Gothic Sovereignty: Street Gangs and Statecraft in Honduras 9781477324172

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Gothic Sovereignty

THE WILLIAM 6( BETTYE NOWLIN SERIES

in Art, History, and Culture of the Western Hemisphere

Gothic Sovereignty Street Gangs and Statecraft in Honduras

Jon Horne Carter

University of Texas Press   Austin

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2022 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-­7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-­form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-­i n-­P ublication Data

Names: Carter, Jon Horne, author. Title: Gothic sovereignty : street gangs and statecraft in Honduras / Jon Horne Carter. Other titles: William & Bettye Nowlin series in art, history, and culture of the Western Hemisphere. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Series: The William and Bettye Nowlin series in art, history, and culture of the western hemisphere | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021028293 ISBN 978-1-4773-2415-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2416-5 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-4773-2417-2 (PDF) ISBN 978-1-4773-2418-9 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Gangs—Honduras—History. | Cartels—Honduras—History. | Gangs—Honduras—Social life and customs. | Gangs—Political aspects— Honduras—History. | Police corruption—Social aspects—Honduras. | Tattooing—Honduras. Classification: LCC HV6439.H8 C37 2022 | DDC 364.106097283—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028293 doi:10.7560/324158

For Adrian Laurel and György Sagi

Contents

Preface ix A Note on Translations and Anonymization xi Introduction 1

Part I. Angels 1 Flash 19 2 Baroque 32 3 Allegory 41 4 Image 54 5 Danger 69

Part II. Devils 6 Underworld 87 7 Dragons 102 8 Crime 110 9 Storm 130 10 Rubbish 149 11 Evil 170 12 Corruption 194 13 Lumpen 216

viii Contents

Part III. Justice 14 Community 241 15 Sovereignty 259 16 Apocalypse 276 17 Trust 289 18 Futures 306

Afterword 326 Acknowledgments 343 Notes 347 Index 365

Preface

This book is a prehistory to the current gang crisis in northern Central America. It begins with the premise that contemporary spectacles of violence in Honduras, in which gangs extort families to the degree that they flee the country, have eclipsed gangs’ initial intervention into national life during the early 2000s. Before gangs became part of the wider organized crime apparatus that holds Honduras hostage today, they emerged in the mid-1990s as a vast underworld of young people refusing the conditions of labor built into a globalizing capitalist supply chain, and they turned instead to the illicit economy. As regional states inaugurated emergency antigang legislation, gangs harnessed and exaggerated their criminalization—tattooing their bodies and faces in occult and satanic images. In this book I ask what can be made of this extraordinary phenomenon in which the devil takes center stage in national history as an immanent critique of social, political, and economic life. What can these images reveal about sovereignty, law, and crime no less than about gangs themselves? Nearly all of this research took place during heavy-­handed security campaigns in Honduras that lent legitimacy to illegal detentions, brutal forms of incarceration, and widespread use of deadly force. Under these conditions gangs became secretive communities and survived by burrowing deeply into the illicit underworld. This altered what gangs were and what it was like to do research alongside them, research that was ethically and logistically complicated and troubled by suspicion toward information-­seeking. While initially the suspicion seemed an insurmountable obstacle, I realized in time how much of gang life was attentive to the surface of its world. Therein, explanation was displaced by indirect forms of communication in which rumor, insinuation, and gesture combined with the fragmentary image-­work of tattooing to suggest a horizon rather than an essence of gang life. The structure and style of this text draw from these aesthetic conventions and attend to the surface of a criminalized world rather than its interior. The book is written in a narrative format in which description and dialogue are punctuated by theoretical reflections. The narrative format in each chapter is organized around a moment of realization in ethnographic fieldwork that redirected my attention and my interpretation of events, encounters, conversations, and images. Constructing a book around such moments allows thinking-­with rather than thinking-­about the context of fieldwork, and foregrounds estrangement in fieldwork as the nonlinear process by which the

x Preface

limits of one’s conceptual imagination are both laid bare and exhausted. From this threshold one begins to think in what I understand as an anthropological register, with emergent concepts rather than rehearsed knowledge. It is for this reason that the chapters of this book are best read chronologically, as they layer one upon the other as accounts of the process by which intellectual dead ends are the telltale sign of rapidly approaching illuminations, which in my case shifted my understanding of sovereign power manifested both by the state and within the criminal underworld.

A Note on Translations and Anonymization

All translations are my own. Pseudonyms are used for all names in this book, including those of persons, organizations, and neighborhoods described, so as to ensure the safety of each individual whose collaboration made this project possible. Some scholarly references that were essential to my understanding of US covert action and the criminal underworld in Honduras have been omitted, though I would have preferred to substantiate definitively certain claims. Likewise, certain geographical locations and physical details of individuals have been willfully scrambled when doing so was inconsequential to the narrative or to the book’s overall claims. As a final note, this book relies heavily on quoted speech, all of which was either transcribed directly from digital voice recordings or reproduced from memory in my fieldwork notebook in moments when I could be alone or during nighttime hours as I wrote daily journal entries. When reconstructing dialogue from memory, I often proofread it with friends who were also witness to those exchanges and discussed discrepancies between our versions of wording or ordering. In a few instances where pseudonyms and other forms of masking verbal exchanges could not shield sufficiently against potentially revelatory inference that regularly endangers persons in Honduras, I have altered the dialogue slightly. This entailed either eliminating lines of conversation or replacing them with related fragments of speech that occurred at another time. Though these instances are few, transparency about such matters is vital to ensuring the ethical coherence of this research and the book itself. But it is also vital to foregrounding the creative practices by which ethnographic methods are consistently recast, mirroring the social practices and cultural forms by which individuals and communities ensure their safety from organized violence. With this in mind, I urge the reader to regard this book not as an exposé but as an ethnography, wherein my interpretations of the ideas, practices, and inspired creativity that shape sociocultural and political life in Honduras reflect such tensions and their ethical demands and investigative work is left to journalists and bodies of law enforcement.

Gothic Sovereignty

Introduction

In the late summer of 2018 a group gathered in the central plaza of San Pedro Sula, the industrial capital of northern Honduras, to walk to the United States as undocumented migrants. They were the first in what would become a crowd of thousands, flooding over border checkpoints in Mexico and described in media as a “migrant caravan”—a collective fleeing conditions in Honduras and creating a near-­utopian ethos of solidarity from within. The migrant caravan looked like a singular phenomenon, a unique expression of a desire for change, but as I will describe, the caravan was not the first group to assemble and reject the conditions of the present in Honduras by literally walking away. The complicated truth at the center of the migrant caravan was that while most cited gang violence as their reason for fleeing the country, it was gangs, a decade and a half earlier, that had created their own nomadic social worlds for reasons that were not so different. What gangs in Honduras have become since the mid-­2000s or so, is an immense disappointment to everyone who has watched their evolution from small, neighborhood clicas (small groups) to death squads that serve the interests of cartels and hegemonic crime groups. In the mid-­1990s when gangs rapidly expanded across northern Central America, it was not only the residents of working-­class neighborhoods in Honduras who were concerned. It was the political and economic elites of the country who had to ask whether this mass phenomenon with possibly tens of thousands of participants had the potential to become a political movement. What was unsettling about gangs was not the violence that surrounded them, as is the case today, but the immediacy of their demand for a different world. This tension between collective energy and political demands made gangs more than a social movement and more akin to a revolutionary one. Over the intervening years there have been many twists in the story of street gangs in Central America. Speaking primarily of Honduras, there were three

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Introduction 3

twists in their history that set the stage for this book. The first of these was that gangs did not become revolutionary movements in a traditional sense, nor did they remotely approximate them. Starting in 2002 they were targeted with state security campaigns whose violence and misinformation systematically delegitimized any claim to the present that gang members might have voiced. Analysis of the structural conditions from which gangs had emerged was buried beneath lurid tabloid news and nationalist political rhetoric that characterized its members as monstrous and pathological, rendering analysis of gang communities unnecessary. Monsters did not have history or political-­ economic causation, and pathologies were irrational expressions that required diagnosis rather than understanding. By the mid-­2000s this transformation of youth culture at a national scale was most often described as el problema de las maras (the gang problem), implying it was their existence that required redress rather than the social, political, and economic contradictions at their foundation. The second twist was that by the mid-­2000s the aesthetic features of gangs began to transform dramatically. It was not only that the tattoos became more detailed, skilled, and pluralistic but that they consisted largely of occult and satanic symbols. In a predominantly Christian nation (89 percent in 2018), the images themselves were shocking, but so too was that many were inscribed upon the face.1 Whether exquisite and intricate or heavy-­handed and crude, disrupting the symmetry of the face with symbols that were both criminalized and anti-­Christian produced a shock experience for many viewers that is difficult to overstate. The tattoos performed an intensification of gang members’ social and political marginalization, taking their criminalization by state law and national media and exaggerating it to the point of parody. Of the voluminous writings on gangs from the late 1990s on, few works have touched on this exhilarating moment when the devil commandeered national culture and politics. Here the appearance of the devil was an explicit provocation that inverted morality and law and transformed the citizen body into that of the criminal. This criminalized body was explicitly abject, refusing recognition from governing institutions long delegitimized by institutional corruption and then by emergency legislation leveraged against gang communities. But understanding gangs as historical, social, and political phenomena was easily derailed by the violence surrounding them that has rendered their humble beginnings and critical image-­work an anachronistic footnote to the spectacles of authoritarian policing and violent tactics employed by gangs across the 2010s. So whereas late liberalism entails the governance of cultural difference through a politics of recognition, the radical alterity of gang life posed a significant challenge to the rules and expectations that governed recognition

4 Introduction

itself. An abject and satanic underworld could not be measured, evaluated, and understood as a commensurate form of difference that tolerance rendered assimilable to social life of the liberal state and thus posed the question taken up by Elizabeth Povinelli in her trenchant critiques of liberalism: How does incommensurability expose the ontological limits of late liberalism and suggest something otherwise?2 Asking such a question of gangs brings their history into conversation with the politics of race and multiculturalism in Honduras that have long demonstrated the threshold of alterity underwriting racialized and bourgeois formations of mestizo nationalism and its modes of social and political exclusion.3 Finally, the third twist in gang history takes up Povinelli’s question in reverse, asking not what gangs made thinkable but what was itself unthought, for the aesthetic critique from gangs was analytically discarded across the 2010s as an adolescent phase portending their realization as the crime groups they have become today. Though there was no shortage of public criticism toward the state’s war on gangs, gangs’ intensifying veneer was regarded as a moral provocation rather than a political one, leaving unchallenged the categories of recognition they abjured. Perhaps observers were unimpressed by their mediocre technique or unsophisticated themes, but such a missed opportunity foisted gangs further beyond the political than they had ventured on their own—to the extreme where incommensurability is silenced by force as the state’s ultimate form of address. In the pages that follow, I will approach the aesthetics of gang life as so many expressions of this deadlock, in which the contradictions of late liberal governmentality are condensed into images, languages, and affects that arrest its dialectical tensions at their extremes. It is this crystallization of contradictions that Walter Benjamin had in mind when he wrote, “The past can be seized only as an image,” adding that such an image “flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”4 These thought-­images of the past, for Benjamin, are accessible only if they are not historicized from the perspective of the present but rather if the present is historicized by understanding itself in the image. In this sense I revisit the diabolical critique of gang communities not as a historiographic analysis of gangs but as a continuation of the underworld they created, in which one might recognize a critique of sovereignty that has run through contemporary social and political movements in Honduras that have no connection to gang life at all.

Background Over the years my anthropological interest in gangs was rarely satisfied by the familiar sociological questions one might ask, such as how many gang mem-

Introduction 5

bers reside in a country or how best to structure a typology of existing gang groups. Even less did I find the familiar criminological questions of interest, as they bypassed legal and political skepticism to frame transgressive sociality as pathologies to be identified and neutralized through punishment. I was interested in how gangs worked as frameworks for social life and how they were entwined with the historical and political forces of their surrounding world. Gangs, in my view, were inventions that recast the terrain of everyday experience, individual desires, and imaginable futures. Gangs took hold of their marginalization and made it into spaces of experimentation. They were threshold communities, pushing the limits of familiar institutions that structured daily experience. In the early 2000s I had little understanding of gangs in Honduras but was nonetheless aware that their alternative family structure rendered fluid everything that grounded mainstream life. They replaced personal names with aliases, ownership of property with a network of illicit spaces, and the given world with one of visceral pleasures and pains. All of this plagued the conscience of the middle class whose lives were invested in cultural institutions of individual responsibility, emotional and sexual restraint, and saving rather than spending. These bourgeois preoccupations shaped much of the popular and academic writing on gangs, even when it has been factually correct and ethnographically rich. It seems that asking not what gangs are but what they might have been has thus far exceeded the analytical priorities of most authors. One of the most common historical arcs used to explain the rise of gangs in Central America is the Los Angeles origin story. Therein hundreds of thousands of refugees fled US-­funded dictatorships in El Salvador and Guatemala during the 1980s to arrive to California and settle into the poorest neighborhoods, where living alongside Bloods, Crips, and other gangs necessitated forming gangs of their own. As has been widely recounted, Salvadoran refugees formed the first clicas of the gang MS-­13 (Mara Salvatrucha, or MS in casual conversation), which attracted Central American youths dislocated in a city where deindustrialization and police violence had plagued poor communities of color since the 1950s. But by 1994, California state Proposition 187 banned undocumented migrants from using public schools and hospitals in the state, and it was followed by the federal Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act as well as the Anti-­Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, both implemented in 1996, which emboldened immigration enforcement efforts in the state. These measures increased deportations from California to northern Central America, and many youths were deported with significant knowledge of gang life learned in California but little orientation to their countries of origin.5

6 Introduction

The moral of this story is usually that the term “Central American gangs” is a misnomer. Pandillas (small, local gangs) had existed in Honduras since the 1970s, but it was the urban experience in the United States that produced what became known as maras. They were a different kind of gang, locally based but purportedly transnational in their self-­understanding if not actual organization. Members of these larger, more aggressive gangs were known as mareros and widely feared as potentially dangerous incarnations of the image held by many Hondurans of the most dystopian urban settings in the United States. Since the late 1990s, the term mara has been synonymous in popular usage with MS-­13 and Barrio 18.6 While North American pundits have commonly dehistoricized this account and portrayed the disorder in urban areas of Central America as a problem native to flailing democracies in the Global South, the reversal of that narrative, in which gangs were created in northern Central America through a history of US imperialist intervention and then deportation, has been important. However, in this book I seek to complicate this counternarrative by suggesting that one might ask not only where the maras literally came from but also under what conditions they have flourished in northern Central America in particular. By the year 2000 only a fraction of those who joined the maras in Honduras were deportees from the 1990s, and few claimed any ties to the city of Los Angeles. They were urban youths who came of age in Central American metropoles, most never having traveled far from their working-­class neighborhoods. But as widespread as this phenomenon was, at this marker in the history of the gangs’ evolution, attempts to generalize across Central America are less helpful than examining the divergent historical and political contexts in which those gangs have thrived. El Salvador was the first country in Central America where the maras became a national issue, and it was the first nation-­state to implement Mano Dura (strong hand, iron fist) policy toward policing. In her work on the impacts of deportation from Los Angeles, Elana Zilberg examines how those policed as undocumented migrants in Los Angeles became criminalized deportees in San Salvador. She describes each city becoming an extension of the other through dialectically entwined “securityscapes” that projected the forms of criminality they claimed to police.7 In turn, Ellen Moodie has asked how urban violence in postwar El Salvador has been naturalized within a political economy of late liberal governmentality in which media coverage of gang policing reaffirms sovereignty and national belonging through a politics of “biospectacularity,” fetishizing the scenes of apprehension of these new criminalized subjects.8 Alongside Zilberg and Moodie, Juan Martínez has produced extensive historical analysis of MS-­13 in El Salvador, examining the social dynamics of gang life as well as the gang’s progression over time

Introduction 7

as deeply imbricated with local communities and yet simultaneously part of loose hierarchies of gang organizations that extend across the region.9 While in El Salvador the legacy of the leftist guerrilla movement and civil war hangs over the setting in which gangs are interpreted, in Guatemala the state and institutional violence of the civil war has most informed analysis of gang communities. Deborah Levenson’s history of youth violence in Guatemala City moves from the civil war period to the 2010s, asking how young people forming gangs refashioned wartime trauma into new group dynamics that would create the violent gang world of the present.10 Anthony Fontes closely examines these dynamics as they inform the subjectivities of gang members in the 2010s, asking how gang members existentially grappled with their life choices and the mortal risks involved but also how media spectacle made of their social world a single culprit for the structural dilemmas of the post–­civil war era.11 While many gang members fled the violence described by these authors, Kevin O’Neill describes the gang member rehabilitation facilities in which religious conversion allows an exit from gang life and a renegotiation of citizenship, by which many may return to the formal economy but are often poised for wage slavery in sites of neoliberal globalization.12 All of these accounts contend with the gangs known as maras, though in his work in Nicaragua on smaller and more local gangs known as pandillas, Dennis Rodgers has described how such groups emerged from particular experiences of urban development. In the wake of the Sandinista Revolution they defended barrios in urban peripheries devoid of law enforcement until the late 1990s to early 2000s, when the state responded with antigang security practices that imposed perennial states of exception.13 These works are but part of a wide-­ranging literature on gangs in Central America that focuses on the gangs’ situated histories, the repressive tactics used against them, and their transition from play-­groups to organized criminal entities. The history of the maras in Honduras is likewise embedded in a national history, though it is one that has neither revolutionary traditions nor wartime trauma at the scale of its neighboring countries. In her work on violence and subject formation in Honduras, Adrienne Pine describes pandillas on the north coast as they drew from elements of urban culture and popular cinema to create symbolic capital, resisting structural violence while becoming themselves a secondary vector of harm in the neoliberal setting.14 Amelia Frank-­Vitale has also examined gangs on the north coast, describing civilian endurance of gang extortion rackets and the complex place of gangs in contemporary political resistance.15 For me an analysis of gangs in Honduras and their massification by the 2000s necessitates thinking with different historical vectors, primarily the emergence of the narcotrafficking economy and the emergency measures

8 Introduction

to dismantle gangs. These were the source material for ebullient gang aesthetics during the 2000s, which I view as an immanent critique of sovereignty and law that is essential to contending with gangs’ place in national history. To grapple with the history of the illicit economy and the state of exception one must return to the question of US military imperialism in Honduras as a historical fact and an enduring experience. For the United States, Honduras has long been a strategic stronghold against leftist unification of the Central American isthmus; as a result Honduran state sovereignty has been consistently constrained by US political and business interests. Direct US influence in Honduran affairs dates back more than a century, initially orchestrated through the business empire of the United Fruit Company, which bribed and bullied the Honduran government until the idea of the “banana republic” had become synonymous with the country as a clientelist state serving corporate interests. The regional impact of US influence was most politically significant by the mid-­twentieth century when discontent toward United Fruit Company labor practices enabled the democratic election, in Guatemala, of populist leader Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. In 1954 the coup that overthrew Árbenz was organized inside Honduras by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), foreshadowing the role Honduras would play during the Cold War as a proxy theater for counterinsurgent covert operations. Cold War covert action in Honduras lay extensive groundwork for the contemporary illicit economy by empowering regional drug traffickers while it also integrated states of emergency into governance that shaped the antigang campaigns across the 2000s. The repercussions of the Cold War in Central America cannot be overemphasized, notably in US influence on the Contra forces and their international assets during the peak of US occupation in the mid-­1980s.

Contras The Contra war began in 1979 when the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front) overtook the Nicaraguan capital of Managua, and President Anastasio Somoza García fled the country. Fearing reprisals, a majority of Somoza’s National Guard crossed the border into Honduras and for the next year lived as exiles in Tegucigalpa or amassed on the border, where they conducted no fewer than ninety-­six incursions across Nicaragua’s northern provinces.16 When Ronald Reagan took office in the United States in 1981, his National Security Council approved $19 million for covert action teams in Honduras to end the suspected flow of arms between Nicaragua and the leftist guerrilla group Faribundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador.17

Introduction 9

Such financial backing funded CIA agents in Honduras who, working with veterans of Argentina’s Dirty War and South America’s US-­backed Operation Condor,18 assembled the Contras as a counterinsurgency army under the name Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force). From 1979 to 1990 the Contras waged a terror campaign against the Sandinista government from two fronts, one in Honduras and the other in Costa Rica. US support for the Contras was a touchstone of Reagan’s first term, as these “freedom fighters,” in his estimation, battled the specter of Soviet influence in Central America.19 Funding for the Contras was pipelined into the US military budget for Honduras, which between 1979 and 1984 increased tenfold. In the years 1982 and 1983 alone, the United States gave Honduras more than $68 million per year in military aid, exceeding the entire period between 1946 and 1980 and making the Contra war what Gregory Treverton has called “the least ‘covert’ covert action in CIA history.”20 The financial backing and organizational fluidity of Contra operations attracted not only mercenaries and war profiteers from around the globe but also Colombian narcotraffickers who moved cocaine through the CIA and military infrastructure in Honduras to the financial benefit of local rebel forces and with lasting implications for the country. But as news of the Contras’ terror campaign against Honduran and Nicaraguan civilians reached the public in the United States, so too did news of CIA-­trained death squads. The military intelligence squadron Battalion 3-­16 was established in the early 1980s by CIA and Argentine military advisers whose idea of counterinsurgency was based on tactics of domestic terrorism—abduction, torture, and ­assassination—carried out by the clandestine military unit that would be responsible for 184 documented disappearances of civilians in Honduras.21 Opposition to funding for the Contras and their death squads mounted in the United States until implementation of the second Boland Amendment in 1984 (the first of which, passed in 1982, permitted support for the Contras outside of attempting to overthrow the Nicaraguan government), which ended all official assistance for Contras and their CIA retainers. But, not wanting to let go of the military campaign, members of Reagan’s National Security Council then established informal channels of support from an international league of anticommunist activists. It is significant that part of that funding came from Nicaraguan exiles in California who received cocaine from Colombian traffickers using CIA infrastructure that they distributed through street gangs in Los Angeles before funneling the profits back to the front lines of the Contra conflict. This aspect of the Contra war remained a little-­known historical detail until the journalist Gary Webb broke the story in 1996, causing a scandal for the CIA.22 Piecing

10 Introduction

together these histories makes obvious the thread connecting state violence, covert action, and the illicit economy in Central America, all of which shaped the contemporary criminal underworld in Honduras in which street gangs are both parasites and prisoners.

Economy Peace talks between the Sandinistas and the Contras began in 1988 and continued through 1990, when the US government promised to end its devastating trade embargo on Nicaragua if the opposition candidate, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, defeated the Sandinista incumbent Daniel Ortega in the Nicaraguan presidential election. Though Chamorro won with 55 percent of the vote, which is considered by many the end of the Contra era, neighboring Honduras remained a highly militarized country. It was flooded with high-­ powered firearms and home to many ex-­military and former covert agents who found their way into state agencies, private businesses, and the illicit economy. The regional plan for demilitarization had reduced the size and duties of the Honduran military police and established a civilian police force, but across the 1990s, ex-­members of Battalion 3-­16 haunted the postconflict years.23 Assassinations and bombings targeted political, judicial, and economic figureheads who advocated for further limits on military power or the prosecution of war crimes.24 Forensic experts exhumed clandestine cemeteries around former Contra bases, where they discovered patterns of abuse from the 1980s that mirrored the torture and abuse used on civilians by the mysterious postwar death squads operating primarily in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula.25 This dystopian aftermath of counterinsurgency, when Cold War death squads refused to put down their weapons, contrasted with the vision of a new Central America in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the triumphant integration of a global, capitalist supply chain within which economically challenged countries such as Honduras would serve as sites of production for consumer societies abroad. When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was ratified in 1993 between Canada, Mexico, and the United States, Honduran President Rafael Callejas Romero (1990–1994) hailed the trilateral agreement as a prelude to free trade across the Americas. Although Honduras was not a signatory, domestic authorities and international consultants reshaped Honduran economic policy to attract multinational corporations by weakening labor standards, environmental regulation, and protective trade barriers. In Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula new “free-­trade zones” were created as extraterritorial districts in which legal standards were tailored to the advantage of international business, and maqui-

Introduction 11

las (assembly plants) were celebrated as a new source of employment for the poorest Hondurans living in urban peripheries. Maquilas offered employment but rarely a livable wage or basic rights to workers. As the harsh realities of free trade became more entrenched, deportees from the United States were arriving daily to the metropoles lacking basic knowledge of their surroundings and possessing few marketable skills. In Honduras this historical arc of the post–­Cold War was complicated further in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch made landfall at category-­5 strength and caused incalculable damage across the country. Strong winds and rainfall wiped out 75 percent of roads and bridges in the country, leaving approximately 1.5 million people displaced and 7,000 dead.26 With a flagging gross domestic product (GDP) and rising inflation, Honduras faced desperate times in the years following Hurricane Mitch. But as the formal economy struggled, the illicit economy grew stronger still. Taking advantage of the disorganization of state agencies in the wake of the hurricane, cocaine traffickers to the United States expanded their enterprise beyond the clandestine airstrips used during the Contra era, adding infrastructure in remote and inaccessible areas to accommodate growing numbers of aircraft leaving the Venezuela-­Colombia border zone.27 Previously in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, sale of cocaine in local areas had been controlled by a small number of distributors, but with the emergence of organized youth gangs in the mid-­1990s, traffickers could move the drug into the farthest reaches of local communities. By the late 1990s, street gangs in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula were still mostly ragtag groups of young people finding amusement in areas of the city without public resources, but a few years later MS-­13 and Barrio 18 competed to control the sale of cocaine in local streets of the country’s major urban areas and absorbed or eliminated smaller gangs in their path. By the turn of the millennium the maras were a national fixation, a negative renaissance of youth culture in the wake of urban violence and a disastrous hurricane. The maras’ very existence troubled simplistic narratives of progress and the “end of history,” to use Francis Fukuyama’s term,28 by exposing the deeper legacies of the Contra period—­enduring military death squadrons who now targeted gangs rather than leftists, and the powerful economic potential of cocaine.

Mano Dura After the attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States, many governments around the world introduced new measures of public security meant to preempt terror attacks and profile potential terrorists. US President George W.

