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CHAPTER 2

Emissaries of the Violent Peace

Like the decomposing landscape where the Guatemala City cemetery meets the city dump, mara history makes for treacherous terrain. Telling the story of the maras’ rise means reckoning with the breathtaking mortality rates among gang-involved youth. Death’s specter materializes in the symbols with which maras and mareros mark their bodies and neighborhoods. Take, for example, the tres puntos (three points) tattoo, once a trademark of Southern California Latino gangs. Composed of three dots in the shape of an ellipsis or an equilateral triangle, it is usually tattooed on the back of the hand or at the corner of an eye.¹ For some it references the Holy Trinity. For others it is a trifecta of sex, mourning, and death. Among the maras of Central America, the tres puntos has taken on another meaning as well. It is said to stand for the only three certainties in la vida loca: the hospital, the prison, and the cemetery. Over the years, as violent death has steadily become more certain than survival, the cemetery has come to loom larger than life among the maras.

Today, relatively few gang members, it seems, survive their twenties. For example, José, a former Barrio18 member, claimed that of the ninety homies he saw initiated into the gang between 1998 and 2000, only three are alive today. Little Fat of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS) believed that he was among five men who survived out of the sixty he ran with in the early 2000s. El Cholo Cifuentes may be the last man alive from his Barrio18 crew that was active in the mid-1990s. They are survivors of peacetime war zones in which thousands of youths kill and die each year in the name of imported symbols tattooed on their bodies and graffitied on neighborhood walls, only to be replaced by others too brash, too ignorant, or too vulnerable to resist the maras’ allure. In recent years, if official statistics are to be trusted at all, the killing has only accelerated.²

How did this happen? How did the maras come to influence the lives and deaths of so many urban youths growing up in postwar Guatemala City?³ And how did groups of youths fighting in the name of symbols imported from US street gangs become such central figures in the making and mooring of peacetime terror? In this chapter I piece together a few key elements of mara history that set the arc of the maras’ dystopian evolution and made them into harbingers of a new age of violence. Drawing from the stories of former gang members and gang associates, as well as journalists’ and scholars’ accounts, I map the political and social ferment of Guatemala City when the maras first took root; how decades of US involvement in Guatemala gave the maras’ “made in America” style an irresistible magnetism for some urban youth; and finally, the ways that this “new way of being a gang” seemed, for a moment, to structure and regulate internecine gang violence before it too fell apart.

Exploring the rise of the gangs in Guatemala means linking irrefutable historical phenomena—US imperialism and Cold War atrocities, transnational migrations and deportations, and so forth—with the multiple and contradictory ways people remember and make meaning out of the past. That is, this chapter tacks back and forth between documented material history and how people remember and symbolically render the past in the present. The point is to provide a relatively clear context and background to contemporary struggles for order, but also to show how in the end, material and symbolic histories are absolutely inseparable. Neither should be valued over the other.⁴ What actually happened in the past only gains power and meaning through how it is imagined in the present, and such memories are always uncertain and under contestation.⁵

To put it another way, making history is a process of creative destruction, of remembering and forgetting.⁶ Many of the stories in this chapter were recounted to me by former gang members and gang associates stuck in prison or struggling to survive on the street. They came filtered—consciously or not—through memories twisted by time and trauma. Some have been passed down from generation to generation, tweaked and embellished countless times before reaching me. Some are fragments of memory that fit, like rough-hewn puzzle pieces, more or less awkwardly with the mishmash of newspaper and scholarly reports that pass for the “historical record.” These stories of the gang past, like any historical account, should not be taken as “merely” history. The maras’ evolution in Guatemala has been concomitant with the rise of out-of-control crime, and these stories reflect collective efforts—made by myriad actors besides the maras—to stabilize the present by pinning down the past. As the harbinger of a dystopian present and future, gang history reflects collective anxieties over Guatemala’s descent into peacetime chaos. This history of the ever-receding past conjures forth dreams and nightmares animating contemporary struggles with severe insecurity.⁷ Indeed, one of the only certainties to emerge in these stories is that the past was more orderly and secure than the present, mirroring the widespread sense of nostalgia at work in Guatemala City (and elsewhere) for long-lost orders of violence. Whether these stories tell the truth about the past is an open and unanswerable question. But even if the old ways of ordering violence never existed as they are remembered, such memories provide a foundation, shaky as it may appear, upon which to construct a sense of order.⁸

