Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death

4. Democracy and Lock-Up

demoCrACy ANd loCk-uP I too have known Satan, I can bring them [mareros] to Christ. —Panamá, Pentecostal street worker, interviewed by the author, Guatemala City, March 1987 The devil is my jefe. —Words said to have been mumbled by m-18 member Áxel Danilo Ramírez Espinoza (alias Smiley), “public enemy number one,” El Periódico, April 17, 2009 Who are we? We are the majority, worker, business executive, housewife, athlete, chewing gum vendor, we are those who drive in the latest model Mercedes Benz and those who take the bus or walk in the street. We are the people who do something constructive and positive for our country and our families and who every day confront the chaos and violence caused by “mareros,” those juvenile gangs.We are humble people, normal people who work to reach what is difficult but not impossible to achieve: peaCe. —National Civil Police of Guatemala, teléfono 110, “Unidos Contra Las Maras,” public relations advertisement The National Civil Police’s “United against the Maras” poster advertises an alignment of Guatemalans who run the gamut, absurdly and obscenely, from a chewing gum vendor to the owner of a new Mercedes-Benz. No matter who they are, the argument goes, all share a normality that is threatened by the noncitizen others: the “mareros.” Nothing could more invert the 1954–80 progressive social imaginary, or more confuse our understandings than the portrayal by the National Civil Police. Policemen sometimes dip into and even control the earnings from the “war taxes” mareros collect; it is likely that the gum vendor has been harassed by a policeman at some point in her or his life; the owner of that new Mercedes-Benz might well 4 106 Chapter 4 have bought it with drug money; and the business executive is not part of a “humble” majority that includes workers and housewives. However preposterous, the poster is hardly surprising. From the moment the Maras appeared on the streets of Guatemala City in 1985, mareros have been represented as threats to democracy, peace, toil, and the everyday life. Over decades of ever-increasing clamor about youth delinquency, neither political parties nor state agencies—be these mano dura or reformist—have seriously studied the gangs in a sustained manner, or developed noteworthy programs to face up to the problems that gangs pose or that youth encounter . Attention has focused on the imaginary marero, and the real ones face a world of police, media people, and others who insist on that diabolical image and push the marero to fit what sometimes starts to stick. This chapter deals with the complexities and the consequences of varied responses to the mareros. It first discusses how expert demonologists in the Pentecostal movement staked out the terrain of handling the Maras during the war. It then recounts what has happened to the whole configuration of Mara power and powerlessness, discussed in the previous chapter, after the postwar state laid claim to a role as engineer of a new Guatemala based on law, and moved gang members into the institutional setting of the penitentiary system. Finally, it addresses the reality that going to jail has become a new—by now routine—stage in the lives of mareros, and that controlling jails in the name of National Citizen Security has enhanced the power of military and ex-military men. Prisons today reproduce the Maras, and they fuel the success of conservative political movements led by men who present themselves as necessary specialists in the management of violence. Neoliberalism and Pentecostals in the 1980s Structural adjustment programs imposed in the 1980s resulted in substantial cutbacks in funds to the state’s Welfare Secretariat, which since 1961 has had jurisdiction over needy and troubled youth. By its own account it could only look after 4.69 percent of its potential clientele by 1987.1 By that year, the Tratamiento y Orientación de Menores (Treatment and Orientation for Minors, Tom), the branch of the secretariat charged with rehabilitating or protecting juveniles, housed and serviced a mere 250 children and teenagers in its five centers, and even these group homes were barely supplied .2 In addition, the leadership of Tom had no vision of its work. Social workers—who had to scurry about after working hours to solicit money for notebooks and pencils as well as supplies such as bandages, soap, toilet democracy and lock-up 107 paper, soft drinks...