In retrospect, my naïveté and oh-so-gringo hubris were breathtaking. I did, however, manage to make inroads toward my initial goal by linking up with evangelical and secular gang rehabilitation programs based around Guatemala City. Through these groups I became acquainted with a coterie of ex-gang peace workers—former gang members and gang associates cum social workers and pastors—who leveraged their experience in the streets into efforts at “rescuing” gang youth. My relationships with these men and women gave me access to prisons and a few neighborhoods where gangs operated.
Very quickly, however, I gave up on the fantasy of becoming embedded in a gang clique. The situation on the street was far more volatile than I had expected. One tell-tale sign was the failure of gang rehab programs to “save” more than a tiny fraction of the youth they served. For example, in one job-skills training program, funded partly by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), nine out of ten participants dropped out or disappeared before completion, many of them killed by police, rivals, or even their old gangs.
What’s more, while I could gain permission from gang leaders to enter this or that neighborhood on an ad hoc basis, establishing a working relationship with an active gang clique seemed riskier than was worthwhile. The year before I arrived in Guatemala, Christian Poveda, a French filmmaker who had made a documentary about Barrio18 in El Salvador, was gunned down under mysterious circumstances.71 He had lived and worked with a Barrio18 clique in San Salvador for more than a year and clearly believed he had earned the trust of the very mareros blamed for his murder. His death made international headlines, but typically, no firm explanation ever surfaced. There were plenty of rumors, however.
My friend Gato, a former gang member and social worker in Guatemala City, had worked with Poveda. He told me the filmmaker was murdered for having betrayed the gang by failing to follow through on promises to provide a portion of the proceeds garnered from the film. “You don’t make promises to the mara that you’re not sure you can keep,” he said. A Salvadoran journalist claimed that pirated copies of the film had made it to El Salvador, exposing the clique to police scrutiny, and that was why they killed Poveda. Others were convinced it was in fact Salvadoran security forces that killed the filmmaker, in order to further demonize the maras.
MAP 2. Guatemala City. Image courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center. NASA photo ID: ISS022-E-86851. http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov.
Whatever the truth, it was rumors such as these swirling about the maras—and about so much of the violence taking place in Guatemala and across the region—that helped to instill in me an inescapable fear. Each time I walked out my door into my relatively tranquil neighborhood in Guatemala City, I would scan the street for anyone “suspicious.” Coming home late at night, every figure silhouetted by the streetlights was a potential thief, murderer, or kidnapper. Of course the real predators would never stand beneath street lamps. And so in vain I stared into the shadows too, and saw things there that were not. I made constant calculations using variables of my own invention to judge which route was “safer” than another, which corner store (tiendita) less likely to be marked by thieves, which taxi driver more trustworthy than the next. It was an absurd game of probability without any rules or hard numbers at all, upon which I daily staked my well-being, and perhaps my life.
I was certainly not alone in this charade of creeping paranoia and false assurances. Politicians, the press, law enforcement, and the general populace all feed and feed upon such fearful doubt, and this helps to make any study of criminal violence an exploration of half-truths, unverifiable data, and rumors floating in and out of focus. While homicide counts are easy to come by, the kind of information that really matters—who is being killed and why, for example—is not.72 “It has become impossible to know who is killing and why because it is always changing,” said the chief prosecutor of Villa Nueva, a sprawling suburb of Guatemala City. “We cannot differentiate between maras, narcotraffickers, and other organized criminal groups.”73
Given the immeasurable difficulties of investigating crime in postwar Guatemala, a retreat to cold numbers is not surprising. There are dead bodies in the street; some have been tortured, and many of them have tattoos. Too often these are the only material facts available. Almost everything else is hearsay, including much of the “data” produced by state offices and NGOs.74 So everyone is subject to a “regime of rumor” under which “everything becomes patchwork; an infrastructure of hidden bricolage floats to social consciousness like a submerged, stitched together body.”75 And nowhere is the power of rumor more influential than inside mara networks and the neighborhoods and prisons they inhabit. After all, “rumor is the language of risk,” and gang members face more mortal risk on a daily basis than I (and most probably you) will experience in a lifetime.76 Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that fewer than 20 percent of mareros survive into their twenties. As among any population caught up in constant violence, a Hobbesian state of war, “torture and assassination frequently are rumor materially enacted on other people’s bodies.”77 During my fieldwork I heard stories of gangsters and gang-involved youths being murdered because of rumors concerning their loyalty, negligence, or some real or imagined slight. Rumors produce dead bodies, and dead bodies produce rumors. Stories bloom from every corpse to explain (away), justify, or otherwise make sense of the death.
FIGURE 3. Former Barrio18 member in his quarters in Canada prison, Escuintla, Guatemala. Notice the dolls he keeps for family visits and his self-portrait with his four-year-old daughter.
Navigating this landscape of risk meant, first of all, finding spaces in which gang-involved individuals felt safe enough to talk with me. Curiously, many chose to meet in fast-food joints—McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Pollo Campero—in the historic zone, a part of the city easily accessible via public transportation. These restaurants tended to be bright, loud, and crowded with middle-class families. Even so, such meetings were difficult to arrange and often fell through. There was only one space where I could rely on relatively secure and consistent access to gang-involved individuals willing to speak with me: prison.
The prison became a primary fieldwork site as well as a key institutional space for understanding the production of violence well beyond prison walls. To ensure I could get to prison whenever I wanted, I became a “facilitator of projects” with gang-rehab organizations. On a few days each week for more than a year I participated in community-building exercises with groups of incarcerated ex-mareros and other convicts. Through this constant contact, I slowly developed a network of gang-involved men willing to open their lives to me. Many of the stories you will read in this book were recounted in prison yards, recorded on a voice recorder smuggled in my underwear through the prison gates and hidden from prying eyes beneath a trucker cap placed carefully between myself and the narrator. Over the years I have come to count several of these men as friends, and they have invited me to meet their families, which in turn gave me access to new street networks that included the few women whose voices also appear here.78
When I wasn’t in prison, I was pursuing contacts and information on the other side of the law. My aim was to collect, Rashomon-like, as wide a variety of perspectives on gangs and criminal violence as possible. To carry this off, I had to assume many roles and manage a schizophrenic existence. I tagged along with pastors in parishes of gang-dominated neighborhoods. I spent weeks in police precincts, occasionally accompanying police raids on criminal safe houses. I got journalist gigs in order to get a press pass and access to government hearings. I built an archive of newspaper, radio, and television reports of allegedly gang-related crimes. I spent months sitting through somnambulant eight-hour extortion and homicide hearings and pursuing coffee dates with judges and prosecutors. And so on. By moving back and forth between sustained conversations with gang-involved men and digging into the representations of