NOSTALGIA FOR A FAILED REVOLUTION

Among large swathes of the urban population today, out-of-control violence and insecurity have given rise to an odd sort of nostalgia for the ordered violence of civil war.⁹ That such nostalgia exists at all is disturbing, given that the endgame of Cold War conflict was state-perpetrated massacres, disappearances, and genocide. But in the late 1980s, when the signs and symbols associated with the maras are purported to have first appeared in Central America, the armed conflict that had simmered and periodically erupted for more than thirty years was grinding to a close. The threat of state violence was still very much on people’s minds, though armed confrontation between the military and what was left of the guerrilla forces was rare, and the nation was groping hesitantly toward peace and the return of nominal democracy. During this period several robbery and kidnapping rings developed in Guatemala City, including Los Pasacos, the Kangooroos, Agosto Negro, and the AR15s, to name a few. The AR15s became famous for using high-caliber weapons in shootouts with urban police; its rank and file were probably deserters from the army. Youth gangs also existed but were for the most part scattered, unaffiliated, and isolated from one another. There were brekeros (break-dancers), decked out in Michael Jackson-esque glitz, tight pants, and jean jackets, dancing to US funk and hip-hop. There were (and still are) the niños de la calle (street children)—orphans and runaways living together for companionship and protection, huffing glue and gasoline, panhandling, snatching purses, and picking pockets. Military police are said to have targeted them for social cleansing.¹⁰ Stories still circulate of el panal blanco (the white van), into which police hustled street children and common thugs. Some claim these people were sent into compulsory military duty, others that they were simply killed.

El Cholo Cifuentes—who would eventually become the leader of a Barrio18 clique in zone 1 of Guatemala City—came of age in the late 1980s. He also claimed to have served a stint transporting cocaine for Guatemalan middlemen involved in the Colombian trade. For more than a decade he has made his home in Granja Penitenciaria Pavón, Guatemala’s oldest prison, known to inmates simply as Pavón. This is where I made his acquaintance.

At first, he said, he resided with the general population, commingling with other Barrio18 members and paisas (non-gang prisoners). However, toward the end of his sentence he requested a transfer to an isolation block. The young gangsters entering the prison were getting too crazy, he said, too out of control, and he didn’t want to risk getting caught up in their bad trouble. In mid-2012, when we spoke in his private cell, he was sick with hepatitis, patches of skin yellow and inflamed, wearing a grease-stained, secondhand Izod golf shirt. I asked him how he first became involved in the maras.

“Ah, yes,” he said, flashing stained yellow teeth. “I was waiting for that question. We were a banda (band or group), not yet a gang. We called ourselves los Guerreros (the Warriors). This was before the maras had become the maras. We got a group together of ten, fifteen guys. And when we saw a man acting dishonorably, like abusing a woman on the street, we shut him up.” He held up a swollen finger in righteous admonition. “‘Calm down, man. Women are not to be touched.’ And we were young, but that’s how we were. Doing the work of heroes.”

Like other aging gangsters, Cholo’s stories are sticky with nostalgia for a more moral, even heroic past.¹¹ To hear them tell it, early gangs hewed to a spirit of communal protection 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.’”

After the shot rang out, an angry mob attacked the police, sending them running. Gato said his people lifted him up and whisked him away to the dump to hide him in the trash. He burrowed into the garbage, sniffed some glue, and fell sleep. Hours or minutes passed, and he poked his bloody head out. An old woman was sitting there, quiet and serene. She shushed him, telling him it was not safe and that he should go back to sleep.