12 Introduction

Bush launched his “war on terror,” which returned many US veterans of the Contra period to public life and then turned to El Salvador and Honduras for military assistance in the invasion of Iraq. Bush also proposed fighting terrorism at an international scale and framed the potential for terrorism as a nearly ubiquitous global problem, justifying governments anywhere in expanding the reach of state security in the name of joining the US alliance against terror. In El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras that expansion was synonymous with the new policing campaign known as Mano Dura, which was directed at organized crime as a form of domestic and international terrorism. In Honduras, Mano Dura was initiated in 2002 and integrated the military and civil police against the measures of demilitarization that followed the Contra war. President Ricardo Maduro Joest was the public face for the program as he won the presidency in 2001 based on a politics of vengeance against rising crime rates in the country, after his son was kidnapped for ransom in 1997 and murdered during a rescue attempt by police.29 In practical terms, Mano Dura advanced the “zero-­tolerance” policing that Maduro had modeled on Chief William Bratton’s work in New York City in the mid-1990s. The Honduran government specifically targeted gang members in 2003 with the Ley Antimaras (Antigang Law), a constitutional amendment modeled on the country’s Antiterrorist Law of 1982, updating it to outlaw gang membership and enable extreme criminal sentencing.30 New antigang forces were integrated into joint exercises with the US Southern Command, militarizing the Honduran National Police. When the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) listed MS-­13 as a newfound “top priority,” media seized upon the group as “the most dangerous gang in America,” as its sudden materialization and tattooed faces presented the maras as something between a carnival act and a criminal leviathan.31 US federal law enforcement made headlines by dragging members of MS-­13 from hideouts across the United States, while Honduran officials speculated that gangs were aiding global terror groups such as Al Qaeda to sneak across the US southern border. The growing mythology around MS-­13 resulted in more US security aid to expand Mano Dura and militarize public spaces in urban areas of Honduras, where the court system was already unable to process the thousands of detainees who languished in overburdened prisons awaiting formal arraignment. But within the national prison system, those detainees began physically transforming the crumbling and disinvested carceral facilities with dramatic renovations that were often funded by organized crime groups themselves. Within a few years, prisoner councils at the Penitenciaría Nacional de Tamara, a national center twenty-­six kilometers west of Tegucigalpa, unofficially established the first administrative collaboration in Honduras known as

Introduction 13

co-­governance, in which the daily functions of the facility were coordinated between directors and a league of inmate advisers. The new relationship demonstrated that the systematic disinvestment of prison institutions within neoliberal economic reform, which included falling wages, reduction of staff, and general infrastructural neglect, had become the very conditions in which inmates not only transformed the physical structure of prisons but reconceptualized incarceration as a form of occupation.32

Cartels Across the 1990s and early 2000s, as gangs sought a path of survival in Central America, those in Honduras were dabbling in a narcotrafficking economy in which they were lowest in the hierarchy but nonetheless successful newcomers. They sold cocaine in the urban barrios (working-­class neighborhoods) and participated in local trafficking operations, but they insisted on their independence from corrupt police as well as the criminal elite who hailed from middle and upper classes. They were the lowest-­level employees of organized crime groups but were committed to their own self-­determination. Their barrios were theirs alone and not simply extensions of the national market space imagined by cartel leadership. So with cartels on one side and the new Mano Dura police force on the other, pandillas and maras were stalwart in their refusal of the present and its political and criminal conventions, as they rejected organizing politically while denying their barrios to cartels. The figure of the devil tattooed on their skin was an incarnation of ambiguity and skepticism that not only made them iconic internationally but foregrounded a paradoxical juxtaposition between their desperation and their emergence as oracular outlaws from the cauldron of globalization’s discontents. At once criminalized and ostracized, gangs had adapted to the violent cusp of globalization’s new economic relations and thus occupied its cutting edge. Their criminality was theatrical and made into an allegorical struggle of evil against a hypocritical good, a paradox that made them thoughtworthy and essential to the political landscape despite their refusal of it. But as anyone living in Central America may attest, the maras have long been little more than instruments of cartels and enemies of their own communities. So, what happened? Across the 2000s transnational, organized crime groups expanded and successfully infiltrated political life to ensure complicity at the highest levels of state authority. The success and consequences of this campaign can be observed in the migrant caravan fleeing cartel violence in Honduras and arriving at the US southern border in November 2018, while the brother of President Juan Orlando Hernández was arrested in Miami on

14 Introduction

drug-­trafficking charges.33 Across the 2000s the three most powerful cartels in Honduras—Cachiros, Atlántico, and Valle—jockeyed for political backing and access to the supply lines from South America, moving historical quantities of cocaine across the country and into Guatemala, where the Sinaloa cartel of Mexico took over under the direction of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera. The Valle cartel was based in the western department of Copán; the Cachiros operated out of the eastern departments of Colón and Olancho as well as Cortés in the west; and the Atlántico cartel dominated Gracias a Dios department in the east and the Caribbean coastal departments of Colón and Atlántida as well as the Islas de la Bahía (Bay Islands) and the western departments of Copán and Ocotepeque. Each of these groups infiltrated deeply into law enforcement, the military, and the political world. Their operations swelled in the wake of the 2009 military coup against President José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, as institutional paralysis and the stacking of Supreme Court justices paved the way for elections widely considered illegitimate during the 2010s in which the Nationalist Party maintained power. The extent of cartel influence in the Honduran military and political establishment was revealed in 2016 when the son of former president Porfirio Lobo Sosa pleaded guilty to drug-­trafficking conspiracy in the court of the Southern District of New York, and the former head of the Cachiros cartel, Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, testified that the brothers of both ex-­presidents Zelaya and Lobo were involved in narcotrafficking themselves, no less than protecting traffickers who used Honduras as a midway point between South America and the United States.34 Today an unquantifiable number of examples demonstrate the stranglehold drug-­trafficking organizations have on the Honduran state and civil society. In Honduras the word “cartel” refers to outlaw traffickers, but it also indicates the intersection of various networks of influence and power that make up a successful illicit operation. Insofar as gangs deeply integrated themselves into the economy of drug trafficking across the 2010s, they became part of its extended apparatus. This transformed gang life, evidence of which came in 2014 with the “child migrant crisis” as most child migrants arriving to the United States had fled their barrios where gang conscription was unbearably oppressive. Since the late 1990s gangs had been collecting extortion payments from local businesses in poor barrios but collected only for their own comparatively meager revenue. Extortion was designed to be payable, leaving the business relation intact. But following the 2009 coup, gangs began sending those extortion payments up through the hierarchy of organized criminal cartels, and since they knew local barrios inside and out, gangs were deployed to extort not just businesses but all poor Hondurans, with special focus on those with

Introduction 15

relatives working abroad. Cartels had no local connections and were indifferent to the human cost of these operations, contracting gangs to demand exorbitant sums of money from local families and force them to beg from relatives working abroad. The consequences of not paying were often death—tiny ramshackle homes were set ablaze and families slain together in single rooms. Gang recruiting strategies became panoptic and fearless, targeting children as young as five and six to serve as local informants. The changes since 2009 make it difficult to speak of gangs as continuous with those of the early 2000s, when their collectivities aspired for their own independent stake in the illicit economy. But as the state demonstrated a structural inability to resolve the political-­economic contradictions at gangs’ foundation, the eventual assimilation of these two social formations would become destiny.

Gothic Sovereignty In this book I use the term “gothic sovereignty” to describe the two interlocking phenomena at the foundation of gang life in Honduras: the historical return of state actors licensed to carry out the excesses of sovereign power in states of emergency, and criminal aesthetics of gangs that draw their vitality from sovereignty’s spectral lawlessness. The former draws from Carl Schmitt’s writings on sovereign political power and the “state of exception,” to think in concrete terms about the historical figures through whom states of exception are incarnated, and the latter draws from Georges Bataille’s writings on sovereignty as an existential state, premised on an economy of desire unconstrained by utility and instrumental reason.35 These two phenomena—the enduring impunity of lawless actors within the state and the seductive moral inversions of criminal worlds—anchor gothic sovereignty as a dialectical imbrication of historical fact and aesthetic practice. I elaborate on both ends of gothic sovereignty through those aesthetic practices as they refract the effects of political sovereignty and its literal emissaries through imagistic thought experiments inscribed on the body. Symbolic and yet fragmentary, tattoo images enact a “semiotic incoherence” that bridges the often opposed realms of affect and symbol wherein the symbol-­image is not a staid repository of meaning but a social actant with unpredictable consequences in the world.36 Among those consequences is the gang community, whose disruption of the historical pres­ ent seems larger than life precisely because its unfamiliar juxtapositions of familiar moral symbols is also the semiotic form of magical ritual found in much of traditional anthropological analysis.37 This book as a whole is organized into three parts. In part I, I explore the connections between the aesthetic style of the Baroque and the temporality of

16 Introduction

crisis in Honduras that gangs were skilled at harnessing. The term “baroque” will be capitalized when referencing its historical periodization and lowercase when referencing contemporary uses of its distinctive aesthetic conventions. I begin with the death of a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent supposedly at the hands of a young gang member, as entry into the clandestine strata of everyday life that military imperialism through the Cold War and the so-­ called wars on drugs and terror have cultivated over decades. I ask what happens when gang members are caught up in those far-­reaching networks, and in turn I draw attention to illicit worlds so often entwined with them. Part II chronicles fieldwork in the barrio where I spent most of my time since 1997. I ask how the subjectivities of young people are transformed as they embrace forms of collective life in gangs. I highlight the power of tattooing and crime as these redirect their lives, through one economic and political crisis after another, when few opportunities for personal transformation were to be found elsewhere. As Protestant church congregations grew rapidly across the 2000s, so too did these congregations of transgression who sought spiritual encounters in laceration and the occult. Part III covers the national penitentiary system as the spectacular focal point of gang life in the mid-­2000s, prior to which gangs had been fugitive social worlds on the run from state authorities. During this time, prisons in northern Central America were theatrical settings where gangs, with money from the illicit economy, refashioned incarceration as a form of occupation. They used the infrastructure against itself and fashioned hermetic sanctuaries in which a baroque criminal power could express itself in manifold images, gestures, and phantasms. These were the aesthetics of gothic sovereignty, refracted from the excesses of state power and reimagined as a world beyond the foreclosing horizons of late liberalism’s shrinking futures.

Part I

Angels

If, therefore, conclusions can be drawn from military violence, as being primordial and paradigmatic of all violence used for natural ends, there is inherent in all such violence a lawmaking character. . . . In the great criminal this violence confronts the law with the threat of declaring a new law, a threat that even today, despite its impotence, in important instances horrifies the public as it did in primeval times. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”

1

Flash

On July 30, 2005, I was in North Carolina spending a few weeks with my family before going to Tegucigalpa for fifteen months of fieldwork. It was early morning when I received a message from my colleague Alex, who had an extensive knowledge of the country’s history and politics. He usually included his own commentary when he sent me links to articles, but this time there was no personal message, only a link. I clicked. “DEA Agent Slain in Honduras,” the headline read. The killing transpired in Tegucigalpa, where I had been doing field research for the previous eight years, and gang members were suspected as the culprits. I felt a wave of panic and vertigo. The event would have broad implications for anyone in the city, as the state response no doubt would be to deepen militarization of public space and embolden the city’s new antigang task force. For several years I had been conducting ethnographic fieldwork with members of the MS-­13 in Tegucigalpa and had witnessed the US war on terror expand into Central America under the guise of antigang policing. It had sent most of the gang members I knew into hiding, but it also made me wary of seeking them out, as association with the group could leave me open to charges of criminal collaboration. As the morning progressed and I read more detailed accounts of the shooting in the Honduran press, some were calling it an “assassination,” a supposition that would bring the FBI and US intelligence to Honduras to investigate. It would also mean that as a white male in my early thirties asking questions about gangs, it was more likely than ever that my research would be misconstrued as undercover police work. For months leading up to fieldwork, I had already felt that the research was doomed to fail. There was an increasing danger in seeking out gang members. With ongoing mass detentions and state violence toward gangs in Tegucigalpa, gang members had no incentive to talk to outsiders. But as I read the accounts of the shooting, with all of this in mind, something else bothered me. After almost a year of interviewing gang members, I knew it was highly unusual, if

An angel visits a local barrio as children play with fire. Photo by the author.

Flash 21

not unthinkable, for gangs to attack law enforcement officers or anyone with social or economic status. Tactically speaking, it invited retribution that could be avoided by victimizing the poor and powerless. As my neighbor Yolanda put it, attacking law enforcement or wealthy families in Honduras was “jalar el diablo por la cola” (to pull the devil’s tail). Given long-­standing colonial relations between the United States and Honduras, to attack a DEA field agent was exponentially worse. Whoever was responsible for the shooting had single-­handedly escalated the state campaign against gangs in Honduras. The victim of the shooting, Timothy Michael Markey, was a forty-­five-­ year-­old California native who had been working undercover on the north coast for only a couple of months. Official sources stated that Markey had traveled to Tegucigalpa on a brief vacation and, near the end of his stay, made a visit to the shrine of the patron saint of Central America, the Virgin of Suyapa. The shrine is on the eastern edge of the city and a popular tourist site. According to accounts in the media, Markey had gone to the shrine alone and carried with him a camera and a briefcase. As he got out of a taxi in front of the chapel, two teenagers approached him and attempted a robbery. Markey was shot, stumbled back into the taxi, and died of blood loss en route to a nearby hospital. The shooters were described as known members of a pandilla called Los Puchos (The Leftovers), whose members hailed from the hills behind the chapel and kept a close watch over the surrounding plaza. I phoned my friend Víctor, who lived in the barrio Los Piñares, where I spent several months each summer. When he answered, I could hear the television news in the background. “You heard already?” he asked. “Yeah, what do you think happened?” “No one knows, but the minister of security has been on television since yesterday. You wouldn’t believe what a circus this is now.” “What is he saying?” “The usual stuff. That gangs are animals who bring shame to the country, blah blah. But they haven’t caught the shooters yet and he’s getting nervous. He’s saying that they should be tried in court as adults.” “How old are they?” “They say the shooter is thirteen. El Siniestro [Sinister One] is what they call him. This kid is well known already. I’ve heard of him, and I live on the opposite side of the city!” “Who is he?” “They say he’s the leader of one of the Puchos clicas. A kid with blond hair. El Chelito [common nickname indicating a light complexion], that’s the other name he uses.” “They want to try a thirteen-­year-­old as an adult?”

22 Gothic Sovereignty

“Well, some lawyers have objected. But he [the minister] keeps saying that they only look like children on the outside. That inside they are violent criminals.” Víctor had to leave for work, so we agreed to talk later. The minister’s comments were not unexpected. Since the late 1990s politicians and police in Tegucigalpa described the growth of street gangs as an epidemic of juvenile delinquency in which youth were corrupted by several vectors at once: a widening generation gap, a wave of consumerism brought on by the global economy, deportations from the United States that sent hardened criminals back to Honduras, and increasing drug traffic from South America. Though there was growing panic about the proliferation of street muggings and everyday crime in the city for which gangs were believed responsible, I had become interested in them precisely because I sensed that there was more to gang communities than what was broadly termed “juvenile delinquency.” A significant transformation had been taking place in the lived experience of poor and homeless teenagers in Tegucigalpa, whether runaways from crowded households in the slums, kids orphaned by Hurricane Mitch, or those deported from the United States and criminalized for their tattoos. Gang communities were becoming larger and seemingly self-­aware, actively embellishing popular accounts of their criminality to create the image of a youth underworld even more fantastic than its caricatures. In English the term “gangs” is often used to describe communities of young people who band together, invent a name, and defend local territory in the face of socioeconomic marginalization. The term is most common in the disciplines of criminology and sociology, in which gangs are viewed as institutions that both arise from and reproduce socially and psychologically deviant behaviors. Scholars in these disciplines often approach gangs as a social problem to be remedied by social scientific findings that may redress poverty and violence at the individual or structural register. But an anthropological study of gangs, I believe, takes a different approach. I, for one, do not perceive gangs as a social problem to be quantitatively measured in terms of membership, criminal acts, graffiti tags, or arrests. I regard gangs foremost as communities premised on solidarity and desire incongruous to their immediate surroundings. Rather than asking how many gang members one can account for and what criminal traits unite them, one might instead ask what makes a gang seductive, what aspirations it fosters, and what rituals cohere those aspirations into aesthetic or social forms. A gang such as the MS-­13, which has chapters in many cities across the Americas, is often described as an international franchise, reproduced from place to place by a common charter, lexicon, and membership status. But what if the coherence of this image was more a projection of law enforcement than

Flash 23

a common reality among gangs and reflected the shared practices of governmentality across Western sovereignties more than gang life itself? What if the connections between gangs in different cities were typically weak and their raison d’être was localized rather than transnational? I suggest viewing gangs not in their essence but in their existence, where each is not part of a larger whole but rather a community pitched within a collection of singular affects that inspire creative action in the face of marginalization. What is called a “gang” then would be the consolidation of these affects into a name, a ritualized action, or a symbol that becomes more than settled features of gang life to be inventoried but rather vehicles of contagion that arouse social energies and actions. In concert with one another, such elements constitute an invention whose singularity reflects and enables thinking beyond the constraints of social, economic, and political marginalization. Such communities are therefore practical and utopian, addressing the need for certain forms of personal security while imagining new forms of style, language, ritual, and enjoyment that transform the surrounding world. I would argue that such social projects constitute what Elizabeth Povinelli calls an “otherwise,” or “immanent derangements and rearrangements” that alter relations of power, politics, and ethics and the world around them.1 A mark of graffiti on a brick wall may be seen as the simplest affective element of gang life. The markings are not merely representations of a group but repositories of potential, sites of affective impact in a dissemination of difference. Such a perspective is not new and can be found in the earliest academic text on the urban sociology of gangs, The Gang by Frederic Thrasher, published in 1927, in which Thrasher describes youth gangs in Chicago as a set of practices that expend creative energies of young people when no other outlet is available.2 In his ebullient, 600-­page ethnography, Thrasher expresses deep concern for the welfare of children but does not regard gangs as their greatest risk. Rather, he argues that the greatest risk to children in gangs were the organized crime outfits of the Prohibition era that would appropriate gang members’ youthful vitality for their own ends. A century later I find myself reflecting on this very question in Honduras, where the fiercely independent gangs of the 2000s have now been appropriated by cartels and other organized crime groups, to disastrous effect. The trajectory was visible even by the late 1990s, when gangs that offered solidarity in the face of rising emigration rates, weakening labor protections, and falling wages sought to empower themselves socially and economically through the expanding illicit economy. As South American cartels increased shipments to satisfy the growing demand for cocaine in North America, gangs in Tegucigalpa used their access to dense, urban residential areas to expand local mar-

24 Gothic Sovereignty

kets en route. As a result, by the early 2000s US antidrug and security personnel broadened their operations from the well-­known trafficking routes of the north coast to Tegucigalpa, where the repression of street gangs and the US war on drugs dovetailed. By 2003 the Honduran state’s repression of gangs was folded into a hemispheric collaboration in both the US war on terror and war on drugs, deploying the Honduran military and police, the DEA, and US military and intelligence personnel all under the umbrella of Mano Dura.3 As these state campaigns fused, the most conflicted areas of Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula could look and feel like war zones that mirrored the ongoing US war in Iraq. For many, the atmospheric resonances between everyday life in Honduras and the violent theaters of US imperialism abroad evoked the era of the Cold War. While the Bush administration looked to Honduran and El Salvadoran militaries for ground support in Iraq, formerly disgraced architects of Cold War counterinsurgency returned to public life in the United States and Honduras as incarnations of a historically continuous state of emergency whose literal return is one aspect of “gothic sovereignty.”4 As state statistics for murder and violent crime in Honduras climbed higher than at any point in national history and estimates of gang membership nationwide exceeded thirty thousand, support for Mano Dura continued.5 The estimates for gang membership were widely criticized as unscientific, but it did not seem to matter, as everyday encounters in Tegucigalpa or San Pedro Sula demonstrated that street gangs had grown exponentially in a few years, and the concern transcended class, politics, or geography. Neighborhoods across the country’s major cities were marked with graffiti staking out gang territories, moving expeditiously through urban space became de rigueur, and newspapers regularly featured front-­page photographs of grisly scenes of gang killings. Staring at the photographs was to ask what it might be like to die a horrific, gruesome death, and routinely I had to stop my mind from reconstructing the events that led up to those incidents. For anyone living in the city, this experience of repressing the unspeakable in turn displaced it into a spectral fog in which the living and the dead seemed to coexist and the cartoonish aliases of gang members were arranged as constellations of actual monsters. That was the case when the profiles of the suspected shooters emerged in the aftermath of Timothy Markey’s death. News media continuously circulated the image of the accused shooter, a thirteen-­year-­old with rosy cheeks named Erlan Fabricio Colindres. Reports said Colindres and his two bodyguards hailed from Nueva Suyapa, the sprawling district of working-­class homes behind the shrine. Police spokespersons focused on Colindres as a dangerous suspect with an extensive criminal profile who grew up in a single-­ parent household caring for his sister and bedridden mother, mostly fending

Flash 25

for himself. He had been to the state reformatory on three occasions and escaped even the most foolproof cells, and recognizing his talents, older gang members in Nueva Suyapa made him the leader of one of the small cliques of Puchos neophytes. According to police reports, Erlan’s life was shaped by desperation, adapted to an antisocial underground of nomadic and orphaned children, and exemplary of the deteriorated social bonds of the urban poor. Police searched for him and the others through the night as officials warned against helping them hide; Erlan was charged with fourteen additional counts of homicide that police had drawn from a backlog of unresolved criminal cases in Nueva Suyapa. Within a short time, the Minister of Security Oscar Álvarez had taken over the investigation, assuring the public that the suspects would be caught. Álvarez was younger than many of his fellow government ministers, charismatic, and media-­savvy, seeming to grasp how media could be weaponized in the state campaign against gangs. As a central figure in Mano Dura, Álvarez evoked the long shadow of his uncle Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, a general whose name is inextricably tied to the country’s Cold War death squads of the 1980s. Martínez personally oversaw their formation and training during the Contra war and persecution of perceived leftists. As his nephew, Oscar Álvarez was thus a second-­generation figure in the state of emergency and a constant reminder of gothic sovereignty’s historical returns as he vilified gang members with such persistence that it seemed Álvarez and his targets were mythological adversaries. Álvarez shaped media narratives that permeated the atmosphere of the city. His method was to focus on a particular individual in the criminal underworld who he insisted was a criminal sociopath at odds with the traditions and mores valued by Hondurans across generations. After Markey’s shooting, Álvarez went after Erlan Colindres with all his rhetorical powers. Erlan was a killing machine, he told the press. Despite his young age he should be tried in court as an adult for the maximum penalty allowed, a life sentence. “Don’t let his childish appearance fool you,” Álvarez said on July 30, 2005, “Underneath is a killer, a parasite who will do anything to keep living his obscene lifestyle.” In the afternoon I got a call from my friend Víctor, whom I have known since he welcomed me to Los Piñares barrio back in 1997. He and his coworkers at an industrial warehouse were standing in front of the breakroom television. “All day they are saying this kid is responsible. They’re saying he’s evil—I can’t believe all of this exaggeration,” he said. Víctor and his coworkers were embarrassed about the incident and mourned for Markey and his family. But beneath those immediate sentiments was an unsettling sense that street gangs and antinarcotics agents had something in common, both belonging to

26 Gothic Sovereignty

a long history of US intervention in Honduran affairs. Gangs were not only an outgrowth of refugee flight to the United States during the Cold War but now active in an illicit economy that flourished during the Contra era and that now the DEA was charged with containing. But the spectacular search for Colindres also foregrounded the death of a white, male, US national at a time when violent crimes, especially femicides, against poor Hondurans largely went without investigation. Broadly speaking, the impunity rate for violent crimes during the early 2000s hovered at nearly 80 percent and by 2019 at nearly 98 percent.6 The urgent concern for investigating Markey’s death pointed a finger at street gangs as a disgrace to a dignified nation that worked hand in glove with the US government on many regional initiatives, though it was impossible to ignore that the differential treatment of the victim based on race and nationality also pointed to the long-­standing colonial relations between the United States and Honduras, in which the loss of a white life mobilized state and international resources, and the loss of other lives was most often minimized even in a routine police investigation. When I first started visiting Honduras in the late 1990s, the presence of the DEA, military contractors, and other US-­based law enforcement was startling to me. Their presence was both overt and clandestine. While their vehicles would roar past passenger buses and their leadership would appear on television news with expansive training facilities in the background, their actual activities were consistently out of sight. In Honduras as in many other countries across Latin America, the DEA had a mixed reputation, romanticized as a rational bureaucracy with technological prowess and derided as the primary vehicle for expanding US influence under the war on drugs. While the DEA was founded by the Nixon administration in 1973, antinarcotics work in Honduras had been ongoing since the late nineteenth century. That work focused on the north coast, where the first US-­based banana cultivators were building plantations and dominating shipping lanes to New Orleans, as political, labor, and organized crime elites vied for control over ports of entry.7 Banana producers consolidated into the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company, and each corporation sought influence over ports and shipping lanes as well as the politics and state formation of Central American republics. As the United and Standard corporations gained power in Central America and the port of New Orleans, their freighters coming from Honduras were suspected to be the primary means of transporting morphine from Europe and cocaine from South America.8 For the next century, the two companies left an indelible imprint on Honduran history and politics, acquiring vast agricultural

Flash 27

concessions, backing political allies, and undermining political leaders who attempted to limit their influence. Early documentation of corporate involvement in drug trafficking is scant,9 but their shipping infrastructure was vital to smuggling operations on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, which, by the time the DEA was established, became impossible to ignore. Though the agency’s mandate was originally for domestic control of narcotics in the United States, it was quickly expanded to include international operations, and its first international office opened in Colombia. In the early 1970s, when the Medellín cartel moved from supplying local consumers to exporting mass production, Honduras became a vital transshipment point, and the DEA’s first Honduran office opened in Tegucigalpa in 1981. At the time the office opened, the United States was moving hundreds of military and intelligence personnel into Honduras following the Sandinista Revolution in a paradigm-­defining exercise.10 US militarists under Reagan considered the region a laboratory for intervention in which to shape an aggressive foreign policy based on arming certain insurgents and persecuting others, with the goal of rolling back nearly a decade of anti-­interventionism following the US defeat in Vietnam.11 The Reagan administration sought to downplay the violent tactics used by the CIA-­backed army on Honduras’s eastern border known as the Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force) and informally as the Contras, but those tactics were difficult to disguise. Contras routinely crossed the border into Nicaragua and terrorized small towns by murdering labor leaders, teachers, political activists, and other civilians. Between 1982 and 1985, three US legislative amendments rescinded funding to the Contras for the purposes of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government, or for military or covert assistance. But Reagan’s National Security Council was not specified within the amendments and immediately sought to continue the war, with unofficial financing from anticommunist crusaders across the globe. US Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, head of the National Security Council, arranged for the illegal sale of arms to the government of Iran to funnel cash to Contra forces in what would later become known as the Iran-­Contra scandal. Investigations into the covert operation led to congressional hearings that dampened Reagan’s final years in office, while North’s inner circle managed to keep the Contra conflict afloat with a vast network of financiers, mercenaries, and shell companies from abroad. The journalist Gary Webb reported in 1996 that members of the Contra leadership also financed the conflict by forging alliances with a new generation of cocaine producers in Colombia. Webb’s meticulously documented reporting describes how Colombian traffickers used CIA infrastructure—planes,

28 Gothic Sovereignty

landing strips, and security clearance—to transport cocaine into California, where Nicaraguan exiles used the well-­established street gangs in Los Angeles and San Francisco to distribute the drug in the form of crack cocaine.12 When the Contra forces opened camps on Nicaragua’s borders in the early 1980s, Honduras and Costa Rica were already serving as transit points for the Medellín cartel’s flights north to America. According to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations report, The logic of having drug money pay for the pressing needs of the Contras appealed to a number of people who became involved in the covert war. Indeed, senior US policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras’ funding problems. . . . Drug pilots soon began to use the Contra airstrips to refuel even when there were no weapons to unload. They knew the authorities would not check the airstrips because the war was “protected.”13

Colombian cocaine traffickers were protected by Honduran military leaders and, the report says, used “Honduran airstrips for refueling and transshipment of cocaine heading north.”14 By 1983 the entanglements between covert operators and narcotrafficking cartels had been documented. The DEA station chief in Honduras, Tomás Zepeda, reported that in his first two years the country’s top military officers, who were CIA assets, were known to be involved in cocaine trafficking and obstructed his work such that in 1983 the DEA office in Tegucigalpa was abruptly closed. It was reopened four years later as negotiations between Contras and the Sandinista government were initiated, but closure of the office at the height of Contra collaboration with known drug traffickers had damaged the credibility of DEA work in the country. Furthermore, the rise of Honduras’s own cartels had been coeval with US military occupation and covert action, if not facilitated by them. At the center of the Tegucigalpa cartel was Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, known to the DEA as one of the pioneering smugglers for Colombian traffickers during the 1970s when he was arrested for possession of large quantities of cocaine in Miami and Arizona. But Matta was most known for negotiating one of the most significant deals in the history of narcotics smuggling in the hemisphere, connecting his Colombian employers with Mexico’s powerful Guadalajara cartel. By the late 1970s Matta had opened numerous businesses to launder his illicit earnings, one of which was a private airline called SETCO, which the United States contracted as the supply transport for Contra forces across the Honduras-­Nicaragua border. Matta built a luxurious and heavily fortified mansion in Tegucigalpa next to the new airport, where on weekends

Flash 29

crowds routinely assembled to ask for financial assistance that Matta freely gave away. A stylish Robin Hood figure who wore open-­collar polyester shirts and designer cowboy boots, Matta was an iconic folk hero of his time. In 1988, when he was arrested for the death of a DEA agent in Mexico and extradited to the United States, more than a thousand civilians streamed into central Tegucigalpa and protested at the US embassy. Agitators threw Molotov cocktails that set the embassy on fire, and security forces killed four students before the crowd was dispersed. My friend Orlando is a human rights lawyer in Tegucigalpa who took part in the protest when he was still a university student. He recalls, We were so mad. Matta was a hero to us. The guy who would make money off the gringos with his airline and then hand out money when people lined up at his door? Yes, a hero. But when the war was over, our government handed him over, and the gringos put him in one of the worst prisons in the country [ADX Florence]. Excuse me, but gringos are all liars. But what depresses me is that the next generation didn’t want to analyze this stuff. They just became consumers. Have you read Eduardo Galeano? It’s all there.

Orlando is a close reader of Galeano’s book The Open Veins of Latin America and contends that, in what is now a classic of anticolonial literature, Honduras does not get a fair representation: Across the hemisphere even the most critical historians still perceive us as children who take orders from the United States. What they don’t understand is that we as Hondurans know how the United States takes a country’s history away from its people. No one asks how we—who have watched imperialism ruin our country, from the banana corporations to the Contras, and now with the gangs—no one asks how we have maintained our own Honduran way of life. They have one story, and we have another. But their story is stronger because it’s simpler. They say there are good guys, bad guys, and pendejos [dupes]. In their version we are the pendejos. But, real stories are complicated.

In the wake of the Contra war, the work of the DEA would continue to simplify these historical narratives, targeting the narcotrafficking networks that US covert operations had facilitated. What would it take to disrupt such narratives? In his well-­known writings on divergent temporalities and the task of historical materialism, Walter Benjamin suggests that the struggle for history “does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’” That is, the details of US facilitation of the narcotrafficking industry are widely documented but

30 Gothic Sovereignty

largely ineffective in changing the dominant or official historical narrative of the period. Benjamin’s historical materialism is premised on a contingency wherein “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” may provide the critically disruptive force to displace hegemonic historical time. Benjamin imagines danger and image together, as danger condenses historical understanding into a moment of recognition that “affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers.”15 While the revisionist narrative of the Contra war in Central America has served as the dominant account, youths whose families fled military conflict in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua grew up with their own experience of history and inaugurated a different mindset that has reshaped the country since the turn of this century. Through the 1990s they arrived as deportees who had been war refugees and then undocumented persons in a city whose police force targeted young, brown men as criminal aliens. These experiences of hardship and difference insulated them against an uncritical or indifferent relation to the historical present in Honduras. Assembling as gangs of outsiders, they thrived as communities of “untimeliness,” which Friedrich Nietzsche describes as an out-­of-­joint relation to the present that becomes advantageous in critical analysis of power and its material manifestations.16 Rather than assimilating to the world around them, those who joined gangs in Tegucigalpa in the wake of deportation flaunted their untimeliness in the face of moral panic from those who easily adjusted to the world as such. On the evening of July 30, before I went to bed, I called Víctor again. His wife, Elena, answered the phone. Víctor wasn’t there, she said. “One of our neighbors was deported and arrived today. They say he was depressed, so Víc­ tor went to see him.” I asked what she thought about the shooting. “That’s all everybody is talking about around here today. How can anyone believe a thirteen-­year-­old would do that?” “What do you think happened?” I asked. She laughed. I could hear their children shouting and playing in the background. I pictured them jumping rope in the street, as they often did at dusk. “Well, we are a poor family,” she said. “We don’t understand a lot of what happens in this country, and even worse when the United States is involved. But there’s something not right about it all. Don’t you wonder how a boy thirteen years old finds a gun? And a gringo goes out to the shrine alone? We would never let you go there by yourself!” “Yeah, I wondered about that.” “These kids who get involved in gangs, sometimes I think they understand more how this country works than I do.” “How so?” I asked.

