We walk down a long corridor between massive sepulcher walls stretched out before us, plots stacked in columns eight high to protect them from the rain. There are dozens and dozens of these tenements for the dead forming a vast labyrinth through the cemetery, and few signs with which to distinguish one tenement block from another. Calavera thinks Giovanni is interred in one somewhere in the northwest corner of the cemetery. We pass an old woman dressed in black, a bouquet of carnations clasped to her breast, and a man atop a wooden ladder polishing a plaque. We pass children cavorting with a puppy down the corridor.
“A few months after my brother died, my sister brought me home from the orphanage. But when I got to the old neighborhood, she was afraid for me to leave the house. She enrolled me in school, and when I wasn’t in school I was supposed to be with her, helping her little business selling tortas. I didn’t know why until a couple weeks after I was back.”
“What happened?”
“I was walking home when a bunch of kids came out of an alleyway. The war between my brother’s gang and the narco-traffickers was supposed to have ended with his death, but my sister told me that things were still crazy. We all know it never really ends. The kids started pushing me around. I was even skinnier than I am now, but quick. ‘It’s him!’ they shouted. ‘It’s true! It’s true!’ They made a circle around me. I could tell they wanted to beat the shit out of me, but they were also afraid. I saw my chance and rushed the smallest one, and he jumped away like I was a leper or something. I ran all the way back to my house. They didn’t follow me.”
FIGURE 5. Children and puppy playing in the Guatemala City General Cemetery.
“What was it all about?”
“Well, I told my sister what happened and asked her what the fuck was going on. She wouldn’t look at me, and then she started crying. ‘Some people believe that your brother’s death was fake—that he didn’t die in the hospital, and that we all hid the truth to protect him.’
“I was shocked, you know, like I was almost crying, too. ‘But you showed me his grave,’ I said to her. And my sister looked so sad. She’s tough, and I’ve only seen her like that a couple of times—when she first told me about Giovanni, and when they killed her husband. ‘They say I only buried dirt,’ she said. ‘They say it was all a charade so that he could escape.’
“‘Well was it?’ I yelled. And then she slapped me hard. I knew why. She never would have done that to me. Never, and I felt bad.” Calavera looks up into the cloudless sky where vultures turn slow spirals far, far above. Then he closes his eyes.
“So,” I say, trying to work it out, “they thought you were your brother? Or your brother’s ghost?”
“Yeah, one or the other. Or they just wanted to kick my ass because I was my brother’s brother. Anyway, soon after that I joined with Casper’s Northside crew and that sort of thing never happened again.”
We walk past a purgatory of gray concrete boxes and come upon an old man in a worn cowboy hat and fine-tooled leather boots. He slouches on a wooden stool, dozing, surrounded by half-carved stelas, protean angels, incomplete Virgins, and a rough-hewn Jesus hauling a bulbous cross. The crude savior crouches beneath his terrible load. He has no face. A mongrel of uncertain parentage is curled at the old man’s feet. Their eyes snap open as Calavera and I draw near. Without moving, the old man tracks our progression. We nod and say good day, and he nods. The dog sniffs the air before curling once again into its tail. The man picks up a marble plaque and after studying it briefly, lays it across a palette nailed between two wooden horses and begins polishing it with a bit of rag. I have a passing vision: the blank headstones and plaques etched with the names of dead friends, informants, and murder victims I read about in the newspaper. Maria Siekavezza. Juan Carlos “Chooky” Rodriguez. Maria Tzoc Castañeda.
FIGURE 6. A mass grave in the Guatemala City General Cemetery.
We turn right onto another long, straight corridor. Bright flowers and succulents grow in plastic planter boxes garnishing the cubbyholes of the dead. Solemn, washed-out portraits return my gaze. A young man with a goatee and shaved head, stained blue with rain and time, poses grimly in a dark suit. A girl child smiles, one hand raised as if in greeting or farewell, from beneath a carved elegy. The wall rises up twenty feet, and many of the cubbyholes are covered over in rough plaster, service numbers scrawled on them in black paint. Others are empty and open, mortar and broken brick, here and there a scrap of faded crinoline. They await the newly deceased to replace those whose families have stopped paying their cemetery dues. Each day cemetery workers haul away the desiccated remains of the indigent dead in wheelbarrows and toss them down a forty-foot hole where the cemetery borders the ravine of trash. Here, at the cemetery’s outermost edge, nature too takes part in erasing the past. Each year, as the rains wear away the earth, one by one the abandoned mausoleums and broken sepulchers tumble down the muddy slope to mingle their remains with the refuse of the metropolis.
* Gang leader.
CHAPTER 1
Portrait of a “Real” Marero
Guatemala City, May 2012. A few days after Calavera and I met in the cemetery, I found myself sitting across from a young man slouched in a desk chair in the corner of a prosecutor’s cluttered office.
“What can you give me?” he asked. He had a wispy mustache and smooth, olive skin, a Miami Marlin’s baseball cap pulled over long black hair tucked behind his ears. The sliver of a roughly etched tattoo on his chest peeked out from under a short-sleeved button-down.
“Not much,” I said. Having grown accustomed to this question, I was careful not to promise more than I could fulfill. I repeated an offer I had made to others. “I can tell your story far from these streets where you have seen so many like you die.”
He gazed at me silently for several seconds and then nodded. “Right on (Órale). Ask me your questions. You ask and I answer.”1
So began my first interview with Andy, a seventeen-year-old member of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS) and protected witness for the Guatemalan government. After more than a year of living and conducting fieldwork in Guatemala City, I had gotten to know many young men caught up in gang life, like Andy, and many more struggling to leave gang life behind. But few were able—or willing—to tell about their lives with such clarity and detail, and none were in quite the predicament in which Andy found himself. Since the age of eight Andy had extorted, killed, and tortured for the MS clique Coronados Locos Salvatrucha (CLS) the most powerful clique of Guatemala’s most-feared mara. As a protected witness in the prosecution of gruesome murders he claimed to have helped commit, he crisscrossed the blurred boundaries dividing the “criminal underworld from the law-abiding world that rests upon it.”2 Straddling the uncertain divide between a weak, corrupt judicial system and the criminals it is meant to bring to justice is dangerous business. When we met, Andy seemed to be making a stand against—or at least reconsidering—the brutal realities that had shaped so much of his life. But whatever personal transformations he might have been experiencing were cut short. A little over a month after our first interview and three days after our last, the MS found and executed him.
FIGURE 7. Andy, protected witness for the Guatemalan government, May 11, 2012.
Before he died, Andy gave Guatemalan investigators detailed testimony describing his gang’s modus operandi, their strategies, and the motives behind unsolved murders both mundane and spectacular. Through our conversations I tried to record his history and map out his beliefs and reflections about the world he grew up in and his current predicament. Oral histories are inherently unstable, always “floating in time between the present and an ever-changing past,