Gato is a born storyteller, and in all the time I have known him, he has never hesitated to blend facts with more convenient or entertaining fictions. This story bears uncanny traces of El Señor Presidente, the opus of Guatemala’s Nobel laureate Miguel Angel Asturias. In the book, el Pelele, an idiot clown, accidentally kills a military officer and runs away to hide in the trash dump, where the vultures pick at his exposed limbs. He is a hapless victim who, in a moment of blind rage, strikes out against a figure of state power. Later, he dies ignominiously, doomed in Asturias’s allegory of life under military dictatorship.²⁰

Though Gato’s life today seems far more stable and secure than were his days leading a street gang, he mourns the past, when, he says, “things were better because we were in charge.” Regardless of the facts, Gato’s story is also an allegory—an allegory for a lost or imaginary past in which his community stood up against abusive police to defend its own. Today, such sentiments of solidarity seem sorely missing, replaced by far more brutal and opportunistic modes of competition and survival. However uncertain and violent the past may have been, from the perspective of the present this history arcs toward one particular certainty: things are far worse now.

Emerging out of a past roiled by social movements that once seemed to hold the promise of a better future, the maras have since eclipsed them. This was brought home to me at an international conference on the maras hosted in San Salvador, El Salvador. It was March 2012, shortly after imprisoned leaders of the Barrio18 and the MS in El Salvador had announced a truce, dropping the national murder rate by an unprecedented 60 percent.²¹ This was big news, and I found myself mingling with journalists, scholars, and members of law enforcement from all over Central America, as well as many from the United States and Europe. José Luis Sanz, an investigative journalist with El Faro who has spent more than a decade delving into the gangs and their histories, addressed the cosmopolitan crowd. “In a matter of years the gangs have achieved a virulence beyond anything else that has followed,” he declared. “Probably not even . . . the epic revolutionary movements of the 70s and 80s spread like such wildfire, leaving its mark on so many generations in such a powerful way as the gang phenomenon has done.”²² This awe-inspiring ascent was intimately entangled with the circulation of bodies, images, aspirations, and violence between the United States and Central America.

MADE IN AMERICA?

Pavón Prison, Guatemala City, 2012. A dozen or so prisoners gathered around cement tables in the prison courtyard, stringing plastic beads on fishing line to make tiny, floppy-eared dog ornaments. Juande, former leader of the MS clique Los Salvatruchas de Normandy, was in charge of the arts and crafts workshop. He slouched on a bench, wearing an immaculate, bright yellow hoodie. He was thirty-three, the age of Jesus when he died on the cross.

“If you make it one more year,” I joked, “you’ll prove you aren’t Christ’s second coming.”

He flashed a gold-rimmed smile, as if to say “what a farce.” Since age seventeen he had been in and out of prison seventeen times. When we met, he was a decade into what he hoped would be his last stint, a twenty-five-year sentence for homicide. In three years he would be up for parole. With a wry smile, he proclaimed that he did not commit the murder for which he was sentenced. But there were plenty of others they never pinned on him.

Juande had a way of holding himself that let you know he could pound your face into the pavement without thinking too much about it. I saw him once feign a back kick hard to the chest of another prisoner who had appeared suddenly behind him. He was quick and flexible for such a big guy. But he always claimed he had left it all behind.

“When you’re up in the mix, you got to be tough on the street,” he said. “You don’t ever show weakness. They’ll take advantage of you.” He jutted out his chin at the other prisoners crowded around the table, then looked down at his hands. “But when you’re lying down in bed you think of all the ways they could kill you. And when a homie dies—well, you don’t cry. You find out who did it, and you make a mission to go kill them. And if you can’t find out exactly who, well you know which gang. Eventually you find out. Nothing stays secret.” For all his aggressive talk and performance, I found Juande to be capable of great patience and generosity. In prison he was Calavera’s closest confidant, and other inmates respected him as a fair and disciplined leader. Over the years I have come to call him my friend.

