Mortal Doubt. Anthony W. Fontes
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a pleasure that comes from the respect you get, from your name entering the myth of the street. This is the way to be somebody—but as you build up your name on the street you are also building up your own prison, because the bigger you become the more of a target you become. And then you’re only thinking that if they do come to kill you, they shoot you in the head. That’s the best way out.”
Money and addiction, myth and identity, pleasure and death are hopelessly entangled when hurting and killing become the ultimate means of fulfilling a sense of power and importance.29 Encoding oneself into the myth of the street means becoming one more rider of the self-consuming Ouroborous, taking a trip on the never-ending cycle of death and revenge that gang war has become.30 Among mareros, killing, and making sure the world knows you are a killer, have become key to being somebody.31
And yet the telling is never an exact copy of the doing. The entangled causes and conditions that drive a person to commit a violent act, or any act for that matter, are not the end products of some rational choice game. Pressed to explain himself, Andy supplied a coherent narrative, a chain of events that made the act inevitable. For gangsters like Andy the act of killing—to choose who lives and who dies—has to seem like a choice, but it is precisely because violence becomes a point of pride and the fodder of myths that the excessive brutality so many mareros claim as their own must remain suspect. If the circulation of personal myths, if being somebody, is a key aspect of why mareros kill, then stories of killing may simply be the raconteur’s fantasies grown from the desire to reflect this brutal paradigm.
THE REAL, THE TRUTH, AND THE DEAD
How do we provide accounts of ourselves to others? What do we expose, and what do we keep hidden? And how do the stories we tell about ourselves entangle what we have done with how we imagine ourselves to be?
These questions hinge on the complex relationship among agency, event, and acts of narration that materialize the event in the moment of its (re)telling.32 That is, no event is accessible outside of its narration; nothing that happens has any meaning separate from how it is “remembered, recounted, and mediated.”33 This means that an event’s existence does not remain locked in linear time. Its temporal contours shift each time it is narrated. What’s more, this intimate entanglement between the doing and the telling also constitutes an essential process in how people imagine themselves to be, in the very making of the subject himself. The narrator is as much a product of the story as he is its purveyor, and in the moment of telling he reinvents his own place in the world.
For Andy, the ability to reinvent himself by performing carefully crafted narrations of self was always a matter of life and death. He struggled for years to pass his chequeo and become a bona fide homie of the Mara Salvatrucha, to show his gang that he was really one of them. Playing the role of the real marero had become his life’s work and key to his survival. But how much of his narration was self-conscious performance reciting the experiences a “real” marero ought to have? That is, if Andy understood me as a conduit through which his story might live beyond his particular place and time, then what was invented to fulfill the image of the spectacular real?
One often-repeated “truth” is that no one escapes the MS. The exit routes once open to Central American mareros—having a kid, going straight, becoming a devout Christian—have crumbled in the face of heavy-handed policing and society’s unwillingness to forgive mareros’ tattooed skin and stained souls. Andy mouthed the words he had heard hundreds of times: “You can run, but you can’t hide.” Years before, El Smokey, the CLS leader before Andy became part of the gang, had run to the United States. Andy said El Pensador, the man who took control after El Soldado died, issued the order to have El Smokey tracked down and killed.
This was in 2006. The SUR, a prison pact between Barrio18 and MS, had been broken the year before, and it was a new, harsher world. Former mareros, labeled “Gayboy Gangsters” and pesetas (meaning “pennies,” because they aren’t worth a damn) by their old comrades, who had slipped away in the preceding years, would no longer be so lucky. “The culero (faggot) who runs gets a green light. Period.” A green light is like the mark of Cain. A message filters out via cellular phone and word of mouth among every clique in the country, ordering execution. Every homie, chequeo, and gangster wannabe has the duty to shoot the person on sight. This is why Andy said El Smokey had run to the North, to escape the web that surely would have ensnared him had he stayed.
As the story goes, El Pensador wanted that loose end tied up. And so in 2007 he sent Andy, along with a boy named El Pícaro, to kill El Smokey. Andy had been in chequeo for almost four years due to his young age and suspicions that he might still have loyalties to his Barrio18 roots. “If you want to end your chequeo, go find that son of a bitch and kill him. That’s your mission,” the ramflero told Andy. The homies in Guatemala knew El Smokey had gone to Los Angeles. According to Andy, it was his women who gave him away.
This is how Andy described the journey: on their way north, he and El Pícaro, newly minted missioneros, passed from clique to clique across the Guatemalan border and into Mexico. From Tecun Uman they crossed the Suchiate River in a truck driven by Mexican MS members. They then traveled up to Veracruz, Mexico, and so on, always escorted by a local MS member who knew the area and could navigate the local authorities, always checking in with El Pensador back in Guatemala, who dealt with the local Mexican clique, ensuring the two boys had food and money. It took three months to complete the trans-Mexico journey and enter the United States.
When Andy and El Pícaro caught up with their target in Las Vegas, some local MS homeboys pointed him out and gave Andy a knife. El Smokey was wearing a turtleneck to cover the MS tattoo etched in gothic letters across his neck.
“They told me, ‘Look at him, that’s the dude over there. Hit him here and he’ll die slowly,’” touching his belly. “‘Hit here and here and he’ll die instantly,’” touching his neck and his temple. “One time, bimbim!”
“Do you remember where you were?”
“In front of a casino. I hit the guy and he went like this.” Andy clutched the right side of his neck. “He took a half step, and boom, he fell. When I left there was a helicopter, tatatatatatata.”
“What kind of gun did you use?”34
“No man! Over there you use a knife. Like I told you, we didn’t have permission to take him with bullets. It was a place of real cops (mero juras) so finfinfin!” He stabbed the air with an imaginary knife. “So he was just left there. That’s right. It was a job for the gang (barrio).”
El Smokey died from the knife wounds in the neck he had tried to conceal, in front of a Las Vegas casino. At first the passersby thought he was fallen-down drunk, a common enough sight in that city. Andy’s mission accomplished, he returned to Guatemala and finally ended his long chequeo. At least this is how he recounted the story to me a few days before MS murdered him.
A month after Andy was killed, I finally got around to watching the film Sangre por Sangre (the English title is Blood In, Blood Out). It is a fictional account of the birth of the Mexican Mafia—a Mexican American prison “super gang”—in Southern California prisons, written by Jimmy Santiago Baca, an accomplished ex-con writer and poet who found his muse in the early years of incarceration. The film—produced and distributed by the Walt Disney corporation—can be found all over Mexico and Central America. I bought a pirated copy in a Guatemala City market. Alongside American Me, it ranks as one of the most popular and “accurate” film accounts of the Mexican Mafia, which to this day holds sway over Latino street gangs like 18th Street and the MS in Southern California and parts of the US Southwest. I watched it alone in bed, drinking a beer.
A third of the way into the film, the main character, Miklos, a half-Caucasian, half-Latino youth desperate to join the prison gang “La Onda,” must demonstrate his worth by killing a white prisoner who has double-crossed the gang. “Show him the book,” the gang leader tells a tall, mustachioed prisoner named Magic. The book looks like a small, black Bible, but hidden in its pages is a human figure marked with black dashes. The dashes are kill points.
“Hit