ADIS NIO

THE GANGS OF GUATEMALA CITY AND THE POLITICS OF DEATH

By Deborah T. Levenson

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5299-0

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………ixINTRODUCTION The Rise and Fall of Tomorrow…………………………..11. Death and Politics, 1950s–2000s…………………………………..212. 1980s: The Gangs to Live For……………………………………..533. 1990s and Beyond: The Gangs to Die For…………………………….774. Democracy and Lock-Up……………………………………………1055. Open Ending…………………………………………………….129NOTES…………………………………………………………….145BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………161INDEX…………………………………………………………….177

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

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—Excerpt from the unpublished autobiography of Rodrigo Sic Ixpancoc, ex-soldierof the Guatemalan Army, El Periódico, November 4, 2010

“To Remember Is to Feel a Knife Tear into You”

Sitting on a chair in small apartment in Guatemala City’s Zone 3, Victorrecounted that in 1985, when he was fifteen, he and his friends foundedMara Plaza Vivar Capitol with companionship and competing in an upcomingbreak dance competition in mind. But a few months later, he explained,Army Intelligence (G-2) stopped him and a few others who werehanging out in a semi-occupied shopping center on the main strip of theshabby downtown Sexta Avenida in Zone 1, shoved them in a van, and tookthem 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 pretendedto be egyptos [members of the guerrilla group Ejército Guerrillerode los Pobres (Guerrilla Army of the Poor, EGP)], the nicas called a meetingand people [the villagers] came and the soldiers came down all of a suddenand killed everyone … [it was] a massacre.” He went on to say that he wassoon dumped back on to Sexta Avenida, and within days he had taken offto 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 formany years. At age twenty-eight, a full thirteen years later, he said, he returnedin 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 lifealmost beyond recognition in 1985 is a small version of the experiences ofmillions from 1980 to 1996, when over 100,000 primarily unarmed peopledied violently in massacres that came at dawn like thunderbolts, and millionsfled without destination. Marked by this history, Victor mentioned onlyfragments of it to me. We spoke in 2002, six years after the Peace Accordsofficially ended the war. Victor told me that he has no idea what the war wasabout. He said, “It just was.”

The 1996 Peace Accords that formally stopped the thirty-six-year war betweenthe Guatemalan military and revolutionary groups over Guatemala’sdestiny brought tremendous relief because, at last, the war had ended.Among other important agreements, the Accords mandated constitutionalamendments to redefine Guatemala as a multicultural nation, limit thearmy’s mission, resettle displaced peoples, allow civil society groups, andreform the judicial system. However, virtually none of its provisions wereor have been implemented because, basically, the war concluded with a victoryfor the Guatemalan military, the state, and the economic status quo,and with the demise of a long revolutionary era. To begin to understandhow deeply this defeat cut into and transformed Guatemala City in the lastdecades of the twentieth century, when the Maras evolved, it is necessaryto appreciate that since the 1954 coup that overthrew a democratic government,the very existence of strong resistance to oppression and repressionwas as important as the oppression and repression. In the decades followingthe 1954 coup, many Guatemalans understood and portrayed the powerof the state and of wealthy elites as temporal and historical, not absolute.Even with its ups and downs, the popular movement made exploitation andstate violence in some way or another provisional because these could be assaultedby demonstrations, strikes, occupations, and citywide uprisings, aswell as by a social imaginary that made challenging domination possible.The movement generated the knowledge that violence is the political tool ofthe state and of elites. From that perspective, Victor’s 2002 understandingof the war indicates a loss of ideological mooring; the war was not somethingthat “just was.”

In other words, what ended with the Peace Accords was more than thecivil war. A way of knowing the world and acting within it had been shattered.The dynamism of an urban subculture of class solidarity whereinjokes get made, songs created and heard, leaflets written, small newspapersmimeographed, banners painted and seen, and political conversations held,was no longer there. To put this into the subjective and emotional frameworkin which life is lived: the ability to give voice, the “euphoria of ethicalactivism,” the existence of a sense of historical purpose on a grand scale,and the vivacity and hope that animated the popular movement had preventedpeople from succumbing to fear for generations; then, abruptly, allthat life was lost and death emerged exultant. After decades of struggleagainst what was widely perceived as an immoral political economy, thechance for an immediate alternative was vanquished. Grinding into dust theproject of progressive social change cut down collective understandings oflife as humanly malleable for humanistic aims. By the twenty-first centurythese visions seem to have become charred remains of plans for a futurethat required a revolutionary human praxis. What could have been memoriesof deaths that served to secure revolutionary victory now elicit despair andanger because so many died in vain. In 2010 an artist from the generationof the 1970s said with infinite sadness: “To remember is to feel a knife tearinto you.”

