Becoming fugitive: Prison breaks and the space of punishment

Abstract

Dominant metanarratives of prison escape—as rebellion in the name of freedom and as spectacular revelation of prison organizational failure—stand in stark contrast to the experience and meaning of escape for those for whom it matters most: prisoners. For prisoners, escape does not necessarily constitute a line of flight out of the space and time of punishment. Instead, it abruptly transforms their relationship to state power and communal belonging that more often than not reifies the isolation that incarceration insists upon. Guided by a prisoner’s narrative of escape from a Guatemalan prison, evasion, exile, and re-capture, this essay brings the phenomenon of prison escape into conversation with carceral geography’s exploration of essential connections and reflections between the prison and other social, institutional and geographic spaces, highlighting how multiple actors and forces beyond the carceral state collude in fixing vulnerable bodies in place . Ultimately, the freedom that escape might promise the prisoner recedes before discourses and infrastructures of punishment and isolation built far beyond the prison, showing how incarceration and freedom cannot be defined by prison walls, nor by the law’s calculations that pretend to mete out justice in discrete units of time.

Keywords

Prison incarceration escape Central America carceral geography

Miguelón, “Big Michael,” as he’s known in the Pavón prison, is a tall, loose-limbed fellow with an unkempt salt and pepper beard. In February 2020—just before COVID-19 ripped through the Guatemalan prison system and the state shut down all visits—we hunkered down in a quiet corner to talk. In 1997, Miguelón was arrested for murdering the man who allegedly murdered his aunt. A judge sentenced him to death. For four years he lived on death row, a concrete isolation block some one hundred yards from where we sat. “Yeah, it was gonna be my turn,” Miguelón said.

And you should have seen how the guards tortured me. When they executed a pair of guys, they said, “The next one is you, Miguelón.” They’d bring me food and I would throw it at them … and they’d chant, like a little song, “Your turn is coming, your turn is coming.”

“Leave me alone,” I’d say. One time I went crazy and barricaded the door, then sat there crying.

“Are you sad, Miguelón?” they’d say. “Well you should have thought about that on the street, ‘cause now you’re going to the great whore.” And when they killed those two guys, I heard them crying out, “Help, help!”

“Did you see how they left in boxes, Miguelón? It’ll be your turn next. Ah, but wait, here I have the keys right here, I could let you out in the night …” And me, crying alone, my God.

[They executed them here] in Pavón with injection and in Escuintla they shot them. But then they transferred us to el Infierno, the “maximum-maximum,” and there the prison break happened, and I had to … I saw the doors open and said what am I doing here? My God, I don’t want to die strapped down. I’d rather die on my feet. So, I escaped (me fugué).¹

… … …

When escaping prisoners breach prison walls, they also gouge a symbolic wound in the state’s claim to inoculate society against insecurity that appears to so many to be rooted in those the law has caught and punished. Such reactions are rooted in collective fantasies about prisons protecting society by containing crime—fantasies that stand in stark contrast to what prisons actually do. The contradictions between the ideal and the reality of prison are especially visible in places like Guatemala, where survival for both prisoners and the prison system has long relied upon the perpetual flow of illicit exchange between the incarcerated and the free (an exchange organized by state agents allied with powerful prisoners) and where prisons have become corporate headquarters for all manner of criminal rackets preying upon wider society (Fontes and O’Neill, 2019; Lessing, 2013). Notwithstanding such contradictions, popular notions of prison escape frame the act as a powerful attempt at grasping a wild “freedom” that is imagined to exist for prisoners once they are outside prison walls. And so, prison breaks in Guatemala, as elsewhere, provoke widespread panic and push the state to engage in muscular shows of force to reperform and prop up its role as sole arbiter of law and order. This was certainly the case for Miguelón. Upon escaping with 70-odd other prisoners, he became the subject of a spectacular country-wide man-hunt in which police, military, border patrol, and countless civilians were conscripted into hunting the “dangerous prisoners” (Hemeroteca, 2018). This was altogether typical; for states and general publics, prison breaks tend to appear as singular acts of resistance representing the ultimate subversion of state sovereignty that reify the “imagined geography” (Gill et al., 2018) of prison as a discrete institution isolating the incarcerated from the free.

For prisoners, however, the metanarrative of escape as rebellion in the name of freedom rings false. Rather than launching a line of flight out of the space and time of punishment, escape abruptly transforms the prisoner’s relationship to state power and communal belonging that, more often than not, reifies the isolation that incarceration insists upon. In this sense, the Spanish verb “fugarse” perfectly captures the prison-escapee’s predicament. The word is derived from the Latin fuga, meaning “flight, escape, or exile,” which also roots the English word “fugitive.” Fugarse is a reflexive verb that in its most literal English translation means “to make oneself a fugitive”—that is, to become outlaw, unmoored from the social networks that sustain life, and risk suffering both physical and social death from violence and isolation more extreme and totalizing than that promised by prison (Králová, 2015; Sudnow, 1967).

