullets to the back of his skull. It’s a grainy, black-and-white image snapped by the police who retrieved his body a few blocks from the McDonald’s where we had our last interview. Andy is lying on his back, eyes staring off to the right, lips parted, exit wounds swelling the left side of his face. A triple slash across the front of his black sweatshirt looks at first like some brutal injury, but on closer inspection is merely the trademark logo for Monster Energy drink. Monster Energy . . . the irony is just too much. Federico gave the photo to me along with the rest of the police report on Andy’s murder. “Here, do something with this for your book,” he said. “Don’t let him be forgotten.”
A month before his murder, Andy said he knew he must die. “Anyway, I don’t give a shit. I’m already dead. I lose nothing. When my time comes, they better come at me from behind, because if not . . .” And this was precisely what they did. “These are my streets,” he had said to me as we walked out of the McDonald’s into the five o’clock sun hanging low over the concrete boulevard where his body would be found. He wasn’t looking, but he must have known they were coming. An hour earlier they’d taken out his friend, El Gorgojo, a fifteen-year-old kid who was often slouched in the corner of the prosecutor’s office to support Andy while he made his declarations. Gorgojo had followed Andy into exile when he left the MS, so he would share his fate. After they shot Gorgojo, Andy called Federico.
“They killed my carnal (buddy). They killed Gorgojo.”13 He was sobbing.
Federico told him to go home, but Andy kept repeating, “They killed him, those sons of bitches. He never did anything to anybody.”14
The phone went silent midsentence, and Federico heard no more from him. It seems as though Andy’s concern for his friend was his undoing. Gorgojo’s killers had seen him in the crowd milling about the body. Perhaps killing Gorgojo was simply a ploy to draw Andy out of hiding. An hour later Andy, too, was dead. That’s when Federico called me at home. “I have bad news for you,” he said. As he spoke, I pictured him sitting in his office, linoleum floors cluttered with case files, requests for Andy’s reentry into the protected witness program stamped “denied” and piled in a cardboard box. And I already knew Andy was dead. Of course he was. Federico sounded terrified. “He told me they’re going to come for me, too,” he said. “They have videotapes, he said. They know my face and they know where I work.”
I told Federico to be careful, and then there was nothing else to say. We hung up, and I slumped back in my shoddy wooden chair in my barely furnished apartment. Stupid boy, I thought, and clutched my belly and cried, but only for a few seconds.
BECOMING A REAL MARERO
This is how Andy said he came to join the MS. He grew up in Ciudad del Sol, Villa Nueva, an urban sprawl bordering Guatemala City’s southern edge. His parents were both Barrio18 gang members. He never knew his father, but his uncle was of the “Clanton 14,” one of Los Angeles’s original sureño gangs that still has mythological status among Barrio18 folk in both US and Central American cities.15 Andy started with Barrio18 when he was just six years old, and he said he was leader of the homitos, the little homies, the gangsters in training who hung around their older, bloodier brethren. When Andy was eight the MS clique CLS—led by El Soldado, a man who would become nationally famous before he died at age twenty-three—captured Ciudad del Sol in a hostile takeover. Andy’s mother was shot eight times and died a few days later, and they killed his uncle with a gunshot to the head. So, Andy said, at eight years old he decided to go on a mission to infiltrate the MS clique that had taken out his people. He joined with a plan to bide his time and kill those who had killed his family. At least this is what he told me after he’d become a government witness. I was never sure whether he was trying to justify—to me or to himself—betraying his gang. I suspect the truth was rooted somewhere else, somewhere deeper and too painful to admit. I believe that after making Andy an orphan, El Soldado took him under his wing. The Coronados killed off his family and then replaced it.
FIGURE 8. Andy, June 20, 2012. Photo: Anonymous.
I asked him what the MS meant to him while he was still part of it.
“It was a family that didn’t leave me to die,” he said. “When I needed it most they gave me a hand and gave me food to eat, you understand. So I couldn’t bite the hand that fed me.”
“So they were your friends?” I asked.
“Not my friends. They were family,” he insisted with what strikes me now as ineffable sadness. “They were my family when I had no family. It was all I had. I had no father, no mother, no brothers or sisters. They were my family.”
With no one to turn to except the very authors of his disaster, eight-year-old Andy had to reconcile insuperable emotional contradictions. Rendering the ordeal into a simpler story line such that his eventual betrayal became a successful conclusion to a tale of righteous revenge ties up the loose ends quite elegantly. In this version of his history, both Andy’s past and present selves retain agency and control that one suspects were absent in his “real” life.
In any case, he said that for years he couldn’t get his revenge because they knew where he came from and kept him closely monitored. He underwent a particularly long and strenuous chequeo—a period in which the aspiring gang member demonstrates his worthiness—being tested with ever more difficult missions. When he was nine, he said, already a year into his chequeo, he had to kill another kid who had tried to run away:
They dropped the kid from chequeo, and for his failure they were going to drop me too. It all went to shit because of this dude. He took off and was in a discotheque here in zone 5. He never imagined that I would come to zone 5 to find him, and I came, and another homie came with me. He was like, “Look at (watchea) that dude, look alive and go hit him.”
“Son of a (a la gran)!” I said. “No way bro, the dude backed me up (el vato me hizo paro).”16
“What do you mean ‘no’ you sonofabitch,” he said, and he got on the phone with the chief, El Soldado. “Look, Soldado,” he told him, “the vibe (la onda) is that the Reaper doesn’t want to hit Casper.”17 And then he turned to me, “Look here you sonofabitch, if you don’t shoot him I’m gonna shoot you.”
“A la gran, okay,” I answered, and so I had to shoot the guy. I shed a tear because he was just a baby. I still had a heart, you know. Since then they showed me how to not have a heart, so I didn’t have feelings about anything.
This