Flash 31

“I just live at the bottom of this hill and wash clothes for a living. I’m not involved in anything. But mareros [gang members]? They see it all. That’s why the people who run this country are afraid of them. They don’t worry about being killed by gangs, like we do. They worry about what gangs know.” “I see what you mean.” “As long as the gangs have power in the bajomundo [underworld] they will be a threat to those people. Why do you think they’re so eager to kill gang members? It’s not because they care about our security out here in the barrios! No. They’re worried about what the gangs find out. When they catch Erlan Colindres I bet they won’t let him speak. If he survives, they’ll send him to prison before he says a word.” “How will they stop him from speaking?” I asked. There was silence. “I’ll tell Víctor to call you when he gets back,” she said.

2

Baroque

My first visit to Honduras was with a student group in 1997. We were a group of eighteen students and an anthropology professor, studying sustainable farming techniques and the growing impacts of free-­trade policies. With us was also Glenda, a former Maryknoll nun who had spent a significant part of her life in Nicaragua. Having grown up in North Dakota, she arrived to Nicaragua in 1963 during the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza García, whose family would rule the country for forty-­two years. She witnessed the brutality of their regime, then the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, the rise of the Contras soon after, and eventually the whitewashing of Contra atrocities by their political backers in Washington, DC. The last few days of our group trip were spent in Tegucigalpa. One evening Glenda took me on a walk to the center of the city, where the Río Choluteca flows between Tegucigalpa and its sister city of Comayagüela, both considered part of the capital at large, to speak with homeless children as part of the Catholic spirit of caritas, charity. That evening she mentioned to me an article from the morning paper about the exhumation of a mass grave outside the capital. The bodies of twelve homeless youths were found with markings of torture and execution by shooting at close range. The patterns were similar to the executions of leftists a decade earlier, she said, and though the Contra war was long over, the US-­trained death squads were still patrolling the streets at night. Instead of leftists they targeted delincuentes (delinquents)—young people living on the street and scavenging for survival—to clear out the central district and attract foreign investment. When we arrived at the river, young people were at the base of the bridges picking through a refuse heap of rotted vegetables. As we watched them, a military vehicle rounded the corner, and several camouflaged soldiers leaped off, scanning the kids on the hillside as they scattered in all directions. Glenda looked at me and then at the military vehicle. “That’s them, right there,” she said.

Image of a gang member, which circulated in popular blogs during early 2000s. Photo source unknown.

34 Gothic Sovereignty

“What’s going on?” “They’re arresting children,” she exclaimed. Everyone on the bridge seemed to halt and turn toward the commotion. Glenda’s face was already flushed as she watched the soldiers run toward the children with weapons drawn. “These are the soldiers trained at the School of the Americas,” she said. “This is what they teach them.” As they ran, several children turned to hurl rocks at the soldiers, forcing them to duck and backpedal. People on the bridge applauded and shouted. The children drew nearer, shouting abuse at the soldiers and hurling more stones. From where we stood I could see some of the children’s faces were painted white and with garish red lips and black circles on their cheeks; they were amateur clowns who performed for tips in the central plaza. Hecklers on the bridge roared at the sight of it all, impish harlequins fighting off a platoon of armed soldiers. Later, as we returned to the hotel, Glenda reflected on the skirmish by the river, saying that the new generation of the young and poor was different in ways she found difficult to pin down. They were more independent and confrontational with law enforcement, which, she speculated, must have to do with the tarnished reputation of police and military institutions in the wake of the Cold War. “If the authorities don’t follow the law, why should anyone?” she said. Glenda asked if I had heard about the street gangs on the outskirts of the city that were a growing fixation of the news media. I had not. The next day Glenda arranged for our group to visit a gang-­prevention program spotlighted recently on Honduran public radio. Our bus left the city center and was soon climbing the distant hillsides through a labyrinth of wood-­plank and cinderblock homes. Newspapers claimed hundreds of gangs terrorized the barrios on the south side, fighting in the streets and wielding homemade weapons. But that afternoon when we arrived in Los Piñares, one of the project’s founders, Víctor, and several teenagers greeted us in the street, the kids looking nothing like gang members as I had imagined them. They were heavy-­metal fanatics with oversized black T-­shirts and faux-­gold chains, their long hair in braids or hanging over their faces. The intervention program was Víctor’s invention. He had set up a bicycle workshop in an old factory building where kids assembled bicycles out of parts found or recycled from around the city. The kids sat astride their makeshift bicycles, stylishly designed and painted in bright colors. Víctor explained that the idea behind the project was to give the kids a sense of purpose where often there was no structured activity for young people. They shared responsibility for opening and closing the workshop, helped newcomers assemble their

Baroque 35

own creations, and thrived on the new mobility the bicycles had given them. In the outer barrios, he explained, many kids felt disconnected from the city, and gangs preyed on their listlessness. But with their fleet of iridescent cycles, young people from Los Piñares had access to the city and garnered some local renown for racing local hillsides in technicolor packs. As we stood outside the bicycle workshop, Víctor pointed to several buildings in the distance that made up a new corporate business park. Most were assembly plants for major clothing manufacturers and had relocated to Honduras to take advantage of the country’s lax labor and environmental standards for foreign companies. They offered low-­paying jobs to legions of underemployed residents in the nearby districts. Though the factories were criticized by international labor watch groups, the Honduran government celebrated their arrival as an opportunity for poor Hondurans to join the global economy. Many in Los Piñares had positions at the Exiid factory, Víctor went on, but wages were meager, and many returned from those jobs with physical ailments. Chemical sprays caused respiratory irritations, shifts without breaks resulted in bladder infections, and hours of repetitive movements caused carpal tunnel syndrome. When newspaper stories described gangs and delinquency in the outer barrios of the south side, he said, they didn’t look at the bigger picture. Most who joined gangs did so because they refused to work in those conditions. The corporate assembly plants could exploit the desperation of poor families, but they were not the only option for young people. Since the early 1990s, he said, the flow of cocaine through the south side had increased every year. Growing up in the shadow of the Exiid factory, many didn’t want to be exploited and instead turned to the drug economy with its promise of autonomy and outlaw glamour. By the late 1990s most economic development in Honduras was synonymous with integration into a global economy. Along the southern periphery the promises of free trade had captured the imagination, but the global business parks also had the feel of an occupying force. Advocates who backed the integration of Honduras into the global economy spoke of a world in which all competing economic models had been vanquished, allowing for a form of capitalism whose ubiquity and flexibility were themselves testament to its historical inevitability. Such a view of history—a progressive chain of events culminating in the triumph of capitalism—is what Walter Benjamin has called “homogeneous time.” For Benjamin, homogeneous time is the constellation of forces that allow a particular world to seem natural, coherent, and inescapable. By the turn of the twentieth century, the momentum of European modernity enveloped his native Berlin inside a powerful narrative of that city’s own past, present, and future. Those narratives were contested and thrown into

36 Gothic Sovereignty

relief by the many objects of his fascination, from the general strike and revolutionary praxis to the practices of surrealist art and avant-­garde theater. The experiential and intellectual space of disruption that Benjamin calls “heterogeneous time” allows for another relation to the present beyond the prefigured mythologies and sensory experiences of the cultural and historical norm.1 I first encountered Benjamin’s work in the late 1990s, when ethnographers and historians of the Cold War in Latin America were focused on his idea of the state of emergency as a constant rather than an exceptional feature of state power. Benjamin regarded emergency powers as the foundation of modern sovereignty and the pretext for power that by the early twentieth century was conveniently cloaked in the legal niceties of liberalism.2 But as I delved deeper into Benjamin’s work I came to understand the importance of “the moment of danger”—when the mythologies of progress in Western civilization fall away and modern sovereignty is revealed as unmediated violence. Benjamin was interested in how the heightened sensory awareness of danger and crisis passed over into cultural forms, which was also the impetus for his deep engagement with the European Baroque as a new wave of exuberant and overflowing aesthetic practices that papered over the waning power and authority of the Spanish crown. It was within the artistic excess of the period that works of allegory were pushed to creative heights and symbol and narrative in allegorical representation exaggerated to the point of artifice.3 Rather than providing a locus of meaning, the Baroque symbol enacted a generative disorientation that would shape Benjamin’s approach to the symbolic as much as to history itself. The allegorical image is, Kathleen Stewart argues, “a representation attracted to the fragmentary, the imperfect, the incomplete, the decayed. It says that things are not what they seem, that meaning is not self-­evident but emerges in the gap between signifier and signified. For [Benjamin], the humanist symbol was a self-­satisfied fantasy of the mystical fusion of sign and referent, while allegory could plumb the depths of doubt, dread, and the dream of redemption in a world got-­down.”4 Modern states responded to crises of legitimacy and the heightened awareness of historical contingency with a flailing effort to close the gap of the symbolic and the mythic that in turn allegorized the symbolic realm such that from his study of the Baroque, Benjamin understood crisis and modern sovereignty as two sides of a coin. In this view, much of modern political life in the West would be allegorized into political theology.5 But for Benjamin the allegorical was not simply an artistic or interpretive practice bound to what is formally designated as allegorical works. On the contrary, such movements and practices were the starting point for rethinking history and recognizing the ideological work of cultural forms. Jacques Derrida points out in his interpretations of Benjamin’s writings on law and

Baroque 37

violence that the “mystical foundations of authority” underwriting sovereign power in the West demanded constant shoring-­up for the dubious self-­ evidence of statehood to remain beyond question.6 Insofar as this play between myth-­making and myth-­breaking shaped political history and practice in the West, Benjamin argues that revolutionary movements would be defined by their disruption of the mythical spell of state life, harnessing its symbolic regime for other critical purposes. However, the culturally disciplined body and mind of the modern West was already conditioned to shock and disruption as technological transformations in communication, transportation, and urban planning remade the sensory realm of everyday life.7 To the extent that the capacity for experience was shielded within a figurative shell that protected the nervous system from these historically abrupt transformations, what Sigmund Freud called the “stimulus shield,” the task of revolutionary disruption was all the more challenging.8 This problematic led Benjamin to an unlikely set of intellectual influences in his studies of allegory and shock, most importantly the French poet Charles Baudelaire and the Parisian surrealists of the 1920s. Though Baudelaire and the Parisian surrealists lived in separate historical eras, they worked creatively with the symbolic realm of European modernity: Baudelaire as one of the symbolist poets who wrote extensively on the alternative modernity of the Parisian underworld and the surrealists as a vanguard aiming to liberate the unconscious whose unsettling of meaning and symbol sought to unlock landscapes of the imagination excluded from modern rationality. While Benjamin’s engagement with the Baroque was largely focused on Europe, in Latin America the Baroque is an extensive field in its own right and requires some further clarification. The baroque style in Latin America is often approached in either of two ways: as a colonial form that has deeply influenced Latin American identity, or as the substance of revanchist movements that challenge the epistemic orientations of modern subjectivity in the West. Taken together these two approaches to the baroque seem contradictory.9 On the one hand, the Baroque is the foundational style of the liberal nation-­state, and on the other, the means of its undoing. This contradiction was present from the beginning of the colonial project in Latin America, which deployed styles of the Spanish Baroque as a means of subjugating modernity’s Others and establishing the nation-­state as the telos of linear, historical unfolding, even as the temporality that defined the Baroque was cyclical. John Beverley notes, The Baroque’s own sense of history is, notably, a cyclical one, based on the allegory of the agricultural year and the four ages of the metals, and the idea that all things are subject to a process of growth, decay, and death. The narra-

38 Gothic Sovereignty

tive of national-­formation in Latin American modernity is by contrast tied to the idea of history as progress, a process of “development.” . . . The Baroque sense of history is aristocratic, the modern sense of history is bourgeois-­ liberal. For the Baroque the Kingdom of God lies outside human history; for the modern sense of history, it is at the “end” of history, and thus within the possibility of human time.10

While the cyclical temporality of the Baroque is organized around the inevitability of death, the Spanish colonial project premised on the Baroque presented itself as historically universal but also finite, and this paradox subjects Spanish colonialism to crisis, breakdown, and disorderliness. To put it another way, herein history both amplifies the sovereign authority of the state and subjects it to the force of decay. The history of the Baroque is thus one of a series of returns, assailing the transcendental conceits of statehood and the apotheosis of the human subject and constituting over time a canon of transgressive and anticolonial movements. Those movements allow for insight into the finitude of purportedly transcendental forms, the experience of desengaño (disillusionment) as the precursor to ingenio (wit), the condition of an amodern subjectivity that is ever nimble in the midst of instability.11 During the late 1990s, as gangs began to refuse the labor conditions of late-­capitalist globalization, they likewise refused the ideological coherence that made it possible as a paradigm of neocolonialism. Gangs’ explicitly baroque tattooing was still years away, although their performative discontent began, by the late 1990s, “a new, positive concept of barbarism” against the numbing of experience within homogeneous time.12 State estimates of thirty thousand gang members nationwide, versus nongovernmental estimates of around twelve thousand, demonstrate the alarm such a refusal could generate.13 Newly formed antigang police units in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula were part of the official investigative body known then as the General Directorate of Criminal Investigation (Dirección General de Investigación Criminal). I visited their offices in Tegucigalpa on many occasions and spoke with detectives about their professional duties, data collection, archives, and the reputation of the police across the country. They were more open than I expected, often expressing their fear of death, which could come at any moment in a botched raid or at the hands of assassins. They were clear that whatever the accurate statistics of gang membership may be, they felt outnumbered. “We feel like there is a big wave, like a tsunami coming,” one of the officers said, “and we are on the beach with just our bare hands to try to stop it.” One of the few decorations in their office was a large photograph of María Sierra Isabel Martínez, also known as La Diabla (The Devil), that police con-

Baroque 39

fiscated from her home during her arrest. In it she is sitting beside another woman on a grassy lawn with a black leather jacket, long hair, and dark eye makeup. “We keep it up there to remind us what we are up against. La Diabla is among the most evil people out there. Evil comes in many forms, you know? We have to be vigilant or we can be pulled in like everyone else.” I was confused and asked him to be more specific. He explained, Well, La Diabla was a cabecilla [leader] for Barrio 18. A year ago she was all anyone in this city could talk about. They said she could make almost any man fall in love with her. Anyone she wanted. That’s how she got to the top of the gang where there are not many women. She had so much power she could give orders and she could say “Go and kill person X” and ten members of Barrio 18 would jump up and do it. Well, when we were trying to figure out how to capture her it took us months. And there were officers here who could not stop thinking about her. Day and night, they said, all they could think about was La Diabla. She would get inside their head, like some kind of brujería [sorcery]. And this is what’s happening with kids joining the gangs. People say, “How can so many be joining the MS and the 18 if it’s so dangerous?” The answer is they think they can be this powerful, like a god. And they look at the world around them and what does it offer? . . . We can’t offer them a better alternative, so how can we convince them not to join a gang? Gangs promise them the heavens, and we can only tell them it’s wrong to break the law. So we keep her portrait up there as a kind of protection because some of us are scared. La Diabla has been in prison for six months, but some people here will tell you she visits them in dreams.

This combination of danger engulfing the existing world and supernatural figures who refuse the present resonated with Benjamin’s characterization of the Baroque as a resurgent language of political crisis in modern statehood. The alarmist and cartoonish demonization of gang members in Honduras was a baroque exaggeration that enabled the United States to extend the war on terror into Honduras as Mano Dura and at the same time inverted Hegel’s “spirit of the times” as if the historical unfolding of truth were mediated by totalizing artifice.14 But then gangs harnessed the symbolic labors of demonization and recast them in a counterperformance felt not only in Central America but across global media. By the early 2000s, when they began tattooing their upper bodies and finally their faces, doing so was highly transgressive. Tattooing their faces meant forfeiting the meager economic opportunities that existed for the poor, but furthermore, it publicly staged their bodies as targets for state violence. The imagery seemed to call out the violent foundations of

40 Gothic Sovereignty

sovereign power that underwrote late modernity’s epistemic orientations and exaggerated the criminalization of those who refused them. But what transformed this aesthetic experimentation into gothic sovereignty was the turn to overtly satanic tattoos covering the body in occult numerology such as 666 and its variants, pentagrams, tombstones, naked bodies, and marijuana leaves. Some gang members shaved their heads and tattooed horns on their scalps. Some tattooed cursive script inside their lips and over their eyelids. Some tattooed their faces with features of the human skull, overlaying their sentient bodies with images of skeletal remains. If anything could halt the flow of historical time, throwing into relief the ideas and beliefs that held together the social world in a given moment, it was the appearance of young people shrouded in scripts of apocalyptic damnation visually making the present a hell on earth. In this sense the baroque aesthetics of the state of emergency provided the means of gangs’ own undoing. Meanwhile, as photographers visited the national prisons overpopulated by emergency law, portraits of incarcerated and tattooed gang members circulated in global media, both pulp and serious, producing shock wherever they appeared. Portraits by the Spanish photographer Isabel Muñoz, taken in 2005 in El Salvador, best capture the existential bravado, artistic skill, and exile beyond all social and political institutions that elevated the gang world to a countermythological social force.15 Muñoz captures the spirit of tattooing as a lacerating path to fleeting beauty, not so far from what Michael Taussig, in his analysis of cosmetic surgery in Colombia, describes as “not simply the coexistence of glamor and terror in the world around us today, but their synergism.”16 In the midst of this hell on earth as young people resisted antigang policing by making themselves beatified, saintly outlaws, Erlan Colindres appeared in July 2005 with the rosy cheeks and childish appearance of an angel. As the minister of security recited the boy’s criminal record on television, Erlan seemed the antithesis of the new criminalized subject and nonetheless dialectically entwined with that subject as its purest incarnation, a cherub suspended over a landscape of devils. In an afternoon press conference the day after the shooting, Minister of Security Álvarez, flanked by FBI officials, described how Erlan escaped four days earlier from the Centro Pedagógico Renaciendo (Pedagogical Center for Renewal), a juvenile detention facility west of the city. He had escaped the center on three previous occasions and was a nearly unstoppable savant, a living example of the problems facing the country. Police and security forces would be working through the night, Álvarez concluded, so Erlan’s arrest by morning was all but guaranteed.

3

Allegory

Yolanda was one of my neighbors in Los Piñares and a Catholic with strong connections to the chapel where Markey was killed. Each year she helped set up the first days of the annual celebration of Our Lady of Suyapa, sweeping out the church and directing the sojourners. I ran into her months after the shooting, in February 2006, when she was on her way to the shrine. The annual celebration was about to take place, and they had been worried that after what had happened, people would be scared to come. But more people were arriving than in years past. “Why do you think that is?” I asked. “Well, it’s strange that the boy is one of the Colindreses. You know who the Colindreses are, right?” I admitted I did not. “It was the Colindreses who found the Virgin of Suyapa!” she said with a laugh. “It was in one of the fields by Chimbo, all the way back in the time of the Spanish.” I knew the story that the small effigy was found in the nearby hills, but the details had slipped past me. “I think of what happened with the DEA agent,” Yolanda said, “and it’s very unfortunate. We pray for his family. But it happened in front of the Virgin’s chapel! Maybe we are too superstitious, but in the church we say, ‘When the Virgin is close by, whenever she appears, we need to stop talking and listen for what she has to say.’” The Colindreses were among the first mestizos to inhabit the hillsides east of Tegucigalpa where peasant farmers tended small agricultural plots and donkey trails wound through the pine forest back to the capital. When the Spanish arrived in 1578 the area was inhabited by Tolupán, Pech, and Tawahka groups who knew of the silver deposits in the Choluteca River and the craggy mountains nearby. As the Spanish planned a settlement that they named Real de Minas de San Miguel de Tegucigalpa (Royal Mines of Saint Michael of Tegucigalpa), across the seventeenth country they devastated in-

Santuario de La Virgen de Suyapa, 1952. Photo by Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/ Getty Images.

Allegory 43

digenous communities to produce one of the sharpest declines of native population in the Americas. Remaining indigenous settlements were in turn displaced by small farmers, and survivors were conscripted into the construction of military fortresses on the north coast or in the local mines. In the aftermath, the Choluteca River that separates Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela became a racial boundary between Spanish families in the colonial township of Tegucigalpa and the indigenous enslaved laborers living in Comayagüela.1 In the seventeenth century, as the Spanish crown faltered financially, mining of gold and silver intensified across the country. By 1700 the crown attempted to shore up its authority in the hemisphere, creating monuments to its wealth in the colonial centers of Baroque architecture in Lima, Peru, and Quito, Ecuador. But in Tegucigalpa the silver mines were quickly exhausted, and the bustling city slipped into an administrative disorder. Governing councils struggled to consolidate authority as mining entrepreneurs with large teams of pack animals and laborers found themselves marooned in the southern highlands without sustenance. Fearing mutiny, the governing body opened state coffers to the mining companies, which used them to sustain their teams and pushed the city to the point of financial ruin. By the middle of the eighteenth century, as the crisis deepened, Alejandro Colindres and his son walked from their small hamlet east of Tegucigalpa to Piligüin Mountain, several kilometers into the hillsides. After a day of work in the fields they were caught by nightfall and camped on the ground for the night. As the legend goes, Alejandro was awakened by a jabbing sensation in his side and, reaching underneath, found a small stick that he quickly tossed away. When he woke the next morning, the stick was again beside him, and the air suffused with a powerful scent of flowers. As Colindres stared at the three-­inch stick of cedar wood, he saw its resemblance to the figure of the Mother Mary and heard voices singing in the air. Colindres packed the stick into his bag and returned home, where his wife placed it on the family altar. It was 1747. Found during the darkest hours of colonial violence and state formation in Honduras, the small effigy was invested with preoccupations of those who lived adjacent to the corruption and plunder of the colonial period. Slowly across the next decade the society of devotees grew as the effigy produced several miracles and became renowned for healing powers, the news of which spread to the capital and drew visitors who trekked to find her. The Colindres family contracted indigenous laborers to construct a small chapel where pilgrims could visit her and pray, and with time the six-­centimeter cedar figurine became the locus of tensions and desires that organized individual and communal life, merging material and immaterial forces of history that would become the story of Honduras itself.

44 Gothic Sovereignty

In his classic analysis of the Virgin of Guadalupe in colonial Mexico, Eric Wolf refers to her as a “master symbol,” a term that implies its referential homogeneity and place within a wider belief system but does not account for the symbol’s infinitely varied effects.2 I think of Our Lady of Suyapa rather as a “mass symbol,” one whose affective potential is a balm for the contradictions of historical experience but configures differently across the social realm. Intimacies with the Virgin of Suyapa vary significantly across categories of class and race in Honduras, and her whitening in reproductions is controversial to the many who today view her as a racially indigenous figure. So it is with saints, who depart from the material plane but revisit the liv­ ing to bring healing and relief from historical episodes that, they assure us, are passing. But if saints promise the gift of healing and endurance, what of those that intervene in historical time? What of those who appear with the force of prescience, fortune telling, the gift of illumination, pointing the way during moments of crisis? In Christian theology angels were such figures that arrived with a message, attempting to communicate the overarching perspective of metaphysical insight across the shortcomings and limitations of human awareness. Saints offer miracles and healing, working within the existing social world to hold the present in place, but angels were always the first sign of historical rupture. St. Thomas Aquinas, the Italian theologian whose thirteenth-­ century Summa Theologia is one of the most extended meditations on angels and demons, describes angels as something between God and humans.3 God, Aquinas argues, is an omniscient force without body, ever present and existent. Humans are minds created by God, residing within bodies. Angels, he argues, are minds created by God but without bodies. Angels are not omniscient and are thus imperfect, capable of whims and mistakes that may be acts of good or of wrongdoing. Without perfect knowledge, their lot is to shepherd the fulfillment of God’s plan on earth and thus arrive to point the way to human actors without giving perfect guidance. Few authors more completely fuse the divine and the political in the form of spectral visions than the English poet and artist William Blake, whose most influential writing on angels in the late eighteenth century was contemporaneous with the upheaval of the French Revolution. Blake asked how angels inhabit the world, signal to human actors, and influence human affairs, though he opposed organized religion and imagined the transformation of the world through political and cultural movements rather than divine intervention.4 Between Aquinas, a medieval theologian, and Blake, a poet of the early industrial period, arises the question of how nonhuman harbingers of futurity are embedded across material and social worlds. There is a tension between monumental figurations of hope and faith in the figure of a saint and angels

Allegory 45

as signaling figures that interrupt historical time as potential for transformation of the world. Where might their potential and agency come from? In the Baroque language of the Catholic Church, the investment and concatenation of human desires is grounded in the figure of the saint, but the potential for the collapse of that symbolic regime exists in the figure of the angel, which leaves behind a clearing and a chance for human action. While saints hearken from the past, angels arrive from the opposite horizon of historical time, peeking over the edges of clouds on the misty cusps of world-­historical transformation, holding their breath with anticipation. One of the most iconic and mystical angels of social theory is the “angel of history” that Walter Benjamin describes in his last theoretical writing synthesizing his thoughts on historical transformation as he fled Nazi-­occupied Paris in 1940. He drew the idea from his many years researching and writing on the symbolic language of the Baroque as well as from a series of Expressionist paintings by Paul Klee known as his “angel series”—crude sketches drawn with only a few lines floating over an aquarelle background. Benjamin purchased one of Klee’s paintings in Munich in 1920, and it became one of his most prized possessions.5 For Benjamin, the angel arrived to the present wanting to change the course of human events, only to find itself repelled by the momentum and force of their inevitability. I imagine Yolanda’s understanding of the saint, healing the world so that it might hold together in crisis, and Ben­ jamin’s understanding of the angel, mourning the impossibility of change, as oppositional and yet complementary metaphors for the unfolding of historical time. The former sustained it with the gift of endurance, while the other pushed against it with futility. But within Benjamin’s work is another figure alongside the angel, “the destructive character,” which is similarly paralyzed by historical conditions but finds the capacity to act. The destructive character was crafted in the context of the interwar period, when the struggle against fascism required asking how one might wake up to history as a call to action. Poised between Marxism and anarchism, the destructive character reacted against debilitating confines of alienation and dispossession, with self-­possessed action that reclaimed itself as a historical subject. “What exists he reduces to rubble,” Benjamin writes, “not for the sake of the rubble but for that of the way leading through it.”6 This rubble was the allegorically perceived world whose symbolic content had once confined the subject to impotence and melancholy. In Benjamin’s work the destructive is salvaged from a naturally occurring element of systems of power as a nonideological negation that “sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed.”7 This theory of positive negativity created a clearing in which

46 Gothic Sovereignty

vanquished histories might arise. The force of gangs’ disruption of the present in Tegucigalpa did not so much continue revolutionary currents of the 1980s as expose the veneer of legitimacy that safeguards state violence such that the history of those movements might mean something different to the present. In the vacuum of their disruption the memories of the dead past and present are intermingled, and the underworld is the space in which counterhistories of power might emerge. The fabulation that surrounds gangs is this labor of the negative, in which the compressed energy of historical silences and erasures threatens to irrupt into the present with deconstructive force that undermines the legitimacy of law. As the police and the FBI searched for Erlan through the night, Álvarez assured the public that this was not simply another street crime. Erlan was not just another boy dabbling in petty crime. He was an “enemigo del pueblo,” Álvarez said, a public enemy and enemy of the common good. Erlan’s immaturity seemed to confirm that his condition was specific to him alone, that he was what the Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso famously called a “born criminal,” an individual dominated by atavistic traits that survived the civilizing processes of the modern world.8 Álvarez didn’t need to cite Lombroso, as by morning he had spun a web of narratives around Erlan that located him in a constellation of urban mythologies, the newest character in a crime world whose narrative was shaped by police officials and tabloid journalists. It was one we heard about constantly but that was always also at a distance, ubiquitous and yet forbidden. Jean and John Comaroff have argued from their work in South Africa that such crime and police stories merge fact with fiction, proliferating tales of magical realism in the Global South and the postcolonial world, thus affirming the mystical force of state sovereignty where it is often lacking.9 If the Honduran state was hostage to geopolitical forces that diminished its sovereign claims, it was nowhere more muscular than in pursuit of gangs. For myself and many others in Tegucigalpa these crime and police stories were something between a guilty pleasure and a new genre of neoliberal urban mythology, and only when the stories struck close to home did the veil of fantasy lift to reveal a ruse of media and police whose fictions often slipped beyond their control. As much as the narrative fictionalized its targets, it also created the sense of another world that could surge up at any moment, portending futures otherwise. The crime world of Tegucigalpa was both a fiction and a reality. In a literal sense it mapped new political relations to learn and memorize as people moved from one part of the city to another, where different gangs with different charismatic leaders held sway. But the crime world also