Guided by Miguelón’s narrative of becoming fugitive, this essay maps the consequences of escape for the prisoner chasing the fantasy of freedom as he struggles to evade the state’s attempts to re-enact and reify the fantasy of containment. It brings the phenomenon of prison escape into conversation with carceral geography’s engagement with essential connections and reflections between the prison and other social and geographic spaces, and does so in a national context virtually unexplored by the discipline. A sense of confused continuity across prison walls haunts Miguelón’s itinerary. This renders visible the carceral “continuums” ( Wacquant, 2000, 2002) and “circuits” (Gill et al., 2018) embedded in practices and institutions of containment, and shows how they imbricate with Central America’s extreme socio-economic inequality as multiple actors and forces beyond the carceral state collude in fixing vulnerable bodies in place (see Cassidy, 2019). Ultimately, the freedom that escape might promise the prisoner recedes before discourses and infrastructures of punishment built far beyond the prison, showing how incarceration and freedom cannot be defined by prison walls, nor by the law’s calculations that pretend to mete out justice in discrete units of time.

(No) Escape from the carceral

For the prisoner cum fugitive, breaching prison walls can mark but one phase of an endless struggle with isolation and (un)freedom. Based primarily in the Global North, carceral geography has developed a wealth of conceptual tools for deconstructing the practices and conditions through which the carceral embrace extends far beyond prison space to track, surveil, and contain individuals and communities in ways both subtle and spectacular. In North America, explorations of a “carceral continuum” links the prison with other social and geographical spaces in relation to neoliberal inequalities and punitive state practices against racialized populations (Wacquant, 2001, 2009); see also Allspach, 2010). Attention to the “more-than-institutional” circulation and containment of marginalized groups has elucidated a “carceral circuitry” suturing myriad modes and spaces of incarceration into an unruly, oftentimes fragile whole (Gill et al., 2018). This focus on the interpenetration of late capitalism’s inequalities and the 21st century’s proliferation of carceral spaces provides an important lens through which to observe and critique how structural violence (see Farmer, 1996) and mass incarceration work through and off one another.²

Indeed, formal “prisoners” are by no means the only subjects of carceral containment, nor are prison guards its only, or even primary, enforcers. For example, as Cassidy (2019) observes in the United Kingdom, a host of civilians—employers, landlords, teachers, etc.—are conscripted into the violence of immigration policing against women seeking asylum from domestic violence, creating a kind of “everyday incarceration” that stretches and multiplies the boundaries of containment trapping vulnerable subjects in place. Similarly, Lewis et al. (2015) conceptualize a “continuum of unfreedom” to capture the many combined constraints—including “hyper-precarity”, socio-legal status, and immigration enforcement regimes— that together fix migrant workers at the bottom of socio-economic hierarchies. These perspectives help elucidate how the specter of poverty colludes with the security state to threaten the fugitive’s freedom at every turn.

Such nuanced attention to the multi-dimensional nature of carceral containment is essential for mapping out the meaning and consequences of escaping prison for the fugitive moving through various states and spaces of exile as he tries to evade death or recapture. In this article, I reach beyond the “prison-centric” analyses of prison escapes, which tend to frame them merely as structural-functional problems to be solved by improving prison infrastructure and administration (Martin and Chantraine, 2018).³ Here, the concept of “carceral mobilities” (Turner and Peters, 2017) is useful for overcoming the “illusion” that carceral space is fixed by prison walls. Indeed, Miguelón’s tale demonstrates how practices of containment “follow” the fugitive, morphing and becoming visible through the spectacle of the prison escape.

Thus, in the sections below, I treat the 2001 prison break from the el Infierno prison as a “diagnostic event” (Moore, 1987) not only of prison life, but also of wider arrangements of power, violence and marginality defining everyday survival in post-conflict Guatemala. In so doing, this article makes at least three contributions to carceral geography. First, I trace the distinct development and consequences of Guatemala’s carceral system, linking the contemporary prison and carceral practices to Cold War-era violence and authoritarianism in a national context virtually unexplored in carceral geography. Second, I use the understudied phenomenon of prison escape to “countermap” (Gill et al., 2018: 194) these carceral continuums and circuits to reveal the otherwise hidden connections between prison life and life on the outside. And third, these connections serve to expose the deep imbrications between Guatemala’s carceral continuum and continuums of “unfreedom”, linking the experience of power(lessness), poverty, and precarity across prison walls.

Peace and prisons

In 2001, when Miguelón became a fugitive, Guatemala’s democratic peace was in its first blush. After 36 years of authoritarian rule and armed conflict (1960–1996)—during which the Guatemalan military massacred upwards of 150 thousand people and disappeared 45 thousand—the return to democracy still seemed to hold great promise. As a Guatemalan human rights defender reflected in a 2012 interview, during the armed conflict, “… you could be disappeared simply for owning a copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude …. Now you have the freedom to think and say what you want” (Polanco, 2012). But through 25 years of peace, the freedom it promised has worn thin, overshadowed by the unrelenting spectacles of government corruption and the rise of out-of-control insecurity haunting peacetime order (Nelson 2009; O'Neill, 2009; Fontes, 2018).

