Maya after War: Conflict, Power, and Politics in Guatemala

6. Life and Death of a Rural Marero: Generations in Conflict

CHAPTeR 6 Life and Death of a Rural Marero: Generations in Conflict On October 28, 2003, during the final days leading up to the annual All Saints’ Day fiesta, Alfonso,1 a young man in his early thirties, was killed by two members of the National Civil Police (PNC), the force charged with keeping order and guarding citizen safety after the signing of the Peace Accords. The police fired eight shots into the man’s back, claiming afterward that he was a gang member, or “marero,” and a dangerous criminal. He died shortly after. Following his death, Mayor Julián Mendoza Bautista requested that the police leave Todos Santos, citing concerns for their safety during the most important days of the All Saints’ Day fiesta, when drunkenness is common and every broken beer bottle becomes a potential weapon. The military arrived the following day to keep order until new police officers were assigned. Alfonso’s murder, like the rise of maras (gangs), was the object of local contention and has had an ongoing and polarizing effect in Todos Santos. At the crux of the conflict are community anxieties regarding rising rates of local crime attributed to gangs and chronic insecurity, and intergenerational struggles over local power. Elders decry the nearly intolerable disrespect of contemporary youth, while young men stress the absence of meaningful local roles or work that take into account new experiences, like migration, that they have had. The conflict over maras and, by extension, youth culture has become central to indigenous community experiences of the after-war epoch. While intergenerational struggles are a general feature of social life likely to divide people (Holland and Lave 2001:17), age cuts across the social and economic processes of Guatemala’s after-war terrain in particular ways, separating those who experienced genocidal violence and “scorched earth” policies carried out by the army from those who were born or came Life and Death of a Rural Marero 139 of age afterward. Long-term struggles for social justice and dignity on the part of older generations are frequently overlooked or underestimated by the youths. The spaces of mutual betrayal or forced complicity that many Maya negotiated during the war remain fundamentally misunderstood, in the shadows manufactured by ongoing violence and impunity. Generation has come to take on new resonance after war, creating different types of divisions even as it exacerbates preexisting ones. Maras have become a catchall, in many ways, for these anxieties and differences. Actions once viewed with dismay in Mayan communities but acknowledged as rites of passage join an expanding notion of what it means to be a marero, ranging from those connected to groups like Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13,2 to young men drinking on the street. Equally important to consider is why there has been such a concerted effort to repress these conflicts in increasingly violent ways that sometimes culminated in murder. Security and the Criminalization of Conflict After war in Guatemala, the legal culture in indigenous communities consisted of “a hybrid mixture of local adaptation and practices and elements of universalist or national legal norms” (Sieder 1998:107). As expectations and hopes have been disappointed by reality, surprising alliances have formed in the name of suppressing community youth rebellion, conceptualized as maras, in Todos Santos. Former civil patrollers and guerillas have mobilized under the umbrella of community security to combat a perceived gang problem, utilizing the older form of comité de seguridad (security committees), commonly shortened to seguridad. In the past, civil patrols served as a form of local power and a secure connection to the state for rural village men.When seguridad first commenced their activites in Todos Santos in the early 2000s, they were subject to repeated legal censure from regional and national authorities and human rights organizations , and Todosanteros defended their need for them as an antigang measure. Security committes are now considered so successful that similar forms are being implemented throughout the country, and there are national attempts to regulate them (Prensa Libre, March 12, 2007). Mara activity, such as it is in Todos Santos, represents a choice for interceding in community processes, made by both returning migrants and the young people who are influenced by them. Through their participation in maras, some young men channeled their education, experience, money, and time into less socially accepted activities—activities that ap- 140 Maya after War pealed to desires among young people to...