Allegory 47

generated a cartoonish genre of tabloid sensationalism that fed the aspirations of gang members as they searched for ways to elevate themselves beyond the authority of the law. While some scholars regard the myth making and fictitious play in gang life as secondary to other forms of analysis, something as simple as renaming oneself through nicknaming and creating an alter ego that transforms one into something else reveals the state of becoming that sensationalism enabled in the criminal world. The alias is often described as a utilitarian invention to conceal one’s identity, but it also entails the fabrication of a double in a community divorced from the nuclear family that assigned one’s original name as a legally codified enunciation. Nicknames are often drawn from archetypes that lift members out of the realm of individual subjectivity and into a sphere of objects and emotions—Rabia (Rage), El Demoncito (Little Demon), Machetazo (Machete Wound), and others. Gangs are equal parts dogma and fluidity, and in situations of desperation they create power by breaking with the forms of legal recognition, such as given names, by which one’s life is always subordinated to the state. To rename oneself is not just to evade the law; it is to invent something backed with equal force and then to become that thing. Álvarez was a skilled fabulist with his own knack for mythologizing, able to grab a thread of truth and work it over until his targets in the gang world were much larger than life. He was himself a foil to the gang world, tabloidesque and relishing the exaggerated characterization of distinct individuals, seeming to draw from pulp genres as he embellished a pantheon of characters in noir urban legends. Álvarez focused on individuals whose identities he could shape and exploit, and it was unclear whether his authority enabled him to create them or it was the strength of his supposed adversaries that created his authority. The lanky and wheelchair-­bound MS leader La Araña (The Spider) had been Álvarez’s first fixation, a young man of about twenty who had been injured in a shootout with police. In his paralysis, La Araña was described by Álvarez as a strategic genius hiding in the shadows and recognizable by the spiderweb tattooed across his left cheek. Álvarez contended that he was almost impossible to reach, with a network of spies surrounding him who were always a few steps ahead of the police. His barrio in Comayagüela is one of the densest sectors of the city, with narrow streets where children could whistle in relays that chirped up the hill within seconds of spotting a police vehicle. Álvarez described La Araña as a tactical genius, a nearly omniscient character who externalized the loss of his mobility into a sociopathic desire for revenge against the police. When the search for La Araña had gone on for several months and none of

48 Gothic Sovereignty

his neighbors or enemies turned him in, Álvarez’s campaign against La Diabla (The Devil) began. She was from Las Américas, a barrio in the rolling hills and ravines just outside the western beltway of the capital. La Diabla is one of the few women who held leadership positions in the Barrio 18 gang, and reporters as much as police seemed fascinated with the idea of a femme fatale at the top of the gang world. Newspapers interviewed anonymous gang members who claimed it was La Diabla who maintained the flow of cocaine into the city market zone, which stretched from the riverfront across ten blocks and ended in the capital’s historic cemetery. Álvarez claimed that in order to control the police, she had collected photographs of officers in “compromising situations” and held them as a form of blackmail. When they arrested her, police helicopters swooped into her barrio as riot trucks and antigang units ran over the hillsides in tactical gear. Álvarez described her as a seductive con artist, a temptress, someone who needed to be deprived of liberty. Before she was sentenced, she gave an interview in a public radio program from Nicaragua that was heard across Central America. She had shocked the listening public with her conviction not to pursue gang life out of a gleeful transgression of social and political norms but to protect her own family against the state violence unleashed by criminalization. Álvarez wanted her in prison like the rest of the gang members in the city, she said. But she had a family. She had her daughter. And if he tried to separate them she wouldn’t have a choice but to retaliate. She was a warrior, she said, a warrior for her gang and a warrior for her family. The radio interview was frequently referenced by my friends and colleagues in Tegucigalpa as a flash of recognition, however brief, that there was more to the war on gangs in Tegucigalpa than the oversimplified dichotomies of good and evil that fueled extreme measures under Mano Dura. As the story of Erlan Colindres’s escape from the Renaciendo detention center became known, Álvarez again shifted his attention, this time to the detention center itself. He insisted that Erlan belonged there, that his amorality was an expression of the collapsing institutions of social welfare, most of all the center for minors. Renaciendo is near the town of Tamara, twenty-­six kilometers from the capital on the westbound highway, at the back of Penitenciaría Nacional (National Penitentiary) complex that includes the prison for men and another for women. Renaciendo was originally designed as a reformatory with curricula for the moral and social rehabilitation of young people. Initially it was managed by Catholic workers and nuns, but by the mid-­2000s management changed hands and was taken over by the general prison administration, which reassigned personnel to Renaciendo from the men’s penitentiary. There

Allegory 49

were regular stories about Renaciendo in the newspapers, usually reporting casualties from gang vendettas. Guards said they were powerless to stop such conflicts, as they were understaffed and rehabilitation programs had been defunded for years. Just as gangs in the adult penitentiary are segregated into their own barracks where they have established their own interior worlds, Renaciendo had become more autonomous since the early 2000s. Inmates vastly outnumbered the guards. Guards told me they felt in constant danger when any form of discipline they imposed on inmates could turn into retribution and cost them their lives. For young people living on the streets in the capital, spending time at Renaciendo was a rite of passage. It was legendary, at the center of the consciousness of a generation of youth who spent formative years in isolation from their families but in the company of their criminalized peers. Álvarez made clear that Erlan was one of them, deeply marked by failing institutions and beyond reform. Renaciendo could not contain him, Álvarez argued, because it had created him. Erlan and the others knew Renaciendo as well as they knew the sewer tunnels, cemeteries, and alleyways of the capital city. But this time, Álvarez insisted, Erlan had not escaped Renaciendo on his own. He claimed to have evidence that La Diabla had bribed prison staff to liberate him on her command. She had been transferred months before to the penal center in Nacaome, where the concentration of MS-­13 was high. As a member of the Barrio 18, she would be surrounded by enemies. Even so, she had funded Erlan’s escape, demonstrating just how powerful the underground was. Even surrounded by guards and enemies, transactions could be negotiated, guards threatened, weapons procured. Álvarez assured the public that the guards who had been involved in Erlan’s escape from Renaciendo would be reprimanded, but he admitted they had little choice. They were as vulnerable as anyone else who visits these prisons, he claimed, and he was prepared to send Erlan back to Renaciendo. But this time he wouldn’t live with the Puchos. He would have his own cell that was already known as the leonera (lion’s cage). It was for Erlan’s own safety, Álvarez said, as there would be attempts on his life. Designs of the cell circulated in the press—slim apertures for windows, a surveillance tower above, and a confined space where Erlan could access fresh air. While the details of Erlan’s backstory were becoming public, Timothy Mar­ key’s life had also entered public discourse. Their stories were interlocking, one criminal and the other clandestine, both invisible much the same way a taboo is functionally present and symbolically absent from social life. Through Erlan and Markey the upper and lower limits of class hierarchy in Tegucigalpa

50 Gothic Sovereignty

seemed to bend far enough in opposite directions to find one another anew, an entanglement of extremes that Georges Bataille has drawn upon to expand the traditional Marxist category of the lumpenproletariat from one signifying an underclass to a capacious concept that addresses all social forms that are inassimilable to the norms of capitalist modernity. Drawing together Marx and Freud, Bataille suggests the lumpenproletariat as a category of exteriority that is unthinkable insofar as it is voided by the totalizing ideological coherence that structured social life.10 In Tegucigalpa, gangs’ performative criminality was engrossing because it imposed this lumpen world onto everyday perception, though it became scandalous when it dragged into the light of day such repressed elements of state life alongside it. Erlan Colindres’s backstory captivated the public as a vicarious encounter with the unseen world of criminalized children, but the story became scandalous when it exposed the life of a covert agent whose existence had been strategically occluded from public awareness. Together Erlan and Markey formed a gothic sovereign dyad through which the socioeconomic composition of the illicit economy became legible as a social world of lumpenproletariat from high and low stations in the social order. Given Markey’s covert status, the public information that emerged about his life was initially constrained and limited to platitudes about his noble profession. But eventually reports leaked through unofficial channels. The online message board “DEA Watch” was a forum for DEA insiders and narcotics agents from parallel agencies to discuss work-­related matters with anonymity.11 In the days after Markey’s death, several posts on the shooting were published. The writers grieved the loss of a colleague but also expressed deep frustration with the DEA as an institution. They hinted that Markey was possibly the victim of workplace retaliation and that his arrival in Honduras was tied to his dismissal from the DEA office in Venezuela. One contributor posted, As I recall, Timothy had a running gun battle with [headquarters] over his getting the boot out of Venezuela some years back. Constantine [unknown figure] reportedly forced Tim to see a shrink because Tim filed complaints about some of the others in the DEA office were crooks. I would take a close look at all those Tim worked with in Venezuela. If any can be found to have lots of money and/or property they can’t account for that would mean Tim was right and one or more of them might have arranged Tim’s murder to look like a street robbery.

This was the first I had heard of conspiracy theories related to Markey’s death. Everything else had focused on Erlan. The author of the post continued,

Allegory 51

There is a major international incident now going on in Venezuela involving DEA. The top people in VZ want nothing to do with DEA because they say our people are part of the problem and not part of the solution. There was talk that Markey was to be interviewed by certain members of Congress to find out what Markey could tell them about the shenanigans in the VZ DEA office. Hmmmm. Not surprised to hear that of all the people walking the streets in [Tegucigalpa] at that particular hour Tim was the only one singled out for what appears to be a murder and not a robbery gone bad. Back in 2001 Tim reported on U.S. State Department narcotics ventures. He was sent to the shrinks in Chicago under the SRP [Suitability Review Protocol] who diagnosed him with “Axis II, Personality Disorder with Borderline Dependent and Self-­ Defeating Features.” . . . I for one would not be at all surprised to see [DEA Administrator Karen] Tandy come up with a laughable report accusing Tim of arranging for his own murder.

Markey, the author says, was a whistleblower in the Venezuela office. Then the author mentions having communicated with Timothy Markey directly: When I talked to Tim just a few days ago he told me he would be meeting with a congressman about what went down in Venezuela a few years ago. Apparently, the Bush-­Cheney oil people are stirring up a lot of trouble in Venezuela to topple the government so that Halliburton and other companies can move in to take over the oil fields. Apparently, Tim knew about some of what was going on just after Bush and Cheney first came to office. Everyone the Bush people didn’t consider safe—or had too much information—was forced out of Venezuela. There is far more to this incident than meets the eye. Fortunately for Bush he has Tandy who will sweep Tim’s death under the rug as nothing more than a case of robbery. Tim died for oil. Another casualty of the Bush-­Cheney Oil Wars. It seems far too convenient timing for the one person with the honesty and courage to report wrongdoing in Caracas to suddenly get shot by “kids” attempting to rob an American man when there were tons of women with large purses to snatch. With US-­Venezuelan relations currently at a boiling point and military action not unthinkable, along with Congress digging into Markey’s reports about DEA corruption in Venezuela, the obvious answer is Markey knew too much.

For several years I had been planning a dissertation project on the evolution of youth gangs in northern Central America that would reverse the orienta-

52 Gothic Sovereignty

tion of other studies that emphasized deportations from California as creating the gang crisis.12 That narrative highlights the role of the United States in supporting right-­wing dictatorships in the 1980s and strengthening repressive tactics in Central America that criminalized the urban poor. The studies offer historical context to exotic and xenophobic portrayals of gangs overrunning countries of the global South but rarely focus on legacies of US imperialism in the region. Cold War interventionism, the violence and institutional impact of counterinsurgency, NAFTA and neoliberal economic transformations of governmentality, and the expanding war on drugs were not so simple as one ideological view prevailing over another. They had transformed everyday notions of legality, culpability, and crime. To declare oneself a criminal in such a context far exceeded what criminologists call juvenile delinquency. Doing so threw into question the legitimacy of the law and the moral authority of its enforcers. In applications for research funding I tentatively titled this project “Legacies of Organized Crime” as an easy reversal of prevailing narratives to suggest that the culprits behind the rise of gangs in Honduras were not weak states of the Global South but rather the legacies of intervention of the Contra war. The Contra war had been an organized criminal operation, the Tower Commission concluded in 1987, that cast a long shadow on law as well as crime in Honduras.13 What made Honduran gangs important was not their connection to the mythologized gang world of Los Angeles or the grotesque crimes attributed to them in tabloid news, but their appropriation of an illicit economy that was itself a historical artifact. Their involvement gave them firsthand knowledge of the dark side of statecraft and sovereignty, the overlapping labors of covert action and organized crime that have been a commonplace in foreign intervention since the founding of the US Office of Strategic Services in 1942.14 Their proximity to the violence of sovereignty made gang life most threatening to the law, and so as the alternative narratives to Markey’s death circulated, I had a sense that the troubled relations between the DEA and covert operations could manifest in the middle of this project. The agency’s complicated history in Honduras is well documented, though it was still possible that Markey’s death was an unfortunate run-­in that could have happened to anyone walking into the plaza of Our Lady of Suyapa. It was just after noon when police vehicles arrived at Nueva Suyapa and climbed the unpaved roads into the hillside. A caravan of vehicles drove with the lights and sirens turned off into the inner sanctum of Nueva Suyapa known as El Infiernito (Little Hell). Normally they would have been pelted by rocks from unseen vantage points as the Puchos defended their terrain, but all was still. Police in black masks stormed a small wooden house, weapons drawn,

Allegory 53

shouting for Erlan to surrender and get on the floor. Officers outside formed a perimeter behind the vehicles, pointing weapons at the door. Neighbors gath­ ered at a safe distance, and after a few minutes the officers emerged dragging a young boy, no more than five feet tall and without shoes. Erlan squinted in the sunlight, as if he’d been sleeping or hiding under a bed. Officers brought out a second boy, Erlan’s bodyguard Manuel, also shirtless and barefoot. The boys looked stunned and afraid. Officers pinned them to the ground and tied the boys’ hands with a pair of shoelaces, as the officers had been so nervous, they recounted later, they had forgotten their handcuffs. The officers picked up the boys and stood them in front of the flashing cameras of national media. There was no doubt which of the boys was Erlan, as his light-­brown hair and flushing cheeks betrayed him immediately. Then, as quickly as they had emerged, Erlan and Manuel were loaded into a police cruiser and whisked away. As Erlan receded from sight, his brief appearance before a nation of pensive spectators was seared into memory with urgency and presentiment of a dialectical image. Víctor and Yolanda described the moment of Erlan’s appearance as a jolt, as if the whole country had paused in a frozen silence. I understand this silence as that of the political history between the United States and Honduras condensing into a single point, a compression of Baroque time that Benjamin, taking from Gottfried Leibniz, describes as a monad, the juncture where melancholic longing for transcendence is redirected onto the natural world of contingencies. In the monad, Baroque allegory enters a spiral of endless interpretation that is halted only as the “phantasmagoria of the objective . . . rediscovers itself” as the very source of the world’s intelligibility.15 Knowledge of spiritless nature then is gleaned only indirectly, inverted by allegory as the promise of redemption in secular time, what Benjamin calls “profane illumination.” Hours later, as I watched Erlan’s capture on a grainy online video, I had the overwhelming feeling that the event was not, as the police would have it, the end of a story. Given the void of silence surrounding Erlan, the moment seemed not the end of a story but the occasion to tell a different one. Michael Taussig calls this opportunity “penultimaticity,” a single chance to intervene in the chain of stories that constitute social existence but to recast that story just before the next storyteller picks up the thread.16 It is here that ethnography and historical time are imbricated each in the other such that the story of Erlan Colindres becomes an active rather than passive historical object.

4

Image

That morning of Erlan’s arrest, photographers captured a handful of images. It was the first time the world would see Erlan, and still at my kitchen table in the United States, I gazed at the photos on my computer screen and marveled at their ambiguity. After hearing so much about Erlan from state authorities, the photos seemed both factual and fictitious. The photos worked to sustain the accounts of his criminality in staging the apprehension of a fugitive. Yet they also seemed to subvert the narrative in capturing Erlan’s diminutive frame and obvious fear as he was manhandled by police officers. In the first image Erlan and Manuel are pinned to the ground, looking up as officers tie their hands behind their backs. In the second, officers escort Erlan toward the police cruisers. And in a third, Erlan and Manuel sit together on the tailgate of a police vehicle looking shocked and exhausted. Months later I arrived in Tegucigalpa and carried my suitcase down the rocky hillside to Víctor’s house. He had built a small room off the back where I would live that year. On a desk inside, by an open window, he had left the news articles that covered Erlan’s arrest. That afternoon I cut the images and pasted them into my fieldwork notebook. Over the next few weeks as I was acclimating to Los Piñares, the stories about the shooting kept coming back to me. I reread the articles, went over the details of the shooting, the boys’ capture, and Erlan’s and Markey’s background stories. Most of the media and police accounts felt tightly controlled, repeating the same details in different order. But the images had an autonomy of their own, offering a window into granular detail that was absent from the official narrative. The images seemed to reach out, unfinished and alive with potential. Embedded in them were unheard messages from a moment in time that had long since expired. The suggestiveness of the images was exaggerated by the blurred pixilation of Erlan’s face, a requirement by law to shield minors from the stigma of arrest. The

He moved through the pixels as a prisoner through a tunnel. Photo by the author.

56 Gothic Sovereignty

blurring made the photos as much an act of concealment as documentation, a puzzle whose self-­evidence diminished with each viewing. Of the three photos it was the second, of Erlan being led to the cruisers, that shaped my thinking during those first weeks. Its interpretive potential felt inexhaustible. It is oriented vertically, with Erlan at the center, flanked by two officers who are holding his arms. They seem to push him from behind as Erlan arched his back while looking up. His face is pixelated, but his eyes are clearly shut and his mouth open. He seems exhausted, surrendering to the officers’ grip. And if one stays with the image, allowing the senses to meld with the scene, it slowly undermines itself. There is a criminal detainee sought by law enforcement but also the body of a child bent into what is an unmistakable Christ pose. Archetypes of the criminal and the martyr oscillate together as a dualism in which demonization becomes its own form of dignity. Criminalization is caught somewhere between agony and ecstasy, poised at a philosophical cusp of law where death and transcendence are sustained in a mutual relationship of becoming. In crime journalism, photographs of police apprehensions are powerful ideological affirmations that a person acting beyond the law is not above it. Their mass mediation doubly inscribes the spectrality of legal authority as absolute. But photographs are undisciplined forms of factual evidence, and multiple interpretations emerge from the ambient details, those Benjamin describes as “contingencies.” Contingencies cohabit with the objectified target of photographic intention, and the web of unintended associations between them forms an “optical unconscious.” Benjamin writes, “No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-­ forgotten moment, the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.”1 I look at these documents of crime journalism, of pulp tabloid literature, as ghostly incarnations of historical time in which multiple futures are nested in such a way as to retroactively encounter their potential. As Erlan was pushed into police cruisers and led away from El Infiernito, the tension between the ideological narrative surrounding him and the lack of information surrounding Markey amplified the optical unconscious. For those who followed Erlan’s case with the sinking feeling that something was amiss within the official story line, the contrast transformed the banal photography of crime journalism into a site of divination. The images were sites of redemptive dreaming that pushed against the flow of homogeneous historical time. The contingent details of

Image 57

crime photography more than decentered the intent of the photographer and made possible the dislocation of that first layer of meaning that Roland Barthes has referred to as the “obvious” or “informational” meaning of an image.2 If speaking in particular about the obvious message of crime photography found in pulp journalism, the kind that often serves to criminalize the accused and glorify law-­and-­order policing of nation-­states, then the contingencies of such a photo disrupt the coherence of legal authority as its ideological regime extends across the sensory realm of the everyday. Journalistic crime photography leaves the viewer less certain of the seamless connection between legal sovereignty in the abstract and the concrete grip of a uniformed officer. The subversive potential of the images rests largely in the possibility of contradictory interpretations that transform criminalization into an ethics of criminality, that of the destructive character destabilizing an ideological field. The image of Erlan in a Christ pose documents authority in a state of emergency that transcends law, though it also documents everyday police work to enforce the law. The runaway meanings circulating from the photo conflate the diminutive child with the culprit who is a danger to the world around him. Staged to document a thirteen-­year-­old’s innate criminality, the photo instead documents the work of criminalization itself. Here gothic sovereignty reverses law’s privileged position in relation to criminality by aestheticizing abjection as a state of actual experience, as opposed to the meaninglessness of violence directed toward a subject stripped of all rights, the figure Giorgio Agamben names “homo sacer.”3 Such possibilities of interpretation make images important sites of political and historical theory no less than ethnographic methods and storytelling. Here Benjamin’s idea of the dialectical image is all the more important as it moves between the literal and the abstract, where the superfluous flow of images in mass-­mediated society is layered as a phantasm where nonlinear and composite associations flourish. These vivid but fleeting spirals of semiotic organization are vital to an anthropology of law insofar as they counter the ideological labors that constantly reassemble law’s coherence. Gothic sovereignty would be a more hermetic phenomenon and far less politically charged were it not for the voyeuristic and sensational styles of mass mediation in which Erlan’s appearance on the national stage was disruptive not because of his age or the exaggerations of his criminality, but because his fatal encounter with Markey made the work of US neoimperialism widely legible. The fact alone was scandalous, but it also took place in the plaza of Our Lady of Suyapa, one of the most sacred sites in the country. With each mention of the name Colindres, the mestizo family who had founded the first cult of the Virgin as an indigenous folk saint, her story reverberated in the background of the other-

58 Gothic Sovereignty

wise profane news event, as if the counterdreaming of the underworld cleared the way for legions of others whose stories had been vanquished by official history. After the discovery of the Virgin in the mid-­eighteenth century, the hillsides of eastern Tegucigalpa became the epicenter of a folk tradition whose miracles intervened in historical time in the name of the indigenous and the poor. The alias “El Chelito” is a reminder of the tension between his light skin and the history of the indigenous saint curated by the Colindres family, which emerged from a tradition of counterhistories, dream images, and resistance to colonial power. For many who paid close attention to gang life in the city, the Puchos and the Virgin of Suyapa were already connected. I had heard Víctor talk about gangs in Nueva Suyapa as devotees of the Virgin, guarding the chapel and praying to ask her protection. But until Erlan catapulted to national infamy, I had never paused long enough to consider how the Puchos’ fusion of outlaw culture and religious life might reorient thinking about gangs in general. A multitude of outcasts resisting historical time resonated as much with millenarian movements across Latin American history as it did with academic portrayals of street gangs in urban megalopolises around the world. “Millennialism catalyzes postponed insurrections,” Frank Graziano asserts, “and provides holy-­war legitimation for assaults against regimes perceived to be evil. It imbues the local dispute with cosmic importance, renders militancy . . . a manifestation of divine will, rewards success in battle with eternal and universal sovereignty, and assuages defeat with the promise of heroic return or divine vindication.”4 The Puchos’ connection to the Virgin placed their microcosmic revolt in the realm of political theology, in which criminality foisted outside the law and the sovereignty that precedes law are bound together—the mysterious force of the miracle mirroring the aura of sovereignty that would exterminate it. Erlan’s ubiquity in national media inadvertently foregrounded his extended family’s deep connection to the Virgin, associating his gang with a tradition of resistance to state authority that the Virgin historically represented. This connection embedded gangs in the temporality of the Virgin’s miraculous powers, a cyclical temporality of Baroque history that contrasts with the linear evolution of the nation-­state. In Tegucigalpa, the history of the Virgin’s discovery is well known and often recounted. She appeared to Alejandro Colindres in 1747, a time when the Catholic Church was aggressively establishing itself by wiping out indigenous cosmologies and imposing a singular framework for religious life in the country.5 The appearance of such folk saints intervened in histories of genocide with the force of miracles, preventing the erasure of local religious beliefs

Image 59

by smuggling them into the Catholic Church’s own imagery and ritual life. At the time of her appearance, the first cathedral was under way in Villa de Tegucigalpa, in honor of the city’s patron saint, San Miguel (Saint Michael). As a religious force San Miguel was quite different from the Virgin of Suyapa; he was a warrior angel who led divine forces against occult sea monsters in the Book of Revelation. The Virgin, on the other hand, who preserved pagan traditions rather than annihilating them, remained cloistered with her following in the hillsides around Piligüin Mountain. It was not until twenty-­one years later, in 1768, that her reputation challenged that of San Miguel, after a powerful military captain, José de Celaya y Midence, arrived in the hamlet seeking relief from his kidney stones.6 María Isabel Colindres lent him the effigy, which after three days left him cured. When word spread to the city, the Virgin’s following expanded such that by 1780 the local cult of followers had built an adobe hermitage in the surrounding pine forest where pilgrims could rest and pray. By the time the cathedral to San Miguel was finished in 1786, the cult of the Virgin had grown larger still, as mail carriers spread the word of her miracles along the mule trail that traversed Piligüin Mountain all the way to Nicaragua.7 By the early nineteenth century there were annual celebrations marking her appearance each February, and when independence from Spain in 1821 led to a half century of chronic instability with forty-­seven changes to government administrations, her following increased still more.8 By 1875 the pilgrimage had become popularized to the point that on the day of her celebration more than six hundred devotees arrived in Tegucigalpa from Santa Ana, Lepaterique, San Buenaventura, and Ojojona, shocking city residents. When the annual pilgrimage was recognized by the Vatican in 1888, the Virgin’s transition from folk saint to a religious complex at the center of Honduran nationalism was unofficially signaled, as priests and bishops from the diocese of Tegucigalpa attended her celebration for the first time amid crowds that overflowed beyond the chapel doors. Incorporation of the Virgin of Suyapa into the progressive narrative of the nation-­state was furthered in 1925 when her cult was recognized by Pope Pius XI as one of the largest Marianist followings in the Americas. But it was not until mid-­century that she was fully integrated into the symbolic realm of Honduran nationalism, after appearing to soldiers on the frontlines of the “Soccer War” in 1969. The Soccer War was a short-­lived military conflict between Honduras and El Salvador lasting only a few days but making international headlines of the growing tensions in Central America as plantation agriculture created massive wealth disparities and displaced peasant subsistence farmers. Economic and technological transformations resulted in an ex-

60 Gothic Sovereignty

port economy in which ruling families benefited from monocropping with cheap labor forces of displaced peasant workers. In the early twentieth century, issues of land distribution became more critical in El Salvador, with a landmass five times smaller than the sparsely populated and mostly rural Honduras, and Salvadorans crossed the border into southern and western Honduras. By the 1960s, Salvadorans made up as much as 20 percent of the national population of Honduras, and in the midst of an economic recession Honduran President Oswaldo López Arellano cast blame on Salvadoran migrants just as the two countries were scheduled against one another in qualifying rounds for the soccer World Cup.9 After Honduras won the opening match in Tegucigalpa, violence among spectators left the country tense. When El Salvador won game 2 and reports of violence against Salvadorans came from departments across the country, eleven thousand Salvadorans fled the country on the eve of the final match in Mexico City. El Salvador won the match; the Salvadoran government then cut off diplomatic relations with Honduras and the next day deployed its air force to bomb the Tegucigalpa airport. The Honduran air force responded, bombing San Salvador as Salvadoran armed forces mobilized across the Honduran countryside to occupy Tegucigalpa. During the conflagration, Honduran soldiers defending the border town of Marcala reported that in the middle of the firefight, Our Lady of Suyapa appeared to them and gestured the path to safety. As the Organization of American States negotiated a truce to what was dubbed the One-­Hundred Hours War, the account of the Virgin’s valiant actions was appropriated by the Honduran military, which named her Captain General of the Armed Forces in Honduras. Since that time the Virgin’s figure has been reproduced endlessly alongside the state seal, flag, Mayan ruins of Copán, and a lineage of national heroes, all of which are now mass-­produced as state kitsch.10 This cheap commodification of her likeness has frequently drawn criticism for the whitening of her skin and drawn attention to the belief among many of her devotees that the Virgin has always been regarded an Indigenous figure. Her assimilation into the symbolic realm of nationalism exemplifies the racism of mestizaje, the mythology of national unity in which the violent erasure of Indigenous lifeways is naturalized into the progressive unfolding of the modern nation-­state. Despite this oxymoronic transformation of an Indigenous folk saint into an iconic reminder of the transcendental legitimacy of state sovereignty, the Virgin’s capacity for the miraculous continues to envelop her devotees in cyclical rather than linear experiences of time. Over the years in Los Piñares, I came to know followers whose daily devotion reworked the overdetermined symbol into a deeply personalized force. Though she reinforced individual con-

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nection with the nation-­state at large, alternately she offered guidance in the face of political and socioeconomic crises seemingly endemic to the dysfunctions of the state itself. Her image performed differently at different times but always stabilized everyday life for the most vulnerable Honduras, when such crises threatened the disintegration of social bonds at the basis of community solidarity. While the Virgin was hardly mentioned in the media accounts of Erlan’s arrest, images of Erlan were similarly sites of demystification that deflated spectacles of gang violence that usually eclipsed the fundamental contradictions of the late liberal nation-­state—institutional corruption, abandonment of social welfare policy, a militarized public space, and frayed sentiments of national belonging. Crime photography was an everyday, profane medium of divination in which the present was not guided by the divine hand of a saint but haunted by harbingers of futures past. Herein crime photography was a site of anticipation whose potential exceeded the present and drew the past and future into a generative indeterminacy. “Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening,” Benjamin wrote in 1935. “It bears its end within itself and unfolds it— as Hegel already noticed—as cunning.”11 The affective disruption of Erlan’s images, as gothic sovereignty, is that cunning. In the poor districts of southern Tegucigalpa, each day required strategies for physical, economic, and psychological survival that Protestant congregations handled in their own way. In fact, while many Catholics lived in the barrio, the only local churches were Protestant, as independent churches could be founded at will. As long as there was a charismatic leader and a group of congregants, they did not need approval from a centralized religious authority like the Catholic Church. Protestantism boomed in Central America across the 2000s in part because the congregations became mutual-­aid networks. Most local churches pooled weekly tithes into a larger fund that supplied loans to members in times of need, and pastors preached an ethics of personal development that, as Max Weber noted long ago, resonated productively with capitalist economic practices. But especially for evangelicals, the theological interpretations that steeled their congregations against the crises of late liberalism had an adversarial relation to the outside world, which they rejected as sinful, institutionally corrupted, and beyond repair. Until one passed on to the afterlife or witnessed the second coming of Jesus, one endured the fallen world rather than attempting to rectify it. In the interim, singing and prayer buttressed the spirit against life’s challenges. In the evenings in Los Piñares, the reverberation of song and the wails of group prayer echoed across the barrio long into the night. A decade earlier the soundscape of the barrio was quite different and filled

