Mortal Doubt. Anthony W. Fontes
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the homitos, the little homies, the gangsters in training who hung around their older, bloodier brethren. When Andy was eight the MS clique CLS—led by El Soldado, a man who would become nationally famous before he died at age twenty-three—captured Ciudad del Sol in a hostile takeover. Andy’s mother was shot eight times and died a few days later, and they killed his uncle with a gunshot to the head. So, Andy said, at eight years old he decided to go on a mission to infiltrate the MS clique that had taken out his people. He joined with a plan to bide his time and kill those who had killed his family. At least this is what he told me after he’d become a government witness. I was never sure whether he was trying to justify—to me or to himself—betraying his gang. I suspect the truth was rooted somewhere else, somewhere deeper and too painful to admit. I believe that after making Andy an orphan, El Soldado took him under his wing. The Coronados killed off his family and then replaced it.
FIGURE 8. Andy, June 20, 2012. Photo: Anonymous.
I asked him what the MS meant to him while he was still part of it.
“It was a family that didn’t leave me to die,” he said. “When I needed it most they gave me a hand and gave me food to eat, you understand. So I couldn’t bite the hand that fed me.”
“So they were your friends?” I asked.
“Not my friends. They were family,” he insisted with what strikes me now as ineffable sadness. “They were my family when I had no family. It was all I had. I had no father, no mother, no brothers or sisters. They were my family.”
With no one to turn to except the very authors of his disaster, eight-year-old Andy had to reconcile insuperable emotional contradictions. Rendering the ordeal into a simpler story line such that his eventual betrayal became a successful conclusion to a tale of righteous revenge ties up the loose ends quite elegantly. In this version of his history, both Andy’s past and present selves retain agency and control that one suspects were absent in his “real” life.
In any case, he said that for years he couldn’t get his revenge because they knew where he came from and kept him closely monitored. He underwent a particularly long and strenuous chequeo—a period in which the aspiring gang member demonstrates his worthiness—being tested with ever more difficult missions. When he was nine, he said, already a year into his chequeo, he had to kill another kid who had tried to run away:
They dropped the kid from chequeo, and for his failure they were going to drop me too. It all went to shit because of this dude. He took off and was in a discotheque here in zone 5. He never imagined that I would come to zone 5 to find him, and I came, and another homie came with me. He was like, “Look at (watchea) that dude, look alive and go hit him.”
“Son of a (a la gran)!” I said. “No way bro, the dude backed me up (el vato me hizo paro).”16
“What do you mean ‘no’ you sonofabitch,” he said, and he got on the phone with the chief, El Soldado. “Look, Soldado,” he told him, “the vibe (la onda) is that the Reaper doesn’t want to hit Casper.”17 And then he turned to me, “Look here you sonofabitch, if you don’t shoot him I’m gonna shoot you.”
“A la gran, okay,” I answered, and so I had to shoot the guy. I shed a tear because he was just a baby. I still had a heart, you know. Since then they showed me how to not have a heart, so I didn’t have feelings about anything.
This was Andy’s first murder, and given the circumstances, it seems that killing the boy was a matter of self-preservation. This was the “choice” Andy’s victim had refused to make by running away, a move the gang interpreted as a decision to die. How does a nine-year-old make sense of such a brutal zero-sum calculus? Age-old philosophical puzzles—the parsing of guilt from innocence, for example, or the possibility of rational choice and free will—become moot, even absurd, when applied to the moment in which Andy took the gun too heavy for his thin wrists and shot another child.
When we spoke, Andy blamed El Soldado for making him into a killer. Like Andy nearly a decade later, the CLS chief would die while apparently cooperating with the government to reduce gang violence in Guatemala City. The reasons for his death remain unclear to all but those who ordered it. El Soldado had played some very dangerous games: becoming a lead negotiator with the government to start gang rehabilitation programs and meeting with and giving talks to the police, the media, and low-level government officials in which he advocated the need for reconciliation, that gangs could be part of peacemaking, and that police profiling was violating poor youths’ human rights. His message made him both a celebrity and a target for other gang leaders (and as the rumors go, for the police as well), for whom gang war was far too profitable to give up. For a short time, national media referred to him, with thinly veiled sarcasm, as the next “savior of Guatemala” for his role in trying to bring peace to the streets.18 A few years before he died, an Associated Press photographer snapped his picture hunched over his baby son at his home in Ciudad del Sol—the neighborhood where Andy’s family once lived—kissing the child’s head and holding a .45.
El Soldado’s celebrity made him the very personification of the MS and all its contradictions. The savior of Guatemala was, according to his contemporaries, also a central player in institutionalizing the practice of descuartizamiento (dismemberment), torture, and other forms of extreme corporal punishment against captured rivals as well as homies who betrayed the gang, wanted to leave, or couldn’t cut it anymore. This kind of violence is performed in a group, a communal act in which aspiring or newly initiated members must take part to prove their mettle. Andy said he participated in a descuartizamiento for the first time when he was ten.
FIGURE 9. El Soldado and his son in front of their home in Ciudad del Sol, Villa Nueva, in 2003. Photo: Rodrigo Abd (API).
“I had to kill a homie from my old barrio (gang).19 We had to dismember him, just me and the ramflero (gang leader).”20
“You had to kill and quarter him?”
“Nope. Dismember him alive. Torture him, make it a party.”
“Where did this happen?”
“Over in Ciudad del Sol, Villa Nueva in a chantehuario. Chantehuario, that’s what you call the houses of war, you understand, where all the homies will be, see.”21
“Were the others around when you were doing it?”
“Yeah. All the homies of my clique: El Extraño, El Huevon, El Shadow, El Brown, El Maniaco, El Delincuente, El Fideo, El Aniquilador, El Hache, El Chino. All of them, you understand.”22
“What were they doing?”
“Marking the wrath (marcando la ira), seeing if I had heart, mind, and balls. All they ask of you in the Barrio is that you have mind, heart, and balls, because if you don’t have any of them you’re not worth dick. That’s right, and I had been a little vato since I was six with Clanton 14. Now they were seeing what I was capable of, testing me. So with faith and joy I had to do it.”
“How did you feel?”
“Look, carnal, the way I grew up, I grew up in the gang. My dad was eighteen, my mother was eighteen, you understand, ok. I had already grown up with a gangster’s outlook, so I took pleasure in killing dogs, going around killing cats. So when I killed a human it was like I was killing an animal. I was already a beast (bestia) for that kind of thing.”23
I still find it difficult to stomach Andy’s glib reproduction of himself as beast, as the devil personified. I wanted some other explanation—something more nuanced and reflective, perhaps. But none was forthcoming, at least not from him. Again and again, he claimed the virtues of a “real marero.” Whether he in fact embodied this image and did so out of habit or was simply playacting is impossible to say. The