Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death by Deborah Levenson (review)

Some years ago I spent a long time trying to understand what I saw as the links between conflicts about contemporary international adoption practices in Guatemala and the history of how Guatemalan children, specifically, experienced the genocidal civil war, particularly in the 1980s. Guatemala experienced tens of thousands of deaths and disappearances during the worst period of this conflict, over ninety percent at the hands of the military. Not only were children “not spared” in this conflict, they were targeted. Evidence exists, and is growing, of death squads that specialized in torturing and killing children. All of this created what I awkwardly called “a culture of missingness” about children, which, some scant ten or fifteen years later, reverberated through the heated and violent debates about the ethics and practices of international adoption.

I wish Deborah Levenson’s new book Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death had been around a few years ago, because it would have been a tremendous help in my thinking about the contested past and present of Guatemalan children. This book is a must read, not only for those who are interested in Guatemala. It is at once a social history, ethnography of maras—gangs—and mediation on the status of youth as a social category today. It is also a reflection on the centrality of youth, crime and violence in state building projects in Guatemala, which is applicable to other nations as well. Finally, it is one of the saddest books I have read, in a world of sad books, but told with an oral historian’s ear for gripping, powerful stories.

Levenson’s main project is to explain the evolution of Guatemala’s youth gangs from the 1980s to today. In the 1980s, “gangs to live for,” were class-conscious youth who stole, Robin Hood–like, up the economic hierarchy, and displayed some measure of affinity with the poor and with movements for social change. The gangs of today, “gangs to die for,” emerged after the failures embodied in the 1996 Peace Accord that changed little. These are the drug-running (and taking), super violent, tattooed, “necroliving” youth who have suddenly replaced “subversives” or “communists” as the emblem of threats to Guatemalan safety and national security. Levenson contextualizes this transition firmly in Guatemalan history, especially the legacies of wartime violence and the painful failures of social change. As she puts it, “what ended with the Peace Accords was more than the civil war. A way of knowing the world and acting within it had been shattered. . . . Grinding into dust the project of progressive social change cut down collective understandings of life as humanly malleable for humanistic aims. . . . What could have been memories of deaths that served to secure revolutionary victory now elicit despair and anger because so many died in vain” (22–23). This becomes for some, “necroliving,” when survival past one’s twenties is unexpected.

I don’t know that I have seen a better explanation of what happens when revolutions fail, or a better explanation for why Guatemala’s contemporary youth gangs ought to be seen, as Levenson puts it, as “orphans of the world” (98). The complex Cold War history of Guatemala in the 1950s, targeted, pre-Cuban revolution, for particular anticommunist force on the part of the US government, created and unleashed a monster of violent repression for decades.

Thus the orphans of that conflict haunt contemporary Guatemalan social life. Images of their muscled, tattooed bodies evoke widespread fears, which help to maintain a parade of right-wing politicians in power—who then continue the social and political conditions that sustain gang culture. Tucked away in Levenson’s book is the larger question of “who benefits?” The mara, she argues, is not autonomous. They are the shock troops of a shadowy system of power in...