Portrait of a ‘real’ marero : Fantasy and falsehood in stories of gang violence

Andy’s utility

Andy was among the first mareros I interviewed who was still deeply ‘in the game’. When he and I met, I had been living in Guatemala City for more than a year conducting fieldwork on the maras. My original plan had been to get as close as possible to active gang networks, perhaps even by becoming ‘embedded’ in a gang clique as anthropologist Dennis Rodgers (2007) had in Nicaragua a decade earlier. ⁸ But the situation on the ground proved to be far more volatile than I had expected, and I was forced to approach my subject from more oblique angles. My most consistent contact with gang-involved individuals came through volunteering with gang rehabilitation organizations (both secular and Evangelical), making regular visits to prisons where former gang members were incarcerated. Through months of facilitating arts and crafts activities, playing basketball, and organizing barbecues behind bars, I gained the trust of men from several gang cliques, who eventually opened their lives to me, and linked me with their families and friends on the street. At the same time, I developed contacts among law enforcement, human rights groups, public defense lawyers, and criminal circuit judges. This allowed me to sit in on trials involving gang-related crimes and track how these crimes were reported in the press as a means of understanding how gangs are discussed in public discourse. ⁹

A month before I met Andy, I climbed the 15 stories of Guatemala City’s Tower of Tribunals. I went to court to witness the sentencing of Rafael Citalan, a 23-year-old guero (light-skinned man) with slicked back hair and a jutting chin. He was one of several MS members allegedly responsible for murdering four people, decapitating them, and placing the heads at various locations around Guatemala City.

Back in June 2010, incarcerated leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha ordered gang members on the street to collect five human heads. In the end, one clique failed, and they only managed to capture four. Gang members placed the four victims’ heads at various locations around the city. With each head they left a note – supposedly written by Citalan’s hand – attacking the government for ‘impunity’ and ‘injustice’ in the prison system. Media outlets across the country flocked to publicize the grisly affair.

Earlier I’d spoken with Edgar Martínez, the lawyer for the prosecution. He was a tall, balding man, amiable and ready to talk. ‘This is the most spectacular and frightening gang case I have been involved with,’ he said. ‘This was a political act. They wanted to terrify the populace and intimidate the government so they would get better treatment in the prisons. It’s the first case I’ve worked on that has had such political overtones. It’s like terrorism.’ For nearly two years, the crimes remained unsolved. Maras are notoriously difficult to infiltrate. ‘They have their own language, their own style,’ said an eager young Guatemalan gang expert working with an FBI taskforce. ‘It is their sub-culture that makes them harder to infiltrate than even organized crime or drug traffickers (narcos).’ And, besides, as they have admitted to me time and again, Guatemalan security officials have very little experience in undercover operations. Martinez told me that the case broke open with the testimony of a secret witness, another MS member who, for reasons he did not explain, confessed and turned on his compatriots. This witness, I would learn later, was Andy. ‘He’s really something. He’s a real marero,’ Martinez exclaimed over fried chicken, his bodyguards sitting stolidly beside us, his eyes wide with excitement. ‘And a good witness. A fine witness.’

The only reason Andy seemed to matter to Martinez and nearly everyone else with whom he worked was his utility. For the government prosecutors reveling in his authenticity, he made possible a deeper understanding of the Mara Salvatrucha than they had ever had before. Guatemalan investigators are often woefully ignorant regarding the criminal structures they face, making a ‘real marero’ witness like Andy a rare treasure indeed. A paranoiac state and terrified society have long targeted poor young men who happen to have tattoos, wear baggy pants, and use certain slang as potential mareros. ¹⁰ And the illicit businesses in which gangs are involved – extortion, drug dealing, hired assassinations – incorporate people and networks far beyond the gangs themselves. ¹¹ The maras are not a discrete ‘thing’ separable from structures of violence linking organized crime, poor urban communities, and corrupt state officials, among others. Distinguishing living, breathing mareros from their brutal public image reproduced in the media and everyday conversation is also difficult. ¹² Gangsters and gangster wannabes alike work hard to mirror the monstrous figure the marero cuts in collective consciousness. Meanwhile, more often than not, both the victims and alleged perpetrators of ‘gang violence’ are not even gang members (see Levenson, 2012). Andy, however, was. He also had a remarkable memory for detail, and seemed able to provide an accurate insider’s perspective on how the Mara Salvatrucha operates.

