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oPeN eNdiNG If something does not go well, you have to cover up the holes, like on the stage set.When an actor makes a mistake he goes on, like nothing happened.The public doesn’t know the script. You don’t have to go into all the mistakes. —Fu (Juan Manuel Orozco Ambrosio), ex-marero, educator, and theater performer and producer, killed April 5, 2009; El Periódico, November 30, 2008 I want to say that I knew Fu and Chuky [a second assassinated actor and ex–gang member], and they were great people and their death hurts me and because of this same violence I had to leave and live outside in a foreign country, but I will never forget my brave friends. I send my condolences to the family of Fu and Chuky from North Carolina. —Flakita de la Frutal, El Periódico, May 3, 2009 The political violence of the Guatemalan ruling elite is the result of calculated decisions about wealth and power, but mareros have no political power or wealth. Their violence is part of the unspoken story of subjectivities that have been created by the absence of positive means of power over life and by fear, terror, and the difficult material conditions that have been part of Guatemalan history. A tragic legacy of Guatemala’s late twentiethcentury history, the mareros of the twenty-first century are not rebels: sadly, they adhere to the standards set by Guatemala’s ruling elites, drug lords, military leaders, and too many other influential people. The backbone of this book has been the backstory of the current gangs. In the course of the decades since the 1980s, they have been vilified and victimized , and some of their members have responded in kind. Today clikas of the Maras with names such as Rokers, Los Locos, and Los Metalles, and young people who hang out and call themselves mareros are in the city and 5 130 Chapter 5 in most of the country’s twenty-two departments. They have become central figures in the minds of many, and a political windfall for authoritarian political parties. As I have stressed, some of these youth may not be violent , but their preoccupation with violence and with death and their crimes against ordinary people alert us to a world in deep trouble. Young people who were once imagined as leading humanity into the great mythical future of the metanarrative of modernity, where “things are getting better, better all the time,” are now shoved into corners by the past. This book has argued that capitalist modernity’s promises have not borne fruit for youth, and it has traced the discourses and identities available to youth and the deeply violent and changing Guatemala in which these have arisen. “Youth” was once a temporal fix on capitalist development’s failure to deliver in present time; it was the quintessential symbol of a bright national future on an alwaysdistant and luminous horizon. “Youth” now seems to signal a marketing niche, the biggest in the world, and a horrific social problem. Fortunately, girls and boys and young women and men are more than metaphors, symbols, objects, or images. They are subjects who transcend the frozen singular categories of identity such as delinquent and street child that obscure our vision (see figure 5.1).Young killers and thieves might also be overworked day laborers, artists on the side, and anxious parents; they are not simply wind-up toy soldiers without emotions. Many experience repulsion , yet feel immobilized inside of a persona named marero who must follow the lethal orders of others. That youth abandon gangs gives hope, and so does the harrowing reality that they do so despite incalculable difficulties. The Maras ms-13 and m-18 “green-light” (give the death warrant to) youth who leave except, it has been claimed, in cases of conversion to Pentecostalism or of special permissions for “good behavior,” which means that those who are requesting a “leave” have complied with orders and accomplished tasks that include homicide. It has been argued that youth who quit do so only in obedience to these Mara guidelines, and therefore only within the gang’s regime of law.1 But youth in fact do quit otherwise. Ex-mareros turn up in all kinds of places through the help of adults who have made no pacts with Mara leaders, or even without any adult support. Ex–gang members can be found working in jobs in the informal and...

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