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with the rumbling beats of popular dance music. Built between a steep hillside and a rock-­faced canyon, the landscape is an echo chamber. In the evening, fiestas blaring dance music in Los Piñares or the nearby barrios made it feel like there was always a party happening, but Mano Dura put an end to that. Social gatherings required permits, and curfews left the streets vacant after nightfall. In the void, local gangs operated more openly, defending their territory with high-­caliber weapons that boomed in the darkness. By the mid-­ 2000s the only other sounds at night were the Protestant worship services. Two such evangelical churches had been built across from Víctor’s house, and at dusk they kicked off with a full rock band that played soaring anthems for several hours. Arriving home from work Víctor would sit in the street and smoke, looking up at the churches with a resigned shrug. Once the services concluded, barely an hour passed before the Pentecostal church nearby started prayer meetings that lasted well into the night, dissolving into a flood of cries and professions of faith as the Holy Spirit took hold. As we lay down to sleep and the barrio otherwise fell silent, the prayer meetings kept going until the church was engulfed in wails and cries, the affective expression of divine messages that overwhelmed the constraints of language. Some neighbors in Los Piñares complained bitterly about the self-­declared pastors of Protestant churches, whom they regarded as a new wave of capitalist entrepreneurs making money on spiritual snake oil. Víctor’s distaste for barrio Protestants, however, was a visceral reaction to the distance they kept from the community, instructed by the Puritanical tradition of denial of pleasure and life’s messy but joyful embodiment. The solidarity inside Protestant congregations in Los Piñares was a boost to those who joined, but many felt they had given up on the community itself. When Protestant megachurches in central Tegucigalpa began to draw some of the powerful business and political elites of the capital, one could also sense the middle and upper classes abandoning the fight to improve the worldly plane. Across the city the response to gangs gradually strayed from community development and toward one of two approaches—either militarizing the police against the evils of the criminal world or funding Christian organizations that offered gang members spiritual salvation. This fusion of the religious and the political fueled the aesthetic transformations of gangs in the early 2000s, establishing a Manichean world of good and evil that gangs shaped to their own creative ends. Just down from Víctor’s house in the floodplain of the Río Guacerique were tall reeds where teenagers hid from police and gangs, along the river bottom. Robert Hertz calls such places the “left hand” of the social world, where the unsightly by-­products of material life are discharged.12 The river plain was contaminated with sewage

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and refuse, small bundles of sorcery that washed up on the shore, and occasional cadavers that drifted in the morning mist, victims of the new underground economy. The first kids I befriended in Los Piñares hid there during school hours, and though they weren’t mareros, they reveled in the maras’ allure. When I returned in 2003, they had bartered for an actual tattoo gun and covered their arms and abdomens with images cribbed from heavy-­metal album covers—roiling flames, rustic tombstones, screaming skulls, and self-­ mutilating zombies. As evangelical and Pentecostal theology equated the salvation of humanity with apocalyptic destruction of a world of evil, the left-­ hand turn of gang culture in the early 2000s harnessed those readings in a Nietzschean “revaluation of values.”13 Gangs inverted Christian apocalypticism, intensifying the affects of the fallen world and claiming it as their own. The spirit work of Protestantism lay the groundwork for an ethics of evil that arrested the present into allegorical images, whether tattooed upon the body or captured in crime photography. But when the first photos of Erlan Colindres were published in the media in 2005, what made them unusually compelling was that Erlan bore none of the literal signs of this new countercultural landscape. His childlike demeanor and lack of visible tattoos instead dovetailed with the notion that he was the purest of all outsiders, a distillation of criminal treachery that required no further embellishment. And as such, following the raid on El Infiernito, Erlan was charged with the murder of Markey and fourteen other unresolved homicides in Nueva Suyapa. He was then driven back to Renaciendo in a police caravan as First Lady Aguas Santas Ocaña Navarro went on television to decry the subhuman conditions at the facility and the undignified plan to lock Erlan in a specially engineered cage.14 Conservative media pundits, on the contrary, complained that instead of a cage Erlan should be restrained around the clock, citing the treatment of suspected terrorists at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a model. Renaciendo Director Waleska Rodríguez responded to the furor by saying the center needed so many basic repairs it was not safe for inmates and certainly not secure enough to prevent another escape. The center was established in 1992, first managed by the Catholic sisterhood and then, by the 2000s, the National Institute of the Family. Rodríguez described the layout, which was designed with minimal security measures for young children. The grounds had no spotlights, the perimeter walls were still low, and there was no barbed wire to prevent someone from climbing over. Because the residents were minors, penitentiary guards and police were prohibited from entering and only controlled the perimeter. All this, Rodríguez said, made it easy for teenagers and the more physically developed kids to escape.15 As Erlan stepped out of the police cruiser in front of the gates of the facility

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on August 1, he turned and spoke to the television cameras. “I don’t think I’ll be here long,” he said. “And when I escape, it’ll be so I can kill the journalists who have been saying all these things about me.” Erlan knew the place well, and as he predicted, it was only a week before he was found missing. On August 8 he escaped through a window and ran six kilometers through fields of scrub brush that led him to a nearby coffee-­ roasting plant, where he was found hours later.16 The photograph from the capture showed Erlan lying sideways in the grass, illuminated by a spotlight. He was cowering in a fetal position, covering his face, wearing no shoes, and his legs covered in mud. Officers stood around him cradling machine guns. Erlan later said his plan had been to wait by the highway and catch a car to Tegucigalpa after midnight.17 Back at Renaciendo, journalists were documenting the progress of the construction of Erlan’s cell. Architectural diagrams showed it was six by five meters, with a concrete floor and steel-­reinforced walls. The sheet-­metal roof was double-­layered, and inside were a toilet, water for bathing, and three concrete slabs where Erlan would sleep with future cell mates. At the top were two windows, each a meter long and thirty centimeters high. The roof was also a terrace surrounded by razor wire, to give the prisoners access to daylight and fresh air. A police tower was built to the side where a guard would reside twenty-­four hours a day.18 Though pundits characterized the cell as an excessively comfortable “private apartment,” there were rumors that since his return to the center Erlan had been tortured. Human rights lawyers interviewing him after his escape said he was badly beaten and that guards had taken him to an old well somewhere outside the premises where he was abandoned for several days in darkness. Seemingly contradictory reports quoted Erlan saying he was concerned for the welfare of his girlfriend and mother and would have to escape soon to visit them, implying he could come and go as he pleased.19 It was unclear whether Erlan was a child victimized by state power or a veteran of the underworld running circles around the clunky organs of the state. One news article leans toward the latter: The danger of this jovenzuelo [young man] is extreme. He coldly recounts how he committed each one of his crimes, feeling no remorse at the time of carrying them out, and swears he will take the life of judges, prosecutors, journalists, and the director and head of security at Renaciendo. State intelligence tells us that he has had communication with his accomplices on the outside, asking them to bring two pistols and 120,000 lempiras for the purposes of helping him escape. For this reason the boy spends day and night with two guards and a tutor from the Honduran Institute of Childhood and

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Family, who is teaching him to read and write and giving him an orientation to Christianity.20

Erlan had been back in Renaciendo for just over two weeks when he escaped a second time on August 25.21 Guards found Erlan running down an access road that led back to the highway where a car without license plates was waiting and sped away. The guards complained that Erlan’s escape had been made possible by judges and human rights activists who had prohibited them from restraining him indefinitely.22 “Renaciendo has been turned into a sieve,” a reporter for La Tribuna wrote. “The boy that some call a ‘little angel’ was held in the center’s health clinic, which, due to the alarming levels of overcrowding, was being used as a detention area.”23 Another reporter described the small room where a dozen boys slept on the floor and the door was secured with only a twisted loop of electrical wires. Reporters documented the breakdown of the facility with explanations used many times before—poor security, guards going missing during shifts, and structural failure of the building itself. Some of the kids stated plainly that, yes, the building was full of holes. They could escape Renaciendo if they wanted to. But they lived there because on the outside they had nowhere to go. The state may have abandoned the prison out of disinterest, leaving it to decay in isolation without resources or oversight. But the kids who spent years there had adopted it. Certainly they didn’t have any such place in the capital, where they were constantly hassled by police and vigilantes. They hid in sewer tunnels and in the recesses of the historic cemetery, under bridges and in wooded ravines. But Renaciendo was the commons they all held together, as if it had been put there just for them. When the guards caught Erlan after his escape on August 25, they did not take him back to Renaciendo immediately but to a dark field nearby, where he was tied to a tree and photographed. In the image he was shirtless and tied by his arms, as if embracing the tree; his wrists stretched forward and his head backward, his body seemingly limp. The images were overexposed and grainy, the white of Erlan’s body and the darkness of the surrounding landscape contrasted so the scene looked stylized as an allegory of shape, color, and affect. Only one was picked up by the press and then reproduced to great shock. It looked like the scene of a lynching. Guards deflected, insisting that Erlan was dangerous and furthermore, his escape would not have been possible if they were permitted to bind him with handcuffs and ankle restraints around the clock instead of letting him free regularly to meet the legal norms of incarceration. The leonera cell designed specifically for Erlan’s containment had been completed on August 25, the day of Erlan’s second escape, and when he was

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returned to Renaciendo he was relocated to the new structure. Human rights advocates who had seen the image of Erlan tied to a tree demanded he be professionally examined for injuries. The process was inexplicably stalled for several weeks, and on November 16 several guards took Erlan and two other inmates to the forensic medicine lab in Tegucigalpa. When the vehicle arrived at the forensic office, Erlan leaped from the cabin and fled, still in handcuffs, into the winding streets and alleyways of the barrio Guanacaste. For several hours police blocked streets, and helicopters swooped low until Erlan and two other Puchos were cornered and detained. On their way back to Renaciendo in the midst of rush-­hour traffic, a truck lurched in front of the cruiser and blocked their path, as three gunmen surrounded the car with Uzi machine guns, demanding Erlan’s release. They were quickly surrounded by a police motorcycle brigade and forced to surrender.24 But after being returned to Renaciendo and locked into the leonera cell designed specifically for him, Erlan escaped again a day later. This time he left no clues as to his whereabouts.25 News stories speculated on whether he was in Tegucigalpa or had gone with a smuggler to the United States. Police were on alert nationwide. Reporters attested that the Puchos in Tegucigalpa had been working overtime with robberies and drug transactions to meet the going price of a bribe for Erlan to escape, which put the staff and guards under immediate suspicion.26 How could Erlan have escaped such a cell? For a week, many Tegucigalpans held their breath knowing that the boy was free again, but not long thereafter, police conducting a boilerplate domestic search in the barrio Mary Flakes de Flores in Tegucigalpa found Erlan living there, in what turned out to be a gang safe house.27 Weeks passed before Erlan escaped again, on January 12, 2006, but was caught within three hours and returned to his cell. This escape attempt was again shocking but quickly overshadowed when Erlan’s trial began days later for the murder of Timothy Markey.28 News coverage from Tegucigalpa showed Erlan’s arrival at the courthouse, pixelating his face as he moved quickly through the double doors in a baggy red shirt and jeans. Inside a photographer took one single photo that was reproduced across the media that afternoon, in which Erlan sits outside the courtroom and holds his hands in the air, palms forward, as if to say, “I have nothing to hide.” His face is pixelated, the colors are washed out by the flash, and the projection of his shadow onto a black wall resembles a pair of wings. In wait, media clamored around the courthouse. And as with everything that involved Erlan Colindres, the hearing itself began with an unexpected note. The judge expressed doubt that Erlan was who he claimed to be. Was he not his older brother, named Josué? Had he used his brother’s name just to get a more lenient sentence, as a minor?

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Erlan didn’t answer. The judge said the boy, even if he was Erlan, was also no longer held responsible in Markey’s death. Police reports had shown that the shooter was another member of the Puchos. The judge paused, asked again if this was Erlan or Josué, and then appeared uneasy with the delay. Accounts of any litigation were not described in the news, but in the end the judge moved to convict on three reduced charges: complicity in homicide, attempted armed robbery, and belonging to a criminal gang. Building on ethnographic work in South Africa, Jean and John Comaroff argue that across the modern world, mass-­mediated spectacles of law-­and-­ order policing have captured the imagination of broad publics in part because they stage the triumph of sovereignty over criminal forces threatening to overwhelm them.29 Likewise, such spectacles are not always favorable to propping up the law itself, and in settings of the postcolonial world where wealth and power are often polarized to the benefit of the ruling class, lawbreaking in the face of militarized police repression is often viewed as a morally ambiguous if not a political act. Though the “usefulness of crime,” as Marx has put it, has been a consistent theme across the social science of law and punishment since the late nineteenth century, Comaroff and Comaroff ask how the mediation of these events into a narrative framework draws attention to contradictions inherent to late-­capitalist globalization and, more recently, anthropocenic crises. These crises generate violent dialectics of desperation, displacement, and state repression. Herein lawbreaking has the power to lay bare the differential impacts of injustices ossified into a social world, as criminality whose creative practices and strategies cohere into social formations usually described as “underground.” While these moments are commonplace in many parts of the world, crime and lawbreaking are often far from banal and offer a twinkling of surreality that escapes the totalizing surveillance of lived experience by state authorities. Public fascination with criminal subjects is probably no less common than is the fear of them, and the contradictory pull of these reactions was heightened in the case of Erlan Colindres. This combination of fear and fascination, of taboo and adoration, shrouded Erlan in an aura such that the name El Chelito took on the connotation of an angel, a sacred and mercurial child who is prior to either law or morality. In the Durkheimian sociology of religion, the sacred and the profane are arranged in a constantly discharging circuit that fuels social life. For Durkheim, the sacred is surrounded by taboos and interdictions that keep it at a distance.30 A religious complex like the cult of Our Lady of Suyapa preserves her integrity by keeping the Virgin hidden most of the year, while her irruption into profane, historical time is understood as a miracle. Erlan’s interruption

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of the flow of homogeneous time is not sacred in this familiar sense but draws its power from the taboo against the elements of social life exiled from everyday consciousness that Durkheim calls the “negative cult,” a concept later expanded by both Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois as “the negative sacred.”31 While Our Lady of Suyapa was confined to a religious enclosure at the edge of town, Erlan’s shrine was the porous carceral system with its low walls, defunct surveillance towers, and easy escape routes. The images of his escapes magnified that aura of the negative sacred, which became a spectral sensation across the city, as if El Chelito were everywhere, around any corner, on any rooftop, and ducking beneath any sewer grate. This diffuse and ambiguous specter of Erlan Colindres evoked for me one of Víctor’s favorite urban legends about the theft of the effigy of Our Lady of Suyapa in 1986 that newspapers described as one of the most disgraceful acts in the history of the Honduran nation. The effigy went missing during the night, and the following morning throngs of devotees arrived to Nueva Suyapa to pray as members of the clergy promised no criminal retribution for the return of the statue. Everything in the city stopped, Víctor said, as the search went on into the night. The next morning a custodian was cleaning the toilet in Don Pepe’s Terrace and Bar in central Tegucigalpa and found the effigy wrapped in a bundle of newspaper, hidden in the tank of the toilet. Photos show her lying on the restroom floor, swaddled in newsprint, as radiant in a toilet as in her silken shrine. The restroom itself was sealed off with Plexiglas and made into a shrine. Víctor loved to pay her a visit there, and after work we occasionally stopped by to pay our respects, as the toilet glowed under soft lighting with a statuette of the Virgin perched in the corner. “This is why everyone loves Our Lady of Suyapa,” Víctor said. “She is a saint for everyone, even the drunkards at this bar.” I stared at the effigy, which looked benevolently over the glowing restroom, the floor covered in coins. “When they found her here, they didn’t say that a saint belongs only in the church. They said that this place was sacred, see? To her it doesn’t matter if she is in Nueva Suyapa or a toilet downtown. She looks out for everyone, the good and the bad.” Don Pepe’s closed in 2012, and I thought back on the singularity of the shrine, its buzzing aura of the negative sacred that united high and low, the same spiritual valences that ran through a dilapidated prison like Renaciendo where the meekest of Hondurans found solidarity. If there are sacred toilets, could there not also be sacred prisons, and could there not also be sacred outcasts who huddle in crumbling reformatories that do not lock them away but curate the intimacies of exile?

5

Danger

One of the constants of ethnographic fieldwork is that you start off with a handful of questions that you hope to answer by spending time with people over months and sometimes years. But then somewhere along the way, the world redirects you. The questions that you started off with are displaced, and more astute questions arise from the context of research. For me, that happened when the journalist Miriam Blanco and I met Erlan Colindres one Thursday afternoon in late 2006. We were on our way to the National Penitentiary, where we had been doing fieldwork together for months. I drove as she returned a list of calls and suddenly snapped her phone closed. “Change of plans,” she said. “What happened?” I asked. “There was a massacre in Module 6 [of the men’s facility].” “So they’re not letting anyone inside?” I pulled to the side of the road. We were near the top of the ridgeline, and Tegucigalpa spread out below us beneath a haze that glowed in the sun. It had been a long day driving from office to office in the city. Sometimes driving to the penitentiary gave us time to think. “You want to go to Renaciendo?” she asked. “For what?” Typically we avoided it, as the center was difficult to navigate. Since Erlan’s arrest it had garnered a lot of unfavorable media attention, and often the guards didn’t respond well to visitors. “I have to do a favor for someone there,” Miriam said. “But I can go alone.” “What is it?” Miriam is one of the few people I know who went to the men’s prison regularly, which was highly unusual. No one went to the men’s prison unless they had to. There were lawyers and human rights activists who traveled there occasionally to speak with clients or administrators, but Miriam went several times a week. Part of it was her professional work, as she researched the de-

When the Virgin was found again, photos showed her lying on the restroom floor swaddled in newsprint. Photo from La Tribuna.

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tails of certain inmates’ cases and sometimes had cases thrown out or convictions overturned. But another part of it was personal, about her survival as a well-­known whistleblower against government corruption and police death squads. She has endured years of anonymous threats, and months before I met her she had been abducted by off-­duty police, whom she escaped by throwing herself from the vehicle on a major artery of the city. At the prison Miriam mined inmates for information about police and white-­collar criminals who formed the upper echelons of cartel organizations. She organized and saved that information on external hard drives that were hidden in several locations outside the city. If anything happened to her, she had friends who would deliver them to journalists to report on the hard drives’ content. Among friends and enemies alike, her databases were treated like an urban legend. Only a select few knew if they really existed, but after months of shadowing her I couldn’t imagine that they didn’t. She spent too much time finding exactly the kind of information that would protect her if one day she needed it. “Last night before I went to sleep my phone rang,” she said. “I didn’t know the number, but good thing I answered. It was Erlan Colindres’s mother.” Miriam looked at me, anticipating my reaction. “She was worried because she hears a lot of different things about him. I promised I would go by one day this week and check on him.” “Should I stay back? I don’t want him to think I’m a US agent that’s come to harass him.” “No, I’ll handle introducing you,” she said. I nodded. “Ok, drive fast. It’s already almost three o’clock.” We crested the hill and Tegucigalpa disappeared behind us as pine forest enclosed the road on both sides and we plunged down the mountainside. I swerved around potholes and pumped the brakes, making sure they were working properly. Miriam was obsessive about her car, certain it would be sabotaged if we weren’t careful. Any mishap would leave us stranded and for the moment, vulnerable. There were many ways to do it. A slightly punctured tire would eventually go flat. Loosen the lug nuts and a wheel would fly off. A small puncture to the radiator would overheat the engine. Loosen the oil pan or plug a tailpipe and the engine would seize. Snip the brake lines and the brake fluid would slowly drain out. As I drove, Miriam made calls to families of prisoners held at the penitentiary, updating them on her investigations. She thrived on overturning shoddy police work, but she spent most of her time chatting informally with inmates, taking notes, and piecing together stories over weeks until something came into focus. Much of the time it seemed that little separated my ethnographic work from her version of investigative journalism, adapted as we both were to the criminal underworld. She approached

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secrecy and euphemism with the kind of patience and careful listening that allowed stories to emerge at their own pace. She never forced anything and tried to read evasiveness and distraction as their own forms of communication about a realm of knowledge that was potentially lethal. At the bottom of the mountainside the highway cut across the valley where sunlight streamed through fast-­moving clouds. The smell of roasting coffee beans filled the car from factories miles ahead. To our left were small farms, and to our right was Villa Nueva, where hundreds of families displaced by Hurricane Mitch had been relocated into a grid of cinderblock homes. After that, miles of empty countryside. We passed several corporate assembly plants where crowds of workers waited outside for the afternoon bus back to the capital. Eventually I saw a single prison guard in a blue uniform sitting with a rifle across his lap on an unmarked road. I turned, and we drove down the rugged road past empty cattle pastures until the hillsides parted and the men’s prison came into view. The outer checkpoint was always unstaffed and the bar raised. Across the parking lot were three police cars and a van from forensic medicine. We stopped at the entrance to an access road that led to the prison administration buildings, beyond which were the prison for women and the prison for minors. Miriam handed them a government identification card. “Gangs expert,” the taller guard said to the other. They looked at the ID, then back at us, and slowly returned it. The taller guard waved us forward, smirking as we passed. Miriam used that ID card often. She said it could get her in any room she wanted. To be a registered expert on gangs meant knowing the gang world with an intimacy that frightened most people. They stayed as far away from gangs as they could and anyone who knew them. Why anyone would spend their lives learning about something that many found abject was a mystery they didn’t care to resolve. On the access road we passed the Barrio 18 barracks. The building was outside the main prison, to isolate them from the MS-­13 and frustrate their mutual vendettas. Barrio 18 inmates had converted an old factory building where prisoners once wove fabrics to be sold in the capital. When Barrio 18 took over the building in the mid-­2000s they painted black, gothic lettering “XV3” on the front the height of the building. Guards stood around outside while gang lookouts lurked on the rooftop, keeping an eye out for military vehicles coming from the highway. “Honk the horn,” Miriam said, looking up. I did. Several of the silhouettes raised their hands. They knew her vehicle. “If we don’t come back, at least they know where we are,” Miriam said. Renaciendo was a rundown affair at the back of the penal complex, past rolling hills with vacant surveillance towers and unstaffed checkpoints. It was

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an unmarked, one-­story building that looked abandoned were it not for a guard sitting by the road. I stopped the car. “We’re closed for the day,” he said. “I’m here to see Erlan Colindres,” Miriam said, handing him the government ID. “And him?” he said, looking to me. “He’s a journalist. From France. No Spanish.” I looked at her incredulously. “He will have to leave his ID here with us,” he said. “Use your passport,” Miriam said, under her breath. I handed it over. The guard looked at it, and then back to Miriam. “You said he’s French.” “He has dual citizenship,” she said. The guard smirked and waved us through. She cursed under her breath. “That was stupid of me,” she said. “Why use my passport when I have other ID cards?” I asked. “Because I don’t want them to think you are here long term,” she said. “It’s better to act like you’re just visiting the country and then leaving.” “So why’d you lie about that?” I asked. “Because they hate gringos here, and if we want to see Erlan, they cannot know you are from the States. They’ll think you are from the FBI. Just stand behind me, and no matter what they say to you, don’t talk. Do you know French?” “A little but not much.” “Ok, it doesn’t matter. Keep your mouth shut and I’ll get us in.” Inside two guards sat in diminutive school desks made for children. There was no other furniture in the lobby. Miriam introduced us and flashed her government ID. The ranking guard leaned back and rolled his eyes. Miriam smiled and explained that Erlan’s mother had called her and asked if we would check on him. “His mother is sick and can’t travel,” she said. “We’ll just be a few minutes.” The guard was impatient. “Why should we let you in?” “What?” “You human rights people call us torturers and murderers, don’t you? Do you know what it’s like to work here for years without even bullets for our guns to protect ourselves?” Miriam tried to calm him, but he was just getting started. “The other day one of the Puchos was mopping the floor right here where you are standing. And suddenly he tries to grab my pistol off the table. And how long do you think he had been planning that? Wanting to kill us when we are just trying to feed our families.” She said her concern was the well-­being of everyone in the center. If he could tell her what they needed, she would write a report and deliver it to the Ministry of Prisons. “They know it all, already,” he said, laughing. “Don’t you understand?

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They take the money that could fix this place and send their kids to private school in Miami and New York. Then people ask why kids join gangs and don’t respect the law.” He stood up and picked up his keys. We could speak to Erlan, but we had to wait. “They have been yelling obscenities at us all afternoon and need to cool down. Walk around a bit and come back,” he said. The interior of Renaciendo was like a school, with open breezeways on three sides of a courtyard that led onto an expansive field with a perimeter wall in the distance. Miriam and I walked slowly down the corridors looking into windows of rooms filled with stacked furniture and boxes, each with a corroded padlock on the door that gave the impression none of the rooms were utilized. We walked past the courtyard into the field and heard whistles from a nearby dormitory. More than forty young people were inside, shirtless and sweating in the afternoon heat. An overwhelming smell of urine hit us before we were even close to the structure. “Who is in here?” Miriam asked. A crowd pushed against the bars. They were Barrio 18, several said, flipping hand signs and laughing. They wanted to know what we were doing. Miriam said we were human rights investigators auditing the prison. I stood back and Miriam did the talking. She had a warm and playful presence. “Write this down,” they yelled, offering a litany of accusations about misspent funds. First, they said, fix the pipes. That’s why it stinks so badly. Second, fix the kitchen. Meals were given out only when the kitchen appliances were working properly. What about shoes, Miriam asked. All of them were talking at once, holding up their bare feet, many of which had infected sores. Despite the conditions in the cell, Miriam had the kids laughing. As they spoke I could see Miriam glancing toward a solitary structure about fifty yards away in the otherwise empty prison yard. As the conversation wound down, she pointed to it. “Is that where Erlan Colindres lives?” she asked. “Another kid lives there now,” one of them said. “El Chelito lives with the Puchos.” “He does what he wants in Renaciendo,” another said. They laughed. Miriam and I walked to the cell. We could see that the door was open and the guard post was empty. Miriam paused and looked back toward the main building. The kids in the dormitory were silent, watching us. A breeze blew and funneled the dust from a makeshift soccer field into a small twister that dissipated some seconds later. We walked to the door of the cell and stuck our heads inside. There was a boy sitting alone, adjusting the dial on a small radio. He looked at us, unstartled. “Do you have batteries?” he asked. Miriam shook her head. “We can’t get any good stations out here,” he said. “Is this where Erlan Colindres lives?” Miriam asked.

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“He’s with the Puchos,” the boy said. “Can you bring us better radios? We need wire, for antennas . . .” Miriam was looking up, where “CHELITO” was written in bold black letters on the ceiling. There was a montage of hand-­ drawn images around his name, flowers and roses with thorns, daggers with droplets of blood hanging from the blade, angels and devils floating around clouds in a sky with a sun and moon, and assorted skulls, hearts, serpents, and revolvers drawn with a childish crudity. Miriam asked the boy if he had family, and he said they lived somewhere in Carrizal, one of the largest barrios in Tegucigalpa. “Would you like for me to contact them?” Miriam asked. He shrugged and continued searching the radio dial. “If you can bring us batteries, we can pick up better stations,” he said again. The afternoon was getting on, so we walked back to find the guards. On our way through the courtyard a boy emerged from behind a wall, at the opposite end, and then vanished again. Then there were two others, peeping over the edge of the roof. I sensed Miriam was nervous. “They say there are more than one hundred fifty kids here, but we’ve only seen how many, fifty?” I shrugged. “Where are they?” she asked. At the front desk again, Miriam asked about the boys we had seen. “Yeah, those are the MS-­13,” a guard said. “They live in those barracks over there. But I can’t let you in. They are impossible to deal with. The sewage piping is ruptured, and every time we try to get in to repair it, they think it’s their chance to escape. None of us likes the situation here, but we are public servants, so we have a duty.” Miriam was writing in her pad, assuring him that human rights workers wanted the same dignity for the guards as they did for the inmates. “Sometimes we fall asleep right here at the desk, from boredom, and then wake up scared because some kid could have killed us in our sleep. They don’t feel the same kind of remorse that you and I do because all they know is abuse from their families, the police, and living on the streets.” He picked up the keys and started walking the other direction. “Come on, the Puchos are waiting for you.” The corridor ended in a round vestibule with several black metal doors. The guard pounded on one of them and opened it. Inside a crowd had already gath­ ered, pressed against a second door of metal bars. In front was a taller adolescent boy who looked at us defiantly with a slight smile. There were countless small scars across his chest and smudgy tattoos on his fingers as he gripped the bars. Looking inside, there appeared to be no windows. Miriam asked several basic questions she asked anytime we were in a new prison ward: how many lived there, if they had enough to eat, if any with ailments had access to medical facilities at the men’s prison nearby. I stood back, saying nothing, as

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Miriam wrote down names and the phone numbers to call their mothers on our way back to the city. “Bonjour!” they yelled to me as the guard pulled the door closed. He went to the next metal door, pounded on it, and then opened it. Inside was a dark chamber where two boys stood a safe distance away. One was tall and lanky with dark skin and curly hair. The other was short with fair skin and brown hair. “El Chelito,” the guard said, stepping backward and looking over his shoulder down the corridor. We stood in the doorway as Miriam explained our visit. They both looked at us without smiling and then looked to the floor. Erlan thanked Miriam, said he was doing fine, and that he’d been living in this cell with Rubén, who was also from the Puchos. Miriam was staring at him, and he met her gaze. “Maybe you can let us inside for a few minutes?” she asked the guard. “If it’s ok with them?” They agreed and stepped back. “Ten minutes,” the guard said. “If you can close the outer door,” Miriam said. He shut the metal door, and the warm glow of a single bulb lit the stuffy interior. We stood awkwardly. Rubén offered us water from a cup sitting nearby. They cleared off the single mattress against the wall, and we sat. “So you know my mother?” Erlan asked. “She called me, yes,” Miriam said. “You used to have workshops in our neighborhood where you would bring the sound system and the rappers could say their rhymes in public.” “You were there!” she exclaimed. “Yeah, everybody loved that. We always wanted to come to your library.” “You should have come,” she said. “I think I saw you downtown sometimes with other boys who lived by the river near the Congress Building.” “Yeah, that might have been us.” The conversation lulled. Erlan looked at me. We stared at each other. I felt tears welling up in my eyes. “Miriam’s telling everyone I’m from France and I don’t speak Spanish,” I said. Erlan smiled. “She only said it so we wouldn’t scare you.” I wiped my face with my sleeve. “It’s ok.” “I’m a gringo, but I’m a university student. I just wanted to come because I felt bad for what happened to you.” “Thank you,” he said. “I wanted to tell you there are people out there who don’t know you, but we worry that you are ok.” “It’s ok,” Rubén said, “we are glad you are here.” “He’s helping me all the time now. You can trust him,” Miriam said. They

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nodded. “We’re moving everything from my office in Tegucigalpa to the inside of the barracks called Casa Blanca, at the penitentiary. You know the police broke in my office and vandalized everything? They destroyed what we had there.” “Yeah, we heard about that,” Rubén said. “It’s a shame,” Erlan said. “People trusted you. They weren’t afraid to go there and ask for help.” “Well, we will be nearby, if you boys ever need anything. It’s just like the office in Tegucigalpa but in Casa Blanca where the police can’t steal our files. You just send us a word, and we’ll come over.” They nodded, and we sat in silence for a moment. “So how is everything right now?” Miriam asked, lowering her voice. “Is there anything we can help you with?” Erlan looked at us, then lifted his shirt. There were fresh scars streaking across his stomach and circular wounds on his chest that looked like burns. He pulled the collar of his shirt to the side and there was a thick scar between his neck and his shoulder. Under two rocker-­style leather wrist bands, there were poorly healed lesions that suggested he had been tied. I felt my head fill with blood, and my vision blurred. I turned away and stared vacantly into a dark corner of the room. I could hear Miriam asking them if they needed help. Rubén was doing all the talking. Suddenly he raised his voice so the guards could hear him. “We don’t give a fuck about these pigs! Every day they try to break us— withholding food, not giving us water, threatening to tie us to a tree out there and leave us for the MS to do what they want. We’re Puchos! This is El ­Chelito—how can we be scared of anything? We are warriors.” Erlan reached over and put his hand on Rubén’s shoulder, smiling. Rubén took a breath and looked at us, speaking quietly again. “This is a big cell for two people, right?” he asked. I nodded. “There used to be five others in here with us. A week ago we were sleeping and there was a sound up there like a monster.” He pointed to a narrow aperture near the ceiling that was the only source of fresh air in the room. “There was a man up there wearing some kind of mask, like a demon. None of us moved because kids will tell you there are spirits here, bad ones. But then later that night the door opened, and they grabbed five of us, put bags over their heads. They took them and no one knows if they are alive or dead.” Again, Erlan seemed to stop him. “We can give you their names,” Erlan said. “Maybe you can check with their families, or at El Carmen [youth detention center in San Pedro Sula].” Miriam wrote down their names in her notebook. “But out here, whatever happens, we can handle it ourselves. Tell my mother not to worry.”