Guatemala’s experiences with both democracy and mass incarceration have revealed just how thin and fading are the former’s promise of freedom and the latter’s promise of peace. These failures are entwined.⁴ Political and economic elite—with proliferating ties to powerful organized criminal groups (Gutierrez, 2016)—have been able to maintain and grow their influence through enormous profits, particularly in transnational drug-trafficking.Such corruption feeds and justifies public frustration with the democratic experiment’s abject failures to materially improve most Guatemalans’ lives. Nostalgia for the authoritarian past and its “ordered” violence is palpable, particularly in urban areas where extreme insecurity haunts everyday life. Decades of state failure to address “out-of-control crime” have led to widespread support for extrajudicial measures to punish the criminal element (see Godoy, 2002; Weston and Burrell, 2007). Such “popular punitiveness” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2006) feeds into both the massive post-Cold War outgrowth of Guatemala’s prison population and ongoing entropy degrading its capacity to contain crime.

The transition period from armed conflict to violent peace was marked by several high-profile prison escapes. In 1993, 38 prisoners escaped under cover of a riot in the Pavoncito prison. In 1997, a Colombian drug trafficker and eight other prisoners escaped with the help of an “armed commando” of men dressed in guards’ uniforms. And in 2005—four years after Miguelón’s escape—El Infiernito was the site of yet another massive prison break when 19 prisoners escaped via a 200 meter tunnel.⁵ While each prison break provoked hysterical public and state reactions, the underlying arrangements of power that govern prison life (and also make prisons key sites in the reproduction of criminal violence) have only intensified in the years since.

Following trends driving incarceration across the Western Hemisphere, Guatemala has struggled with a rapidly increasing imprisoned population which neither elected officials nor the wider public seem willing to care for. Today, the country’s prison system is overwhelmed and underfunded, running at nearly 300 percent overcapacity and riddled with corruption (Fontes and O’Neill, 2019).Some sites that house pre-trial detainees are overpopulated by more than 500 percent (CIEN, 2015). And so, the state cannot hope to keep its burgeoning prison population alive without constant support from the prisoners’ families, loved ones, and illicit networks on the outside. Indeed, prisoners, prison officials, and the prison system itself depend entirely upon a continuous flow of bodies enabling movement of both licit and illicit goods in and out of the prison to even survive. Everyday exchange between prisoners and their visitors (known as “La Visita”) is an essential element of prison life, providing economic opportunities for visitors and prisoners by upholding ties of kinship, love, and loyalty that keep prisoners linked to the outside world despite their physical separation (Muehlebach, 2012).⁶

These arrangements depend upon the state’s complicity in both reproducing crime and the porous walls imagined to hold it at bay. Prison officials enable and leverage these connections for profit. According to prison administrators, more than 30 percent of prison staff are believed to take part in illicit trafficking rackets that ensure a constant flow of drugs, booze, and weapons into prisons (Author interview, 2015; Fontes 2016). At the same time, powerful prisoners are able to leverage control over prison life to operate lucrative criminal rackets from behind bars. As a case in point: in 2019, Guatemalan officials claimed that more than 85 percent of extortion calls were made from inside the country’s prisons (Lopez, 2019). Thus, while street networks triage the state to help prisoners and the prison system to survive, the state’s complicity in crime has made the prison itself an essential space for perpetuating violence and insecurity across the nation.

Against this crumbling capacity to control the incarcerated, the specter of escape looms large for prison administrators. Degrading infrastructure and corrupt administration make escape possible, even probable, with prisoners escaping every year since the end of the armed conflict. And yet, escape marks the absolute limit of prison permissiveness. After enumerating all the drugs and other illicit goods flowing into the prison via networks of prisoners, visitors, and prison officials, a prison director stated, “the one thing we must do is prevent an escape … for if even one prisoner escapes, the prison director takes the blame and ends up behind bars himself until the matter is thoroughly investigated” (Anonymous, 2012).

Escape and prison power

On 17 June 2001, Miguelón was witness to- and erstwhile participant in the largest prison break in Guatemalan history. He was among the 78 prisoners to escape El Infiernito, the country’s highest security prison at the time. On 18 June, a front page story in Guatemala’s newspaper of record announced, “Armed with AK-47 s and Uzi submachine guns, seventy-eight dangerous prisoners escaped the High Security Prison … known as ‘The Inferno’ in a bloody escape (fuga) that left one guard, one PNC agent, and one prisoner dead” (Hemeroteca, 2018). In fact, the architects of the escape were a small group of men linked to the organized criminal networks Agosto Negro and Los Canguros, responsible for a string of high-profile bank robberies and kidnappings in the late 1990 s. According to prison officials and prisoners, these men fit the typical profile of successful escapees; “The guys that dig tunnels and actually, make it out? They’re always powerful prisoners with lots of money,” said a Guatemalan prison inspector. “They usually belong to an organized cell—kidnappers, or narcos, or gangs. They have long sentences on their heads, and people on the outside to help them” (Ortega, 2021).