In the 1990s, Juande said, his family struggled financially, but his sister had a decent job as an accountant for a Korean-run factory, and she provided him with pretty much everything he needed. He was into stylish clothes. “I already had my loose pants, my Nike Cortezes, which was the style back then.” When he was fourteen, she offered to pay his way to the United States because he was getting picked on by a group of guys in the neighborhood. Either that, or to buy him a gun so he could protect himself. He chose the gun because, he said, he didn’t want people to think he was scared.

After we’d been hanging out for almost a year, Juande told me the story of how he joined up with the MS. We were sitting out on the prison patio, my recorder hidden beneath a baseball cap between us, the sun blazing on the concrete as a cool breeze wafted through. His storytelling style was always intensely cinematic. I felt like I was listening to an improvised script of West Side Story set in Guatemala City. He was fifteen, he said, when he first made contact with MS—back in 1993, when hardly anyone in Guatemala had even heard of MS or 18. There was a girl in his high school that he really liked, and he was always bothering her, trying to get her to pay attention to him. He performed a snippet of their courting.

“‘I can’t go with you,’ she would tell me.

“‘But why? You’re a woman and I’m a man.’

“‘No! It’s that there are other people behind me.’

“‘What, your parents don’t let you have a boyfriend?’

“‘No, that’s not important.’

“‘Then what? You don’t like me?’

“‘No, I like you. I just can’t.’”

He kept pursuing her and pursuing her. Finally, she told him that if he really liked her, he should come to a party where she would be:

When I got there, I saw at the back of the room a ton of cholos standing around. But since I had come for her, I went in, and walked to the back of the room, and found her.

“Right on,” I said.

“You came.”

“Like I wasn’t gonna come?”

So I was in the middle of all the cholos, and they’re watching me, right. I see that they’re riding with beanies, baseball caps, earrings, all tattooed. They dressed like I dressed. “These are my people!” I thought. I’m looking at them. The guy who had the command (ramfle) in those days was El Ice, may he rest in peace. El Frio of Normandy.

“Yo, morro, come here.”²³

“What the hell?” I say. I thought that . . . well, in Guatemala faggots (huecos) are called morros, but in El Salvador morros, or bichitos, are boys or kids. Like “huiros” or “patojos.”

“No,” he says. “It’s just our slang (calua). Like saying, ‘yo patojo.’”²⁴

So I come up to him. She’s standing there with him.

“And so you like Clowney?”

That’s when I learned that she was Clowney of MS of Normandy. She had hidden it. Later I saw the letters “MS” underneath her bellybutton.

“This was why I couldn’t pay attention to you. Because I am the Clowney of Normandy. And who are you?”

“My name is Juande,” I said. “And I am not anything.”

“Really? You’re nothing?” she says. El Ice, the deceased, is watching me.

“No, I’m nothing.”

“Then why do you dress like that?” El Ice asks me.

“Because I like it.”

“But who have you seen dressed like that?” He was trying to find out where I come from.

“Look, I’m from section A,” I say. And all of the dudes are looking at me now. “And my friend Pocholo lives there. . . . He dresses like this with loose clothing (ropa floja). And I like how he looks. But it’s not a sin to dress like this, is it?” And everyone laughs.

“It’s all good, don’t worry.” And he says to Clowney, “OK then, the dude is pleasing to you?”

“The truth (la neta) is that yes, he is pleasing to me.”²⁵

“So then, do it. Let him inside, and you see what you do, but don’t be careless. You know the process to follow. Tell him.” It was about bringing me in, involving me with the gang.

So I’m dancing with her. “Simón carnal (Right on, brother)!” They’re all yelling.²⁶

“Carnal?” I say to myself. These aren’t my brothers, I think to myself, but okay.

