In our last meeting, Andy sat across from me in a McDonald’s, a chicken burger and fries untouched before him. Middle-class parents eyed us nervously while their children shrieked in the ball pit some thirty feet away. “Human beings have five senses,” he said. “The marero will have a sixth. The sixth will be that he has no heart, that he doesn’t give a damn about anything. You will dismember for your gang, you will kill for your gang, you will die for your gang. This is how you describe a marero.”24
It was as though he was reciting from a script. The cadence was measured and precise, with emphasis on the action verbs: descuartizar, matar, morir (dismember, kill, die). He seemed to be describing a sociopathic subject freed of the empathies expected of “normal” humans: for others’ suffering, for the value of human life, for the need to be considered human at all.25 “I am more than human,” Andy seemed to be saying, “because I am less.” To identify so closely with the inhuman, the beastly, the demonic is to reject all facets of belonging in wider society—worldly, spiritual, and otherwise—since “one’s worthiness to exist, one’s claim to life, and one’s relation to what counts as the reality of the world, all pass through what is considered to be human at any particular time.”26
Such wholesale alienation cannot be invoked with mere words. It must be created through ritual and repetition. The urge to fetishize the violence of Andy’s world is strong: to hold it at arm’s length and convince oneself that it is not ours, it belongs to some other realm, some other time, some other species. I know. I have done it. The image of grown men performing similar acts—in a war zone under military orders, perhaps—seems to me more palatable, or at least less world-rending. Children who kill, children who learn to glory in death, embody an ethical and even existential set of dilemmas for human societies. They invoke a deep-seated sense of horror, an internal scream pleading “How could this happen in the world I live in?”27 And yet by reacting this way, we ignore how children like Andy learn to do what they do through an education. Andy’s life demonstrates how this behavior is taught. Accepting this fact means accepting that any one of us could be molded in exactly this way.
Through the brutal acts the MS made him perform, Andy made himself in the image of the unfeeling killer that mareros are so widely imagined to be. He became not only a child who has killed, but a child who assumes he must be a killer in order to be anything at all. Once he was caught up in this image of himself, all possibility of a different life and a different way of being seemed to disappear. But at least some of his brutal braggadocio was pretense. Several times Andy seemed to let slip the suffering hidden behind the facade of the unfeeling killer, admissions quickly swallowed back again.
“I’m already grown and I’m always shedding tears, loco,” Andy said the last time I spoke with him. “Because one knows that loneliness attacks, and one has a heart. Maybe not for caring for other people, but for caring about oneself. . . . To not have a person who will listen to you, to be able to talk and have a peaceful life. . . . But whatever, it’s the life that I chose and so it has to be cared for.”
“Chose?” I asked. “Do you think at the age of eight you can really choose?”
“Like I said, I didn’t know the deal then.” He shrugged. “I didn’t know what I would get myself into. But here are the consequences, you understand, and I’m grown. All that’s left to me is to tighten my belt and continue forward, with my chest high. This is what destiny wants.”
“Would you say you were a victim?”
“No way, I’m no victim. No way, carnal.”
“A victimizer then?”
He paused for a moment, and then laughed uncertainly. “That’s it. Other people are my victims.”
Andy’s outright rejection of victimhood sutures him tightly to the carefully nurtured and hyperaggressive machismo typical of the maras. But refusing the mantle of victim, to my mind, only reifies his victimhood. His stubborn insistence on his own agency required turning a blind eye to the lifetime of brutal exploitation that he had survived until then, not to mention the complex assemblage of violent structures and structural violence that framed his life.28
Upon reflection, however, my urge to think of Andy as a victim may very well stem from my need to empathize with his dilemma and so bridge what too often feels like an insuperable divide between my perspective and his. I cannot deny that I was, to borrow a phrase from Antonius Robben, “seduced” by Andy’s being a “real” marero, drawn in by his eloquence and bravado before so much risk and violence. Over the years of writing and contemplating Andy and his fate, I have gained a modicum of distance from this seduction, but it was woven into all our conversations and still shapes how I convey his story to you. Andy and his story can only emerge through the lens of my recollection and reflection, warped by my own sentimental image of his life and death.
KILLING INNOCENCE AND BEING SOMEBODY
Before Andy entered adolescence, he was accustomed to killing. Once accustomed to killing, he claimed, the distinctions between the “innocent,” the relatively sacrosanct, those-who-deserve-to-live, and those who do not all but disappeared. In his short life, Andy learned that the categories of innocence and guilt and right and wrong cannot be and never are stable.
As Andy grew from a child into an adolescent, gang war in Guatemala intensified, and CLS expanded from the territory in Ciudad del Sol won from its rivals to running extortion rackets in La Paz, El Alyoto, Linda Vista, and numerous other neighborhoods. It became the dominant gang in Villa Nueva. Its success was underpinned, at least in part, by turning the violent techniques used against enemies and traitors onto extortion victims residing and doing business in its territories.
In conversation with me, Andy made no distinction between innocent victims and enemy combatants. When I asked him if it was difficult to kill people who posed no threat to him, he replied, “No way. It was a luxury for me. It was a luxury to go killing people, go collecting. In the clique we had this thing of seeing who would kill more people. So every day we would go. One day I would kill two and another guy comes and he’s killed three.”
“So it was a competition between you?”
“Exactly. It was ‘who’s the best?’ The best sniper, you understand. That was the game.”
“What type of arms did you use?”
“Guns. M16, AR-15, 9.40, 380, 357,” he said, ticking them off on the fingers of one hand. “Whatever there was, even machetes, to use to take a person’s life when the time came.”
He claimed this was his expertise. Not for nothing, he said, did they call him El Reaper. He was for a long while one of the youngest in his clique, and as the youngest he was often given the dirtiest jobs. El Soldado and those working beneath him knew that the police could do little against a child. Another member of the MS serving multiple life sentences recalled getting hauled in a half dozen times as a minor for homicide. Once a policeman jerked him by the handcuffs off the pavement, muttering, “Just wait ’til you’re eighteen, you son of a bitch,” while the boy grinned in his face. Andy said the police picked him up a few times, but no witnesses ever came forward to testify against him, and he never spent more than a few days in police custody before the charges were dropped for lack of evidence.
Andy hurt and killed his share of victims, but no matter what he said, he certainly was a victim himself. But for Andy, and countless others caught up in such violence, an act of killing can be about far more than simply ending another’s life. The most cogent summary of what death and violence does to and for boys like Andy came from another MS member named Mo. “This world is not like your world,” he said in a quiet voice, sitting in the prison yard, staring at his hands. He had been incarcerated for over a decade, and with forty years left of his sentence, would likely die in prison.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Here