Political violence in the second half of twentieth-century Guatemalawas spectacular. It exceeded that of other countries in the Americas: Guatemalahad the highest per capita number of “disappeared,” it was one of twocountries where acts of genocide took place, and it was there that the worstmilitary massacres on the continent happened. Guatemala was also distinguishedin this period by the force of its popular and revolutionary movements.The depth of the state violence that did not stop them is one measureof their profundity, and so are the even greater horrors that it took to finallydestroy them.

Violence takes many forms, has varied consequences, and conjures updifferent images. The extreme forms of political violence that overtookGuatemalan history and came to have a cultural weight and political rolein it, held together and overlapped with structural, symbolic, and everydayforms of violence. Yet these are not all equivalent. Given that violence isvaried and embedded in daily life, we need to distinguish a limited sense ofthis term and concept to capture the violence that “consciously or purposelybreaks into the inner existential shell of a person i.e. into that room in whichthere is no other hiding place. A room from which there is no escape, thebody of the human being.” To make explicit the varied worlds of power,hope, pain, and conflict in which the youth who joined gangs grew up, thischapter continues by contrasting two periods, 1954–80 and 1980–2000s, decadesduring which the kind of violence that converted life into a “space ofdeath” emerged as a historical protagonist, as if on its own.

Normal Guatemalan State Violence: 1954–1980

Guatemala was politically globalized on a grand scale in June 1954, when, infull anticommunist armor, the United States allied with Guatemalan elitesto violently end the country’s singular attempt at a democratic reformist government,one based on electoral politics, civil liberties, and national capitalism.In the years that followed the famous 1954 coup, a symbol of Cold Warpolitics everywhere, the United States and the Guatemalan military and politicaland economic elite developed a system of rule consisting of electoralpolitics supported by a liberal constitution that guaranteed civil liberties andof constant state terrorism. These forms of sovereignty went hand in hand.The United States showcased Guatemala as a model of its foreign policy ofpromoting democracy, poured in investments that furthered manufacturingand large-scale capitalist agriculture, and collaborated with the Guatemalanstate to build an extensive system of terror based on thousands of informantsand on death squads that brought so-called subversives into secretcenters and slowly tortured them to death in the tens of thousands. Duringthe apogee of electoral democracy, modernization, and economic growthunder the reformist government of Julio César Méndez Montenegro (1966–70),death squads disappeared an average of forty-three persons every fivedays. This durable arrangement lasting decades distinguishes the Guatemalanexperience from those of countries such as Argentina, Brazil, andChile, where the suspension of constitutional rule signaled comparativelyshorter periods of outright military rule and terror.

This mix of terror and constitutional rule started in the wake of the 1954coup. In the months following it, many 1944–54 government officials andsupporters were charged and often shot or imprisoned for “subversion”under anticommunist legislation. But soon thereafter and especially afterarmed opposition emerged in 1960, activists and their friends and familiesrarely went to jail. For the most part, punishment meant death, and ithappened without accusations, trials, bullets, electric chairs, firing squads,or gallows and trap doors. Death arrived slowly via ropes, bites, sticks,matches, knives, machetes, fingernails, rocks, and blowtorches, by meansthat were, to quote Michel Foucault on the ancien régime, “inexplicable phenomenathat the extension of man’s imagination creates out of the barbarousand the cruel.”

