Mortal Doubt. Anthony W. Fontes
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very first encounter, I did not need to cajole Andy into telling me about his life—he readily agreed to my using a voice recorder in each of our interviews—but that does not absolve me from having used him as well. I am using him now. When Martinez mentioned the possibility of meeting him, I jumped at the opportunity. “A real marero!” While my reasons for wanting to meet Andy were distinct from the government’s, I shared a similar dilemma. Reliable informants were hard to come by and harder to keep. Throughout my fieldwork, my network of people involved in criminal groups was in constant flux. Friends and contacts were transferred into maximum security prisons, were killed, or simply disappeared. I was careful to keep my correspondence with Andy—and his situation—secret from my networks in prison. I confided only in Calavera and gave him no details. He warned me in no uncertain terms that Andy’s cooperation with the government would get him killed. Still, although I pursued Andy, at the time I did not realize just how short-lived our relationship would be. It took a couple of weeks of repeated phone calls to Federico to finally set up an interview.
Federico introduced me to Andy as an American (gavacho) scholar who wanted to learn about gang life. I emphasized that I was not a cop, nor did I have any connections to law enforcement, but was merely a researcher and writer with no stake in the struggle between the Guatemalan government and the gangs. Careful not to promise more than I could fulfill, I never pledged more than to write his story. In retrospect, however, even this paltry promise may have shaped how he chose to represent himself. Did he improvise and edit his tale to match what he imagined would keep me coming back for more? He already knew that his usefulness to the government was all that kept him out of prison. He was used to being used. Before I used him for my research, before the government used him to take apart the Mara Salvatrucha, gang leaders used him to commit many, many murders. Children who kill do not risk the same legal consequences as adults. For years his usefulness kept him alive when everyone about him was dying. And a week before his death, Andy fantasized that he was using the government to wipe out his enemies.
“More than anything . . . look, I’ll explain,” he said. “What I want is that they catch all those assholes so that I remain as the commander. To govern, you understand! Once I’m in charge it’s gonna be another deal, loco (dude). No more extortions. . . . Well, there will be extortions, but you won’t see any deaths. We’ll go to the homes and tell them, ‘Look, we’re going to take care of you, but we don’t want the violence.’ To reach an accord without the violence.”
At the time, I shrugged off this declaration as so much brash naïveté, the foolish musings of a young man. In retrospect, I was blind to just how skilled Andy had become in bending his words to manipulate those around him, including me.
FINDING AND LOSING ANDY
I did not fully comprehend while he was alive just how precarious a position Andy was struggling to maintain, nor all the roles he was playing at once. He was a protected witness against the MS while undergoing initiation with their rival, the Little Psychos, a powerful Barrio18 clique, in another part of the city. He was saving his skin from prosecution for quartered corpses dumped in front of his house while claiming revenge against the MS for killing his family, who were Barrio18 members.11 Andy would brag about killing enemies and innocents and in the next breath be cursing his old clique for hurting children. The complexities and contradictions of his life only came into focus as I pieced together what I could from our recorded interviews and the transcripts from his court testimony.
Take, for example, the constellation of aliases he used in his short life. Andy, aka El Fish, aka El Niño, aka El Reaper, aka José Luis Velasquez-Cuellar. Each of his names addressed an aspect of his self and his history. He said that before she died, “my mother called me Andy,” and that’s how he introduced himself to me. When he was a toddler his neighbors and family called him El Fish because of a funny hairstyle he wore for a time. “They called me El Niño because I was the youngest ‘homito.’” Homitos are little gangbangers, who emulated the Barrio18 members who controlled his neighborhood before MS killed them all. When he was a gang wannabe trying to pass his chequeo—an initiation period in which the gang measures a wannabe’s worth—with the MS, “they called me El Reaper [as in the Grim Reaper], because I collected the most lives,” he said. He claimed they also called him El Enigma, because they could not fathom his true desires. To the legal system and the press, he was Jose Luis Velazquez-Cuellar.12
I have kept two pictures of Andy. The first I took at our initial meeting in the public ministry building. Federico had introduced us perhaps an hour earlier. In the photograph Andy looks into the camera without expression—no smile, nothing—as if he were looking through me. I had asked to see his tattoos, and he lifted his shirt up to his skinny shoulders, exposing his chest. There were two: a gaunt female face wreathed in flames and a roughly etched marijuana leaf. The latter I have seen many times. It is a popular “subversive” symbol among disaffected Central American youth.
“My first tattoo,” he said with pride. “I got it when I was eight.”
“And the other?”
“My mother. They shot her eight times.”
The second photo was taken about an hour after he was gunned down with five bullets to the back of his skull. It’s a grainy, black-and-white image snapped by the police who retrieved his body a few blocks from the McDonald’s where we had our last interview. Andy is lying on his back, eyes staring off to the right, lips parted, exit wounds swelling the left side of his face. A triple slash across the front of his black sweatshirt looks at first like some brutal injury, but on closer inspection is merely the trademark logo for Monster Energy drink. Monster Energy . . . the irony is just too much. Federico gave the photo to me along with the rest of the police report on Andy’s murder. “Here, do something with this for your book,” he said. “Don’t let him be forgotten.”
A month before his murder, Andy said he knew he must die. “Anyway, I don’t give a shit. I’m already dead. I lose nothing. When my time comes, they better come at me from behind, because if not . . .” And this was precisely what they did. “These are my streets,” he had said to me as we walked out of the McDonald’s into the five o’clock sun hanging low over the concrete boulevard where his body would be found. He wasn’t looking, but he must have known they were coming. An hour earlier they’d taken out his friend, El Gorgojo, a fifteen-year-old kid who was often slouched in the corner of the prosecutor’s office to support Andy while he made his declarations. Gorgojo had followed Andy into exile when he left the MS, so he would share his fate. After they shot Gorgojo, Andy called Federico.
“They killed my carnal (buddy). They killed Gorgojo.”13 He was sobbing.
Federico told him to go home, but Andy kept repeating, “They killed him, those sons of bitches. He never did anything to anybody.”14
The phone went silent midsentence, and Federico heard no more from him. It seems as though Andy’s concern for his friend was his undoing. Gorgojo’s killers had seen him in the crowd milling about the body. Perhaps killing Gorgojo was simply a ploy to draw Andy out of hiding. An hour later Andy, too, was dead. That’s when Federico called me at home. “I have bad news for you,” he said. As he spoke, I pictured him sitting in his office, linoleum floors cluttered with case files, requests for Andy’s reentry into the protected witness program stamped “denied” and piled in a cardboard box. And I already knew Andy was dead. Of course he was. Federico sounded terrified. “He told me they’re going to come for me, too,” he said. “They have videotapes, he said. They know my face and they know where I work.”
I told Federico to be careful, and then there was nothing else to say. We hung up, and I slumped back in my shoddy wooden chair in my barely furnished apartment. Stupid boy, I thought, and clutched my belly and cried, but only for a few seconds.
BECOMING A REAL MARERO
This is how Andy said he came to join the MS. He grew up in Ciudad del Sol, Villa Nueva, an urban sprawl bordering Guatemala City’s southern edge. His parents were both Barrio18 gang members. He never knew his father, but his uncle was of the “Clanton 14,” one of Los Angeles’s original sureño gangs that still