That is, those prisoners who plan and manage prison breaks tend to be those who already exercise enormous control over prison life, control based upon coordination with prison officials and networks on the outside. Such inmates are pivotal players in prison “co-governance.” This is a shifting dance and détente in which power is “… organized between two forces (powerful prisoners and authorities), who both have the means and desire to instrumentalize others …to ensure their control over each other, while they also have the possibility to disorganize the existing arrangement” (Weegels, 2020: 63). In every prison, prisoner-state official rulers impose some version of order while extracting profit from the general population by taxing prison businesses. The most important source of wealth is the constant flow of illicit commodities, primarily drugs, cellphones, and weapons. The distribution of these profits among prison officials and prisoners alike lubricates the machinery of power. This means that, in practice, co-governance depends upon prisoner–state official cooperation to make prison walls selectively porous, and then leverage this power into shared profit.

The precise balance of power between government officials and prisoners varies from prison to prison and year to year. In general, however, state officials are understandably eager to maintain at least the semblance of control, such that—if and when—prisoner power becomes too egregiously visible, state authorities move to reassert themselves through ritualistic performances of violence.This was the case in the Pavón prison in the early 2000s, for example, where a prisoner-run “Comité de Orden y Disciplina” (Committee of Order and Discipline) exercised unchallenged control over the prison, using prison facilities to flip cars in lucrative carjacking schemes and hold kidnapping victims for ransom. The prison was known as “The Hilton” of the penitentiary system, where wealthy prisoners built comfortable residences (one famously fitted out with a jacuzzi) and converted an isolation block into a night club. In 2007, the government conducted a spectacular raid on the prison with hundreds of police, prison security, and military special forces to “take back” the prison. They carried out the extrajudicial execution of several leading committee members and transferred hundreds of inmates to other prisons (Laguardia, 2020).

Notwithstanding such spectacular efforts to keep prisoners in their “place”, over time prisoner and state power have become thoroughly integrated. Captain Byron Oliva Lima, for example, sentenced to 25 years behind bars for his role in the 1996 murder of Archbishop Gerardi, embodied the apotheosis of prisoner power.⁷ During more than 15 years behind bars, through numerous transfers, Lima rose to rule nearly every prison facility he occupied and transformed life in each one, earning the moniker “king of the prisons” (Nómada, 2019). He did so by leveraging his connections with military networks embedded in the Guatemalan government. Under his direction from 2007 to 2013, the Pavoncito prison became a model of prisoner productivity. Torre Fuerte (Strong Tower), his non-government organization, used prisoner labor to manufacture police uniforms for the Guatemalan government, as well as regalia for the Partido Patriota (Patriot Party) led by Lima’s kaibil compatriot Otto Perez Molina. After Perez Molina won the presidency in 2011, Lima expanded his influence by filling six of seven prison sub-director positions with military allies, and then leveraged these connections to organize prison transfers and tax wealthy prisoners in return for favors or protection.⁸

Powerful prisoners occupy similar positions in every prison, meaning that the conditions that made the 2001 Infiernito prison break possible have been the norm, not the exception in the post-Cold War era. A purported organizer of the 2001 mass prison break, Rigoberto Antonio Morales Barrientos (alias Rigorrico) repeatedly took spectacular advantage of these conditions (Toc, 2013). A string of high-profile bank robberies and kidnappings in the mid-1990 s made him infamous. In 1998, months after their first arrest, Rigorrico and his accomplices escaped from a rural jail in Xelaju, only to be recaptured four months later. Authorities sent them to El Infiernito, the highest security prison in the country at the time. Miguelón described the scene:

“I was in there and saw how much power those guys had,” he explained, shaking his head in awe. “They had the means and the will and they did it, [it was] a good plan. I only learned about it after I left. If I had had a plan, I swear I would not be here, or perhaps I’d be dead or who knows, but none of that matters.” He shrugged. “All of a sudden I heard yelling and I left my cell and they told me—well no one told me—I just heard a voice saying, ‘they’re gonna kill you against the wall, better get yourself to the mountain.’ So I took my chance and I left. I had no plan, nothing. Those that went ahead, they sure had a plan, but I didn’t and so I’m here paying.”

Miguelón was, by his own admission, an unwitting pawn in someone else’s plan. Like him, most of the escapees had little or no inkling of what was taking place until the gates opened and it became a wild free for all, a chaotic exit that gave cover to the organizers. “So with the authorities, they opened the doors that are always locked,” Miguelón recounted.

How they did this, no one knew, no one knows, but everything opens up and we get to the street and the most powerful guys get taken away in cars, two maroon suburbans driven by twin girls … It was like a movie!

The rest of the 60-odd fugitives streamed down the dirt road to the highway that runs from the capital city to the Pacific Ocean. According to newspaper reports, several commandeered a public bus that the police captured an hour later (Hemeroteca, 2018). Many more, including Miguelón, crossed over the highway and ran into the forest. He was running towards what he called “the mountain.”

“When I thought I was out of danger,” Miguelón said, “I sat down and said to myself, ‘My God, how beautiful, I’m free! How wonderful, thanks be to God, papá.’ I kept walking, not knowing what would happen tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, you understand. But later I said to myself, ‘better if I had stayed locked up!’”

