Mortal Doubt. Anthony W. Fontes
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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 for “impunity” and “injustice” in the prison system. Media outlets across the country flocked to publicize the grisly affair.
Before the trial, I’d spoken with Edgar Martinez, the lawyer for the prosecution. He is a tall, balding man, amiable and ready to talk. “This is the most spectacular and frightening gang case I have been involved with,” he said. “This was a political act. They wanted to terrify the populace and intimidate the government so they would get better treatment in the prisons. It’s the first case I’ve worked on that has had such political overtones. It’s like terrorism.”
For nearly two years the crimes remained unsolved. Maras are notoriously difficult to infiltrate. “They have their own language, their own style,” said an eager young Guatemalan gang expert working with an FBI task force. “It is their subculture that makes them harder to infiltrate than even organized crime or drug traffickers (narcos).” Besides, as they have admitted to me time and again, Guatemalan security officials have very little experience in undercover operations. Martinez told me that the case broke open with the testimony of a secret witness, another MS member who, for reasons he did not explain, confessed and turned on his compatriots. This witness, I would learn later, was Andy.
“He’s really something. He’s a real marero,” exclaimed Martinez, his eyes wide with excitement, while we were sitting over fried chicken, his bodyguards sitting stolidly beside us. “And a good witness. A fine witness.”
The only reason Andy seemed to matter to Martinez and nearly everyone else with whom he worked was his utility. For the government prosecutors reveling in his authenticity, he made possible a deeper understanding of the MS than they had ever had. Guatemalan investigators are often woefully ignorant regarding the criminal structures they face, making a “real marero” witness like Andy a rare treasure indeed. A paranoic state and terrified society have long targeted poor young men who happen to have tattoos, wear baggy pants, or use certain slang as potential mareros.7 And the illicit businesses in which gangs are involved—extortion, drug dealing, hired assassinations—incorporate people and networks far beyond the gangs themselves.8 The maras are not a discrete “thing” separable from structures of violence linking, among others, organized crime, poor urban communities, and corrupt state officials. Distinguishing living, breathing mareros from their brutal public image reproduced in the media and everyday conversation is also difficult.9 Gangsters and gangster wannabes alike work hard to mirror the monstrous figure the marero cuts in the collective consciousness. Yet more often than not, both the victims and alleged perpetrators of “gang violence” are not even gang members.10 Andy, however, was. He also had a remarkable memory for detail and was able to provide an accurate insider’s perspective on how the MS operates.
The gleam of excitement in Martinez’s eyes when he touted Andy to me—“a real marero!”—spoke volumes. By giving the government the case of the four heads, Andy offered prosecutors a chance to show they were not the corrupt, incompetent bureaucrats most Guatemalans believe them to be.
But even as Andy helped prosecutors take apart the Mara Salvatrucha’s most powerful clique, the government failed to give him cover. Andy’s murder only months after helping investigators break open one of the most sensational mara cases in history epitomizes the state of justice in Guatemala today. As part of the witness protection program, officials locked Andy and three other gang associates who had followed him into exile in a room for three days with little food. The stipend money they were promised never materialized. When the boys complained, no one listened, and when they complained more loudly, officials kicked them out of the program. After Andy’s death, Federico, a young, earnest investigator who had taken Andy under his wing, waved a sheaf of papers in my face. “These are applications to get him back in the safe house,” he said, shaking his head. “All rejected. He hadn’t even begun to give us 1 percent of what he knew.”
When