on them in black paint. Others are empty and open, mortar and broken brick, here and there a scrap of faded crinoline. They await the newly deceased to replace those whose families have stopped paying their cemetery dues. Each day cemetery workers haul away the desiccated remains of the indigent dead in wheelbarrows and toss them down a forty-foot hole where the cemetery borders the ravine of trash. Here, at the cemetery’s outermost edge, nature too takes part in erasing the past. Each year, as the rains wear away the earth, one by one the abandoned mausoleums and broken sepulchers tumble down the muddy slope to mingle their remains with the refuse of the metropolis.
* Gang leader.
CHAPTER 1
Portrait of a “Real” Marero
Guatemala City, May 2012. A few days after Calavera and I met in the cemetery, I found myself sitting across from a young man slouched in a desk chair in the corner of a prosecutor’s cluttered office.
“What can you give me?” he asked. He had a wispy mustache and smooth, olive skin, a Miami Marlin’s baseball cap pulled over long black hair tucked behind his ears. The sliver of a roughly etched tattoo on his chest peeked out from under a short-sleeved button-down.
“Not much,” I said. Having grown accustomed to this question, I was careful not to promise more than I could fulfill. I repeated an offer I had made to others. “I can tell your story far from these streets where you have seen so many like you die.”
He gazed at me silently for several seconds and then nodded. “Right on (Órale). Ask me your questions. You ask and I answer.”1
So began my first interview with Andy, a seventeen-year-old member of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS) and protected witness for the Guatemalan government. After more than a year of living and conducting fieldwork in Guatemala City, I had gotten to know many young men caught up in gang life, like Andy, and many more struggling to leave gang life behind. But few were able—or willing—to tell about their lives with such clarity and detail, and none were in quite the predicament in which Andy found himself. Since the age of eight Andy had extorted, killed, and tortured for the MS clique Coronados Locos Salvatrucha (CLS) the most powerful clique of Guatemala’s most-feared mara. As a protected witness in the prosecution of gruesome murders he claimed to have helped commit, he crisscrossed the blurred boundaries dividing the “criminal underworld from the law-abiding world that rests upon it.”2 Straddling the uncertain divide between a weak, corrupt judicial system and the criminals it is meant to bring to justice is dangerous business. When we met, Andy seemed to be making a stand against—or at least reconsidering—the brutal realities that had shaped so much of his life. But whatever personal transformations he might have been experiencing were cut short. A little over a month after our first interview and three days after our last, the MS found and executed him.
FIGURE 7. Andy, protected witness for the Guatemalan government, May 11, 2012.
Before he died, Andy gave Guatemalan investigators detailed testimony describing his gang’s modus operandi, their strategies, and the motives behind unsolved murders both mundane and spectacular. Through our conversations I tried to record his history and map out his beliefs and reflections about the world he grew up in and his current predicament. Oral histories are inherently unstable, always “floating in time between the present and an ever-changing past, oscillating in the dialogue between the narrator and the interviewer, and melting and coalescing in the no-man’s-land from orality to writing and back.”3 The conditions of Andy’s life, the circumstances of our encounter, and his violent death place his story in the most volatile and treacherous zone of this “no-man’s-land.”4 Threading it together requires pivoting back and forth among Andy’s recorded voice; the memories, myths, and fantasies it invokes; and the fact that he is gone.5 His is a story shot through with lacunae and ellipses. Perhaps if he had lived, I could have distinguished more truths from untruths. But this confusion is in a sense precisely the point. Such a fractured narrative is entirely appropriate for a tale of violent life and death. Andy’s story is about how a young man survived and learned to use violence. It is also about how this violence dictates how that story can and should be told. The complex interplay between truth and rumor, the facts of the matter and the inventions of the imagination, illuminate the possibilities and pitfalls of the search for order in the midst of chaos.
Both the real and imagined violence of Central America’s gangs makes delving into the gang phenomenon extremely difficult, for at least two reasons. First, as gangs have become more insular and more violent, getting past collective fantasies about them by getting “close” enough to gang-involved youth has become far riskier. Second, such fantasies are deeply a part of gang culture itself. In twenty-first-century Central America, maras have become erstwhile emissaries of extreme peacetime violence. They have come to distill in spectacular fashion the fear, rage, and trauma swirling around out-of-control crime. Young mareros like Andy are drawn in by and work hard to re-create the phantasmagoric figure the maras cut in social imaginaries, linking the acts of violence gangs perform to the ways gang members (and others) collectively and individually make sense of this violence. This entanglement between symbolic meaning and material violence was starkly illuminated in Andy’s courtroom testimonies. Even as he engaged in flights of fantasy, his testimonies provided the locations of real cadavers, decapitated and quartered, and revealed in precise detail acts of violence no more gruesome or farfetched than the deeds he claimed as his own.
By the time I met him, Andy had become expert in playing the part of the “real” marero, a patchwork figure sewn together from the facts, fears, and fictions swirling about criminal terror. In drawing an image of himself for me, he seemed to swing back and forth between self-consciously acting out this role and searching for some alternative means of representing his life. I will not—I cannot—parse truth from fantasy. But neither do I wish to simply reproduce and reify the fetishized spectacle of gang violence that seemed so integral to Andy’s sense of self.
Instead I follow Andy’s lead. Since he seemed to fold fantasy and experience so seamlessly in his narration, I have written this account of Andy’s life and death in a similar vein. I will not arbitrate between the truth of his stories and the lies, half-truths, and flights of fantasy. By walking in Andy’s footsteps I show how his forays into fantasy cannot be understood as solely his own. “Men do not live by truth alone,” writes Mario Vargas Llosa, “they also need lies.”6 The fiction of the “real” marero Andy worked so hard to fulfill also served the needs of those who would use him for their own purposes and who in turn take part in the layering of fantasy into Andy’s tales. These exchanges—between gang leader and gang wannabe, investigator and witness, writer and subject—illuminate how essential shared fantasies and falsehoods are in the production of knowledge about criminal terror, as well as in the making of violence itself.
ANDY’S UTILITY
A month before I met Andy, I climbed the fifteen stories of Guatemala City’s Tower of Tribunals. I went to court to witness the sentencing of Rafael Citalan, a twenty-three-year-old guero (light-skinned man) with slicked-back hair and a jutting chin. He was one of several MS members allegedly responsible for murdering four people, decapitating them, and placing the heads at various locations around Guatemala City. He sat in chains in a glass and metal cage, wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, and plastic clogs, head bowed before his own reflection. As the judge droned out a long list of his crimes, pronounced his guilt, and handed down his sentence in minute detail, Citalan kept shaking his head.
Back in June 2010, incarcerated leaders of the MS had ordered gang members on the street to decapitate five people. In the end, one clique failed, and they only managed to kill four. Gang members placed the four victims’ heads at various locations around the city. With each head they left a note—supposedly written by Citalan—attacking the government