Becoming fugitive

“My God, how beautiful, I’m free.”

Miguelón’s evocation of freedom captures a wild sense of bursting forth, untethered from the weight of the law, the judgments cast down by sovereign and society. As Miguelón’s narrative shows, this initial sense of freedom is both spatial and temporal—a powerful expansion of the perceived conditions of possibility. In a sense, this notion of liberty is “desublimated:” removed from civilization’s strictures, an atavistic return to an “untamed” state. Both Freud and Nietzsche recognized such a state as being freer and, in some ways, happier than life conditioned by civilization. Now Guatemala, like the rest of the post-colonial world, is no stranger to the consequences of the powerful wreaking their will upon the weak. From colonial history into the Cold War and through late capitalism, political and economic elite have given full reign to their will to power, embracing a “… freedom to be genuinely without care for the predicaments, vulnerabilities, or fates of other humans, other species, or the planet” (Brown, 2018: 71). But there is something deeply ironic about impugning such “ugly freedom” (Anker, 2022) upon prisoners fleeing the prison. For Miguelón and his compatriots—who would be framed before the public eye as extreme threats—this unhinged version of freedom is ephemeral, delusional, and even utopic, painfully abstracted out of and severed from real life. For the fugitive without resources, without a plan, without networks to protect him from the state’s wrath and the specter of starvation, merely running away from prison’s confinement entraps him in what Stauffer (2015) would call a “liberal story of culpability, Western legality and freedom.” A story that is revealed, when one digs just a little, as a dangerously misleading fiction.

As Miguelón himself realized, “… better if I had stayed locked up!”

Hunted on the mountain

The sheer scale of the 2001 prison break, and prison officials’ clear complicity in allowing it to happen, provoked the security state into a muscular show of force. This performance drew upon well-worn strategies and scripts developed through years of authoritarian rule that bled into the country’s 21st century democratic experiment, making for a distinct—and extremely violent—approach to extending the carceral gaze and grip. The moment Miguelón and his 70 odd compatriots stepped beyond the space of the prison, they became living, breathing vessels of disorder—and hard evidence of massive carceral failure. The authorities moved to re-capture and contain them by deploying violence along a carceral circuit that drew first upon a militarized security apparatus. In the eyes of the wounded, humiliated, and furious security state, the prisoners were animals fit only to be hunted and killed:

… you should have seen how they went about killing people. I could hear it. “Poc!” over here, and “poc!” over there … all over the mountain. Look, in those days there was a law that said ‘prisoner seen, prisoner dead’ because there were no journalists. Once I got to the city it wasn’t like that. But there on the mountain the police had dogs, and they hunted us. They shot guys out of trees…

What Miguelón referred to as “prisoner seen, prisoner dead” was a 21st century revival of an age-old “ley fuga”—“flight law”—that was formally enforced under General Ubico’s rule (1930–1944) as a means of eliminating political prisoners.⁹ Nominally, it protected state agents who harmed or killed prisoners attempting to escape. In practice, the ley fuga was a thinly veiled cover for extrajudicial murder. Guards would escort an “enemy of the regime” to a pre-determined place, and then tell the prisoner that they were free to go. After the prisoner took a few steps towards imagined freedom, the guard would shoot him in the back (Mendoza, 2021). Abolished during Guatemala’s “democratic spring” (1944–1954), the ley fuga continued to be formally debated in the Guatemalan Congress after the return to intermittent military rule. During the armed conflict, the security state dropped escape as an excuse for execution, instead opting to engage in the outright disappearance and murder of suspected communists and subversives, dumping bodies in ravines or burying them in secret on military bases (Manz, 2005).

As Miguelón indicates, while the prison break provoked a national “state of exception” (Agamben, 2005) and drove the state to murder, the suspension of law in the name of order had a historically and culturally specific geography (Gregory, 2006). That is, its borders were defined by the competing and limited reach of both the security-state and those actors in civil society and government who might collapse the space of exception by making it visible. For instance, the jurisdiction of the “prisoner-seen, prisoner dead” dictum encompassed “the mountain” but not the city, neatly mapping onto historical-geographical distinctions in the practice of violence. In the early 1980 s, as the Guatemalan military ramped up counterinsurgent violence, rural spaces became sites of massacre, scorched earth campaigns, and acts of genocide, particularly in the western highlands where insurgent groups sought protection and solidarity with majority indigenous populations (Manz, 2005). Meanwhile, in the Guatemala City and other urban areas, the counterinsurgency engaged in subtler forms of terror to avoid attention from the news media, embassies, human rights organizations, and other civil society actors based in the city. From the 1960 s onward, the police and army disappeared tens of thousands of suspected subversives, steadily sowing terror laced with doubt amongst the population. In this way, the Guatemalan government and its allies in the United States were able to obfuscate the atrocious realities of counterinsurgency from local and global publics, producing an eerie silence that would sustain the specter of terror for decades after its enactment (Green, 1995; Suarez-Orozco, 1990).