The gleam of excitement in Martinez’s eye when he touted Andy to me – ‘a real marero!’ – spoke volumes. By giving the government the case of the four heads, Andy offered prosecutors a chance to show they were not the corrupt, incompetent bureaucrats that most Guatemalans believe them to be. However, the very fact that I was able to gain access to Andy at all exposes just how illusory the state’s ‘protective custody’ was in practice. I suspect that Martínez invited me to meet his star witness in the hopes that I might someday help him in some way – though in truth I saw him only once after Andy’s murder, and he had no interest in discussing the matter. He and other investigators who worked closely with Andy had evinced deep frustration at what they saw as their institution’s unwillingness to provide Andy with meaningful protection in return for the information he could provide, because even as Andy helped prosecutors take apart the Mara Salvatrucha’s most powerful clique, the government failed to give him cover. Andy’s murder only months after helping investigators break open one of the most sensational mara cases in history epitomizes the state of justice in Guatemala today. As part of the witness protection program, officials locked Andy and three other gang associates who followed him into exile in a room for three days with little food. The stipend money they promised never materialized. When the boys complained, no one listened, and when they complained more loudly, officials kicked them out of the program. After Andy’s death, Federico, a young, earnest investigator who had taken Andy under his wing, waved a sheaf of papers in my face. ‘These are applications to get him back in the safe-house,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘All rejected. He hadn’t even begun to give us 1% of what he knew …’.

When I met Andy, he had already been kicked out of the witness protection program and was seeking his own security by joining a Barrio 18 clique. From our very first encounter, I did not need to cajole Andy into telling me about his life – he readily agreed to my using a voice-recorder in each of our interviews – but that does not absolve me from having used him as well. I am using him now. When, in a follow-up interview, Martínez offered to set up a meeting for me with Andy, I jumped at the opportunity. ‘A real marero!’ While my reasons for wanting to meet Andy were distinct from the government’s, I shared a similar dilemma. Reliable informants were hard to come by and harder to keep. Throughout my fieldwork, my network of people involved in criminal groups was in constant flux. Friends and contacts were transferred into maximum-security prisons, killed, or they simply disappeared. I was careful to keep my correspondence with Andy – and his situation – secret from my networks in prison. The one ex-marero friend I confided in about Andy was adamant that the state’s promise of protection was absolutely meaningless and that Andy’s cooperation with the government would get him killed. Still, though I pursued Andy, at the time I did not realize just how short-lived our relationship would be. It took a couple of weeks of repeated phone calls to Federico to finally set up an interview.

Federico introduced me to Andy as an American (gavacho) scholar who wanted to learn about gang life. I emphasized that I was not a cop, nor did I have any connections to law enforcement, but was merely a researcher and writer with no stake in the struggle between the Guatemalan government and the gangs. And careful not to promise more than I could fulfill, I never pledged more than to write his story. In retrospect, however, even this paltry promise may have shaped how he chose to represent himself. Did he improvise and edit his tale to match what he imagined would keep me coming back for more? He already knew that his usefulness to the government was all that kept him out of prison. He was used to being used. Before I used him for my research, before the government used him to take apart the Mara Salvatrucha, gang leaders used him to commit many, many murders. Children who kill do not risk the same legal consequences as adults. For years, his usefulness kept him alive when everyone about him was dying. And a week before his death, Andy fantasized that he was using the government to wipe out his enemies:

More than anything … look I’ll explain. What I want is that they catch all those assholes so that I remain as the commander. To govern, you understand! Once I’m in charge it’s gonna be another deal, loco (dude). No more extortions. … Well, there will be extortions, but you won’t see any deaths. We’ll go to the homes and tell them, ‘Look, we’re going to take care of you, but we don’t want the violence.’ To reach an accord without the violence.

Finding and losing Andy

While he was alive, I did not fully comprehend just how precarious a position Andy was struggling to maintain, nor all the roles he was playing at once. He was a protected witness against the Mara Salvatrucha while undergoing initiation with their rival, the Little Psychos of Barrio 18, in another part of the city. While ducking a murder charge for quartered corpses dumped in front of his house, he claimed revenge against the Mara Salvatrucha for killing his family, who were Barrio 18 members. ¹³ He would brag about killing enemies and innocents and in the next breath curse his old clique for hurting children. The complexities and contradictions of his life only came in to focus as I pieced together what I could from our recorded interviews and the transcripts from his court testimonies.

