Mortal Doubt. Anthony W. Fontes

photo ID: ISS022-E-86851. http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov.

      Whatever the truth, it was rumors such as these swirling about the maras—and about so much of the violence taking place in Guatemala and across the region—that helped to instill in me an inescapable fear. Each time I walked out my door into my relatively tranquil neighborhood in Guatemala City, I would scan the street for anyone “suspicious.” Coming home late at night, every figure silhouetted by the streetlights was a potential thief, murderer, or kidnapper. Of course the real predators would never stand beneath street lamps. And so in vain I stared into the shadows too, and saw things there that were not. I made constant calculations using variables of my own invention to judge which route was “safer” than another, which corner store (tiendita) less likely to be marked by thieves, which taxi driver more trustworthy than the next. It was an absurd game of probability without any rules or hard numbers at all, upon which I daily staked my well-being, and perhaps my life.

      I was certainly not alone in this charade of creeping paranoia and false assurances. Politicians, the press, law enforcement, and the general populace all feed and feed upon such fearful doubt, and this helps to make any study of criminal violence an exploration of half-truths, unverifiable data, and rumors floating in and out of focus. While homicide counts are easy to come by, the kind of information that really matters—who is being killed and why, for example—is not.⁷² “It has become impossible to know who is killing and why because it is always changing,” said the chief prosecutor of Villa Nueva, a sprawling suburb of Guatemala City. “We cannot differentiate between maras, narcotraffickers, and other organized criminal groups.”⁷³

      Given the immeasurable difficulties of investigating crime in postwar Guatemala, a retreat to cold numbers is not surprising. There are dead bodies in the street; some have been tortured, and many of them have tattoos. Too often these are the only material facts available. Almost everything else is hearsay, including much of the “data” produced by state offices and NGOs.⁷⁴ So everyone is subject to a “regime of rumor” under which “everything becomes patchwork; an infrastructure of hidden bricolage floats to social consciousness like a submerged, stitched together body.”⁷⁵ And nowhere is the power of rumor more influential than inside mara networks and the neighborhoods and prisons they inhabit. After all, “rumor is the language of risk,” and gang members face more mortal risk on a daily basis than I (and most probably you) will experience in a lifetime.⁷⁶ Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that fewer than 20 percent of mareros survive into their twenties. As among any population caught up in constant violence, a Hobbesian state of war, “torture and assassination frequently are rumor materially enacted on other people’s bodies.”⁷⁷ During my fieldwork I heard stories of gangsters and gang-involved youths being murdered because of rumors concerning their loyalty, negligence, or some real or imagined slight. Rumors produce dead bodies, and dead bodies produce rumors. Stories bloom from every corpse to explain (away), justify, or otherwise make sense of the death.

FIGURE 3. Former Barrio18 member in his quarters in Canada prison, Escuintla, Guatemala. Notice the dolls he keeps for family visits and his self-portrait with his four-year-old daughter.

      Navigating this landscape of risk meant, first of all, finding spaces in which gang-involved individuals felt safe enough to talk with me. Curiously, many chose to meet in fast-food joints—McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Pollo Campero—in the historic zone, a part of the city easily accessible via public transportation. These restaurants tended to be bright, loud, and crowded with middle-class families. Even so, such meetings were difficult to arrange and often fell through. There was only one space where I could rely on relatively secure and consistent access to gang-involved individuals willing to speak with me: prison.

      The prison became a primary fieldwork site as well as a key institutional space for understanding the production of violence well beyond prison walls. To ensure I could get to prison whenever I wanted, I became a “facilitator of projects” with gang-rehab organizations. On a few days each week for more than a year I participated in community-building exercises with groups of incarcerated ex-mareros and other convicts. Through this constant contact, I slowly developed a network of gang-involved men willing to open their lives to me. Many of the stories you will read in this book were recounted in prison yards, recorded on a voice recorder smuggled in my underwear through the prison gates and hidden from prying eyes beneath a trucker cap placed carefully between myself and the narrator. Over the years I have come to count several of these men as friends, and they have invited me to meet their families, which in turn gave me access to new street networks that included the few women whose voices also appear here.⁷⁸

      When I wasn’t in prison, I was pursuing contacts and information on the other side of the law. My aim was to collect, Rashomon-like, as wide a variety of perspectives on gangs and criminal violence as possible. To carry this off, I had to assume many roles and manage a schizophrenic existence. I tagged along with pastors in parishes of gang-dominated neighborhoods. I spent weeks in police precincts, occasionally accompanying police raids on criminal safe houses. I got journalist gigs in order to get a press pass and access to government hearings. I built an archive of newspaper, radio, and television reports of allegedly gang-related crimes. I spent months sitting through somnambulant eight-hour extortion and homicide hearings and pursuing coffee dates with judges and prosecutors. And so on. By moving back and forth between sustained conversations with gang-involved men and digging into the representations of gangs and gangsters in the press and in everyday conversation, I came to understand how mareros themselves incorporate—self-consciously or not—the phantasmagoric image the maras strike before the public eye. That is, gangs play a part in forging their symbolic power and are in turn forged by it.

      Clearly I had to be careful crisscrossing the blurred divide between the state and its underworld. I always introduced myself as a scholar/writer, emphasizing my interest in life histories and personal perspectives while eschewing direct questions about particular criminal activities. Hewing to the “outsider” role—one with no stake in the clumsy struggle between law and outlaw—was the best way I knew to preserve my safety and that of those who spoke with me. But after a year in the field I too was pulled into the vortex of vicious, sometimes deadly rumor circulating in and beyond the prisons. It happened at a conference in San Salvador while I was talking to a respected crime journalist. For months I had tried to track him down, and I asked him if he would give me an interview or at least have a drink with me and exchange notes.

      After a long, calculating look, he replied, “Before I talk to you, I have to know one thing. Are you Interpol?” I laughed, but he went on. “I have heard that you are working for Interpol, passing them the information that you get. Is this true?”

      “No!” I exclaimed, perhaps a bit more forcefully than I meant to. I wanted to seem nonchalant—“How ridiculous!”—but I could hear my pulse throbbing in my ears, and my mind was racing—flipping through all the people I knew whom he might have spoken to, all my gatekeepers, friends, and informants. Who would have said such a thing? Who was this journalist? Whom would he have talked to? Though I was able to clear up the rumor after returning to Guatemala—and no one, thankfully, got hurt because of it—the episode was an important lesson. In utter ignorance, I had been recast by rumor into the role of a transnational cop. That this role was entirely invented—to my knowledge Interpol doesn’t have agents in the field anywhere in Guatemala—mattered far less than the fact that this was how some of those I interacted with in prison chose to make sense of me. The consequences of my entanglement with these webs of rumor and suspicion could have been far, far worse.

      Given how precarious the situation could be, and because informants and opportunities to enter prisons or mara-dominated zones could arise and disappear very quickly, I had to jump down every rabbit hole I found. Such was my “research plan.” Slowly, my network of friends and contacts grew beyond gangsters to include police, prosecutors, human rights activists, prison directors, social workers, taxi drivers, church pastors, journalists, and many others. Over the years I have done my best to keep in touch with this network, though many of my gang-involved contacts and friends