end?
Ultimately, the meaning of this story goes deeper than whether Andy actually did this thing in this place the way he said he did. Andy, speaking to me, answering my questions, caught up in the maelstrom of his last days, explained his life to me this way, using these words and these symbols as anchors in the story. Storytelling always entails an act of self-creation. Whether the Las Vegas story was true, a flight of whimsy, or an allegory for something else too painful or too mundane to tell, it exposes a brief fragment of the self that Andy invented and reinvented to survive and, perhaps, to survive beyond his time and place among the living. In my effort to capture and convey his experience, I have become another purveyor of Andy’s life and death, adding one more degree of separation and sowing one more set of sutures to keep the whole thing from coming apart at the seams. Still, I cannot stop the narrative from unraveling. Every facet of Andy’s life, every version of his life story that he told and that I inferred, every lie, flight of fancy, and grim confession recede into the event horizon of his murder, from whence they cannot be reclaimed. That Thursday afternoon when another youth about his age blasted five bullets through his skull forms both the beginning and the end of Andy’s story.
After killing El Smokey, Andy returned to Guatemala and was finally “jumped in” (brincado)—officially accepted into the gang. He was thirteen years old, a bona fide homie belonging to the MS’s bloodiest and most powerful clique in Guatemala. Three years later he helped organize the crime of the four heads. Shortly afterward he walked in on El Pensador, his ramflero, snorting cocaine, an act prohibited by MS internal rules (alcohol and marijuana are okay; anything else receives swift punishment). Andy reported his ramflero’s violation to the other homies, but El Pensador denied everything, threatening to turn Andy into ceviche. Andy knew well enough not to hang around after his ramflero made this kind of threat. He split with three other guys, Gorgojo and two other young chequeos dissatisfied with their indentured servitude, leaving CLS forever.
A year later, a dismembered female body in a trash bag appeared in front of Andy’s house in zone 5 of Guatemala City. His “marero-ness,” it seems, was obvious to his neighbors, and someone fingered him to the cops. He roundly denied his guilt—“How could I be so stupid as to leave a corpse in front of my own house?”—but no one listened. Fearing the real possibility of going to adult prison and seeing an opportunity to get back at the MS, Andy told the police he could give them the perpetrators of the quadruple decapitation. In exchange, they promised to make him a protected witness.
Three months later, under armed escort on his way to give testimony in the Tower of Tribunals, Andy said, he caught sight of a CLS member waiting outside the underground entry, watching the media and prosecutors streaming in. His collar was pulled up high to cover the tattoos on his neck. They locked eyes for a second, Andy said, and that’s when he knew. He walked on through the warren of tunnels beneath the Supreme Court, into the cramped, stuffy courtroom. Sitting before the sweating judge, he put it all down on tape, all he knew of the MS: the leaders, the structures of command, the weapons caches, the fronts, the accountants, the soldiers. Extortion networks. Murdered children. Bodies buried in basements.
Andy’s story is a collection of memories twisted by trauma, fantasies of power, and Hollywood invention, lies and myths that he drew upon in his narration of his life. This layering of truth and fantasy was by no means his alone. Storytelling is always an exchange between the actor and his or her audience. This exchange takes place as much through the fantasies we project upon one another as it does through the truths we believe we are sharing. As Andy engaged with his violent past and impossible future, he fulfilled law enforcement officials’ fantasies of protecting society from gang atrocities. And through our brief encounter, he fulfilled my own dream of delving into the life of a “real” marero. His violent death permanently blocked the possibility of continuing this exchange, providing an abruptly certain sense of closure to a narrative filled with lacunae and ellipses. And now, the only way I know to give back what is owed is to keep the promise I made to Andy of a poor kind of immortality. I have constructed a hall of mirrors out of the shards of Andy’s life to reflect how acts of brutality are etched into life through the endless blurring of truth and fantasy, memory and myth. And though Andy’s story may appear singular, it is not. As I explore in the next chapters, the processes of violent creation and destruction that shaped his life, his death, and his story are in fact layered into the making of the maras, and of the world itself, on a far grander scale.
Brother’s Bones
FIGURE 10. Sepulchers in the Guatemala City General Cemetery.
Calavera and I climb a ragged stone staircase up a low rise in the middle of the cemetery. He talks of how he wishes he could forget much of his past, but also how so many memories slip away no matter how hard he fights to hold them close. In prison, it was easier to simply not think of the dead or of problems beyond his capacity to solve. Having witnessed so many men lose themselves raging against their past and the present it had made, he became adept at forgetting. But since walking free, his past has mounted a clandestine assault. Ghosts mark him from the shadows, from just around a corner, and in strangers’ sidelong glances. They are whispered reminders of all he survived and the unlucky bastards who did not. The cemetery is rife with these ghosts and their stories. Some of their stories he lived, too. Some he heard from his sister, Casper, and others, repeated so many times they became his own, slipping into his dreams.
One such story begins with his brother Giovanni walking through the old neighborhood more than a decade before. Where the path forked a young man sat on a broken cement bench, staring at his hands. It was Casper. When he saw Giovanni, he straightened up, calling out, “What do you think they have waiting for us, carnal?”
“El Soldado said it was to make peace with the Boyz 13.”
Casper spit. “Those motherfuckers. I’d sooner skin my dick.”
“Well, we’ll find out,” Giovanni shrugged. “I’m just glad you came.”
“Of course I came,” Casper blurted, then caught himself. “Where the fuck could I run?”
Giovanni looked at Casper and then beyond him into the ravine of trash and the slums clustered against the steep hills on the other side.
“Come on,” he said. “It’s time.” The left fork cut between two weather-beaten and crudely graffitied tin warehouses, then made a precipitous drop to a packed gravel road worn by dump truck tread and the soles of trash pickers. Giovanni started down the right fork that twisted across a desolate space pocked with crabgrass, broken bits of masonry, and scrap metal. Casper followed. More and more debris appeared as the path wound on, as if they were approaching the foundation of some blasted edifice, until it swung up sharply and into the cemetery’s outer border.
After a minute a plateau of broken and eviscerated crypts came into view to the left down the slope. They could see a cluster of dark figures gathered there among the ruins, some sitting, others leaning against scattered gravestones.
“Wait up a moment,” Casper said.
“What is there to wait for?”
“Just hold on, will you.”
“OK.”
They huddled against a mossy concrete slab. The sun had dropped into the hills cresting above the ravine of trash, swinging beams of light upward through the warship clouds strung in ragged columns across the sky. Suddenly the clustered figures threw their heads back and a shout of laughter echoed faintly, and Casper and Giovanni could hear traces of a deep voice speaking in rapid cadence. Then