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“Ok,” Miriam said. She looked at her watch. “I’ll speak to your mother, and we will be back as soon as we can.” There was a small radio on a nearby shelf, and Miriam picked it up, turning the dial, stopping on a reggaetón station. She smiled, dancing slightly. “You all have to dance in here. It’s good for keeping your spirits up.” She egged them on, and both boys got up and danced spontaneously. For a few moments it was as if we were in a community hall in the barrios of Tegucigalpa and the prison didn’t exist. They grooved in the dimly lit cell. As the song ended, they laughed awkwardly, and the mundane world of the prison returned. But something uplifting had happened, and that in itself felt worth the visit. Moments later the guard rapped at the door with his nightstick, like a gunshot, and opened the door to the vestibule. “Ten minutes,” he said. Outside in the parking lot, dusk was approaching. “I lost track of time in there,” Miriam said. “We need to get back.” We stopped at the security checkpoint on the way out, and Miriam said goodbye to the guard and asked for my passport. He opened a drawer, and then looked under a notebook on the desk. “We don’t have any passport,” he said. Miriam stared at him and then insisted we had left it there. “It must have been the other guard,” he replied. They went back and forth. Miriam was arguing with him that there had been no change in the shift. It was the same guy in the booth. She turned quickly. “Go now,” she said. “Get the hell out of here!” I accelerated out of the parking lot. “Go that way,” she said, pointing to side road. “We can’t go back the way we came.” I drove fast down the dirt road, and soon we came around a curve and turned onto the paved highway back to Tegucigalpa. Miriam was checking the mirrors and scoping out the road ahead of us. “What was going on?” I asked. “I couldn’t hear what the guard was saying.” She looked at me with an expression I had not seen before. “Those guards just stole your passport. That’s what happened.” “Why would they do that?” I asked. “What I want to know is this—how can they do that?” She looked at me solemnly. “I thought you were protected by the embassy.” I was confused. “What do you mean? No one protects me. I don’t have any protection like that.” “But Jon, you are in Honduras, doing research about gangs. How can you not be protected by someone?” I still didn’t understand. “Who would protect me?” “The FBI or the CIA, for example, people who want to know about gangs.” “I don’t work for the US government!” I exclaimed. “Be careful driving,” she said, pointing to the road ahead. “Like I said, I don’t work for the US government.”

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“Well, that’s clear now, after that guard stole your passport! I can’t believe I let this happen. What cagadal [fucked-­up situation].” She looked out the window. “Let what happen?” Miriam was annoyed. “He took your passport. Now people know who you are. They know that we were talking with Erlan Colindres. I would never have gone out there if I knew you weren’t with the US government.” “Jesus,” I said. “Why would you work with me if you thought I was an agent, like that?” “Because I’m not scared of your country, and there are agents everywhere down here. You have to get to know the enemy. You think we didn’t do research about you when you first emailed me? We can find out things, just like your FBI.” “Well, so what did you find out? That I’m a student?” “We didn’t find anything.” “And so?” “That might also mean you are a new agent and there’s nothing about you yet.” “Oh my god,” I said. “Anyway, it’s not about the guards.” “What then? I’m lost.” “Don’t you know the gringo who used to be in charge of everything at Renaciendo? He’s one of your compatriots, after all.” “Who are you talking about?” “Frankie Stearns? You’ve never heard of him?” “I don’t think so.” “He was a consultant to Renaciendo until just before Erlan escaped last year. The First Lady vouched for him! So you’re saying you don’t know who I’m talking about?” “No, I guess I was in New York and didn’t hear about it. I wasn’t paying attention to prisons back then. I never planned on coming to the prisons until they locked up nearly all the gang members I used to talk to in Los Piñares.” “Well, the guy I’m talking about has a neck like this,” she put her hands in a circle like the trunk of a tree. “Everybody thought he was some kind of US agent, but he said he was an evangelical pastor. Then the first time we heard him preaching he started off, ‘I was in the CIA and I used to be a hitman, an alcoholic. I used drugs, cocaine and marijuana, and then I found God.’ That is the guy who had full access to Renaciendo anytime he pleased. So now do you see how Erlan Colindres escaped, and a day later he killed a DEA agent?” “Why?”

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“Oh hell,” Miriam said, looking at me. “Because, Jon, your own countryman gave the orders. You think he’s really a pastor? People say he’s into all sorts of things. And that agent from the DEA must have known something about it. That’s how an agent gets killed. Not because two kids want to rob a gringo in broad daylight!” We were cresting the hill, and Tegucigalpa spread out across the valley. In the distance we could see the Suyapa cathedral, glowing as the sun receded behind the ridge. Headlights were appearing on the beltway. I was lulled by the panorama when a boy appeared from the side of the road and rolled a tire into the path of our car. Miriam screamed. I crashed into it, and our front headlight exploded. The car lurched sideways into the oncoming lanes where another vehicle dodged us, and I brought the car back under control again. “What was that?” I said, in shock. Miriam was looking in the rearview mirror. I could see the boy scrambling up the hillside. He seemed to be smiling. “Dammit, we should have taken the back road,” she said. “What do you mean?” “They’re sending us a message,” she said, looking at me. “That had something to do with Renaciendo?” Miriam laughed. “What do you think? Has that happened to us before, all the times we’ve driven the route home?” She was shouting. “This is a small country and word travels fast,” she said. “How many kids from Renaciendo do you think they could call to try and scare us on the way home?” We descended the ridge in silence. Miriam pointed to a shopping mall, one built along the beltway to serve the outer, poorer, residential districts. “Go there,” she said. At the door armed guards were frisking several young men, a protocol to keep gangs out. “There’s an internet cafe on the first floor,” Miriam said. “I want to show you something.” The gleaming floors and bright lights were a shock to the senses after spending the afternoon in Renaciendo. In a dim corner of the lower level was a cyber cafe that was empty except for a few teenagers in Catholic school uniforms, looking at social media and giggling. Miriam sat down and entered the URL of a site that was accessible only by direct entry. She could type like lightning. “You have to know how to archive everything,” she said. “Do you?” I didn’t know what she meant. “One of the kids who worked at our office was a hacker. He showed me how to set up a vault in el internet clandestino [the dark web] where only other hackers can get to it. Most of the police in this country are too lazy to find it. We should have scanned your passport and put it there.” “What should we do, go to the embassy tomorrow?” “First, I want you to see who you are dealing with,” she said. She searched “Frankie Stearns” and “CIA” and hit return. There were message boards with

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dense pages and then grainy photos of a clandestine weapons lab from the 1980s. The text was a detailed and spiraling narrative about a vast conspiracy theory that I had stumbled across before, as I read about the history of US covert operations and the Contra war, though I couldn’t remember many of the details. The lab was initiated by high-­ranking FBI insiders on the sovereign land of a Native American nation in the Pacific northwest, a location that gave them cover from US federal law. The lab developed experimental weapons, some of which were supplied to the Contras. I didn’t remember the name Frankie Stearns, but he was described in the narrative as an ex-­Marine affiliated with the lab. “Read here,” Miriam said, advancing the screen to the last page. Relations soured with the leadership of the tribal council, it stated, and a significant member of the tribal governing council was murdered. Stearns was the primary suspect and vanished before being apprehended. “He lived in Nicaragua for years,” Miriam said. “How do you know?” “You can hear it in the way he speaks Spanish,” she said. “He thinks he can hide it but he’s got a Nicaraguan accent.” I stared at the image, a grainy and low-­resolution jpeg, wondering where this was leading. “So then in 2002 he arrives to Tegucigalpa and says he’s an expert on trauma and drug addiction. But the important detail is this: if he’s wanted for murder in the US, and hasn’t changed his identity, and yet the US embassy knows he’s here, why hasn’t he been sent back to stand trial?” My mind was blank. “What does that tell you?” she asked. “They have some kind of understanding,” I said. “No, it means they don’t have the authority. And if he has more clout than your embassy in this country, what does that mean?” I couldn’t think. “It means he’s got security clearance that is higher than the ambassador.” After a few moments of silence, I could see what she was suggesting, as everything snapped together in an instant. Stearns was the incarnation of gothic sovereignty’s historical returns. “So you’re saying Stearns, being connected to Renaciendo, used Erlan to assassinate Markey.” Miriam stared at me with no reaction. “When foreigners like you come to Honduras they have to learn,” she said. “It’s like we all have the same instincts, but Hondurans have one more that you don’t have. We have to know how to survive. We have to live with gangs, with cartels, and with the United States. So we have to be able to know things before they happen. People from other countries are sleepwalking compared to us.” Ever since I’d met Miriam, I always felt several steps behind her, unable to keep up as her intuition seemed to arc out in front of us, decoding the world before it revealed itself. It didn’t matter if we were at a government ministry,

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listening to testimony from victims of police violence, or attempting to evade rush-­hour traffic. She had powers of anticipation that I lacked. That evening, as we drove to Los Piñares to drop me off, we drove in silence. I thought about her state of awareness, her ability to read the muted premonitions embedded in the social world, and those magnified by technologies and circulation of mass media. I felt inadequate as an ethnographer and as an anthropologist and wondered if Miriam and I would even speak again after tonight. If I had no government ties that afforded her protection by association, I was a glorified chauffeur, at best. At worst, I was putting her in danger with my own ignorance. Ethnographic methods await this moment when one’s senses and intuitions reach their limits. As we drove to Los Piñares I could feel my attention shifting, adjusting to an awareness of my own shortsightedness, lack of experience, and misreading of the world around me. The visit to Renaciendo had transformed the way I thought not only about gangs but about the underworld in which they operated. That underworld was not new, and gangs did not run it. It had deep histories and seasoned veterans who were skilled at remaining invisible in official narratives of US-­Honduran relations. Frankie Stearns was one of them, and Erlan had entered his orbit. So too had Markey. Each of them—a covert operations professional, a young gang member, and an undercover DEA agent—lived their lives outside the visible and acknowledged social world of Tegucigalpa. They were inassimilable to it, each defying the self-­same, rational, and calculating subject position at the basis of social life’s familiarity and homogeneity. Such an ordering did not account for them. They were elements of what Bataille describes as the heterological social realm, analogous to the unconscious—where practices and individuals who do not fit the rational and prudent conventions of a capitalist life driven by efficiency and productivity are repressed until they arrive with scandalous disruption to the given world. For Bataille, the heterogeneous includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditure . . . everything rejected by homogeneous society as waste or as superior transcendent values. Included are the waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter (trash, vermin, etc.); the parts of the body; persons, words, or acts having a suggestive erotic value; the various unconscious processes such as dreams and neuroses; the numerous elements or social forms that homogeneous society is powerless to assimilate (mobs, the warrior, aristocratic and impoverished classes, different types of violent individuals or at least those who refuse the rule—madmen, leaders, poets, etc.) . . . violence, excess, ­delirium, and madness characterize heterogeneous elements.1

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Bataille, writing in the 1930s, speculates that fascist demagogues would attempt to expose and yoke the heterogeneous into a political force. But in the late liberal societies of global capitalism in which such elements are nonetheless still excluded from everyday consciousness, are the excluded elements of the heterogeneous not occasionally organized into communities of their own? Communities in which wasteful expenditure, sovereign power, and criminal recklessness coalesce into a separate economy? Where abundance is valued over scarcity, where pleasure is valued over prudence, and where risk is valued over self-­preservation? Is that what the “criminal underworld” was? When we hear about “gangs” in Honduras, were they the newest and most flamboyant social communities to take root in a heterogeneous sphere that long preceded them? Despite all the pearl clutching about gang violence, was the real scandal their theatricalized irruption into everyday consciousness that exposed a realm of contemporary life otherwise repressed? When Miriam dropped me off in Los Piñares we agreed to go to the embassy in the morning to report the theft of the passport. “They’re going to ask why we were there, and I doubt you want to mention Erlan Colindres. We’ll figure it out.” She reversed the car and drove away. I stood for a few moments in the intersection as fireworks from a nearby birthday party exploded in the sky and illuminated the streets. The cascading thoughts that plagued me on the way back had subsided, and for a moment I felt a deep sense of connection to Los Piñares and to Tegucigalpa as it twinkled in the distance. Whatever I had been thinking for months leading up to this moment had been partially wiped away, and in the space cleared by its absence I sensed the opportunity to be more present to the world around me. The intellectual baggage that I had arrived with felt lighter. That night I stayed up late taking field notes for several hours until the streets outside were silent. Before bed I looked back at the pages of my journal from a few days earlier, which read like they were written by someone else. I made notes in the margins with a different-­colored pen, reflecting on what in retrospect were clumsy and flailing attempts to find a toehold in the research. Finally, I thought. Fieldwork had begun.

Part II

Devils

What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties . . . the ploughshare of evil must come again and again. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

6

Underworld

I began this book with the story of Erlan Colindres because the shooting, his incarceration, and finally our encounter with him dismantled how I had been thinking about gangs. I had been researching gang history in Tegucigalpa for several years, spending summer months on the southern fringe of the city in the barrio I am calling Los Piñares. Like everyone in the barrios I watched as gangs moved into the narco-­economy, handling street-­level drug sales and defending turf with more sophisticated firearms. It was clear that gangs had taken the illicit economy by storm, but I had not considered that it meant being part of an underworld whose history was imbricated with the clandestine side of US imperialism and Honduran statecraft. Instead my focus had been on the evolution of gang aesthetics, which I viewed as a reaction to the state’s highly repressive campaigns against lower-­tier crime groups such as gangs. In part II of this book I describe the evolution of the gang world in Tegucigalpa’s outer barrios from pandillas to maras and their practices of tattooing that often focused on themes of the gothic. But I begin with the illicit economy as the cauldron of material and affective abundance from which gangs reimagined themselves during the early 2000s. Across the 1990s there had been hundreds of pandillas around the south side of the capital, each with idiosyncratic names and symbolic representations its members created collectively. The Ponys, Metallica Gang, Felons of Honduras, The Nerds, Airplanes, Rockers, Monkey Gang, Machete Control Gang, Octopi, Charcoal Gang, Mudpuddles, The Weeds, The Incinerators, Unforgiven, Satanic Maniacs, Clunkers, Black Demons, Gummy Bears, Poison, 30/30 Gang, Grasshopper Gang, Kids from the Eucalyptus Trees, and more. As I walked through the south side of the city, the technicolor murals and brutalist graffiti on barrio walls marked a Renaissance of youth culture, one that privileged art and leisure over the toil of deskilled labor that awaited most young people from the barrios. But by the early 2000s a transformation

The underground swelled beneath our feet. Photo by the author.

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of gang culture was taking place as the MS-­13 and Barrio 18 absorbed nearly all the local gangs under their banners. Some went willingly, and others were conscripted by force as street violence in the barrios spiked. Los Piñares was a compelling site to observe all that was happening. It is a small but populous barrio abutting on one side the paved road that leads to several corporate business parks and on the other side the Río Guacerique, which flowed from a reservoir a few kilometers up the ridge. It was home then to around 150 families and had four unpaved streets running down the hill and four running horizontally, with a footpath cutting across in a diagonal. In the late 1970s the first residents settled there in a shady pine grove that, seen from vistas high up the ridge, is still intact, giving the barrio the appearance of a lush garden in the middle of a sea of corrugated metal rooftops. Most of the homes were plank wood, the streets were strewn with bulbous stones, and many houses were without electricity or water. The barrio was disputed territory between Barrio 18 and the MS-­13, as was obvious by the layers of graffiti at the main barrio entrances where each gang defaced the murals of the other with large X’s until the surfaces were palimpsests of gang affects that looked like monuments to a new underworld. Though the maras were intimidatingly spectral, supposedly connected across borders as international networks stretching all the way to Canada, their local groups were also gang communities in a familiar sociological sense. They were teenagers coping with forces of structural marginalization who banded together to create oppositional identities with a hue of outlaw glamour. Their members were the sons and occasionally the daughters of families who formed part of the social fabric of Los Piñares who, no matter how committed to transgressing the expectations for young people in the barrio, remained nonetheless recognizable as members of the community. By the early 2000s the underworld of narcotrafficking seemed to expand exponentially, changing the lives of those young people involved in gangs. Cocaine traffic in Los Piñares became more evident in a few short months, as points of sale multiplied and distribution on street corners became more brazen. Eventually it was clear that gangs walking the streets were doing more than defending territory from other groups. They were defending market space and accruing capital that, in turn, afforded them more latitude than ever before. They could bribe police, purchase clothes and electronics, graffiti their symbols anywhere they chose, sell drugs openly, extort neighbors for money, and occasionally take the life of a rival gang member without repercussion. Each gang was more than the sum of its membership and part of a broad network with safe houses across the city. All of this quickly translated into de facto authority in the local streets beyond that even of the police. In

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Los Piñares the police rarely left the station just a few blocks away. They complained about being underpaid and understaffed and were reluctant to risk their own safety by intervening in local gang activities. Most neighbors in Los Piñares also considered confrontation too dangerous and instead scrutinized the new developments quietly while outwardly feigning obliviousness. Despite the frenzied transformations of barrio life, a typical conversation with neighbors rarely if ever broached the topic of gangs or drugs. People were openly critical of the police, but that was not controversial. Gangs, however, were another matter. Given the taboo around talking about gangs, I knew there were aspects of local life about which I too would remain strategically uninformed. It was awkward, being there as a researcher and acting as if I wasn’t doing research, but in the end it came as something of a relief. I had been uncomfortable asking about gangs in the first place. The topic was exploited in government propaganda and tabloid media such that further interest in it would be regarded as prurient at best and, at worst, cause to avoid me altogether. Asking friends and neighbors to articulate what they had otherwise skillfully denied knowing put all of us in a bad position. In public, social interactions with neighbors were often so bland that I worried I was simply not connecting with anyone, though communication was happening. After a while I realized the range of subtle cues inside of otherwise anodyne interactions—from the raising of an eyebrow, a figure drawn in the dirt with your foot, a pursing of the lips, to a prolonged stare over the shoulder. All of it referenced the troubled world around us, and as I grew accustomed to this layered and conspiratorial communication, it was the subject of ethnographic methods that occupied much of my thinking. Researching what was forbidden was anything but intuitive. It required counterintuition, a decentering of the foundations of ethnographic research as it is commonly practiced—participant-­observation, interviewing, and photography—and proceeded with a scuttling, orthogonal movement. Preserving relationships with people meant not asking direct questions but instead relying upon the gradual unfolding of chance and intuition to reveal the world slowly. That slow process, I realized, was also singular to a given researcher and shaped by things that were outside of my control—one’s personality, physical appearance, ability to tell a joke, reserves of patience or impulsivity, and so on. As I was looking at the world, so it was looking at me, and in Los Piñares this meant respecting the time required to know a place, a knowability that was itself a cultural artifact composed of historical and social particulars that accreted over the world like a thick skin. To move through it was to envelop oneself in potential events and relations that would be shaped by how a

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community displayed or concealed itself or rather, the relation between public knowledge and its lacunae. The accretion over time of things come to pass and things on the horizon is the gossamer substance called atmosphere, what Kathleen Stewart describes as “the plasticity and density of lived compositions . . . proliferating in everyday scenes of living through what is happening.”1 All the while that the world assembles around and through us, social life in zones of risk is redirecting matters such that forbidden knowledges remain both intimate and distant. In the midst of it all I found myself trying to stay ahead and always somehow in the slipstream of life’s happening, where the most practical tool is the very basic and yet numinous fieldwork notebook. A plain composition notebook that is equal parts diary, archive, and scrapbook, it is less a storehouse of information than a chronicle of the disorientation and attunement that grounded me in a new place of experience. I use simple composition notebooks rather than fancy ones to take the pressure off of what is largely a process of groping along, an unglamorous waiting for things to occur, and what goes into the notebook usually begins with free-­form diary writing. But then it moves into an aggregation of ephemera from everyday experience in the form of jottings, drawings, clippings, and material fragments. These amass into a composite account of each day that one revisits through recursive readings, where new margin notes create a supplementary text that fills in gaps, makes connections, and inches along toward insight that recasts previous questions into better ones. From this process comes an account not only of fieldwork’s day-­to-­day affairs but of how one’s observational and interpersonal style shapes the ideas that emerge from it. Ethnographic fieldwork is not finding answers but rather investing in time, in an accretion that displaces the desire to figure out or get to the bottom of things and grounds me in passing time through naïve and unassuming activities. One tries to stay engaged without overdetermining what one is listening and looking for. Staying engaged can mean outlining the structure of a day, drawing objects and scenes, rendering conversations as dialogue, or compiling the basic information always impressed upon strangers. But as recording one thing means also missing another, the notebook is fundamentally imbued with lack, like a painting of a landscape that ends at the frame. I return to the notebook again and again hoping that in this incompleteness, as fragments of experience pile atop one another, a jolt of recognition leaps from the pages like a lucky roll of the dice. It is through unexpected connections in montage that the notebook becomes an active field of illumination rather than a passive repository of data. Such, for me, are “methods”—simple yet nimble, alert yet patient, and recursive rather than linear.

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In ethnographic methods training, the social aspects of research and the formation of friendships over time, are often shorthanded as “immersion,” like slipping beneath the surface of a pool. The term evokes a world sinking into the researcher, displacing the sense of self to allow for a mutual becoming in the presence of another. One begins to think differently, to process and react differently, and to move beyond research questions contrived out of context as to embrace new approaches to a familiar problem. The fieldwork notebook is the place where this erosion of one’s familiar patterns of thinking and being is chronicled, where calendar dates provide a minimal ordering for an account focused on dis-­orientation and un-­knowing that gradually shifts into another analytic perspective. This at first resembles the passage from disorder to order that grounds the Enlightenment tradition of induction (organizing, classifying, and then abstracting), though it is more akin to Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical method than a Hegelian teleology, as the amassing impact of contingency undercuts stable identities and objects of analysis that otherwise provide intellectual comfort.2 “It must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality,” Michel Foucault writes of Nietzsche’s genealogical method, “[and] seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles . . . genealogy must define even those instances where they are absent, the moment when they remained unrealized.”3 To think genealogically is to attend to the force of history without totalizing ends, Foucault suggests. The historical sense gives rise to three uses that oppose and correspond to the three Platonic modalities of history. The first is parodic, directed against reality, and opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition; the second is dissociative, directed against identity, and opposes history given as continuity or representative of a tradition; the third is sacrificial, directed against truth, and opposes history as knowledge. They imply a use of history that separates its connection to memory, its metaphysical and anthropological model, and construct a counter-­memory—the transformation of history into a totally different form of time.4

Fieldwork, then, is an artful waiting. It cultivates a temporality of understanding in which bits of information, dialogue, and drawings, juxtaposed with news clippings, doodles, and dreams, amass into a new ecosystem of understanding premised on the growing awareness of the thresholds that con-

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strain one’s perspective. All the while that one experiences a sense of loss there is also a new rhythm and mindfulness that emerges, as the world moves through intellectual and personal encounters with an unwavering resonance that transforms the researcher. The intellectual flexibility that keeps this process open rather than constrained is cultivated over years of practice as ethnographers find their footing in research methods directed as much at the epistemology of research itself as at the supposed object of study. In Los Piñares, where it was boorish to inquire about gangs but where their atmospherics could be felt all around, I often returned to the work of Ivan Chtcheglov and the intellectual and activist collective known as the Situationists to reformulate empiricism as a genealogical exercise. I was interested primarily in their radically divergent approach to urban ethnography they called “psychogeography.”5 Mapping Paris of the 1950s, psychogeographers shifted away from a positivist accounting of space in order to reimagine the city based on the affective intensity of different locations. They cut up city maps and rearranged them to produce visual tableaux that privileged sites where lived experience and creativity thrived against socioeconomic forces of alienation. As a practice, Situationism attempted to disrupt the dream sleep of capitalist production by thinking with and against the city itself, artistically embellishing its different vitalities to bring their potential to fruition and reshape urban experience. In Tegucigalpa, gang communities also cultivated theatrical flair from specific sites they made their own, from graveyards and abandoned structures to underground passages and labyrinthine barrios. As much as they were part of the city, such amodern spaces also undermined any sense of the city as a cohesive urban project—and hence became the backdrop to gangs’ revolt against the conditions of the present. Cultivating these spaces as their own, gangs were remaking the city not as effete Situationists but as deshechables (throw-­ away poor) whose vulnerability before the law inverted urban citizenship by foregrounding communities banished to the social and legal exterior. As gangs embellished uncanny landscapes and summoned the underworld into a legibility, they conjured gothic sovereignty as a field of affects whose allegorical spectrality pitted criminal monstrosity against the strained coherence of late liberal urbanism. The allegorical physiognomy of urban life was the basis of Roger Caillois’s Guide to Phantoms, a psychogeographical foray into the Paris neighborhood of his youth.6 Caillois’s urban “phantoms” were atmospheric residues left by cycles of architectural destruction and construction, where the accidental anthropomorphism of buildings and alleys and the materiality of urban life conceal poor and itinerant communities invisible to the Parisian middle

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class. Caillois was part of a generation of interwar Surrealist anthropologists practicing what they called “sacred sociology,” in which they scoured the disenchanted and secular modern city for the persistence of the sacred. They approached the city as a theater of affects in which the banality of modern urbanism clashed against experiences of the positive and negative sublime. Caillois and others were inspired by the photographer Eugène Atget, whose images of Paris were uniquely devoid of human figures, as if the city were a character on its own.7 Caillois’s colleague Eli Lotar was equally influenced by Atget and photographed the periphery of Paris where slaughterhouses and other sites of industrial production were concealed from view. Lotar cultivated spectral allegory from the negative sacred, training his camera on the corporeal remnants of meat production—skulls, piles of bones, and tightly wound animal skins discarded in the streets—that challenged the viewer’s sublimation of economic production no less than of death itself. Both Caillois’s and Lotar’s works aimed for nothing less than the reinvigoration of myth in contemporary society as they allegorized modern urbanism by foregrounding the negative sacred and channeling the force of transgression into works of literature and art. Georges Bataille, in turn, focused the same critical questions onto urban gang violence in the United States with his 1934 review of the book X Marks the Spot, a collection of photographs of gory gang slayings in Chicago of the Prohibition era. For Caillois, Lotar, and Bataille, what made the negative sacred powerful in the domain of visual art and literature was that death in the modern city was itself an irresolvable contradiction, at once repressed from the rational ordering of daily life and at the same time naturalized, visible, and no longer a great shock to publics desensitized by the circulation of crime-­ scene photographs in tabloids. In his review Bataille writes, [T]his new custom, which also seems to be emerging in Europe, certainly represents a considerable moral transformation affecting the public’s attitude towards violent death. It seems that the desire to see ends up winning out over disgust or fear. So, with the publicity becoming as broad as possible, American gangster wars could perform the social function known in the form of circus games in ancient Rome (and bullfights in present-­day Spain). From there to think that the gangsters will have the same destiny as the barbarians of the Roman era, who after having made the delights of the civilized have overturned and destroyed everything, there is only one easy step to cross. Indeed, the gang’s investments in American society do not appear less astounding than the height of skyscrapers.8