Juande went to more parties and brought in other youths from his neighborhood. The fact that he had a gun and knew how to use it impressed other gang members, and he had a natural flair for giving orders and intimidating people. He took part in the business side of things—robbing stores and setting up modest extortion rackets—and became a bona fide member of Los Salvatruchas de Normandy. Eventually he helped raise and discipline other MS cliques.

Juande was one of tens of thousands of youths across urban Central America enamored of the style, the exotic language, and the confidence and coolness he saw in the cholos he met and associated with the image they struck. In the gangsters at that party he glimpsed a vision of himself, a reflection of what he was, he thought, already aspiring to be. The language, the girl, the clothes: “These are my people!”

How did US-style gangsters become the archetypes of “cool” for Juande and so many others like him? Where did this aspirational image come from? In the early 1990s groups of youths naming themselves after Los Angeles street gangs—La Mara Salvatrucha, Barrio18, White Fence, Latin Kings, and so forth—suddenly seemed to be in every major city in the Northern Triangle of Central America.²⁷

When they first emerged before the public eye, politicians, security watchdogs, and the media quickly labeled the maras a transnational phenomenon. Worries of an internationally networked “super gang” mushroomed and persist to this day.²⁸ However, cribbing and copying imported gang styles and structures is not the same as forming a transnational criminal network. While deported gangsters were important conduits for this transnational transfusion, they were not the only ones, and official estimates of their initial presence have proven to be greatly inflated. A series of studies conducted in late 1990s and early 2000s in El Salvador—the Central American nation with the greatest gang presence—seemed to show that less than 17 percent of gang youth had ever been to the United States, and less than 11 percent had even been gangsters when they lived there.²⁹ In Guatemala, where many of the founding gang members were Salvadoran migrants, proportions would have been even less. Flesh and blood deportees would play important roles in founding early gang cliques in Guatemala and across the region. However, whatever respect and admiration they inspired was by no means wholly their own. Their influence took hold through the symbolic power of all things “American” in Guatemalan society. This power stems from long histories of exchange between the United States and Central American societies and reverberates far beyond the street gang phenomenon.

From Hollywood movies to Maytag washing machines, from the Cold War to the War on Drugs, the influence US society has exercised over its Central American neighbors is inescapable. In 1954, to protect US corporate interests, the US government engineered a coup to oust Guatemala’s second democratically elected president.³⁰ The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used the coup to develop its Cold War playbook and made the tiny country a testing ground for a new kind of psychological warfare drawing on techniques developed in the US advertising industry.³¹ The CIA would go on to perfect the methods developed in Guatemala and apply them in Cold War conflicts around the world.³²

The damage done to Guatemala was deep and lasting. The coup permanently crippled Guatemala’s nascent democratic institutions. Political conflict raged for the next forty years, and US cold warriors lent a hand by training and nurturing right-wing death squads that decimated the moderate Left in Guatemala. The result was a deeply polarized political landscape in which anticommunist demagogues and military men would rule until the return of nominal democracy in the late 1980s. And perhaps ironically, throughout Guatemala’s long history of civil strife, the United States has also been the primary destination for Guatemalans fleeing poverty and violence. The American dream, the dream of El Norte, the land of decent wages and a chance to “get ahead,” is deeply etched into Guatemalan society.³³

In the aftermath of the Cold War, US cultural and economic influences over Guatemalan society have only deepened. The nation’s economy is tied to providing raw commodities—sugar, coffee, and silver—to US markets. Jobs in factories making goods for US consumers are highly prized. Customer service telemarketing, employing fluent English speakers, most of them deported from the United States, is one of Guatemala’s most dynamic growth industries.³⁴ Over 80 percent of cocaine bound for the “insatiable North American nose” passes through Guatemalan territory, corrupting security forces and politicians and transforming both urban and rural economies.³⁵ Guatemalan authorities must fight against or collude with narco-traffickers enriched by US dollars and armed with weapons manufactured on US soil.³⁶ Meanwhile, the richest Central Americans go on weekend shopping trips to Miami, Florida. The point is, in both historic and contemporary terms, as both a driver of bloody chaos and the site of sanctuary and prosperity, the United States has played essential—if schizophrenic—roles in Guatemala’s development.