In peacetime, the subversive haunting the national order has been replaced by the criminal, the “delinquent,” and—most powerfully—the image of the transnational gangster. The emergence of transnational gangs like the Mara Salvatrucha, with their penchant for brash spectacle and made-in-America branding, quickly came to dominate public perception of crime and insecurity, providing a powerful excuse for political actors’ intent on re-militarizing state security. From 1998 onwards, legislatures in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala passed Mano Dura (iron fist) laws targeting the gang threat through militarized raids on poor urban communities, mass arrests, and incarceration (Cruz, 2015; Muller, 2021). Despite its abject failures, this authoritarian approach to crime control remains popular today. In interviews with police officers, taxi drivers, and small business owners, I cannot count how many times an interlocutor has invoked the dictum, “gangster seen, gangster dead,” to express nostalgia for the wartime order, frustration at the leniency of contemporary laws, or to refer approvingly to extrajudicial murders of suspected delinquents by vigilantes and death squads (Fontes, 2018).

Such violent frustration is linked to the prolonged collective experience with extreme insecurity. The 2001 mass prison break was a powerful moment in the dawning of abject disillusionment that would overtake the body politic in following years. The government declared a national state of emergency and began making radio announcements that “…provoked psychosis and fear among the population … Dozens of calls expressed fear at the massive escape of dangerous prisoners” (Hemeroteca, 2018). The following day, the government published mugshots of the escapees still on the loose with the title “Dangerous Prisoners Escaped from Prison” and began offering rewards for information leading to their capture (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Photos of the escaped prisoners with the title, “Wanted! Dangerous prisoners escaped from prison.” (Hemeroteca, 2018)

Paradoxically, this prison break—a spectacular example of how fragile the prison’s hold over (some of) the imprisoned can be—became a powerful opportunity for the penal state to re-entrench and expand its hold over the public it so clearly fails to protect. The fugitives’ movement provoked a convulsive extension of the carceral state into spaces that had been left relatively unpoliced since the end of the armed conflict. The state’s murderous response and the public’s hysteria framed the fugitives as altogether savage and dangerously brutal men whose very existence threatened the social order and, therefore, must be hunted down and eliminated using whatever means necessary. They constituted a living, breathing contradiction to the precarious perception of order clung to by state and society. Inherent is the assumption that the fleeting sense of wild freedom that marked Miguelón’s first moments on the lam constituted the fugitive’s entire existence. Accordingly, the prison escapees become the savages requiring the state’s (re)turn to savagery. Healing the social body requires they be cleansed. On the mountain, where the violent sovereign is free to enact its will beyond the law and public prying, cleansing meant killing. But once the fugitive slipped beyond this space, it was a social death that awaited him. This execution is slower but perhaps more complete, for it entails severing the bonds—of love, loyalty, and kinship—that constitute his connection to a space beyond the prison and undergird his survival on both sides of prison walls. And so, even as Miguelón eluded the hunt on the mountain, the freedom for which he and his compatriots had risked everything remained out of reach, lodged firmly in his imagination.

“There were four police and two dogs on my trail. I asked myself, what do I do?” Miguelón said, flashing a ragged smile.

And as a kid one always watches movies, right … and so I said to myself, “the river, the river.” There was a ravine and I went right down in the water and walked, like from that entryway to that door over there, and I lost them…

Exiled in the city

Surviving within a Guatemalan prison requires, above all, building and maintaining relationships with people on the outside. No prisoner prospers without such networks, making them key elements in Guatemala’s “carceral communities” and other prison contexts across the western hemisphere (Darke et al., 2021). While some organized criminal leaders, gang members, and narco-traffickers can count on their connections to provide them with a comparably comfortable existence, even in some cases considerable freedom and power, the vast majority of prisoners have only their families and loved ones to lean on. Through liberal visitation policies, such networks are able to provide prisoners with essential goods, making the flow of visitors the essential lifeblood of prison survival. The constant exchange between inside and outside of prison they make possible—of licit and illicit commodities, of familial and emotional commitments—sustains prison life and triages the prison system itself (Fontes, 2018; Fontes and O’Neill, 2019). Such exchanges trespass the physical, legal, and symbolic borders between the prison and the outside. But these are precisely the bonds that the escaped prisoner loses first. In moving outside the prison, the fugitive does not merely lose these essential networks; they can also be conscripted into the state’s efforts to surveil and re-capture him. Such intimate betrayal turns the freedom escape might promise into abject exile. The final phase of Miguelón’s fugitive life was lived in a shrinking “geography of survival” (Mitchell and Heynan, 2009) trapped between the exigencies of poverty and the state’s infiltration of both his family and urban space.

Having escaped prison, his death sentence, and police hunting parties, Miguelón reached out to his parents.

I arrived to my house asking for clothes, food, money. My little mother, who was still alive, told me, “What have you done, my son, what have you done? My God.”

“Ay, mama…”

“What do you want?”

“Food, mama. Clothes, money.”

“Clothes I’ve got, food I’ve got, money I don’t, my son. But look your father is going to come. He ordered that if you came, we should shut the doors to you.”

“How sad, how sad. Oh God mama.”

“Here take it, look your food, put on these clothes, and eat right here.”

