Over the last thirty years, across the Northern Triangle of Central America they have become public enemy number 1, emerging as packed and contradictory symbols of violence driven by seemingly new faces and forces, yet still haunted by the ghosts of Cold War and even colonial atrocities.31 This role is spectacularly overdetermined. Playing so perfectly to such a wide array of collective fears, the maras have come to represent “an almost incomprehensibly dark reality,” emerging as the erstwhile emissaries of all the failures of peacetime progress to heal the wounds of war and find a path toward collective prosperity.32 And so, investigating the making of the maras is a means of probing the spaces, circuits, and discourses—the worlds—out of which they emerge and which they cannot help but forge.33
The maras have come to represent a world unhinged by fear and violence, both past and present. The gangs are symbolic figures through which politicians, scholars, and others link the revolutionary past with the insecure present, and their violence becomes coded as a legacy and inheritance of civil war. In this sense, the MS and Barrio18 replace the Marxist guerrillas of another age as foot soldiers of the “new urban insurgency”34 fighting in the “slum wars of the 21st century.”35 This rendering is dangerous in its own right, because it imputes a coherent politics to gang violence that it simply does not have, while opening the door to right-wing politicians’ calls to remilitarize society in defense against the insurgent threat.36 In El Salvador, Elana Zilberg highlights this confused play between past and present, showing how a veritable “hall of mirrors” turns contemporary conceptions of the maras into “double faced” reflections of a host of Cold War killers.37
Some scholars have tied the rapid spread of gang culture to deep socioeconomic inequalities.38 While absolute levels of urban poverty are not significantly greater than in prior epochs, widespread access to globalized media has made poor youths keenly aware of their position on the proverbial totem pole. Gang membership can provide a “pathway to manhood” for ambitious youths with few options of finding dignified, licit employment.39 Children growing up in poor urban neighborhoods have plenty of other reasons to join gangs: for self-protection, for revenge, to make money, to become desirable, to gain a sense of belonging, to survive.40
Likewise, the circulation of symbols, language, and imagery traveling via migrant bodies, Hollywood films, and the internet has also contributed to the gangs’ allure for poor youth. Gangs are said to be products of a globalized consumer society and its inherent brand name fetishism. As Donna Decesare writes of gangs in El Salvador, “[K]ids desperate for ‘real’ Nike kicks will spend a family’s whole remittance check, sell crack, or steal to buy them. Acquiring style is costly and requires some effort. Clearly, poverty is not the only thing drawing . . . youth into gangs.”41
Popular opinions of what maras are and why they do what they do both interweave with and diverge from scholarly analyses, running the gamut of psychological, spiritual, social, and historical explanations. The notion that gangs are the inheritance of civil war, for one, is widely shared, prompting a taxi driver to tell me, “These gangs do the same thing to poor people as the guerrilla once did!” We spoke as he maneuvered his beat-up taxi through the early morning Guatemala City traffic. “All they do is extort and brainwash the people for their own destruction.”
Or, as a truck driver who had served in the military toward the end of the civil war declared, “I know exactly how to take care of these maras. The same way we took care of the guerrilla. Give me 10 platoons of kaibiles armed to the teeth, and we’ll clean them all out street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood.”42
I asked him how he and his platoons would identify the enemy. “Just ask the people,” he yelled over the grinding engine. “Everyone knows. Just ask someone who is not afraid to say.”
Indeed, “everyone” knows, or pretends to. Experts and laypeople, politicians and pundits all seem to have an explanation of the why and wherefore of the maras.43 Gangs are a deep-throated articulation of profound odio y envidia—hatred and envy—coursing through Guatemalan society.44 Gang members are “like sex addicts, but addicted to killing,” as a Salvadoran crime reporter declared at a meeting of police and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to discuss peaceful crime prevention. Another taxi driver repeated the common refrain that mareros “worship the devil and the Santa Muerte—they have given their souls to the Beast (La Bestia).”45 An evangelical gang pastor ministering to a violent suburb of Guatemala City put it slightly more subtly. “The nights are worse,” he said as he excused himself from our interview to return to his neighborhood. He laughed bitterly. “This is like Alcoholics Anonymous. They need a twelve-step program to stop from killing. Constant supervision, constant intervention, because killing is all they know.”
The maras are also an answer to the conundrums facing vulnerable urban youth in search of protection. “When a drunken father comes home and beats a kid’s mom and molests the kid’s sister,” said longtime youth advocate Emilio Goubaud, “and the boy tries to fight back and gets kicked in the stomach, the gangster is across the street. He offers the child a toke of his joint, and smiles at him. ‘The whole world is shit,’ he says. ‘The only thing to do about it is to have more power. You want to fight your father? Here, take this gun. Fuck that bitch. He deserves to die. Welcome to la vida loca.’”46
For some, the maras’ willingness to kill and die has made them useful mercenaries following the orders of higher powers—doing the dirty work of corrupt police, who in turn take orders from politicians, organized crime, and the rich elite intent on maintaining the status quo. For others, gangs are simply an ugly expression of a collective fall from grace and loss of traditional values. I asked Walter Villatoro, a well-respected criminal circuit court judge, why maras had become so violent. “Aha,” he thundered, pounding his desk. “I will tell you! We have become rotten from the beginning. It starts with Caesarean sections, the separation of child from mother, feeding newborns animal milk, and leaving them alone in their cribs. The gangs are the vomit of a sick society.”47
Like savage “Others” raised up through history and across cultures, the maras’ image enshrouds and eclipses the complex structural and historical forces that make the catastrophic present so deeply uncertain. They have become another justification for savagery in the name of the law and order promised by so-called civilization.48 They are foot soldiers in a vague and dystopian civil war. They are inhuman and unfeeling killers who do not fear death. They are youth trying to protect themselves, or maybe just to get some style. They are boys struggling to become men, parasites feeding off collective fear, by-products of consumer capitalism, and souls lost along a path blazing into an ungodly future.49 In twenty-first-century Guatemala City, the incessant meanings made of the maras and “their” violence are as contradictory and contingent as the disordered order they represent. And taken together, the countless interpretations of what the maras are and what they mean make them into something else entirely: a kaleidoscopic looking glass through which the catastrophic present forms and dissolves and reforms in infinite, inscrutable patterns. Once again, it is “through a glass, darkly.”50
FIGURE 2. Marero in isolation lockdown, Canada prison, Escuintla, Guatemala.
EXPLAINING VIOLENCE IN THE NORTHERN TRIANGLE
Postwar Guatemala City is not alone in being dominated by what Hannah Arendt would call the “all-pervading unpredictability” of violence.51 In the contemporary world, such spaces are legion.52 Since the end of the Cold War the “democratic wave” and the triumph of market fundamentalism have been accompanied by a “gradual erasure of received lines between the informal and the illegal, regulation and irregularity, order and organized lawlessness.”53 In this era marked by renewed ambiguity and increased uncertainty, Latin American
