Mortal Doubt. Anthony W. Fontes

and the chest. “And he will die slowly, painfully. Hit a man here or here,” he continues, pointing to the neck and the head, “and he will die instantly.”³⁵ I rewound the scene and watched it again and again. Astounded. Angry. Laughing in confusion.

      Did Andy see Sangre por Sangre? Did twelve-year-old Andy travel all the way to Las Vegas to kill an escaped ramflero? Did he knife the man in the neck on a busy street in front of a casino and escape before the police helicopter arrived? Does it matter whether this boy did this thing in this place? Or whether he and his homeboys spun it out of a collage of their experiences, Hollywood films, and the internal stories circulating and transforming endlessly in the unstable myths of the MS?

      Of course it matters. Let us assume, for a moment, that his story is true. That Andy did make this trip north, and his US compatriot parodied the film scene to the young missionero. The film itself is based loosely on the very real spaces, events, and even personalities that spawned the Mexican Mafia. It is also a “foundational text” of gang culture. Central American cliques connected to both MS and 18 present the film to new recruits to teach them the ethos, history, and meaning of the Latino gangs. It became the script through which Andy performed this murder. All of them—Andy, the US homeboy, and even El Smokey—became actors reinventing a piece of theater that itself is a simulacrum of real events. Art imitates life, life imitates art, in a chaotic circuit that never seems to end.³⁶ And in telling the story to me, Andy spun the cycle onward, drawing me (and through me, you) into a performance of violence that is not locked in time and place, but is staged again and again before new audiences while drawing on a Hollywood invention that has now become an intimate element of the real. Or he lied to me sitting in the prosecutor’s office. Why? Did he lie so that the poor chance at immortality I offered would be commensurate with his imagination? Because the invented story shines so much more than the violent drudgery much of his life in actual fact was? Such glaring uncertainties are not separate from the violent acts they obfuscate, but in fact are integral to how this violence becomes woven into the world. That is, these fantasies and falsehoods are irrevocably linked to both the rationale for and consequences of acts of violence. Together, the act, the narration, and its reception tie the dead bodies to efforts to justify, mourn, or exalt the violence and enhance the sense of power that, no matter how fleeting, the story can provide the teller, who, no matter how he tells it, may or may not be the doer. Approaching the scene from the “outside,” one can watch the bloody drama and count the dead and sometimes identify the actors and even analyze their roles. But how is all this violence and suffering scripted, and to what end?

      Ultimately, the meaning of this story goes deeper than whether Andy actually did this thing in this place the way he said he did. Andy, speaking to me, answering my questions, caught up in the maelstrom of his last days, explained his life to me this way, using these words and these symbols as anchors in the story. Storytelling always entails an act of self-creation. Whether the Las Vegas story was true, a flight of whimsy, or an allegory for something else too painful or too mundane to tell, it exposes a brief fragment of the self that Andy invented and reinvented to survive and, perhaps, to survive beyond his time and place among the living. In my effort to capture and convey his experience, I have become another purveyor of Andy’s life and death, adding one more degree of separation and sowing one more set of sutures to keep the whole thing from coming apart at the seams. Still, I cannot stop the narrative from unraveling. Every facet of Andy’s life, every version of his life story that he told and that I inferred, every lie, flight of fancy, and grim confession recede into the event horizon of his murder, from whence they cannot be reclaimed. That Thursday afternoon when another youth about his age blasted five bullets through his skull forms both the beginning and the end of Andy’s story.

      After killing El Smokey, Andy returned to Guatemala and was finally “jumped in” (brincado)—officially accepted into the gang. He was thirteen years old, a bona fide homie belonging to the MS’s bloodiest and most powerful clique in Guatemala. Three years later he helped organize the crime of the four heads. Shortly afterward he walked in on El Pensador, his ramflero, snorting cocaine, an act prohibited by MS internal rules (alcohol and marijuana are okay; anything else receives swift punishment). Andy reported his ramflero’s violation to the other homies, but El Pensador denied everything, threatening to turn Andy into ceviche. Andy knew well enough not to hang around after his ramflero made this kind of threat. He split with three other guys, Gorgojo and two other young chequeos dissatisfied with their indentured servitude, leaving CLS forever.

      A year later, a dismembered female body in a trash bag appeared in front of Andy’s house in zone 5 of Guatemala City. His “marero-ness,” it seems, was obvious to his neighbors, and someone fingered him to the cops. He roundly denied his guilt—“How could I be so stupid as to leave a corpse in front of my own house?”—but no one listened. Fearing the real possibility of going to adult prison and seeing an opportunity to get back at the MS, Andy told the police he could give them the perpetrators of the quadruple decapitation. In exchange, they promised to make him a protected witness.

      Three months later, under armed escort on his way to give testimony in the Tower of Tribunals, Andy said, he caught sight of a CLS member waiting outside the underground entry, watching the media and prosecutors streaming in. His collar was pulled up high to cover the tattoos on his neck. They locked eyes for a second, Andy said, and that’s when he knew. He walked on through the warren of tunnels beneath the Supreme Court, into the cramped, stuffy courtroom. Sitting before the sweating judge, he put it all down on tape, all he knew of the MS: the leaders, the structures of command, the weapons caches, the fronts, the accountants, the soldiers. Extortion networks. Murdered children. Bodies buried in basements.

      Andy’s story is a collection of memories twisted by trauma, fantasies of power, and Hollywood invention, lies and myths that he drew upon in his narration of his life. This layering of truth and fantasy was by no means his alone. Storytelling is always an exchange between the actor and his or her audience. This exchange takes place as much through the fantasies we project upon one another as it does through the truths we believe we are sharing. As Andy engaged with his violent past and impossible future, he fulfilled law enforcement officials’ fantasies of protecting society from gang atrocities. And through our brief encounter, he fulfilled my own dream of delving into the life of a “real” marero. His violent death permanently blocked the possibility of continuing this exchange, providing an abruptly certain sense of closure to a narrative filled with lacunae and ellipses. And now, the only way I know to give back what is owed is to keep the promise I made to Andy of a poor kind of immortality. I have constructed a hall of mirrors out of the shards of Andy’s life to reflect how acts of brutality are etched into life through the endless blurring of truth and fantasy, memory and myth. And though Andy’s story may appear singular, it is not. As I explore in the next chapters, the processes of violent creation and destruction that shaped his life, his death, and his story are in fact layered into the making of the maras, and of the world itself, on a far grander scale.

Brother’s Bones

FIGURE 10. Sepulchers in the Guatemala City General Cemetery.

      Calavera and I climb a ragged stone staircase up a low rise in the middle of the cemetery. He talks of how he wishes he could forget much of his past, but also how so many memories slip away no matter how hard he fights to hold them close. In prison, it was easier to simply not think of the dead or of problems beyond his capacity to solve. Having witnessed so many men lose themselves raging against their past and the present it had made, he became adept at forgetting. But since walking free, his past has mounted a clandestine assault. Ghosts mark him from the shadows, from just around a corner, and in strangers’ sidelong glances. They are whispered reminders of all he survived and the unlucky bastards who did not. The cemetery is rife with these ghosts and their stories. Some of their stories he lived, too. Some he heard from his sister, Casper, and others, repeated so many times they became his own, slipping into his dreams.

      One such story begins with his brother Giovanni walking through the old neighborhood more