But I couldn’t stand it. I took what she gave me and went back on the street. I felt people were watching me.

Miguelón received the same response from his extended family—even the uncle whose wife’s murder had prompted Miguelón to take revenge. They shut every door in his face for fear that anyone giving him shelter would become an outlaw themselves. His most intimate relationships had been conscripted into entrapping him, making his family essential nodes in an expanded “carceral circuitry” (Gill et al., 2018), and transforming his home into one more site of surveillance (see Moran and Keinänen, 2012). And so, the walls of his prison expanded to encompass the space of the nation itself.¹⁰

I would tell them, “I don’t want to go back to prison, better for me to go to another country.”

“Well get going then, you can’t come here anymore. The authorities threatened us, they’re giving money to turn you all into them,” they would say. Aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, they all closed their doors, and I had to look for other solutions to get ahead. I had no money, no house, I had nothing … like I am right now, I have nothing, only my life.

Miguelón is drawing a direct comparison between the isolation of exile and his contemporary isolation as a prisoner bereft of outside networks to support him. In Guatemalan male prisons, there is a term for men whom no one visits: russos (Russians). “A russo is, like, embargoed,” explained a prisoner known as Trompas, whose wife—his last solid connection to the outside—stopped visiting him after she discovered that he had been unfaithful to her with another woman. “That’s me. Stuck out in Siberia.” These are the men who are forced to beg for a few coins from other prisoners’ visitors, who call out from isolation cells adjacent to the entrance where the women’s line forms when it is time for visitors to leave, “Precious mothers, beautiful little mothers, your blessing please…” jingling plastic bags of coins strung up on the cell bars. To be russo is to occupy the lowest rungs of prison social orders. They cannot run businesses because no one brings them the capital and commodities to, say, make pastries or cut hair. When a cell phone is taken in a search, russos cannot get another smuggled in or acquire cash to buy one in the prison black market. Russos must work for others if they are to work at all and, lacking any social and economic standing, they are immensely vulnerable.

Back in the city, embargoed by the only people he could rely on, Miguelón found himself in a familiar position—occupying the lowest end of a “continuum of unfreedom” (Lewis et al., 2015) that, in Guatemala, traps the poorest members of society on both sides of prison walls. To survive, he turned to begging and petty theft. “I’m going to tell you something, papá, here in this life, one can’t be a saint, one can’t be faithful,” Miguelón recounted. “You have to … I knew I was doing bad stuff. I had already been shot at, I had robbed and gotten away with it, and finally when I could get back to working, they caught me.” After more than two months, he managed to get false documents and returned to looking for honest work, but by then his luck had run out. At 4 a.m. one morning, the police boarded the bus Miguelón was riding from Guatemala City’s outskirts towards the city center.

“Everyone get off with your documents in your hands,” they said … And I take out the documents I had gotten, right, but they had photos of the fugitives. They keep looking at me from head to feet.

“You’re one of the fugitives,” they say.

“What fugitives? Look at my documents.”

“What’s your name?’

And they kept looking at me up and down. My God. I’m not escaping this time. I felt this desperation, sadness, wanting again to flee. And I tried! But there were more cops standing in my way.

“And you, where are you going?”

“I gotta piss.”

“Piss right there.”

“No, but I gotta make poo-poo.”

“No, no, do it right there.”

They took all the people off the bus and then they surrounded me, cuffed me, and took me in—well, they had me at the station. “You are Miguelón, you are Miguel Angel Perez,” and they gave it to me in the face. They had me playing the piano, papá.

What a movie. I survived on the mountain and I suffered in the city, repentant. But still I was content to be free.

Time, work, death

When Miguelón and I last spoke, 21 years had passed since his capture and re-incarceration. The state commuted his death sentence—Guatemala has not executed anyone since 1999—but tacked on an additional 15 years to his 30-year sentence. He winced and looked away when I asked him how many years he had left. He is 54 years old.

That time is the operator of punishment in prison is obvious, but prisoners fight back as best they can against prison-time’s tyranny (Foucault, 1977: 160). Prisoners must find ways to navigate the constrictions of “time-space walls” (Moran, 2012) that temporally dissociate them from the outside world. In this way they carve out their own sense of self against the dulling routinization of “clock-time” (Wahidin, 2002: 182; see also Cope, 2003; Wahidin and Tate, 2005).¹¹ For Miguelón, this means work. “Right now, I make hammocks, twisting string down below, to maintain myself,” he said.

Day after day I go to work, and I don’t pay attention to what happens in my sector. My only obligation is the [evening count], and no one bothers me because I don’t give them space, because I’m working. It is my happiness.

Like many others, Miguelón is resigned to this “honest work,” work he couldn’t find during his sojourn as a fugitive. Such work can be considered a “metaphorical escape” alongside myriad other means of turning away from the painfully slow and homogeneous passage of prison-time (Hardt, 1997; Wahidin, 2002). But such work is also about survival. It earns about 1 quetzal (.15 US$)/hour counting knots and twisting string as the days pass into a future that will remain firmly trapped within prison walls. After surviving death row, escape, being hunted, recaptured, and thrown back inside, it appears that Miguelón has indeed been “disciplined,” bending body and soul humbly and happily to his work (Foucault, 1977).