The story of the maras in Guatemala emerges out of these transnational entanglements, but in ways that blend fantasy and reality in endless loops and feedback effects from beginning to end.

Transnational Birth Stories

In the 1970s and 1980s, when Guatemalans and other Central Americans began migrating en masse to the United States, Mexican Americans dominated Southern California’s Latino gangs. For the most part, these gangs looked down upon and discriminated against Central American youths looking to join their ranks. They were too country and had funny accents, making them unfit for the gangs’ standards and easy targets for ridicule. Neither were they allowed to found their own gangs. However, as more and more Central Americans settled in the Los Angeles area, the story goes, one gang saw an opportunity for expansion and opened its arms to these newcomers: 18th Street, or Barrio18. 18th Street was not the largest Hispanic gang in Los Angeles, but it was among the largest and among the oldest as well, claiming a direct lineage to the Clanton 14, a prestigious Latino gang with a history dating back to the 1950s.³⁷

Guatemalans, Hondurans, and especially Salvadorans began to swell 18th Street’s ranks. Joining meant gaining the respect, the companionship, and most of all the protection that went along with belonging to one of Los Angeles’s biggest gangs. But it also meant sublimating their distinctive national identities into the dominant Mexican American subculture. They had to dress like Mexican cholos, speak like cholos, and so on, if they wanted to be accepted. Then, sometime in the late 1970s, a group of Salvadoran immigrants decided to go their own way.³⁸

In 2012 investigative reporters Jose Luis Sanz and Carlos Martinez interviewed retired members of 18th Street and the MS in Los Angeles about the history that gave rise to the ongoing feud between the two gangs. “The Salvadorans who would form the first Mara Salvatrucha gang,” Sanz later said,

decided they didn’t want to do what other Salvadoran youth who arrived before them had done; integrate with the Chicano gangs and conceal their Salvadoran identity by speaking like Chicanos, hiding or denying their origin, their place of birth, and dressing exactly like the cholos dressed—Sanchez pants, long dress shirts, a belt, slicked hair, this young man who has been caricatured so much and continues with the passing of time . . . and they were distinct as well because they didn’t look like gangsters, they were groups of youthful fans of heavy metal music.³⁹

These Salvadoran youths would consolidate into their own gang and call themselves La Mara Salvatrucha, becoming one more Los Angeles gang fighting for turf, drug distribution networks, and respect. Sometime later, not too much later according to Sanz and Martinez’s sources, the MS and 18th Street turned on each other. How the break between the two rivals occurred, and how it escalated into an ongoing blood feud, is lost to history. It is said that Salvadoran members of 18th Street asked for permission to leave and begin their own gang, and when 18th Street refused, the Salvadorans left anyway, creating a schism that widened and hardened over the years. Another version has it that the MS killed an 18th Street member by accident in a drive-by, and the tit-for-tat killing never ended. Yet another version links the definitive break to a fight between the two gangs’ leaders over a particularly beautiful woman, tying the age-old myth of feminine temptation leading to man’s downfall into the gangs’ origin stories.

