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1990s ANd BeyoNd: The GANGs To die for If you talk, you are dead. —Author interview with Short, a member of ms-13, Guatemala City, 2005 [The worst effect of war is] the undermining of our social relations because our social relations are the scaffolding we rely on to construct ourselves historically, both as individuals and as a human community. Whether or not it manifests itself in individual disorders, the deterioration of social interaction is itself a serious social disturbance. . . . A society that becomes accustomed to using violence to solve its problems big and small is a society in which the roots of human relations are diseased. —Ignacio Martín-Baró, sj, Writings for a Liberation Psychology, 115 The mareros’ thinking is military thinking that is always reproducing war, they live in war with the logic of war, thinking of the enemy’s attack. [They live within] a militarized culture of obedience, discipline and the fulfillment of orders and missions. —Interview with Rodolfo Kepfer, psychiatrist, El Centro Correccional de Menores Etapa 2, San José Pinula, Guatemala Afounding member of Mara Plaza Vivar Capitol back in 1985, Victor returned to Guatemala in 1998. He was twenty-eight years old, and the war had only recently ended. He sought out his old gang because, he explained, the only family he wanted now in the city was his Mara. It was “all over” with his mother: “She does not like me.” After thirteen years of living in Mexico and working with gangs there, he found that the mareros in Guatemala City had become “more sophisticated,” “Mara five is with 18 [Mara-18, or m-18], and mibarrio Plaza Vivar Capitol is with ms [Mara Salvatrucha, or 3 78 Chapter 3 ms-13].” Identifying himself as a veterano, a name he said referred to someone who had killed, he joined ms-13 to assume a “leadership role” and dedicate himself to gang rivalry. Speaking in military terms, he told me that “everyone sees themselves as soldiers serving mibarrio [my gang/my place] in a war without any Geneva Code.” His response to my query about his reference to the Geneva Code was “war without rules.” When I asked him to explain what that gang war was about, he gave the same explanation as he did for the civil war: “Who knows, it’s the way it is.”1 Guatemala City had changed dramatically since Victor’s teen years. Consumption of hard drugs, especially crack, had become pandemic. Video shops now dotted neighborhood blocks. Small weapons were everywhere, and private security was one of the few growing urban enterprises. Military and ex-military men had created an expanding industry of over two hundred companies that employed thirty-five thousand people by 2002, more than twice the nation’s fifteen thousand policemen. Private security companies hired out men and women to protect individuals, hotels, restaurants, malls, small stores, private homes, and gated communities, the last of which were increasing in number in response to the rising common violence against people and property.2 It was difficult to not spot guns bulging out of shirts, pants, and jackets on any routine walk through the center of the city. It was no longer possible, as it had been in 1987, to walk down Sexta Avenida in Zona 1, change dollars on the black market in the empty lot behind Plaza Vivar Capitol, and strike up a friendly conversation with young people who called themselves breks and mareros and who sported brandname clothes. By 2000, youth in and around Maras had become secretive. At the same time, photographs of them as muscular tattooed young men stripped to the waist or behind prison fences had become ubiquitous in the media.Tall tales proliferated. By the early 2000s, mythological numbers had appeared: the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) claimed that 200,000 mareros, an army, “operated” in Guatemala. The National Civil Police, reorganized from the ill-reputed National Police, gave wildly divergent numbers without explanation: a 2002 figure of 50,000 was reduced to 10,833 in 2003.3 Another source, the Association for the Prevention of Crime, stated in 2006 that 165,000 youth belonged to Maras nationally.4 These fluctuating numbers, tattoos that were said to be Satanic symbols, and the constant evocation of the Maras’ “international links,” one that for some had echoes of the old “international communist plots,” spread panic. Without proof or hesitation, the influential U.S. Army War College scholar Max G. Manwaring cited the...

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