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Bataille regarded the mass mediation of gang violence as an emergent genre of escapism in which death, once a sacred matter shielded by taboo, was displayed as profane. This was, for Bataille, a sign of social crisis in the United States comparable with the fall of Rome, metonymically organized around the popular and virulent appeal of the gangster as much as the phallic prominence of towering skyscrapers. In Tegucigalpa, likewise, the figure of the gangster was deeply associated with the marginal barrios, which were magnified in the popular imagination by a similar contradiction—perceived as the crucible of gangs’ untimely social movement no less than perilous social decay. In news media, Los Piñares was one of the barrios most renowned for gang violence and moving there I found it almost impossible to dispel the brutal images associated with the district. But the longevity of ethnographic fieldwork would displace these images eventually. I recall the moment my senses began to slow, as my concern for safety began to divorce itself from the phantasm of bloody tabloid crime scenes. I began to see not the barbed wire atop security walls of a house but rather the purple petals of large orchids that grew along them. Friends and neighbors could sense that I had settled in, seeing it in my posture and hearing it in my laughter, as my sense of Los Piñares became more localized, a product of immersion in its existing world more than its representations in popular media. In certain moments it was possible to imagine the place Víctor had encountered in 1982 when he arrived looking for unoccupied terrain to build a small home. There were just a few houses among the stand of pine trees and a community of mutual aid and what he called “valores de la escuela vieja” (old-­school values). There was camaraderie and excitement about their corner of the world on the edge of the capital, where most came from rural areas and were enthralled with the speed and variety of city life. Their children were the first generation to come of age in Los Piñares, and many of them would form the first gangs by the early 1990s. A decade later, by the early 2000s, Los Piñares had a reputation across the city. It was not the toughest barrio but made headlines on a regular basis. When there were community festivities and I invited friends from other parts of the city to participate, the conversation would lull in a way that I came to understand only later. Most of them lived inside the city beltway, where barrios were tight and atomized territories more or less safe to traverse by day. But the outer barrios were sprawling, provincialized, and often risky after dusk. Despite their trepidation, though, the same friends read the lurid newspaper reports about Los Piñares and the outer barrios with a peculiar interest, if not fascination. An unusual subterranean force was clearly emerging there. My neighbor Teodoro sometimes compared the feeling with the excitement

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engendered by the popular radio program of his youth Myths and Legends of Honduras, which for years showcased uncanny tales from across the country and inscribed a canon of national hauntings that exploited the dialectical tension between the premodern and modern. But the canon of gang legends that emerged from the outer barrios had its own vitality. It drew from the tension between material conditions of late capitalism and liberal ideologies that papered over them but also from the bulimic production of the tabloid press, whose excess seemed to summon Baroque aesthetics from a repository of transhistorical countercultural forms rather than from the minds of teenagers. Nonetheless, the spectacle in the outer barrios transformed them from areas of relative insignificance in relation to the center of the capital to zones of curious distinction in which the popular identity of working-­class Hondurans was changing. Previously marginal to official histories of the city and confined to the back pages of newspapers, suddenly the outer barrios were the subject of headline stories. Historical agency was no longer confined to the halls of power in central Tegucigalpa but relocating pell-­mell to the margins of the city. It rendered the city center an anachronistic shell of historical agency, hollowed out by decades of graft, corruption, and class privilege to the benefit of those who often decried the conflict in the outer barrios as a lack of cultural refinement. Depending on one’s view, by the early 2000s the marginal barrios were either at the threshold of sociocultural innovation or the site of antisocial devolution. Such was the work of the Baroque, whose intervention in historical time forces a revaluation of the organizing ideas of a cultural era in which, Leo Cabranes-­Grant notes, “old worlds are forced to mean otherwise, while neologisms crack open hegemonic identity to express new identities.”9 In the barrios, neologisms were everywhere in graffiti that inscribed the city with a mobile language whose speedy innovation had already moved on by the time one stood before them attempting to decipher their meaning. And the effect of living in the midst of the gang movement itself produced novel ways of viewing the present that were themselves neologistic. Neighbors frequently lamented that the government enticed foreign companies to relocate to Honduras by bending labor and environmental laws for them, while gangs’ performative criminality made theater of that very lawlessness on the city periphery where international factories and gangs themselves transgressed the law in performative fashion. But while gang members were vilified as juvenile delinquents, working at maquiladoras’ corporate sweatshops was heralded by government as a path to responsible citizenship for the working classes. As these contradictions deepened, gangs played on such moral inversions to muddy the facile moral rhetoric heralding corporate capitalism and free

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trade as a utopian panacea for underdevelopment and demonized those who refused it. Gangs were a thorn in the side of local life, but they alone had a language that broke through the ideological din of procapitalist triumphalism that few voices of political resistance could challenge. Though discussing them openly was discouraged, gangs were nonetheless a subject of interest as a sociological anomaly that had grown out of US interventionism and now threatened to drag all those suppressed histories back to the present as pundits and scholars attempted to explain them. For me as a researcher there were obvious themes of interest, from the organizing structures of the group to rituals and interpersonal dynamics of members, from the history of gang formation in California to the urbanization in Tegucigalpa, and so on. Friends who encouraged me recommended getting out of the barrios to pursue the project in one or several of the rehabilitation clinics in central Tegucigalpa where youths attempting to leave gangs could get tattoo removal, psychological counseling, and job skills training. Such clinics were well funded by international donations and put professionals, international volunteers, and gang defectors face to face with each other. There was no shortage of newspaper features about these clinics or years later of academic articles and books about them.10 There you could watch individuals actively transforming their lives as they made courageous decisions to leave gangs at the risk of violent retribution against them and their families. But by that time I had little interest in the process of leaving gangs through religious conversion, dramatic though it was, and found the religious organizations and their dependence upon biblical doctrines of penance to be both grating and painfully superficial. I was less interested in the remorseful setting of rehabilitation where the pivot of recovery was the discovery of one’s ostensibly true self, a purified version of the individual with the power to condemn who and what one had been in the past. Rehabilitation rested on this schism where the self of the gang world ended and a journey to health and happiness began. Many found their way out of gang life in this way, though the model turned individuals against themselves, rewarding an inwardly directed violence that manifested as guilt, or what Nietzsche describes as “ressentiment.” Ressentiment is the revaluation of individual strength as a moral weakness and victimhood as a privileged space of reflection. In Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s theory of desire he describes the body as an arena for struggle between active and reactive forces.11 The former are outwardly manifested expressions of health and strength that fully engaged the senses, and the latter are the redirection of those forces inward to celebrate self-­flagellating guilt as a noble achievement—not unlike humbling the individual to repent for their decisions as a condition of rehabilitation.

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On the other hand I was drawn to the transformative potential of gang communities and an affirmative reading of gang experience. To me it was obvious that the seductive promise of gang life was its vigorous and vital creative strength, which rehabilitation and religious conversion cast as a moral problem. It seemed essential to reconceptualize gangs as more than disorderly aggregations of criminalized pathologies and to think of criminality as something more than a merely personal choice. Was such a calculated decision to transgress the law, collectively and openly, not a political choice? The question was what conditions made joining gangs defensible to oneself and what made transgressing the law an empowering experience. Gangs were not yet mercenary organizations conscripting local youth but were a social world that aggregated around a decision to part ways with the law. Their transgression was generative, as ideas seemed to orbit around them with an intellectual vitality that contrasted with their profanation as a uniform and cliché sociological object. Gangs were a negative utopia, a sociopolitical community in which transgression of the law offered glimpses of a life worth living. Membership foisted the individual beyond the abstract morality of state law where the work began of defining the self on other terms—through renaming, ritualized hazing, and a change in family structure—and asking what one might become rather than who one is. I found the clinical and moralizing atmosphere of the centers too alien, even if those who worked there were ethical and well intentioned. It was clear to me that the focus on remorse and self-­criticism also served the rehabilitation expert, whose identity hinged on the salvation of the individual. In the clinic the relation between individual client and rehabilitation expert was a closed circuit wherein the salvation of the client was also the salvation of the guide, and those who were most saved were those who did the saving. The relation between the gang member’s criminality and the teacher’s elect status was one of exploitation in which a particularly nasty moral terrain could be squeezed for ample returns in the form of salvation. The clinical space of rehabilitation, therefore, took an active interest in the gang members’ excessive experiences and smuggled that interest in the cloak of the teacher’s self-­sacrifice, pity, and ascetic relation to life. But in the barrios, the institutional language and protocols of rehabilitation were inoperative. One experienced gang worlds on their own terms. In the barrios, gangs were not reducible to one person’s life story, especially the kind that negates gang life retrospectively to bolster a personal narrative of redemption. The functionalist perspective in sociology is well established, generally that gangs provide structure, economic mobility, and personal security when none exists in the community itself, and a person joins as a rational choice.12 In contrast,

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I was beginning to understand gangs as vehicles for a creatively destabilizing vitality whose seductive power attracted members despite internecine conflicts and state repression. To become aware of that potential and actively transform one’s existence was pathologized in rehabilitation settings, whose parasitical relation to gangs I found more difficult to face than the spectral menace of gang life unchained. The divergent moral economies of rehabilitation and gang life were mirrored by that of the formal economies of the barrio. In Los Piñares, swimming upstream against economic scarcity was dutiful and righteous, and the illicit economy, with its seductive currents of illegal drugs, money, and glamour, was cordoned off with taboos. Gangs were the social worlds that grew on that economy and hence oppositional societies that reversed the flow of moral certitude. Joining gangs was lethal in a figurative and literal sense, marking the end of an identity forged within the moral economy of scarcity, while revealing the arbitrariness of lethal force outside the institution of the law. In this regard the ubiquity of the illicit economy made the barrios another social reality, one that the legal architecture of state life typically foreclosed with the threat of force. Its liberation imbued the barrios with aura and made a first flirtation with petty crime a heliocentric rotation toward the white heat of an economy of transgression. But even as the streets were suffused with South American cocaine and Mexican marijuana, it was newly popularized heavy-­metal music that gave the economy of transgression its aesthetic veneer, in which anti-­ Christian tropes converged on the figure of the monstrous as the incarnation of social exteriority. Rather than finding themselves adrift in the slums, youths who joined gangs rode the cutting edge of societal transformation like surfers on a towering wave. The barrios themselves were no longer impoverished doldrums on the periphery of history but rather summits that soared over the urban skyline, gorges that plunged through scenic canyons, and miles of block and wood-­plank homes grafted to the hillsides like medieval strongholds, all of it guarded by gang communities whose symbols adorned the landscape in the language of a new economy. Amid these intensifying atmospherics, a cultural wind seemed to blow away traditional values that had been passed down pedagogically within tight family structures and replaced them with new, visual forms of understanding. Artful body language, tattooing, urban fashion, and the crude symbols spray-­painted on walls all manifested gang life visually as the exteriorization of desire, baroque forms that condensed into dream images and marked the threshold to another set of possibilities beyond the dominant discursive regime. Scholars of criminology and sociology often talk of gang “culture” as if it were an inventory of static forms that constitute a singular and self-­evident object, whereas

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I view gangs as inspired proliferations that multiply as a form of difference resisting final settlement. This view is consonant with Deleuze’s definition of Baroque aesthetics, which he describes as an operation rather than an object, one that continues a path of inspiration by producing new “folds” without end.13 Drawing from Gottfried Leibniz, whom he considered the first philosopher of difference and becoming rather than Being, Deleuze imagined folds as the basis for natural and social phenomena, in which inner subjective worlds are enveloped by the outer physical world. Each phenomenon, then, is constituted by the mutual becomings of inside and outside that are singular expressions of particular social and material contexts. By contrast, the questioning and creative intention of a thinking subject unfolds, manifesting difference that is ever open to continuation. To think of gangs as baroque social phenomena is to regard each community as a singular concatenation of desire and context and its inspired actions as divergent, creative impulses that might in turn produce—or enfold—other communities situated in different social and material configurations. Such a reading of gangs differs significantly from those that regard them as reproductions of the same, of a static sociocultural form that is copied as if from a template or acquired as a franchise. Gangs are, in my view, contagious incarnations of inspired divergence that escape the constraints of a given sociality by inventing new ones. What was often described as “the gang problem” in Tegucigalpa was therefore a problem of proliferation in which their communities manifested around the abundance of the illicit economy rather than an occupation in which the maras colonized barrios with local chapters of a hegemonic form. Generally speaking, gangs could be said to arise in urban settings of different historical moments as they shape agency from particular social and material constraints whose only point of convergence is the structural violence of marginalization. But in Tegucigalpa those constraints were nullified by the flooding abundance of the criminal economy, a milieu of prodigality in which liberation from economic toil dovetailed with embodied risk to enable new social worlds organized around practices of laceration. Where desire and mortality entwined as a shared and ritualized existence known in gang worlds across Honduras as la vida loca (the crazy life), the traditions of self-­preservation and responsibility that enabled survival for most families in the barrios were undone with surprising force. Thus, the demonization of gangs in the early 2000s was less a rational expression of a shared respect for the law than a panicked flailing in the face of unimagined cultural transformations. When these social practices surged to prominence and became legible as a mass phenomenon, the self-­evident

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veneer of practices such as thrift, prudence, and the rational calculations of value was undermined. What Bataille calls the “restricted economy” of scarcity could no longer be understood solely on its own terms, juxtaposed as it was with the “general economy” of material surplus that included the sheer abundance of the illicit and a corresponding social world in which the conservation of wealth was supplanted by expenditure.14 Just as the restricted domain of legality conditioned its own cultural practices, so too the general economy became the site of new and unfamiliar practices that inverted them. Socialities of expenditure were multiple rather than ideologically narrow and commonly favored decadence over prudence, risk over calculation, and pleasure over self-­denial. What mediated these oppositional social realms and prevented the dissolution of a world premised solely on wanton profligacy was the institution of sacrifice—ritual forms that regulate the violence of expenditure and ensure the sustainability of collective life. In Tegucigalpa the rituals binding gangs’ social worlds of expenditure were collective practices, such as hazing, tattooing, and nicknaming, that enshrined expenditure as a source of integrative vitality rather than dispersal and destruction. In the face of bourgeois ideology that enshrined a lifetime of drudgery confined by economic and social conservatism, gangs offered more than a shortcut to economic abundance. They reclaimed violence and pain from the theater of capitalist exploitation in which death was rendered a mundane and mournful resignation. In so doing, gangs eroticized pain and death as the absolute threshold of experience, the ultimate forms of expenditure whose finality could not be claimed by the banality of structural violence, but was, rather, a sovereign act of self-­sacrifice.

7

Dragons

Víctor was in his early twenties when he moved to Los Piñares. It was 1982, and there were only a handful of houses on the hill, most of them at the bottom, where the Río Guacerique flowed ten feet deep through a limestone canyon. The road had been unpaved as long as anyone could remember and was used to access the cattle ranch of a former Honduran president who owned four square miles of the countryside he opened to squatters staking out new residential districts. Víctor had a shock of black hair atop a thin face, with lively eyes and a jutting chin. He was newly married and walked with his wife, Elena, who carried their first son, Marico, in her arms. Víctor tugged along a donkey loaded with collected wood scraps and pieces of corrugated metal. “The US had really started funding for the Contras by then and they paved the road,” he said. “This is why people supported the US from time to time. They needed to move soldiers around the country and built nicer roads than we had ever seen.” The road to access Los Piñares had been paved to give access to “The Farm,” a rural military installation some twenty miles away in the hamlet of Lepaterique, where the CIA maintained an interrogation unit. After arriving in Los Piñares Víctor built his house next to a towering ceiba tree at the bottom of the hill. “I could never sleep, back then,” he told me, “because the tree had a branch that went over the water and people would climb up and dive into the water and swim all night long. All you could hear was laughter all the time.” When I met Víctor a decade and a half later, he was one of the locals in Los Piñares who organized social programs for kids, especially those involved in gangs. Like many gang theorists who preceded him, Víctor was concerned that there was little structure for young people in the barrios, which made gangs an attractive outlet for their creative and social energies. Víctor worked several jobs, as security at the local library, handyman at a charity in the center of Tegucigalpa, a member of the local governing body, and the head of a youth development group called Amigos Todos y Unidos Siempre (Friends All and

Once Dragones’s tattoo machine, made from an electric toothbrush, ballpoint pen, and sewing needle. Photo by the author.

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United Forever). He was greeted on the streets by everyone—local teenagers who wanted cigarettes or small amounts of money, neighbors who were in conflicts they were trying to work out, card sharks on the corner who paused their games to ask him to tell a joke, young women who sought him out to mediate conflicts with their fathers. There seemed no end to his capabilities as an untrained social worker. At the time, Víctor lived in a wood-­plank house at the bottom of the hill, where his original home had been washed away during Hurricane Mitch. The family was eight in total, Elena, Víctor, and their three sons and three daughters, along with several dogs that followed Víctor across the barrio wherever he went. Theirs was a two-­room house and small even by Los Piñares standards, with no wall or fence around the yard, no barbed wire, and no security beyond twisted wiring that held the door shut at night. “Some people build walls to protect themselves from their neighbors,” he said, “but we live like this. Open and friends to everyone. That’s how I survive. Better to have allies than to live alone behind a big wall.” When we met, Víctor was a security guard at the library that had been established by a development organization that funded afterschool tutoring for children. It was a unique building in an otherwise unremarkable barrio, with stucco walls, an iron gate, and a shady courtyard with pink and white flowers. Most days he sat in a folding chair watching telenovelas and reading from sociology and social-­work textbooks donated to the library from international organizations. “After Hurricane Mitch there were so many boxes of donations of different things no one had any use for,” he said. “We thought they were useless, but now these [social science books] are guides that we all read and discuss.” The library was Víctor’s de facto office for conflict mediation between young people or between young people and their parents. Some afternoons young gang members, inspired by Víctor’s example as an autodidact, tried their hand leading workshops there on substance abuse, self-­ esteem, and sex education for other young people who were eager to listen. After long days at the industrial warehouse, Víctor would arrive home and cook cuts of beef over an old metal barrel by the river while telling stories about the past and present. Neighbors dropped in often, forming a small circle and chipping in storytelling, all of us with our eye on the bridge to Brisas del Norte where confrontations between the MS-­13 and Barrio 18 flared up from time to time. Living on the border between barrios claimed by opposing gangs, Víctor was one of many in the barrio concerned about the rapidly changing realities for young people. He and other local volunteers complained that the media overemphasized the well-­trod history of the maras’ beginnings in California and often paid no mind to the gap between generations in urban barrios

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that was straining families and making gangs a second family for runaways. In Los Piñares almost everyone came from rural settings in the southern and eastern provinces, whose value systems seemed quaint alongside the brash stylishness of their children. It was a tension that Víctor knew well, coming from a small hamlet in southern Honduras on the border with Nicaragua. His father worked as a farmhand for a cattle rancher who, expanding his production in the booming beef export economy of the 1960s, acquired grazing pastures by evicting peasant farmers. “No one blamed my father, but his boss generated a lot of ill will,” he said. “That was when land reform was happening, and I wanted to be a part of it.” He would have grown up as part of the agrarian reform movement in the southern highlands of Honduras had he and his father not gone swimming one fateful afternoon in a local river. Both lost control in the current, and Víctor saw his father vanish under the water. Víctor found himself in an eddy, bouncing on his toes for an hour until he passed out from exhaustion. “Before I lost consciousness there was a woman on the other side of the river, watching me and smiling in a kind way, as if she were helping me. I reached for her but it just caused me to sink deeper and I knew I would drown.” Víctor woke up later on the shore, where two cattle rustlers had found him after taking their animals to drink. They didn’t see any woman, and the cattlemen thought I was crazy. When I told my mother she said I had seen my guardian angel. I was spared so that I could take care of the family. So at fifteen I walked from San Fernando to El Hatillo, and from there I helped cattlemen load their steers into a truck bound for Choluteca, and all the way I slept with the animals. In Choluteca I met another cattleman who needed help, and he gave me another ride to Tegucigalpa. We got to the city and after we unloaded the truck, they didn’t need me anymore, and there I was in the middle of the market. This was Comayagüela in 1977, so it was nothing like it is now. There were no gangs, and the only danger was death squadrons you heard about, but no one where I was from knew if that was real or not. I had never seen a city this size and I didn’t know what to do. I just walked into a cantina and asked if they could let me work. I started carrying crates of beer. At night I slept on the streets until I had saved enough to pay for my first room, which was in the courtyard of an old schoolteacher. She had been trained by Catholic nuns and took off my rent if I kept her place clean and swept up the fruit that fell in the courtyard. We were halfway up the hill to Picacho [the western ridgeline], and people said that in the forests on that hill there were spirits, like El Duende and La Llorona. Ever since I had seen the saint by the river, I wanted to know about

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these things, the spirits of the world that care for us. I’m Catholic, but we Hondurans, especially the groups that still practice native culture here, we have our past, and you might be Christian but also hold onto these other things. . . . So there are people like me who believe that there are spirits out there who are not just what the Catholics or Protestants believe. So I walked those hills in Picacho a lot, sometimes at night, hoping to see things. It’s expensive to live in the central district, and people said out here, all this land, was the ranch of the former president who was lenient when the first squatters arrived. Other landowners had goons to beat you up and kick you out, but he didn’t look down on the poor, and there were no problems until later when people kept coming and all of this became what it is today. Then he realized he was surrounded by the poor, which made him nervous and he built that wall around his house. But no one would bother him; on the contrary, we are here to protect him. Without him there would be no Los Piñares or any of this. Elena walked with me, and all we brought was our clothes and some wood on a mule that belonged to the bartender I worked for. When we got out here it was easy to choose because all of this had been cleared for cattle grazing except this one area. We chose this spot because there was a big ceiba tree, almost fifty feet tall, and the water was so clear you could see the fish all the way at the bottom.

By the time I arrived in Los Piñares in the late 1990s, the river was a sewage canal where the water was shallow and clogged with garbage. Tens of thousands of residents lived in the watershed. The way Víctor saw it, the population grew rapidly because the area was clean and had country charm. The barrios felt like rural villages connected by foot paths. “We were next to the city, but you felt like out here there was everything you needed, woodworkers who made furniture, leather workers who made shoes, women who baked bread, and so on. There was always a strong local economy, a lot of bartering instead of using money. Anyone could survive out here.” But after the road was paved, the market economy of the capital quickly extended to Los Piñares. “During the ’80s we got the first bus to take you into the city, and then there were products from the market coming out here. The artisans stopped making things locally and were working in Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela, wherever they could find a job.” Had the route remained a rocky and uneven access road, things may have been different, but it provided direct access to The Farm, where perceived leftists were sent for interrogation and many of them were tortured, executed, and buried in unmarked graves. Víctor said he remembered seeing the trucks passing by and averting his eyes. When I first visited Los Piñares in 1997, the wartime atrocities at Lepate-

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rique were just beginning to be understood. But the era of the Cold War was quickly displaced by the hyperbolic rhetoric of neoliberal trade pacts that promised to integrate the poor and working-­class families at the margins of the domestic economy into the juggernaut of global capital. The first time I visited with the group of university students from the United States and we traveled to Los Piñares to see Víctor’s bicycle project, we ogled the density of the barrios on the hillsides of the southern periphery. On one side of the road, plank-­wood and cinderblock homes were stacked to the hazy ridgeline, and on the other side, ravines plunged a kilometer to the river. Billows of wood smoke fogged the street, dogs darted through traffic, and children ran and played as washing suds dripped from open drainage pipes into the road. Though the Contra war was still fresh in the minds of those who lived it, free trade captured the imagination of a younger generation who had little knowledge of the catastrophic impacts of NAFTA on small farmers in rural Mexico. As the garment-­assembly plants were constructed, there was palpable excitement. Our student group was studying the impacts of the Washington Consensus, a ten-­point program created in 1989 for reform in countries hamstrung by economic crisis, and we ventured to Los Piñares to see solutions to development issues that had not been the brainchild of foreign banking executives but were rather smaller-­scale efforts designed by local communities. One such program had been invented by Víctor and several of his neighbors, to work with kids to build a fleet of bicycles out of found parts. They put together a set of tools, scavenged the city junkyards, and refurbished an old garage into a public workshop. The kids involved had become known for racing down the hillsides in large groups, and when we arrived in Los Piñares ten or so teenagers were waiting for us astride their bicycles. They wore heavy-­metal T-­shirts, had grown their hair long, and had the swollen marks of homemade tattoos on their forearms. Víctor introduced himself and then turned to the bikers. “And these are the Once Dragones [Eleven Dragons],” he said, smiling. They gave us a short tour of the one-­room garage filled with bicycle parts and tools, all used collectively and managed by two young women with backward-­turned ball caps and hands blackened with bicycle grease. They kept track of the inventory, opened the garage at certain hours, and joked that girls needed to learn less about making tortillas inside the home and more about organizing the community. Víctor seemed very pleased. The bicycle project gave them mobility out of the barrio, they said, where they were usually stuck without transportation. It alleviated depression, Víctor added, from boredom and lack of purpose. It was the first of his lectures, of which I would hear many over the coming years. Violence between gangs, he went on, was just a way of expressing desperation. The girls laughed. One said, “But

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when we are riding fast, coming down these hills and knowing we can crash? That makes us feel alive.” We walked down the hillside to a precipice dropping hundreds of feet to the Río Guacerique. Since there was no garbage pick-­ up from the city, the edge of the barrio was the de facto dump. A long heap of garbage stretched down the hill and into the river plain, where children and adults scavenged with bulging sacks over their shoulders. Back at the road, as we loaded into the bus, the teenagers hopped on their cycles, and as we started back to the capital they whisked past us, their long hair and black shirts flapping in the wind, smiling as they swerved through traffic like a flock of bats. Though I had visited Tegucigalpa each summer since my initial trip in 1997, volunteering at a shelter for homeless children called Vida de Paz, it was in 2000 that I started a master’s program in anthropology. I returned to Tegucigalpa hoping to live in Los Piñares for a few months of thesis research, interviewing residents about the impacts of free trade and its impacts on the lives and imagination of young people. The Honduran and US governments were engaged at the time in negotiations around what would become the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and I was starting graduate school. When Hurricane Mitch hit in 1998, I had watched on television as the barrios populares, built on hillsides denuded of vegetation, were swallowed by landslides and rivers swollen into raging currents that erased everything in their path. I didn’t have a phone number for anyone in the barrio and didn’t even know if Los Piñares still existed, as numerous barrios were wiped from the map as Hurricane Mitch produced landslides across the steep hillsides surrounding the capital. But I thought that as the CAFTA agreement was becoming a reality, Víctor was one of the people I should speak with, along with the kids I had seen that day in 1997, astride their bicycles, who seemed at home in the most economically challenged sectors of the city. One morning I hailed a taxi from my hostel in Comayagüela and asked if I could be taken to a barrio called Los Piñares. “Next to Brisas del Norte, way down in the southern side?” the driver asked. “I think so,” I said. “But that’s not a zone for outsiders,” he responded with concern. “I’m looking for a friend, actually, but I don’t know if he lives there any longer,” I said. The driver pointed at the front page of a newspaper on the passenger seat, with a large crime-­scene photo of bloody bodies inside what looked like a working-­class home somewhere in the country. “Before you go out there you should know what it’s like,” he said. I told him I would just check quickly, see if I could locate Víctor, and wouldn’t stay long. He capitulated. “Ok, well, you have a look and I’ll wait for you.” I said ok. The fear of gangs was everywhere by then. After Hurricane Mitch,

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the media turned to the city periphery in a series of long-­form investigations about poverty, malnutrition, child abuse, drug and alcohol consumption, and that catch-­all category of youthful transgression called “juvenile delinquency.” Each day as I considered potential research projects, I combed through the reports and crime stories, trying to separate the embellishments of the tabloid press from what was actually happening in those areas. When the taxi pulled up to the bicycle workshop in Los Piñares, it was sealed with a heavy chain and lock, like the project had never existed. A passerby pointed us to the library, and when we arrived I found Víctor sitting in the courtyard with several teenagers, watching a Venezuelan soap opera on television. When I stepped out from the taxi he came to the gate and greeted me like he remembered me. I told him I’d visited the year before, and he seemed to have guessed as much already. He waved the driver back to Tegucigalpa. “Come on in,” he said. “We can get you a cab later.” I sat at the television with the kids—Jorge, Beti, and Gerson—who were part of the Once Dragones. “We closed the shop a few months ago because some guys from the MS came by and told the girls they wanted rent,” Víctor started. “They pointed a gun in my face,” Beti said. “We don’t have money, so that’s enough to close the shop. Nobody needs to die over bicycles.” “But we still have the group,” Gerson said. Víctor smiled and left the room. He came back with an armful of books, most of them written by development groups. They were manuals for workshops in conflict resolution, addiction, and family trauma. Víctor wanted to make the library a counseling center. “It’s fascinating to be here again,” I said, “especially after reading the newspapers in my hotel for the last week.” “All they report on is crime and poverty,” Beti said. “I’m surprised you wanted to come out here again!” Everyone laughed. “Well the center of town was alienating. I didn’t know anyone, so it’s lonely.” “You should move out here!” Víctor said. “It’s much safer. We can keep an eye on you.” I was taken aback. The thought had not occurred to me that it could be safer. “Where would I live?” I asked. “In the same building where we had the bicycle project. It’s an old factory, very big on the inside. There’s running water and a toilet. All we have to do is find a mattress.” “Ok,” I said. Gerson was cutting pink roses from a nearby vine and putting them into a vase of water. “We’ll go clean it up,” Gerson said. “Make it look nice.” Víctor smiled at me and winked.