Take, for example, the constellation of aliases he used in his short life. Andy, aka El Fish, aka el Niño, aka El Reaper, aka Jose Luis Velasquez-Cuellar. Each of his names addressed an aspect of his self and his history. ‘Before she died’, he said, ‘my mother called me Andy’, and that’s how he introduced himself to me. As a toddler, his neighbors and family called him El Fish because of a funny hairstyle he wore for a time. ‘They called me El Niño’, he said, ‘because I was the youngest “homito”.’ Homitos are little gang-bangers, who emulated the Barrio 18 members who controlled his neighborhood before MS killed them all. When he was a gang wannabe trying to pass his chequeo (an initiation period in which the gang measures a wannabe’s worth) with the Mara Salvatrucha, ‘they called me el Reaper’, as in the Grim Reaper, ‘because I collected the most lives’, he said. He claimed they also called him El Enigma, because they could not fathom his true desires. To the legal system and the press he was Jose Luis Velazquez-Cuellar (Herrera, 2017).

I have two pictures I’ve kept of Andy. The first I took in our initial meeting in the public ministry building. Federico had introduced us perhaps an hour earlier. In the photograph Andy looks into the camera without expression, no smile, nothing, as if he were looking through me. I had asked to see his tattoos, and he lifted his shirt up to his skinny shoulders, exposing his chest. There were two: a gaunt female face wreathed in flames and a roughly etched marijuana leaf. The latter I have seen many times. It is a popular ‘subversive’ symbol among disaffected Central American youth.

‘My first tattoo,’ he said with pride. ‘I got it when I was eight.’‘And the other?’‘My mother. They shot her eight times.’

A month before his murder, Andy said he knew he must die. ‘Anyway, I don’t give a shit. I’m already dead. I lose nothing. When my time comes, they better come at me from behind, because if not …’ And this was precisely what they did. ‘These are my streets,’ he had said to me as we walked out of the McDonald’s into the 5 o’clock sun low over the concrete boulevard where his body would be found. He wasn’t looking, but he must have known they were coming. An hour earlier they’d taken out his friend El Gorgojo, a 15-year-old kid who was often slouched in the corner of the prosecutor’s office to support Andy while he made his declarations. Gorgojo had followed Andy into exile when he left the Mara Salvatrucha, and so he would share his fate. After they shot Gorgojo, Andy called Federico. ‘They killed my carnal (buddy). ¹⁴ They killed Gorgojo.’ He was sobbing. Federico told him to go home, but Andy kept repeating, ‘They killed him, those sons of bitches. He never did anything to anybody.’ ¹⁵

The phone went silent mid-sentence and Federico heard no more from him. It seems as though Andy’s concern for his friend was his undoing. Gorgojo’s killers had seen him in the crowd milling about the body. Perhaps killing Gorgojo was a ploy to draw Andy out of hiding. An hour later, Andy was also dead. That’s when Federico called me at home. ‘I have bad news for you,’ he said. As he spoke, I imagined him sitting in his office, linoleum floors cluttered with case-files, requests for Andy’s re-entry into the protected witness program stamped ‘denied’ and piled in a cardboard box.

Becoming a real marero

This is how Andy said he came to join the Mara Salvatrucha: He grew up in Ciudad del Sol, Villa Nueva, an urban sprawl bordering Guatemala City’s southern edge. His parents were both Barrio 18 gang members. He never knew his father, but his uncle was of the same ‘Clanton 14’, one of Los Angeles’ original sureño gangs that still has mythological status among Barrio 18 folk in both US and Central American cities. ¹⁶ He started with Barrio 18 when he was just six years. When he was eight the MS clique Coronados Locos Salvatrucha – led by El Soldado, a man who would become nationally famous before he died at age 23 – captured Ciudad del Sol in a hostile takeover. Andy’s mother was shot eight times and died a few days later, and they killed his uncle with a gunshot to the head. So, at eight years old, Andy said he decided to go on a mission to infiltrate the MS clique that took out his people. He joined with a plan to bide his time and kill the people that killed his family. At least this is what he told me after he’d become a government witness. I was never sure whether he was trying to justify – to me or to himself – betraying his gang. I suspect the truth was rooted somewhere else, somewhere deeper and too painful to admit. I believe that after making Andy an orphan, El Soldado took him under his wing. The Coronados killed off his family, and then replaced it.

I asked him what the Mara Salvatrucha meant to him while he was still part of it.