But don’t be fooled. The Guatemalan prison system’s capacity to live up to the Foucauldian ideal is limited to russos like Miguelón who find themselves locked at the lowest end of the proverbial totem pole. In another part of the prison, Rigorrico, the alleged Infiernito escape mastermind, also serves out his time engaged in work. Court records and prisoner accounts show that in the two decades since Rigorrico returned to prison, he has continued to operate kidnapping and extortion rings from the various prisons and isolation blocks where he serves out multiple life sentences (González, 2018). For Rigorrico, as for other powerful prisoners, mass incarceration is a condition and modality to be leveraged. Following his re-incarceration, Rigorrico searched out and organized prisoners with short sentences who upon release became part of his extortion and kidnapping operations on the outside. The scheme extended into Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. He was also a founding leader of the “The Imitators,” an extortion network that would masquerade as Mara Salvatrucha, 18th Street, or the infamous narco-trafficking group Los Zetas to leverage the fear these criminal brands inspire in the populace into profit (España, 2019). Twice found guilty for his continued engagement in crime, he continues to live a privileged life in Pavón. “He cannot be touched because of how much money he makes,” confided a fellow prisoner, “and he doesn’t get involved in fights [over prison governance], because they do not concern him.”

“I regret it all,” Miguelón confessed, “because I tell myself I would have served my time already if I hadn’t run away … More than anything it was a moment of ignorance and everything turned out badly.” He should have been patient and disciplined, he should have served his sentence bending body and soul to humble work. Instead, he ventured a blind leap out of prison space-time, only to find that the carceral embrace had encompassed and subverted the places and people that made the freedom he was seeking livable. His despair in the telling was palpable. But surviving is still something.

“This I have lived, and I have to tell it and thank God. As [a buddy] used to say, ‘You’re still counting the days and telling stories Miguelón,’” he said. “Others aren’t around to count anymore, friends of mine. We still tell their stories, we who are still marking time and suffering, we all had to live through it, but they can’t talk and have nothing more to tell.”

Miguelón has survived, for which he counts himself lucky. Such is the arbitrary nature of punishment. For his momentary taste of (un)freedom he must live out the rest of his days tying knots, trapped in the same space with men like Rigorrico: men whose crimes have also landed them behind bars, but for whom the carceral is but a puzzle to be solved—an obstacle to their ambitions, or perhaps even their vehicle—as they continue to terrorize and kill and profit while safely ensconced within the penitentiary system.

… … …

The 2001 escape from the El Infierno maximum security prison breached the veil of invisibility that cloaked the realities of incarcerated life and prison power from the public eye, a veil that is essential for maintaining the fantasy of law and order that imagines prison walls protecting society from crime. The breach provided the Guatemalan security state with an opening to re-perform and re-entrench itself in this shared fantasy by hunting down, killing, and recapturing the fugitives. This convulsive expansion revealed a distinct carceral circuitry linking a security apparatus built through histories of civil war violence with dawning societal awareness of the “criminal threat” that would colonize and dominate public perception in Guatemala and across Central America in the following decades. At the same time, the image of freedom that drove Miguelón to join the prison break also proved a fantasy, a pipe dream that evaporated in the face of unrelenting isolation and poverty on the outside. Trapped by the carceral state’s infiltration of his most intimate allies, he found himself caught at the poorest end of a continuum of unfreedom that also trespasses prison walls, allowing powerful prisoners to wreak their will while trapping the poor surviving on both the inside and outside of prison.

These insights demonstrate how pivotal the experiences and phenomenon of (failed) escape and evasion can be for carceral geography’s exploration of containment beyond prison walls, and for analyzing the intersections and reflections between prison life and wider society. As shown above, fugitives on the lam not only inhabit the overlap between carceral continuums and continuums of unfreedom. They can also provoke a violent extension, renewal, and reorganization of carceral containment as state and society struggle to re-entrench the physical and symbolic isolation marking off the “imprisoned” from the “free” in which prison walls are imagined to play such central roles. This is crucial. In the 21st century, metastasizing “cultures of control” (Garland, 2002) are evolving terrifyingly effective means of surveilling and containing vulnerable bodies well beyond the prison that are, for one reason or another, deemed out of place. We live in an age of rapidly proliferating walls and technologies that police crime, borders, citizenship, urban centers, and even intimate spaces of everyday life (Armstrong and Jefferson, 2017; Gill and Moran, 2016; Koskela, 2000). Thus, escape and evasion, in both literal and figurative terms, have become increasingly difficult, particularly when entering and existing in rich countries.¹² These developments are a provocation to listen to-, understand, and apply the perspectives of those who have, even for a short time, managed to evade the evolving reach of the carceral gaze and its inimitable embrace.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this research was provided by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and American University.

ORCID iD

Anthony W Fontes

Notes

Anthony W Fontes is author of Mortal Doubt: Transnational Gangs and Social Order in Guatemala City (University of California Press, 2018).

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