Mortal Doubt. Anthony W. Fontes
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and ethical mores that have all but disappeared today. These accounts blur the idealized memories of popular revolution with the birth pangs of a new era and the criminal phenomenon that would dominate it. In the mid- to late 1980s, although the guerrillas had already been effectively defeated in the highlands and stamped out in the capital, revolutionary zeal was still something palpable in Guatemala. The children and youths who would become involved with gangs carried with them a political awareness rooted in working-class solidarity and leftist politics that had helped spark and sustain the social movements and armed efforts against the government.
Working with a team of Guatemalan researchers in the mid-1980s, historian Deborah Levenson interviewed dozens of Guatemala City youths involved in this early generation of maras.12 She found that they were growing up in shantytowns populated by refugees displaced by war and in working-class neighborhoods terrorized by the counterinsurgency. The refugee families had fled scorched-earth campaigns in the countryside, while death squads targeted urban trade unionists, students, and other urban-based “subversives” for disappearance and torture. Lingering fear silenced the survivors of these movements and engulfed entire communities. As a result, their children would have few tools and little opportunity to understand the politics or legitimacy of the violence that made their world.13 The youth who formed the street gangs that would later be subsumed into the MS and Barrio18 inherited both the vestiges of progressive politics and shades of nightmarish violence of the continent’s bloodiest, dirtiest war.14 This toxic cocktail of failed revolution and ingrown terror still courses through the veins of postwar society.
Silence grew up in zone 5 of Guatemala City. He is a tall, light-skinned man with a big belly and scarred hands. He showed me where the knuckles were disjointed and the small bones in his left wrist broken. Today he goes by Juan Gabriel, but when he was fourteen and joined a Barrio18 clique in zone 5 of Guatemala City, they gave him the apodo Silence because, he says, he never shut up. People who knew him when he was an active gang member speak of his violent temper. For an imagined slight, it is said, he macheted a man across the collarbone in broad daylight on a crowded street. To proclaim his undying allegiance to Barrio18, he had tattoos etched up each arm and across his neck. He was thirty-two when I met him and had left the gang ten years earlier. He had spent these years trying to burn away those tattoos. Blurred shadows and mottled skin were all that remained.
It was during popular protests in the late 1980s, Silence said, when he was about five years old, that he first heard the word mara. “Look, it was toward the end of the main violence of the civil war,” he told me in a Wendy’s across from the National Cathedral, the orange pillars catching the day’s last light. “When Vinicio Cerezo came and . . . bus fare was at 15 cents and he changed it to 85 cents. An egg cost 5 cents, and he wanted it at 10 cents.” Vinicio Cerezo was Guatemala’s first democratically elected president of the modern era.15
“How do I explain?” Silence continued. “It’s like, if today they come and say bus fare is Q1, and we’re going to put it at Q5! Who of the people would allow that? But it was a transition government moving toward democracy. There still existed all that military repression. So people went out to protest and were attacked by the military police. There were many jailed and beaten, and some were even disappeared. In those days no one knew a thing about the maras of Guatemala, absolutely nothing.” He paused to survey the other patrons, then went on. “But gang members had been arriving since the ’70s and organizing in an anonymous way. And in the time of Vinicio Cerezo, the opportunity presents itself for the gangs to make themselves known in Guatemala. The gangsters who were organized here in zone 6 of Guatemala City, they came out to respond in favor of the people, to support the protest because, most of all, many of those who had been incarcerated or beaten or killed were their family members. So, the army is subjugating the people—and the gang comes out and pushed back the army. And that was when one heard about . . . searches from house to house, cars were upturned, busses set on fire, etcetera. This was—,” Silence paused again, searching for the appropriate word. “This was unstoppable.”
“So the news comes out, and it comes out that the Barrio18 gang announced that they weren’t going to allow the rights of the people to be abused and that they were there to defend the pueblo. So when I heard that story I was five years old, and I told myself, ‘Damn!’” He pounded a scarred fist on the Formica table. “‘When I’m big I want to be like that.’ Not wanting to be a gangster, exactly, but to be someone who fights for the rights of others. That’s how I conceived of the vision.”
No historical record exists of Barrio18 members secretly organizing throughout the 1970s and 1980s. But in his story Silence draws an organic link between the transnational gangs that would become a zeitgeist of postwar disorder and a prior generation of urban youth who embraced a vibrant mix of countercultural solidarities and styles. The term mara itself emerged in connection with the same protests that Silence remembers so vividly. In a 1985 press interview a police chief referred to the mass of youth taking part in these protests as marabunta—swarming army ants—and the term quickly caught on in public discourse and eventually among the maras themselves.16
Levenson’s research in the 1980s was and remains one of the few existing scholarly accounts of this lost generation of maras. The stories she collected speak of poor urban youths searching for and finding a deep sense of belonging with one another. These young people carved out social spaces in which they could express themselves—politically, artistically, and even sexually—with more freedom than the edicts of mainstream culture allowed for.17 And for many of them, whatever violence came from being part of a gang—fights with rival groups, robbing middle-class youth, and so on—paled in comparison to the brutalities they witnessed in their homes and the counterinsurgent terror of massacre and disappearance that destroyed so much of the country’s politically minded underclass. In retrospect, however, the vibrant and ambiguous mix of social forces that compelled these youths to join together proved extremely volatile. Revisiting their accounts thirty years later, Levenson herself seems overcome by a sense of nostalgia for what was or might have been. This generation of mara youth, she writes, today appears “almost suspended in historical time between what now seems like a shutter-shot moment of an urban popular movement’s peak and its quick bloody demise.”18
Nostalgia for communal solidarity against an abusive authoritarian state saturates collective memories of the last years before peace was officially declared.19 During this period, Gato—a former thief and drug addict who reformed in prison and became a government social worker—was the leader of a street gang in zone 1 of Guatemala City. Gato was my first real contact and one of my closest friends in Guatemala. One evening in 2012, as Gato, his wife, and I were drinking beer in their home, he recalled how his crew collected protection money from the local drug dealers, prostitutes, and thieves working around the Parque Concordia, about ten city blocks from the National Palace. These were fond memories. He claimed his gang was strong enough—and he had enough personal cachet—to hold the respect of the local underworld. He could rob police of their guns with just a knife, he bragged, and twirled a fork in the air to demonstrate.
His wife, Catalina, who grew up with him on the streets, clicked her tongue. “He gave all of that money away,” she said, shaking her head, “or drank it.”
Gato laughed and told a story of getting caught by three cops in the Parque Concordia. “One of them was a policeman we knew as Chino, who would extort the street kids and if they didn’t pay he would arrest them. Chino put his gun to my head and the gun went off. It was probably an accident, a misfire, or just nerves. It snapped my head back.” He put the fork down and massaged a small white scar on the side of his head. “The bullet is still buried there. A crowd gathers around me, people from all over the neighborhood—shopkeepers and transvestite prostitutes, men and women crying, ‘Gato is dead.’ A little boy leans over me and Gato opens one eye. ‘Gato is alive,’ the boy shouts. He puts his hand on my other eye, ‘Ay Gato, your eye, it’s still there. It’s just covered in blood.’”
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