‘It was a family, that didn’t leave me to die,’ he said. ‘When I needed it most they gave me a hand and gave me food to eat, you understand. So I couldn’t bite the hand that fed me.’

When we spoke, Andy blamed El Soldado for making him into a killer, and for forcing him to take part in acts of torture for which gangs have become infamous. This kind of violence is performed in a group, a communal act in which aspiring or newly initiated members must take part to prove their mettle. Andy said he participated in a descuartizamiento (dismemberment) for the first time when he was 10:

‘I had to kill a homey from my old barrio (gang). ¹⁹ We had to dismember him, just me and the ramflero (gang leader).’ ²⁰

In our last meeting, Andy sat across from me in a McDonald’s, a chicken burger and fries untouched before him. The court hearings for the crime of the four heads were drawing to a close, and Andy spent less time in Federico’s office. He had given me his cell phone number, and for the past few weeks we had arranged our own meetings in locations of his choosing. Like many other gang-involved youth I interviewed, he often chose to meet in a McDonald’s or other fast food chain restaurant. As we spoke, middle-class parents eyed us nervously while their children shrieked in the ball-pit some 30 feet away. ‘Human beings have five senses,’ he said. ‘The marero will have a sixth. The sixth will be that he has no heart, that he doesn’t give a damn about anything. You will dismember for your gang, you will kill for your gang, you will die for your gang. This is how you describe a marero.’ ²⁴

It was as though he was reciting from a script. This was a phrase that he had heard and repeated over and over, and the cadence was measured and precise, with emphasis on the action verbs: descuartizar, matar, morir (dismember, kill, die). Through the brutalities the Mara Salvatrucha made him perform, Andy made himself in the image of the unfeeling killer that mareros are so widely imagined to be. Once caught up in this image of himself, all possibility of a different life and a different way of being seemed to disappear. But at least some of his brutal braggadocio was pretense. Several times, Andy seemed to let slip a suffering hidden behind the façade of the unfeeling killer, admissions quickly swallowed back again.

‘I’m already grown and I’m always shedding tears, loco,’ Andy said the last time I spoke with him. ‘Because one knows that loneliness attacks, and one has a heart. Maybe not for caring for other people, but for caring about oneself … To not have a person who will listen to you, to be able to talk and have a peaceful life … But whatever, it’s the life that I chose and so it has to be cared for.’

Killing innocence and being somebody

Before Andy entered adolescence, he was accustomed to killing. Once accustomed to killing, he claimed, the distinctions between the ‘innocent’, the relatively sacrosanct, those-who-deserve-to-live and those who do not, all but disappeared. In his short life, Andy learned that the categories of innocence and guilt and right and wrong cannot be and never are stable. In conversation with me, Andy made no distinction between innocent victims and enemy combatants. When I asked him if it was difficult to kill people who posed no threat to him, he replied:

‘No way. It was a luxury for me. It was a luxury to go killing people, go collecting. In the clique we had this thing of seeing who would kill more people. So every day we would go. One day I would kill two and another guy comes and he’s killed three.’

The most cogent summary of what death and violence does to and for boys like Andy came from another MS member named Mo. ‘This world is not like your world,’ he said in a quiet voice, sitting in the prison yard, staring at his hands. He had been incarcerated for over a decade, and with 40 years left of his sentence, will likely die in prison.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

The real, the truth, and the dead

How do we provide accounts of ourselves to others? What do we expose, and what do we keep hidden? And how do the stories we tell about ourselves entangle what we have done with how we imagine ourselves to be? These questions hinge on the complex relationship between agency, event, and acts of narration that materialize the event in the moment of its (re)telling. Together, these three elements form what Feldman (1991) (following Jean François Lyotard’s formulation) has characterized as a ‘narrative bloc’. The key theoretical assumption here is that no event is accessible outside of its narration; nothing that happens has any meaning separate from how it is ‘remembered, recounted, and mediated’ (Hoffman, 2005: 337). This means that the event’s existence does not remain locked in linear time, but that its temporal contours are set ‘a-chronically’ through its repeated narration. What’s more, this intimate entanglement between the doing and the telling also constitutes an essential process in the making of the subject himself. The narrator is as much a product of the story as he is its purveyor, and in the moment of telling he reinvents his own place in the world.

