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deATh ANd PoliTiCs, 1950s–2000s I feel terrible when I talk about all this. I don’t want to upset [anyone]. —Excerpt from the unpublished autobiography of Rodrigo Sic Ixpancoc, ex-soldier of the Guatemalan Army, El Periódico, November 4, 2010 “To remember is to feel a knife Tear intoyou” sitting on a chair in small apartment in Guatemala City’s Zone 3, Victor recounted that in 1985, when he was fifteen, he and his friends founded Mara Plaza Vivar Capitol with companionship and competing in an upcoming break dance competition in mind. But a few months later, he explained , Army Intelligence (g-2) stopped him and a few others who were hanging out in a semi-occupied shopping center on the main strip of the shabby downtown Sexta Avenida in Zone 1, shoved them in a van, and took them to a military base, where they received a few days of training. Then, in his words, “They took us up to the mountain in a truck with some nicas [Nicaraguans] to some village . . . and we had on rubber boots and pretended to be egyptos [members of the guerrilla group Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (Guerrilla Army of the Poor, egp)], the nicas called a meeting and people [the villagers] came and the soldiers came down all of a sudden and killed everyone . . . [it was] a massacre.” He went on to say that he was soon dumped back on to Sexta Avenida, and within days he had taken off to Mexico in fear of g-2 because, he said, “the others [the mareros with him] were killed.” In Mexico, he worked with the Mexican drug ring La Eme for many years. At age twenty-eight, a full thirteen years later, he said, he returned in 1998 to a changed Guatemala City and joined Mara Salvatrucha (ms-13), which had arrived in the 1990s. The abrupt and murderous military intervention that changed Victor’s life almost beyond recognition in 1985 is a small version of the experiences of 1 22 Chapter 1 millions from 1980 to 1996, when over 100,000 primarily unarmed people died violently in massacres that came at dawn like thunderbolts, and millions fled without destination. Marked by this history,Victor mentioned only fragments of it to me. We spoke in 2002, six years after the Peace Accords officially ended the war. Victor told me that he has no idea what the war was about. He said, “It just was.”1 The 1996 Peace Accords that formally stopped the thirty-six-year war between the Guatemalan military and revolutionary groups over Guatemala’s destiny brought tremendous relief because, at last, the war had ended. Among other important agreements, the Accords mandated constitutional amendments to redefine Guatemala as a multicultural nation, limit the army’s mission, resettle displaced peoples, allow civil society groups, and reform the judicial system. However, virtually none of its provisions were or have been implemented because, basically, the war concluded with a victory for the Guatemalan military, the state, and the economic status quo, and with the demise of a long revolutionary era.2 To begin to understand how deeply this defeat cut into and transformed Guatemala City in the last decades of the twentieth century, when the Maras evolved, it is necessary to appreciate that since the 1954 coup that overthrew a democratic government , the very existence of strong resistance to oppression and repression was as important as the oppression and repression. In the decades following the 1954 coup, many Guatemalans understood and portrayed the power of the state and of wealthy elites as temporal and historical, not absolute. Even with its ups and downs, the popular movement made exploitation and state violence in some way or another provisional because these could be assaulted by demonstrations, strikes, occupations, and citywide uprisings, as well as by a social imaginary that made challenging domination possible. The movement generated the knowledge that violence is the political tool of the state and of elites. From that perspective, Victor’s 2002 understanding of the war indicates a loss of ideological mooring; the war was not something that “just was.” In other words, 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 . The dynamism of an urban subculture of class solidarity wherein jokes get made, songs created and heard, leaflets written, small newspapers mimeographed, banners painted and seen, and political conversations held...

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