in criminal violence carried out by a revolving cast of shadowy actors.54
MAP 1. Northern Triangle of Central America. Source: Based on a United Nations map of Guatemala, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guatemala_location_map.svg.
Nowhere are such ambiguities of power and legitimacy more pronounced than in the Northern Triangle of Central America.55 The array of local, national, and regional factors creating the conditions for out-of-control violence in Central America today is dizzying in its variety. It includes, to quote just one World Bank study, “rapid urbanization, persistent poverty and inequality, social exclusion, political violence, organized crime, post-conflict cultures, the emergence of illegal drug use and trafficking, and authoritarian family structures.”56 Likewise, the causes and conditions giving rise to peacetime crime across the region are virtually endless.57 However, for those who must live and die with the brutal specters haunting urban life, such explanations do not explain much. In fact, the act of pinning down this violence to a discrete set of causes and conditions imposes a false sense of certainty that is itself another kind of violence. It offers a sense of assurance that can only be upheld by the security of distance. When we close that distance, the utility of such easy answers evaporates.
Perhaps this is why the most nuanced scholarship on the region’s struggle with insecurity has long been riddled with doubt. In neighboring El Salvador, Ellen Moodie uses the term unknowing to capture how those living in the midst of postwar violence struggle with the uncertainties of everyday crime and insecurity and recall the ordered violence of war with fitful nostalgia.58 For Honduras, Jon Horne Carter flags how silence and elision—leaving the violent realities of everyday life “unsaid”—has become a collective survival strategy for residents of insecure zones of Tegucigalpa.59 For postconflict Guatemala, Linda Green demonstrates how fearful silence surrounds survivors’ memories of civil war atrocity,60 and Diane Nelson hones in on how life for the poor and marginalized is a struggle with duplicity—a sense of being repeatedly “duped”—by the failed promises of a failed revolution, by two-faced politicians in the present, and by the postwar order itself.61 These analyses focus on the production of and struggle with uncertainty through discourse, anchored in what Michael Taussig might call the “epistemic murk”62 of life in the midst of extreme violence and precarity.63
By honing in on the synthesis of symbolic meanings and their expressions in the physical world, I go through and beyond the discursive and epistemic to draw out the destabilizing psychological, emotional, and visceral impacts of living with the specter of extreme peacetime violence. My approach begins with the observation that the doubt at work here is not merely cognitive, but a structure of feeling that is woven into the built environment and etched upon the body.64 It is as concrete as the prison walls that fail to quarantine criminals, as sharp as the razor wire slicing through city space, and as visceral as a palpitating heart. And since death is a daily risk, the doubt I am talking about cuts to the quick. This is mortal doubt. I mean mortal in two distinct senses. First, it is corporeal and embedded in the flesh; second, it holds within it questions that run the gamut between life and death and thus open onto crises of existential proportions. Such doubt sets the conditions for the confused traffic between terror and the array of reactions people employ to metabolize, confront, and make sense of it. Living with relentless encounters, both real and imagined, with the specter of violent pain and death means engaging in constant calculations and using vague variables to assess the risks of walking out one’s door each day. The stakes are ultimately life itself, but they are also the existential and ethical foundations we use to order, make sense of, and live with what counts as reality. These foundations are physical and psychological: the sanctity of the human body, for example, or the perception of certain spaces as safe and others as unsafe. They are institutional: the state and its underworld, the prison walls that separate the incarcerated from the free. And they are ethical and existential, organizing how we think and act: truth and fiction, good and evil, structure and agency, guilt and innocence, life and death. Even under the most secure circumstances, such distinctions are far less clear-cut than common sense would have them be. After all, order and certainty are always built on shaky foundations, always falling apart and being built back up again. And life lived with profound doubt over the terms of everyday survival exposes just how false and fading these apparent foundations can be.
Given these circumstances, one is tempted to deride the certainties derived through the marero as fraudulent and deceitful, mere symptoms of “false consciousness” obscuring the relations of domination and exploitation defining contemporary social orders.65 Indeed, one of the reasons I wrote this book was to expose the clumsy charades that hide the physical and structural violence of Guatemalan (and global) society behind the tattooed mask of the marero.66 The point, however, is not to label the ways people make sense of violence and insecurity as either true or false, accurate or mistaken. The point is that in this never-ending search for certainty, truth and falsehood matter far less than how the meanings made of the maras induce individuals, communities, and institutions to act in certain ways. That is, symbolic renderings of the marero have material effects that impact the making of the world, which in turn feed into how people imagine the maras and the violence they represent, and so forth. Caught up in the loops and feedback effects that synthesize the material and symbolic in the messy construction of reality, this meaning making weaves through the social fabric, becomes embedded in the urban landscape, and is pressed into the struggle for power and profit in myriad ways.67 In this sense, the maras form a key site upon which competing projects to control, order, and dominate Guatemalan society are exposed in all their violent contradictions.
The structure of the book reflects how the promiscuous play between the material and symbolic shapes the struggle for certainty at multiple scales and in divers spaces. Part 1, “Truths and Fictions,” maps the synthesis of material and symbolic histories in shaping mareros’ lives and collective history. Part 2, “Worlds and Underworlds,” expands out from the maras into the prison system and the city to show how myriad actors—the state, private businesses, and military men, among others—feed and feed off the struggle to impose order on peacetime violence. Finally, part 3, “Spectacle, Structure, and Agency,” explores how the spectacle of gang violence is produced and consumed on national and global scales, making accomplices of distant bystanders and undermining the very possibility of innocence for any of us.
I have written the helter-skelter chains of meaning and material effects into the arc of each chapter. Fantasy and reality weave together in ways that cannot always be pulled apart. However, since giving up on explanation altogether would only lead to losing the thread, I have tried to strike a precarious balance. The chapters conscientiously frame key aspects of the mara phenomenon and peacetime violence in order to guide readers along. These are the bones of the book. In between are the sinews and ligaments. These are short narrative fragments that offer neither analytical frameworks nor attempts at explanation. These narratives perform the entanglement of truths and fictions that is so integral to how meaning is made from and by the maras. They are meant to draw readers directly into the spaces, relationships, and acts of meaning making upon which this book is based.68 One cannot carry out such research and expect to get out clean, so they also expose the destabilizing ethical encounters that define ethnographic research in the midst of so much violent uncertainty. Altogether, this structure is meant to guide readers into the confused struggle to draw order out of chaos, wherein readers are free to get lost.
RUMOR’S REACH
In 2010, when I first landed in Guatemala City, I thought I had come to seek out the “real” marero. That is, I was determined to get as deep as I could into gang networks and tell “authentic” stories from the perspective of gang-involved youth.69 I dreamed of embedding myself in a gang,