Perhaps none of these stories is true; perhaps they all are. In any case, the making of profound enmity never occurs in a single moment. Love and hate, allies and enemies—these relationships form and crystallize over many actions and many years until the layers of sediment harden into bedrock, until that hatred is a natural, unquestioned thing. But gang history is an oral history, and as such, particular events are pulled out of the flow of time or thrust back into it, becoming watershed moments changing the course of history itself. But we know that history doesn’t work like this; it only becomes so when we try to go back and reconstruct it to make sense of the present.⁴⁰

The Flow of Fantasy and Flesh

In the early 1990s, riding a tide of national consternation in the wake of the Rodney King riots, the Moral Majority in the United States targeted Latinos suspected of gang membership for arrest and deportation. They were the vanguard of the “alien threat”: foreign criminals destroying the inner cities of America. Men and women picked up in raids or culled from US prisons found themselves fast-tracked into deportation, loaded onto planes, and sent back “home.”⁴¹

Most had never returned to their country of origin since leaving as small children and now found themselves adrift in a harsh, alien environment. Mainstream Guatemalan society rejected them wholesale. Central America’s civil wars were grinding to a close, and these deportees represented the deeply entrenched troubles of the new democracy, the libertine-ism spawned by the arrival of liberty. For gang-involved deportees, setting up gangs in the style of those they had left behind was a strategic means of survival. They found many youths willing and eager to join, even if they had no idea what being part of a mara would mean. As Silence mused, he and other boys he knew growing up poor and abandoned were “ready for a future in which we could join a transnational gang, but we were really just aficionados. It was more like a hobby.”

Coming from the United States and all it stood for, these deportees found they had a marked cultural cachet among poor urban youth. Their allure was rooted, at least in part, in the Hollywood images they so closely resembled. As planeloads of deportees touched down in Guatemala, Latino gangster films made in Hollywood—films like Sangre por Sangre and American Me—inspired Guatemalan youths to emulate what they saw. Such films may even have been key conduits in the transnational transfusions that brought the mara phenomenon to Central America. For example, I was talking to Estuardo—a Barrio18 member approaching the end of a six-year sentence for involvement in an extortion ring—about a recent prison riot when he abruptly shifted the conversation to the clique he had joined twenty years earlier. He claimed it was the first Barrio18 affiliate in zone 5 of Guatemala City, and the members called themselves Los Vatos Locos.⁴² In the film Sangre por Sangre (the same movie Andy seemed to reenact), Los Vatos Locos is the name of the protagonist’s street gang, caught in turf battles with the Tres Puntos. These were fictionalized amalgams, drawing their names and styles from early Los Angeles Latino street gangs. Soon after Sangre por Sangre’s 1993 release, groups of youths calling themselves Los Vatos Locos emerged in zones throughout Guatemala City.

Forged in feedback loops between the “real thing” and its Hollywood simulacrum, this new way of being a gang was defined by more solidarity, more brotherliness, and distinct forms of self-expression.⁴³ Acolytes of this new order hewed to an imported ideal of deathless brotherhood and barrio pride, sporting the clothing, language, and of course, tattoos of the North. They were eager to learn the logistical organization and strategies that had made Latino street gangs in the United States sustainable, even multigenerational organizations. “Snyper was his name,” recalled José, one of three surviving members of an early Barrio18 clique in zone 18.

He was an 18 of Hollywood Gangster . . . from the United States. When we met him he came talking half Spanish, half English. He would tell us that we had to learn to speak like that to be more involved and focused with the gang. He came with this ideology of expanding ourselves, to make our territory bigger. We only had the actual park, it was the only sanctuary that we had, and we were living on the brink of war all the time. From there, it was only about four blocks to where the MS were. El Snyper organized us. He began organizing the money to gather when somebody got arrested and needed a lawyer to get him out, or to buy weapons. Because our clique had no guns. I had a shotgun, but it was homemade. . . . And so we started making contacts with the police, and they would sell us arms and bullets.

