spaces, businesses, and violent spectacles through which the mara phenomenon has evolved. Of course the maras are not the problem, and the problem does not begin or end with them. They have been forged through relationships of exchange that collapse the deceptive divides between the local and the global, the state and its underworld, the innocent and the guilty, and so forth. By tracing the endless enmeshing of the imagining and the making of the world, I show how the maras’ flesh and blood violence is indissoluble from their symbolic power in social imaginaries and how they provide cover for a host of actors feeding and feeding off peacetime insecurity.13 To this end, the marero who walks the streets and the marero infesting strung-out imaginations blend and merge in ways that cannot be drawn apart. This doubled figure, in turn, provides a lens through which to witness the making and mooring of collective terror in Guatemala City and beyond.
ORDERS OF VIOLENCE, PAST AND PRESENT
How deep must one dig to uncover the roots of Guatemala’s extreme peacetime violence, or for that matter, the roots of any contemporary catastrophe? The question begs an answer of infinite breadth and complexity far beyond the scope of any single book. But a story has to start somewhere, and in understanding how the maras were made and what they mean, the legacies of Cold War atrocities are both crucial and inescapable.14 This history is particularly visible in the historic zone of Guatemala City, where activists continue to struggle to keep memories of the military’s atrocities alive. They have posted images of the civil war dead and disappeared everywhere. These black-and-white portraits are plastered on car park walls, facades of buildings, and above the bars of certain cantinas. Many of them are Mayan villagers—men, women, and children—massacred in the highlands during military scorched-earth campaigns. Today they are called victims of genocide.15 They are also trade unionists, students, journalists, and other “subversives” disappeared by the police, tortured by the military, and executed without ceremony.16 A few are celebrated as martyrs, their memory sanctified in museums and scattered rituals of public mourning.
These faces are, without exception, solemn. They are reproduced from national ID cards, or in many cases from the archives of the police who kidnapped them. Their suffering, inflicted with considerable support from the United States, and the bitter disappointments of postwar progress, imbue these images with powerful emotional and political valence. They accuse, they plead, they condemn. Most of the bodies of massacre victims remain in mass graves in the mountains, bones woven and swirled together, picked apart by families and forensic anthropologists still searching for justice.17
As for the disappeared, some ended up interred in secret on military bases and in anonymous graves in city cemeteries.18 State security forces discarded others like trash. At the height of the conflict, hundreds of bodies a month were dumped in the barrancos, steep ravines that cut through Guatemala City. Few were recovered by loved ones. Openly mourning these dead would only attract government suspicion. Public reaction to the government’s campaign of urban terror remained quiet, muted by an “existential uncertainty.”19 There were few public venues within Guatemala where accusations or even inquiries could safely be made. There were plenty of rumors whispered fearfully among friends and loved ones, but nowhere for them to register in the public sphere. In 1984 human rights organizations and victims’ families finally confronted Defense Minister Mejia Victores, demanding to be told the whereabouts of the disappeared. Mejia Victores is said to have responded, “Disappeared? There are no disappeared—those people probably migrated to the United States to find work, or died in the 1976 earthquake.”20
FIGURE 1. Portraits of the disappeared plastered around zone 1 of Guatemala City.
More than thirty years later, of the roughly forty-five-thousand men and women disappeared during the civil war, the bones of only a few have been identified and returned to their people.21 For the rest, it is the car park wall, the bar bathroom, the stained sidewalk, and empty reliquaries in the homes of their families.
The legions of desaparecidos haunt the postwar order.22 Lingering uncertainty over their fate steals the possibility of peace for those they left behind. “Disappearance is even more cruel than public assassination,” writes Edelberto Torres Rivas, “since it raises the perception of danger by placing it in an imaginary world, unsure but probable, created by the possibility that the disappeared person is alive. While one suspects that the disappeared person may be dead, nobody knows the truth. Doubt, prolonged over time, is a highly productive way of sowing fear.”23 During the Cold War, counterinsurgent terror provoked and preserved collective doubt through the “sacred currency” of silence.24 Such strategies proved highly effective.25 With political, logistical, and sometimes financial support from the United States, military-backed dictatorships across Latin America destroyed progressive social movements and armed groups struggling to reform their societies from below, virtually ensuring that the causes for which they fought would remain pipe dreams in the era of so-called peace.26
Today, doubt about violence is still a basic fact of everyday life in Guatemala City. However, something has changed radically. Violence and its suffering move through the social body in ways altogether different from civil war atrocities. The most obvious distinction is this: in place of silence, a dissonant chorus greets peacetime brutality, screaming accusation, seeking to blame, determined to name the source of so much murder and suffering. Each act of violence that infiltrates the public sphere is immediately embroiled in the chaos of postwar political maneuvering for power and influence. Guatemalan politicians from across the spectrum blame their adversaries’ policies for creating the conditions giving rise to so much murder. Researchers, activists, analysts, and journalists seek to describe, often in minute detail, how and why this violence is happening. International donors and organizations—the United States, the United Nations—make endless prescriptions for diminishing it.27 The litany of voices rising up in response to contemporary violence creates a distinct kind of confusion. But these voices are no less paralyzing than was the past’s profuse silence.
Such intense and fearful uncertainties about criminal violence help to push concerns over past injustices, no matter how grievous, into the background. In Guatemala City, the collective experience of living with violent crime has given rise to widespread nostalgia for what is remembered as the ordered violence of civil war. This nostalgia is certainly not universal. “Things are certainly better now,” said Mario Polanco, longtime human rights activist and executive director of Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM), when I asked him to compare the terror of the past with that of the present. “Back then, you could be disappeared simply for owning a copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude. I had a copy that I would have to cover with newspaper so it wouldn’t be seen on the bus. Now you have the freedom to think and say what you want.”28
For most residents of Guatemala City, however, the freedom of thought and expression they have gained does not appear as important as the sense of security they sense they have lost. Today, among urban residents the dominant sentiment regarding the wartime past is that “in those days at least you knew if you stayed out of politics you could avoid trouble.” Without the ideological, class, and ethnic categories defining who might be a likely target of counterinsurgent state brutality, the logic goes, the violence of Guatemalan society has become unhinged. Even if nostalgia for wartime terror is driven by distorted reckonings of the ever-receding golden past (as so much nostalgia is), such longing still exposes how unstable the present has become.29 Peacetime violence has been freed from the narrow constraints of revolution and counterrevolution, making potential prey out of those who once imagined themselves safe, and every new murder becomes a hotbed for rumor and supposition, another reason to feel vulnerable.
What Maras Mean
The institutional and existential chaos of Guatemala’s postwar order requires a standard-bearer capable of containing the collective confusion, rage, and