For Andy, the ability to reinvent himself by performing carefully crafted narrations of self was always a matter of life and death. He struggled for years to pass his chequeo and become a bona fide homey of the Mara Salvatrucha, to show his gang that he was really one of them. Playing the role of the real marero had become his life’s work and key to his survival. But how much of his narration was self-conscious performance reciting the experiences a ‘real’ marero ought to have? That is, if Andy understood me as a conduit through which his story might live beyond his particular place and time, then what was invented to fulfil the image of the spectacular real? One oft-repeated ‘truth’ is that no one escapes the Mara Salvatrucha. Andy mouthed the words he had heard hundreds of times: ‘You can run, but you can’t hide.’ Years before, el Smokey, the CLS leader before Andy became part of the gang, had run to the United States. Andy said El Pensador, the man who took control after El Soldado died, issued the order to have El Smokey tracked down and killed. El Smokey had run to Los Angeles, to escape the web that surely would have ensnared him had he stayed.

As the story goes, in 2007 El Pensador sent Andy along with a boy named El Pícaro to kill El Smokey. Andy had been in chequeo for almost four years due to his young age and suspicions that he might still have loyalties to his Barrio 18 roots. ‘If you want to end your chequeo, go find that son of a bitch and kill him. That’s your mission,’ the ramflero told Andy. This is how Andy described the journey: on their way north, he and El Pícaro, newly minted missioneros, passed from clique to clique across the Guatemalan border and into Mexico. From Tecun Uman they crossed the Suchiate River in a truck driven by Mexican MS members. Then up to Veracruz, Mexico, and so on. ‘Local homeboys guided us, gave us food and money, and drove us past police checkpoints,’ he recalled. They stayed in communication with El Pensador back in Guatemala, who dealt with the local Mexican clique. It took three months, he said, to complete the trans-Mexico journey and enter the United States. When Andy and El Pícaro caught up with their target in Las Vegas, some local MS homeboys pointed him out and gave Andy a knife. El Smokey was wearing a turtleneck to cover the Mara Salvatrucha tattoo etched in gothic letters across his neck.

‘They told me, “Look at him, that’s the dude over there.” Then one says, “Hit him here and he’ll die slowly,’’ touching his belly. ‘’Hit here and here and he’ll die instantly,’’ he touched his neck and his temple. “One time, bimbim!”

A month after Andy was killed, I finally got around to watching the film Sangre por Sangre (the English title is Blood In, Blood Out). It is a fictional account of the birth of the Mexican Mafia – a Mexican-American prison ‘super gang’ – in Southern California prisons, written by Jimmy Santiago Baca, an accomplished ex-con writer and poet who found his muse in the early years of incarceration. ³⁰ The film – produced and distributed by the Walt Disney corporation – can be found in markets all over Mexico and Central America. Alongside American Me, it ranks as one of the most popular and ‘accurate’ film accounts of the Mexican Mafia that to this day holds sway over Latino street gangs like 18th Street and the Mara Salvatrucha in Southern California and parts of the US southwest. A third of the way into the film, the main character, Miklos, a half-Caucasian, half-Latino youth desperate to join the prison gang ‘La Onda’, must demonstrate his worth by killing a white prisoner who has double-crossed the gang. ‘Show him the book,’ the gang leader tells a tall moustachioed prisoner named Magic. The book looks like a small, black Bible, but hidden in its pages is a human figure marked with black dashes. The dashes are kill points. ‘Hit a man here and here,’ says Magic, pointing to the stomach 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’ (Hackford, Blood In, Blood Out). I rewound the scene and watched it again and again. Astounded. Angry. Laughing in confusion.

Did Andy see Sangre por Sangre? Did 12-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 Mara Salvatrucha? 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 pertaining 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 theatre that itself is a simulacrum of real events. Art imitates life, life imitates art, in a chaotic circuit that never seems to end. ³¹ 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 to 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, such 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 of his life. Storytelling always entails an act of self-creation (Feldman, 1991; Hoffman, 2005). 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 agent in the narrative bloc 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 unravelling. 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 boy about his age blasted five bullets through his skull forms both the beginning and the end of Andy’s story.

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. However, Andy’s initial question – ‘What can you give me?’ – reminds us that every ethnographic encounter is always-already a process of exchange, in which ethnographer and subject together produce knowledge about the world and what it means. And this exchange occurs 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 the truths and fantasies of his violent past and impossible future, he fulfilled law enforcement officials’ fantasies of protecting society from gang atrocity. And through our brief engagement, he fulfilled this ethnographer’s dream of delving into the life of a ‘real’ marero. To convey these processes, 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 exchange between truth and fantasy, memory and myth. 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.