Like the vast majority of this generation of mareros, Jose’s former compatriots are dead and gone. But the logic of solidarity and organization that they took on would spread beyond particular gang cliques, transforming into allegiance to gang pacts and codes that seemed, for a time, to order when, where, and against whom gang violence could occur. By joining up with the MS or Barrio18, the gangs that would come to dominate and subsume the rest, newly minted mareros were supposed to take on their gang’s codes of allegiance and revenge, imported from the streets and prisons of Southern California. The first was the age-old feud between Barrio18 and the MS, which would map onto and transform already present street rivalries in Guatemala City. The second was the ideology of the Southern United Raza (SUR), an unstable but influential article of faith enforcing solidarity among imprisoned Latino gang members in Southern California. The introduction of these two doctrines in Guatemala City and other Central American cities would integrate into and transform the “architecture of enmity” that carved up urban space, prisons, and postwar society itself.⁴⁴

MS13, BARRIO18, AND THE SUR

I met Triste while he was serving a five-year sentence for armed robbery in Canada prison, located sixty kilometers southwest of Guatemala City. We would talk in his quarters—a tin-roofed shack—as prisoners came and went asking him to etch tattoos into their skin with his homemade rig. When he was nine years old, sick of the squalor and his abusive father, Triste made the journey solo from a Guatemala City slum to Los Angeles to join his mom. He got into trouble in middle school and more in high school, and after a few years in juvenile hall, he joined a gang called Widmer Sreet. At twenty-two he ended up in adult prison for selling drugs, and it was there that he had his first contact with the Mexican Mafia.

The birth of the Mexican Mafia (MM or La Eme) is another canonical story in US gang history. The Mexican Mafia is said to have originated in Deuel Vocational Institute (DVI) in Tracy, California, in the late 1950s.⁴⁵ It was an adult facility but also became the last stop for the California juvenile detention system’s worst youthful offenders. According to gang intervention specialists, youth entering DVI called it “gladiator’s school” because of the need to constantly fight in order to hold your own. Housed with adult criminals, youth prisoners were constantly picked on. A group of Mexican Americans is said to have founded La Eme as a means of self-protection. As the story goes, Rodolfo Cadena, a seventeen-year-old from East Los Angeles, recruited other young toughs into a cohesive group to defend themselves against older inmates: against the bullying, sexual molestation, and general victimization that were and remain an everyday part of US prison life.⁴⁶

Today, La Eme has become a prison “supergang” that controls prison black markets throughout the California prison system.⁴⁷ La Eme founded and enforces the SUR, a code of solidarity among imprisoned Latino gang members in the United States.

“In prison in California they teach you discipline, they teach you respect,” Triste said, speaking a mix of English and Spanish typical of deportees who grew up in the United States. “You graduate from just being a gang member.” Triste said that during his stateside incarceration he had no personal contact with known members of La Eme, who were in isolation lockdown. But the entire prison population understood the raison d’être of the SUR. “The Mexican Mafia are the ones that made the SUR,” he explained. “The unity. Us Hispanics, if everyone of us stands on his own in prison, we won’t stand up to anybody. We’re small, fat, chaparritos mostly.” He laughed and slapped his ample belly. “You have to stick together to have power. If you’re on your own everyone knows. If you don’t stick together you’ll get raped, become somebody’s bitch.”

Arising out of sordid histories of officially sanctioned racial violence in US prisons, the Mexican Mafia would eventually play a crucial role in governing California prisons. To put it simply: La Eme and the SUR provided—and still provide—the promise of protection to imprisoned Latino gang members through the threat of imminent violence. The Southern United Raza is the crystallization into “law” of a strategic solidarity among Latino gang members in prison who, on the street, would be at one another’s throats. “Southern” refers to Southern California, the geographical hub of Latino gangs and home to most Mexican Mafia members.⁴⁸ “Raza” (race), as in la Raza, encompasses all those who identify as Latino and conveys the central role of race in casting the lines of opposition between warring factions in urban California and in the US prison system. As for “United,” the SUR dictates that blood feuds between rival Latino gangs in Southern California must be left at the prison gate. They have no place inside, because in prison everyone is already suffering. Those gangs who pay homage to the Mexican Mafia—in loyalty and other currencies—have long been known as sureños. Sureño gangs often attach the number “13” to their title to show their affiliation with La Eme (“M” is the thirteenth letter in the alphabet).