victim had refused to make by running away, a move the gang interpreted as a decision to die. How does a nine-year-old make sense of such a brutal zero-sum calculus? Age-old philosophical puzzles—the parsing of guilt from innocence, for example, or the possibility of rational choice and free will—become moot, even absurd, when applied to the moment in which Andy took the gun too heavy for his thin wrists and shot another child.
When we spoke, Andy blamed El Soldado for making him into a killer. Like Andy nearly a decade later, the CLS chief would die while apparently cooperating with the government to reduce gang violence in Guatemala City. The reasons for his death remain unclear to all but those who ordered it. El Soldado had played some very dangerous games: becoming a lead negotiator with the government to start gang rehabilitation programs and meeting with and giving talks to the police, the media, and low-level government officials in which he advocated the need for reconciliation, that gangs could be part of peacemaking, and that police profiling was violating poor youths’ human rights. His message made him both a celebrity and a target for other gang leaders (and as the rumors go, for the police as well), for whom gang war was far too profitable to give up. For a short time, national media referred to him, with thinly veiled sarcasm, as the next “savior of Guatemala” for his role in trying to bring peace to the streets.18 A few years before he died, an Associated Press photographer snapped his picture hunched over his baby son at his home in Ciudad del Sol—the neighborhood where Andy’s family once lived—kissing the child’s head and holding a .45.
El Soldado’s celebrity made him the very personification of the MS and all its contradictions. The savior of Guatemala was, according to his contemporaries, also a central player in institutionalizing the practice of descuartizamiento (dismemberment), torture, and other forms of extreme corporal punishment against captured rivals as well as homies who betrayed the gang, wanted to leave, or couldn’t cut it anymore. This kind of violence is performed in a group, a communal act in which aspiring or newly initiated members must take part to prove their mettle. Andy said he participated in a descuartizamiento for the first time when he was ten.
FIGURE 9. El Soldado and his son in front of their home in Ciudad del Sol, Villa Nueva, in 2003. Photo: Rodrigo Abd (API).
“I had to kill a homie from my old barrio (gang).19 We had to dismember him, just me and the ramflero (gang leader).”20
“You had to kill and quarter him?”
“Nope. Dismember him alive. Torture him, make it a party.”
“Where did this happen?”
“Over in Ciudad del Sol, Villa Nueva in a chantehuario. Chantehuario, that’s what you call the houses of war, you understand, where all the homies will be, see.”21
“Were the others around when you were doing it?”
“Yeah. All the homies of my clique: El Extraño, El Huevon, El Shadow, El Brown, El Maniaco, El Delincuente, El Fideo, El Aniquilador, El Hache, El Chino. All of them, you understand.”22
“What were they doing?”
“Marking the wrath (marcando la ira), seeing if I had heart, mind, and balls. All they ask of you in the Barrio is that you have mind, heart, and balls, because if you don’t have any of them you’re not worth dick. That’s right, and I had been a little vato since I was six with Clanton 14. Now they were seeing what I was capable of, testing me. So with faith and joy I had to do it.”
“How did you feel?”
“Look, carnal, the way I grew up, I grew up in the gang. My dad was eighteen, my mother was eighteen, you understand, ok. I had already grown up with a gangster’s outlook, so I took pleasure in killing dogs, going around killing cats. So when I killed a human it was like I was killing an animal. I was already a beast (bestia) for that kind of thing.”23
I still find it difficult to stomach Andy’s glib reproduction of himself as beast, as the devil personified. I wanted some other explanation—something more nuanced and reflective, perhaps. But none was forthcoming, at least not from him. Again and again, he claimed the virtues of a “real marero.” Whether he in fact embodied this image and did so out of habit or was simply playacting is impossible to say. The idea that mareros are essentially different from other criminals, and from other human beings, is an important part of their public persona. It is also a notion the maras have taken on and self-consciously cultivated. The key distinction, the way to “recognize” a marero, is his capacity for violence without the psychological baggage that would paralyze a “normal” human being.
In our last meeting, Andy sat across from me in a McDonald’s, a chicken burger and fries untouched before him. Middle-class parents eyed us nervously while their children shrieked in the ball pit some thirty feet away. “Human beings have five senses,” he said. “The marero will have a sixth. The sixth will be that he has no heart, that he doesn’t give a damn about anything. You will dismember for your gang, you will kill for your gang, you will die for your gang. This is how you describe a marero.”24
It was as though he was reciting from a script. The cadence was measured and precise, with emphasis on the action verbs: descuartizar, matar, morir (dismember, kill, die). He seemed to be describing a sociopathic subject freed of the empathies expected of “normal” humans: for others’ suffering, for the value of human life, for the need to be considered human at all.25 “I am more than human,” Andy seemed to be saying, “because I am less.” To identify so closely with the inhuman, the beastly, the demonic is to reject all facets of belonging in wider society—worldly, spiritual, and otherwise—since “one’s worthiness to exist, one’s claim to life, and one’s relation to what counts as the reality of the world, all pass through what is considered to be human at any particular time.”26
Such wholesale alienation cannot be invoked with mere words. It must be created through ritual and repetition. The urge to fetishize the violence of Andy’s world is strong: to hold it at arm’s length and convince oneself that it is not ours, it belongs to some other realm, some other time, some other species. I know. I have done it. The image of grown men performing similar acts—in a war zone under military orders, perhaps—seems to me more palatable, or at least less world-rending. Children who kill, children who learn to glory in death, embody an ethical and even existential set of dilemmas for human societies. They invoke a deep-seated sense of horror, an internal scream pleading “How could this happen in the world I live in?”27 And yet by reacting this way, we ignore how children like Andy learn to do what they do through an education. Andy’s life demonstrates how this behavior is taught. Accepting this fact means accepting that any one of us could be molded in exactly this way.
Through the brutal acts the MS made him perform, Andy made himself in the image of the unfeeling killer that mareros are so widely imagined to be. He became not only a child who has killed, but a child who assumes he must be a killer in order to be anything at all. Once he was caught up in this image of himself, all possibility of a different life and a different way of being seemed to disappear. But at least some of his brutal braggadocio was pretense. Several times Andy seemed to let slip the suffering hidden behind the facade of the unfeeling killer, admissions quickly swallowed back again.
“I’m already grown and I’m always shedding tears, loco,” Andy said the last time I spoke with him. “Because one knows that loneliness attacks, and one has a heart. Maybe not for caring for other people, but for caring about oneself. . . . To not have a person who will listen to you, to be able to talk and have a peaceful life. . . . But whatever, it’s the life that I