Foucault’s discussion of the creation and reproduction of the body politicthrough mechanisms of discipline and punishment offers insight into modernGuatemala, although with a twist. The types of violence and physical tortureof bodies that Foucault argued were foundational to an archetypal ancienrégime underwrote capitalist modernization and constitutional rule inGuatemala. In the case of Guatemala, in Foucault’s formulation of the biopoliticsthat manufacture the life of members of modern nations as “a powerbent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, ratherthan one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit or destroyingthem,” the words “in addition to” need to replace “rather than.” Foucaultrecognized the rule over life through death. He conceptualized sovereigntyas the ultimate power over life and death, but he wrote that a shift occurredin the modern age: “One might say that the ancient right to take life or letlive was replaced by a power to foster life…. Now [in the modern period] itis over life, through its unfolding, that power establishes its domain; deathis power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secretaspect of existence, the most ‘private.'” In post-1954 Guatemala, deathwas not “power’s limit.” The death-squad tortures produced death that wasnot “simply the withdrawal of the right to live.” These tortures rested on the”whole quantitative art of pain,” calculated to “carry pain almost to infinity.”The death squads’ vocation was that “art of maintaining life in pain” in waysnot unlike those that Foucault describes in great detail as “the spectacularof torture.”

One difference is that these slow tortures were not part of the sort ofpublic spectacular to which Foucault refers. Instead, a phenomenon perhapsmore insidious and even more terrifying replaced this or added a newdimension to it. Within the death-squad system, grotesque torture to createthe most painful death occurred in secret, but the catch is that almost everyonein the city knew about it. It was on view within the imagination becausethe bodies turned up, and their gashes and mutilations told stories. Foucaultwrote that in ceremonies of public execution, “the main character wasthe people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.”He thought that if execution took place in secret, it “would scarcelyhave any meaning.”

But what if “real and immediate presence” is in the imagination, a sortof modern individual private theater that everyone had? The scarred bodiesprovided the public performances in which the mind’s eye had to do a horribledouble work of staging the scene and being its impotent spectator atthe same time. Where does the mind go when the newspapers report in detailabout a man who turns up dead in a ravine, burned with a blowtorchon the stomach and elsewhere, his tongue cut out and his face beaten in soseverely that his lips were swollen and his teeth broken, or about a womanand her baby found tortured and murdered? Her breasts had bite marks andher underclothing was bloody. Her two-year-old son had had his fingernailspulled out. What the bodies told of their deaths became the public spectacle.That bodies appeared with their proverbial “signs of torture” “reactivated”state power because the agony of an excruciating death was on fulldisplay, a spectacle of what happens and can happen to anyone, one thattakes place first somewhere unknown, and a second time in the imagination.This death-in-life state barbarism was already part of politics beforethe massacres of the 1980s, the period many call “the war.”

What the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben delineates as the “camp,”in reference to concentration camps established at various points in modernhistory and most notoriously by the Nazi Party, in which “the most absolutecondition inhumana ever to appear on Earth was realized,” belonged to Guatemalandeath-squad victims over and over for decades in concealed locationsand to the imagination of those who were not there, except that theyarrived in their mind’s eye, without presence or power, again and again.Tortures seemingly beyond the power of conceptualization, much less execution,went on, conceived and executed. This was national political rule,not a concentration camp, not a strategy to exterminate a group from thebody politic, but a strategy to control the entire body politic. Those who werenot tortured—the witnesses who had no access to the event that they hadto actualize in their heads—were not called upon to coproduce this systemof terror, as Germans were in their acquisition of and complicity with anti-Semitismin what the historian Claudia Koonz calls a “Nazi conscience.”Racism against Mayas saturated and saturates national life, but the Guatemalanstate organized fear and sadism, not Ladinos (the common term fornon-Maya), against an urban popular political movement that included bothcity Ladinos and Mayas.

In the late 1970s, Gabriel Aguilera Peralta, Jorge Romero Imery, EnriqueTorres-Lezama, and Ricardo Galindo Gallardo did quantitative research onGuatemalan state violence in the post-1954 period. Their findings were publishedin Costa Rica in 1981 under the title Dialéctica del terror en Guatemala.Many have repeated and none have improved on the book’s principal argumentfor the years 1963–79. Dialéctica del terror details how the counterrevolutionarystate renewed its power through waves of terror. When populardiscontent and mass struggle advanced, so did state brutality, which in turncaused social conflict to decrease, and with that so did state violence. Madeeven more determined by the repression, the popular organizations thentook advantage of the diminished repression to emerge with even greaterforce and so forth until, so the authors optimistically believed, the movementwould inevitably triumph. Tragically, even before the book’s publication,Romero Imery and Galindo Gallardo were kidnapped. Imery’s mangledbody turned up months afterward, and Galindo Gallardo was never seenagain. By then the state had started to turn its “normal” terrorism into amassive terrorist onslaught that upended predictions about an ultimatebackfiring of violence.
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