8

Crime

For years Jorge was my closest friend in Los Piñares. When I arrived for my first extended stay there in 2000, he was nineteen years old. Jorge was the most curious about me and the most willing to ask questions about my background, US pop music, popular cinema, and myriad other aspects of life outside of Honduras. He was tall and lanky, with a round and expressive face, and a chest full of amateur tattoos done with sewing needles and typewriter ink. He was a great mimic, able to recite lines from the Hollywood films with all the intonation and gestures that made him seem like a piece of rubber that could be shaped into nearly anything he wanted. And as a rapper, he was unself-­conscious and mesmerized his friends with playful and sometimes dark verses that seemed to emerge from him spontaneously. In 1999 his brother Jael was killed in a local shooting. Of the three surviving brothers, Jorge had inherited Jael’s portable cassette player and headphones and carried them wherever he went. He loved music of all kinds and not only knew pop and rap, but, after reading in the library where Víctor worked, could rhapsodize about nineteenth-­century classical composers in a mocking tone that revealed both an interest and disdain for European high culture, much to the entertainment of his peers. But above all it was ballads that moved him, especially the melancholic and seductive tunes of several contemporary Mexican rock bands. His large hands stretched over the neck of a beat-­up classical guitar kept in the library, playing along with the radio hits one after the other. Jorge often skipped school and spent time at the library writing songs and making notes in a pad of lyric poetry he kept in his back pocket. As we became friends I experienced for the first time those moments in ethnographic research when the openness of another person sharing their world with me, in all its joy and pain, far exceeded expectations I previously held for my own research. In the long and unstructured hours we spent together each day, I watched

Transformation. Photo by the author.

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as he mourned his brother’s death, processing his own sense of guilt for what had happened and unsure of what to do next in his life. Jorge was amiable and social in a way that papered over his sense of dislocation and a sorrow that over time had become a faintly visible but simmering rage. Once our friendship had slipped into a natural rhythm he began to talk openly about taking revenge on the boys who shot his brother and about his fear that doing so would make things worse. In the meantime, it seemed music calmed his nerves, and we spent much of our time adjusting the television inside the factory until it picked up music video channels from the United States, to which Jorge danced alone or with others of the Once Dragones, his body twisting in fluid contortions that flowed one into the next as if his bones were made of rubber. These moments of exuberance were part of what seemed an overwhelming melancholy following Jael’s death. It wasn’t just Jorge who struggled to process what happened, but his entire family. At home their grief took its toll over the months until a tense silence settled over everything. Jorge said his parents blamed him and his brothers for what had happened, and his siblings were already making amends. His eldest brother enrolled in the city police academy. His middle brother stayed close to home and helped their mother with laundry, ironing, and cooking. His youngest brother, Abel, vanished one afternoon and called a week later from Atlanta, where he was working construction and planning to wire money home. Jorge, though, was all inaction. He was standing next to Jael when he was shot and blamed himself for not stopping it. The paralysis he felt upon seeing the pistol pointed at his brother seemed to overtake his life in the aftermath of the shooting, as Jorge’s outgoing demeanor faded and he walked aimlessly around the barrio or stood reservedly on street corners, a world apart from the lively teenagers surrounding him and a pall over his face as the desire for vengeance was consumed by fear. Often when gangs killed one brother they would come for the others preemptively, knowing revenge would come sooner or later. Víctor spent hours telling me how concerned he was for Jorge, one of the brightest and most talented young people in the barrio. He had tried different kinds of therapy with him that he had learned from books in the library on trauma, but Jorge stopped showing up for their meetings. “Just be a friend to him,” Víctor told me. “He has been more cheerful since you moved out here. Maybe things are improving.” Though I would live in several places in Los Piñares, sometimes with Víctor and other times in my own apartment, the first place I lived was in the old factory building at the top of the hill. Víctor knew the owner, got permission and procured a key, and sent Jorge and Gerson with me to see if it would be suitable. The day we opened the factory’s large, steel doors for the first time, we found ourselves staring into a cavernous interior where the footprint of the

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original assembly line was still in the concrete floor. Soft light came through panels of Plexiglas in the tin roof. The place was somber. We cleared out an old storage room cluttered with junk, and Gerson returned with a mattress, then minutes later with a desk and chair. As I wondered how I’d make it there alone, Jorge and Gerson pulled hammocks out of a backpack and quickly hung them from the rafters, settling in as if to take a nap. Jorge lit a cigarette and passed it to Gerson. A few moments later they had dealt a card game on the floor between them, and I realized they had no intention of leaving. They hung a framed photo over the factory entrance of a boy staring blankly into the camera. It looked like an enlarged school photo. “Who is that?” I asked. Jorge didn’t seem to hear me, though a few moments later when Gerson and I were alone, he explained. “It’s Jael,” he said, “Jorge’s older brother.” I stared in silence. “He was the first one killed by gangs here. You would have liked him. He was funny, like Jorge when he’s not depressed.” That afternoon Gerson and I went to the roof to clean off the terrace, which was crowded with large, rusted bails of barbed wire. “When Jael was shot they shot him in the head with a .32 revolver,” he said, apropos of nothing. “It happened in the doorway to their house while everyone was cleaning early in the morning. Jorge was behind him when it happened, washing his school uniform.” “He saw it,” I said. “He saw it,” he replied. Jorge and Gerson were drifters who lived seminomadic lives in the wake of violent events in their lives. Gerson had grown up fending for himself on the local streets after each parent abandoned him, and Víctor said that since Gerson was young he had slept outside in alleyways or by the river. Jorge said that as for himself, he never felt welcome in his home after his brother was killed. “It’s like they wish it had been me,” he said. Gerson was known as a reliable laborer in Los Piñares and regularly picked up odd jobs, but Jorge had an edge that made people uneasy. It was not long after we moved into the factory that Beti arrived. She was the third in their triad, also nineteen but more like an older sister. She took a look around and laughed raucously at the hammocks. “These cabrones [dudes] just moved in with you!” she said. Beti was lively and gregarious, and unlike other members of the Once Dragones, she was by the book—she was finishing high school, didn’t curse, and didn’t smoke. But she was invested in keeping her eye on them and laughed often when in their presence. The first afternoon that she stopped by when Jorge and Gerson had gone out and I was alone, we sat in the hammocks and talked. “I came to check on you because you shouldn’t be here alone,” she said.

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“How did you know?” I asked. “I saw the two of them walking past my house,” she said. We talked. She asked what I planned to do in Los Piñares for the next few months, and I explained my interest in the media sensationalism about gangs. She looked at the floor as I spoke, her smile fading. “It’s difficult to talk about that kind of thing here because someone is always listening,” she said, gesturing to holes left for ventilation at the top of the brick wall. “One has to be discreet,” she said. “Know what I mean?” I nodded. “The maras are growing larger around Los Piñares,” she said, nearly at a whisper, “and Gerson and I worry that Jorge is going to join them. He’s the kind of person they look for. He has trouble at home, he’s angry about injustices in his life, and he acts tough even though he’s still pretty innocent, if you ask me!” she said, laughing again. “But we worry because if he joins, that’s it.” “What do you mean?” “I mean we won’t see him anymore.” She looked at me and waited. “What I mean is he’ll be with them and then all he’ll learn is their world.” She raised her eyebrows then looked away. “That’s what you want to learn about, right?” she asked. “Maybe, yeah,” I said feebly. “I don’t know now.” “All this with the Once Dragones used to be like a big game,” she said, “but things have changed now. These groups that we’re talking about are different.” She stared as if studying my reactions. I couldn’t think of what to say. “There are a lot of other things to learn about out here,” she said. “Maybe you’ll change your mind.” “Oh, I’m very open to that,” I said. “Excellent!” she said with a grin, suddenly back in her lively mode. Though Beti was concerned for Jorge, it was Gerson she was closest to. Gerson was short and thin, his clothes covered in a patina of dirt that made them look soft to the touch. He was abandoned as a child when his father left the family just after he was born and his mother went to the United States as an undocumented migrant just before Gerson’s fifth birthday. He had been passed between relatives ever since. “My mother would call sometimes, from California, then Arizona,” he said. “But we never knew how to contact her. She married a Mexican guy, and people say she’s in San Antonio, Texas, still cleaning hotel rooms.” He shrugged. Unlike some of the orphans in Los Piñares who went north to find their parents, he was not planning to try to locate her. She had been well intentioned when she left him behind on the trip to the United States, which is unpredict-

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able and even more dangerous for women. But his uncle who had agreed to accept him never fully welcomed Gerson into the household. The three years that Gerson lived there he worked as a newspaper boy at the front of the barrio instead of attending school and gave all his earnings to his uncle. The uncle was not satisfied with the meager contributions and abused Gerson after spending hours at the local billiards hall. One night, after drinking for hours in a nearby cantina, he arrived home and beat Gerson badly. Gerson was nursed back to health by a neighbor. “I was afraid he would reach for his pistol,” Gerson said. “I didn’t want to be a problem—he’s my mother’s brother, after all. So, after that I just lived by the river or wherever I felt like. Some neighbors would offer to take me in, but I got used to being outside.” Jorge’s parents were still together. Like many in Los Piñares, they dressed in the style of the rural south where they grew up. Standing next to them— in his knock-­off sports jerseys, heavy-­metal T-­shirts, faux-­gold chains, and ­tattoos—Jorge looked like a marooned California urbanite. That generation gap between teenagers and their parents in Los Piñares could be a source of humor or of tragic disconnect, as authoritarian fathers often ran their sons and daughters out of the house for challenging sexual taboos and other moral conventions. When that happened, Víctor emphasized, the MS-­13 and Barrio 18 were there to pick them up. The maras gave them a place to sleep, hip aliases as if they were superheroes, and a sense of solidarity against a social world that rejected them. In the early 2000s the maras were practically part of the infrastructure of local life, as much a framework for new socioeconomic realities as the international factories or the wide-­laned beltways that connected shopping malls, gated communities, and business parks in an archipelago of investment capital. Gangs were no longer a lively diversion, as Beti pointed out, but something “different.” That difference was difficult to sum up because their communities remained illegible—a negation of the present in which laughter, glamour, and death were weaponized against platitudinous rationalizations for the structural violence of late capitalism. When I met the Once Dragones they were already sure their gang would be dismantled by the maras. They took shelter in the old factory building where they could close the exterior doors and relax. It was stressful, Beti explained, knowing that sooner or later the maras would come for them the same way they came for other gangs across the district. But if the alternatives to joining a gang were attending underfunded schools, working for low wages, or migrating to the United States or Canada, those were not attractive either. And although talk about gangs with neighbors produced awkward silences, in the space of the old factory the Once Dragones talked about them constantly. Just

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sitting on the terrace with them at night I ended up with more hours of interviews than I could transcribe during university semesters back home. By day Víctor and I regularly traveled to meetings in other communities across the city where neighborhood councils meeting in closed-­door sessions discussed different approaches to diverting young people from gangs. From this too came a litany of recordings in which local activists, teachers, parents, and on a few occasions, police talked open-­endedly about the challenges faced by those in the poorest sectors of the city, but such meetings took for granted that we had been observed walking to the community centers, that gangs knew what the meeting was about, and that they might consider me to be an agent of the state. In such contexts my presence was viewed at best as a curiosity and at worst dangerous, such that after a while I felt the only ethical position I could take was to assume my presence was always dangerous. If I had a different physical appearance or style of spoken Spanish, things might have been otherwise, but because of those factors I had to rethink all of the research methods or else change the focus of my research significantly. The approach I took, over years of research, was to try not to study gangs at all. Until I felt sure of how to do this kind of research, it seemed best not to ask questions about gangs, not to seek out their members, and to stop discussing them with the interest of a researcher. Instead I took a passive role and just lived in Los Piñares without exhibiting much direction. I spent unstructured days writing field notes at the factory or in conversation on the street corners, until the purposeless fluidity of my life had matched up with Jorge’s own—and we started spending much of our time together. He was always avoiding school and the possibility of work, and he passed time trying to borrow money from friends, conning a free meal from neighbors, or smoking cigarettes by the river waiting for the shooter in his brother’s death to cross the barrio perimeter on the way to the city bus stop. I watched and listened closely, let him do most of the talking, and hoped that this proximity to his life would teach me a new language for Los Piñares as a sociohistorical community and for criminality as an embodied practice. It was coincidental that by night during this time I was reading Jean-­Paul Sartre’s study of the French playwright and petty thief Jean Genet, a massive tome I had been trying to finish for several years.1 I was interested in Sartre’s work because it broke from the materialist readings of criminality that often deflated the vertiginous thrill of crime and instead asked how emotional life and personal history shape certain affinities for transgression. Sartre’s analysis begins with Genet’s youth, when as a ten-­year-­old orphan he was caught in the act of stealing food and publicly labeled a “thief.” Sartre clings to this formative experience across the text, asserting that it was the first negation in

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Genet’s life that exiled him from the world. Across Genet’s works we find the cultivation of oneself as criminal posed as the negation of that negation and hence a classic Hegelian synthesis that incorporates criminality into social life as constitutive of it. This was the basis for what Sartre calls an “ethics of evil,” a life Genet committed to living out rather than denying the label he had been given as a child. Genet exaggerates his criminality as a work of art and transforms himself from a criminal into an aesthete. As I passed time with Jorge by day and Genet by night, I wondered about the mutual implication of the criminal and the community of upstanding citizens. Obviously, law created criminality and internalized the criminal as constitutive of society itself, but what about the criminal aesthete whose exile becomes its own paradise? There dialectical synthesis unfolded as the possibility, even the foundation, of another social reality. One afternoon as we walked to the river Jorge told me that what had made it easy for me in Los Piñares was that I didn’t look threatening. “You have a cara de niño [baby face],” he said. “No one perceives you as aggressive. But me, since I was a boy, it’s the opposite. They said I had cara de malo [face of evil].” The term is used often to insinuate that for whatever reason those who have a sullen or angry appearance often turn out that way. “Even my teacher told me that, when I was not even ten years old,” he laughed. “Then one day I broke all the pencils in the box she kept on her desk, and she immediately came to me. ‘I know it was you, maldito [cursed one].’ I just smiled.” Maldito is even stronger language than cara de malo, suggesting that one is irredeemable and harboring bad intentions. While Jorge recounted these incidents he also seemed to imagine a different life without a countenance he couldn’t change and in which his brother wasn’t dead and his family accepted him with open arms. Whether he was cultivating chickens on the roof of the factory, slipping into the high school to steal notebooks for his poetry, or admiring the .32 caliber pistol he started carrying under his shirt, I viewed Jorge’s existential condition as the material entanglement of rapidly changing social dynamics in Los Piñares. Cara de malo and maldito were terms used to describe not just Jorge’s appearance and personality but his actual person as a site of social forces whose intersection created a character locally glossed as malo, bad. This assemblage of affects, materiality, and experience is what Kathleen Stewart describes as “worlding,” that is, “an intimate, compositional process of dwelling in spaces that bears, gestures, gestates, worlds.” Here it is not symbolic representation that overdetermines a sense of who, what, or where one is located but rather “qualities, rhythms, forces, relations, and movements.”2 Worlding is a process rather than a static object, defined by the flow of

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memory, rhythm, and horizon that come together as novel rather than readily defined phenomena. Stewart writes of ethnographic practice as attunement to these fluctuations and compositions rather than documentation of “what’s there” and social theory as a body of concepts that emerges from within it rather than operationalized to understand it. In Jorge’s case the social forces that assembled in his life and yet flowed back against it created contradictions whose embodiment through time only he would express. Over time his particularly disruptive disposition would push back against the constraints of the surrounding world with what Antonin Artaud describes in theater as “emotional athleticism”: “a kind of emotional musculature which corresponds to certain physical localizations of feelings.”3 Artaud continues, “The place from which the athlete draws the strength to run is the place from which the actor draws the strength to hurl a spasmodic curse.” Expressions excluded by social context are made possible only by strength cultivated against it.4 Jorge’s character was like a submerged volcano that so far had produced only mild disturbances on the surface, though the atmospheric vitality surrounding the gang phenomenon was pushing his affective paroxysms toward the surface. As I write, my word choice and compositional style draw from the process of worlding as much as from the contextual density of talk where the presence of danger is mediated by silences and ambiguities that leave interpretive practices open rather than established. I think of this contextual density as a variation of what Deleuze calls “minor languages,” communicative styles that arise from the constraints of a given system but whose practice undermines the stability of naturalized ideas and understandings.5 Slang is often quantified as a list with definitions, for example, but this inventory can never capture the metonymic associations by which slang is situationally grasped by individual listeners. The same might be said for the many kinds of euphemism and redirection that guard against dangerous speech in a place like Los Piñares and the rich silences in social interaction that remain illegible to the uninitiated. What at first glance may seem like what Audra Simpson calls “ethnographic refusal” is instead a creative leap in communication in which the unspoken attains new importance.6 Alongside gesture and body language, each of which can be strategically exaggerated or understated within the gaps and displacements of prosaic small talk, these imperceptible practices of linguistic and bodily subterfuge are what I call “undercommunication.” Undercommunication is a lifelong practice learned at an early age by those growing up in Los Piñares, where the matters of gangs and police corruption are forces to contend with and where generally the behaviors of men have gone unregulated. Between men, confrontations of many kinds often led to violence, and beneath the surface of conversations with many young people

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were experiences of abuse. Jorge had experienced physical punishment as part of his childhood, and his sister made no secret that she lived with a diffuse but constant fear of sexual assault. As each conversation helped me grasp the larger reality of communication in the barrios, I could also see how Jorge and the Dragones often made the unspoken visible by overtly talking around it. Dwelling in the aporia of speech was a counterintuitive way to become versed in local life, but it cultivated a communicative intuition that asked not just what was being communicated but of what communication consisted.7 Likewise, as I put these accounts into writing I look for language and structure that does justice to the careful approach to everyday talk that shielded Los Piñares from view, an integration of form and content that often distinguishes ethnographic writing from other forms of social science documentation. By the mid-­2000s, it seemed that across northern Central America the MS-­ 13 and Barrio 18 had forcibly incorporated every other gang in existence, and as this happened the pitfalls of interviewing became more serious. Neighbors felt threatened as graffiti of the MS-­13 or Barrio 18 gangs covered the entrances and perimeters of barrios across the city. The three gangs that had been the first in the barrio and something of a novelty—the Once Dragones, the Muñecos, and the Vatos Locos—vanished or went underground within a few months. Their murals across the barrio were crossed out with X’s in heavy, black spray paint, a negation that announced the presence of a new and as yet invisible force. Neighbors were on edge, but no one would go to the police, who didn’t get involved in such matters anyway. Jorge seemed pleased by it all, as his dislike of the local police intensified after they never responded to his brother’s murder. “They are scared to even come outside,” he said with a smirk as we passed the station on the way to buy a morning newspaper. “They just wash their police cruisers and act like nothing is happening.” Each of the Dragones had their own strategy for coping with the growing danger, and for my part, I stopped carrying my digital recorder and camera when I went out. Strange faces passing through Los Piñares announced new forms of surveillance as daily life became more insular, private, and anxious. Víctor and Elena kept the kids closer to home, especially their three daughters, who with time were restricted to staying inside the house. Neighbors locked themselves behind security walls, barbed wire, and barking dogs. Even before he would join the MS-­13, Jorge thought of the maras as a movement and clearly recognized himself in it. But for Gerson the situation was otherwise. He was thin and soft-­spoken, and he didn’t share Jorge’s reactionary desire. The scar on his left cheek and his forearms speckled with burns told a story of abuse, but I sensed no bitterness in him. He had come to

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terms with alienation from his own family and learned to take care of himself. After years of sleeping by the river and working odd jobs, he had a network of adoptive kin who offered him a meal here, some clothes there, at first out of pity and years later out of respect. He never attended school and had grown up with an older crowd, playing cards and drinking corn liquor on the street corner of the barrio’s main intersection. Even when card games lasted into the night he was there, the next morning, fixing potholes in the sun or patching the roof of the school without expectation of pay. He seemed to exist on reciprocity alone. There would be little to shield him from the maras as they stalked the barrio for recruits. One night on the terrace when Jorge was not around and Gerson had more room to express himself, he described the earlier days, before the maras, as a contrast to what was happening: When the Once Dragones started, Jorge and Marlon had seen those other movies, the Mexican ones about gangsters and narcos. They all thought that was cool—being an outlaw. But the Once Dragones was not like that. We were already a group, right? We were friends and there were all these other kids making gangs. So that year of the soccer tournament, we just said, ok what’s a dumb name? Somebody said “Once Dragones” and we laughed so hard and said that’s it. So then when Víctor and the guy from La Rosa made this soccer tournament and invited everyone from across the southern district, hundreds of people came. The teams all showed up with uniforms, and Víctor had gotten a trophy for the winner, all that. Víctor said we should enter it, and we didn’t want to let him down, so we made shirts, just like, wrote on them with paint “Once Dragones.” When we arrived at the field everyone was looking at us like we were fools. They were laughing at us. And then when we played it was a disaster. We were kind of famous after that, like a bunch of clowns.

In 1999, when sociologists from the National Autonomous University published the first study of the new wave of juvenile delinquency in the city, Gerson and the Dragones fit their descriptions. They lived at the margins of the state where social and economic resources were nearly absent. Their barrio was part of the city but lacked infrastructure, especially for young people. They were curious about the size of the surrounding city and exhausted their youthful exuberance in a nomadic search for thrills, walking through neighboring districts and fighting with other groups. And finally, their parents were of another time and place and struggled to offer guidance. The study’s authors conclude,

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Rural youth and families are attracted to the cities and produce a flow of migrants from country to urban areas, big and small, without the state regulating and controlling growth. This situation is the result of unresolved problems in the agrarian sector such as concentration of landownership and thousands of families who are landless, the latter of which make for cheap labor when they arrive in the city. Many of the barrios were born of urban land occupations where now public services are absent or insufficient, where there is no dedicated space for public activities, and there is no personal or familial privacy. Young people there face great difficulties forming social identities. In the labor market those young people make up a large share of the workforce but have a difficult time finding work . . . [and] are frequently discriminated against. . . . The maras offer an alternative to young people to connect with others and to socialize and defend themselves against a hostile news media. The gang is a refuge where they can disregard this bias, where their friends are a source of new security with whom they share their poverty and frustration.8

As the authors note, the maras targeted young people already socially dislocated, and during the next year, the Dragones would be exactly the kind of group the maras dismantled and forced into their ranks. Before I left for New York at the end of summer 2003, an MS-­13 symbol was spray-­painted on the wall of Jorge’s parents’ house, and Jorge thought they were after him specifically. “They already know who I am,” he said, seeming almost proud. When we spoke by phone a few months later, he said they were forcibly recruiting in Los Piñares and that he was already tattooed. What about Gerson, I asked. No one had seen him in weeks, he replied. If it were anyone else Jorge would have assumed the worst, but Gerson knew how to live on the streets. He knew how to disappear and take care of himself. Jorge was sure of it. Some of the neighbors said Gerson had moved in with an uncle on the north side; others said he had gone to the United States. Jorge said he thought Gerson was living like a nomad, in the ravines and unincorporated areas where most people just saw scrub bushes and garbage heaps. The next summer when I was back in Los Piñares, Víctor and I went to a community meeting in Barrio Sin Fronteras, built for refugees from Hurricane Mitch. It had a hundred or so cinderblock homes in a grid a few miles beyond the city limits. It was poorly designed and isolated, and those who lived there had few options but to make it work. The barrio had become one of the worst gang havens in all of the capital, with a captive population and an ineffective police force. It was a quarter mile from the highway bus stop to the community, and as we walked I heard a whistle. I looked up to see a slim figure salute

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us from the top of a refuse heap in the back of a city garbage truck. There was no mistaking that it was Gerson. I exclaimed but Víctor didn’t react. “Best not to tell anyone we saw him,” he said, as we continued walking. “The MS know he has no family, no one to protect him, and I’m the only one he told where he was going. He lives in the city dump.” The city dump was a sprawling and open ravine to the north of the capital. “How long has he been there?” “Six months or so. That’s where he can hide. There is a whole community there. People throw away food, clothes, whatever you need, you can just pick up from the piles of trash.” Beti had been close with Gerson since they were children and worried about him most of all. She grew up helping her parents run a billiards hall where Gerson was the only child allowed inside, and he became like an adopted brother to her. Beti was a vibrant spirit in the Once Dragones, one of the girls who initially ran the bicycle workshop, and as they got older, she would playfully antagonize the boys to cut through their tough exteriors. When Jorge or Gerson talked to me in self-­serving ways about their dilemmas or personal histories, she would interrupt and tell her version, adding detail and dramatic flair that turned the stories to comedy. Víctor treated her like a colleague, as if she were helping the boys the same as he was. Beti acted as something of a mouthpiece for the group who kept the goofy clique of teenagers connected with the larger community. While the guys spray-­painted walls of the high school, broke into unsecured houses, or fired Jorge’s revolver into the night sky, Beti was skilled at smoothing things over. On days when there was little to do other than mill around or watch television, Beti conceptualized creative projects that connected the Dragones with the local community. Initially these seemed diversionary, but it was clear by the end that they had some larger goal beneath the surface. Every Wednesday when the local community board met in the community center, Beti attended. It wasn’t until I started going that I saw her advocate for the Dragones as if they were a wayward scout troop under her rehabilitation. She stood in the middle of a circle of the local leaders, men and women whose other duties included keeping the community solvent, making utility payments, collecting local tax payments, and electing delegates to regional directive councils, and she argued for leniency, saying the Dragones were always on the cusp of transforming themselves. She talked about each member of the group as if she were a school counselor outlining their prospects for finishing the school year and advancing to the next grade or reconciling with their families, and she explained recent bouts of disorderly behavior as an exception. Before the MS-­13 and Barrio 18 changed forever what “gangs” would

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mean to those living in the barrios, Beti advocated for the project that marked the Dragones in neighborhood history—a mural on the side of the community center. The Dragones themselves scavenged for paints and brushes and drew their mural on paper several times before the final design made it to a derelict wall facing the bus depot. The mural depicted a Mayan pyramid encircled with plants and animals, and in front of it the Dragones made a small garden of flowering plants relocated from the riverbed. Riding the success of the mural the Dragones dreamed up new projects that Beti would negotiate with the community council. They painted a mural on a high school and another on the interior of the community center; they cleared trash from alleyways, planted gardens in vacant spaces, filled potholes with gravel, tutored kids in the primary school, repaired fencing around the trash dump, cleaned drainage ditches after floods, offered public workshops on sex education, and organized three communitywide celebrations for Día del Niño (Children’s Day). For Beti the Dragones were a vehicle for organizing her generation, which she thought she could steer toward the common good. When Beti graduated from high school with specialized coursework in office management, she got a secretarial position in central Tegucigalpa. She called Víctor and me to her mother’s house to ask which shoes and dress to wear to an interview, grimacing at herself in the mirror. Jorge and others were bitter. “No one will hire us. They know who we are—from the barrios. It’s how we talk and dress. You can’t hide it.” He held out his hands, speckled with tattoos. “They think we are all thieves.” A year later when I was back in Los Piñares, Beti was advancing professionally and had taken on additional duties at her job. A few months went by, and she was rarely around, and at the billiards hall her mother, Emilia, told me she worried that Beti was always arriving home late. Sometimes her supervisor paid for a private taxi, but Emilia still worried. The city at night was unpredictable at best. “It’s a good job. Better than the factories. But each day I see how things are changing,” she said, gesturing to the main road outside the billiards hall. “From right here I can watch people all day, and a person my age can see what has happened. There is a lot of delinquency, and those men up there,” she pointed to the police station, “they aren’t doing a thing about it. Makes you wonder whose side they are on, doesn’t it?” It was a Thursday in late July when Beti didn’t arrive home. A heavy rain had been coming down all day. Beti left work earlier than usual and got a collective taxi in front of the old Casa Presidencial, formerly the presidential mansion. “The market was flooded so they took us toward the highway,” Beti

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told me. “And then when he turned into Los Altos, behind the airport, we knew something was wrong. But we couldn’t see well because of the rain, and suddenly we were in a garage and there were several more men there, and each of them with a weapon.” Beti and the other three passengers, one man and two women, were stripped of their clothes, tied up, and kept in a dark room for two days. Anonymous callers contacted her family and instructed them to wire money to a bank account. “We did as they said,” her mother told me. “They wanted five thousand dollars in twenty-­four hours. I had an attack of nerves and don’t remember it all. My husband borrowed the money from our family and friends. Thank God people found it in themselves to help us. I don’t want to think what would have happened otherwise.” Beti said she had heard about kidnappings like this and tried to keep calm as she waited. A day after the money was wired, she was released. A driver put her out by the side of the highway without clothes or money. An older man running a fruit stand saw the car and ran to help, covering her in a blanket and later taking her back to Los Piñares. “The people who kept us at the house were not gang members,” Beti said. “These were grown men, people who have things already. Cars, houses, and expensive phones. To me, these are professional kidnappers. Organized crime. Mafia.” She filed a report with the local police, who were surprised at her vehemence. “I don’t know if they thought I should be more afraid, you know, that they would come back for retribution, but I was enraged,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep for days because I was so angry. I could hear the blood in my ears. Then it all went away, and there was something wrong with my hearing, like I was in a bubble and the world was far away.” The local police, as usual, did not follow up. “They told me that they did not have the resources to investigate and that I should go home and be grateful that I am alive,” she said. After a few days of recovery, Beti went back to work and psychologically processed the incident as best she could. But then her report must have leaked from the police precinct. “A month later some kids we had not seen before came to the billiards hall and asked for my dad,” Beti said. “They were fifteen years old at the most. They stated that we had been to the police and that there was a fee for that. They wanted another three thousand lempiras or they would kill my father and burn down the billiards hall. They were armed, so my father said nothing.” This was when she started to understand, Beti said. “The big groups with power and the muchachos [young males] out here, they are connected. We had never seen the boys, but they knew their way around, and we think they were from San Francisco just up the hill. These were gang members who become

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spies for organized crime. They don’t protect their neighborhoods like the gangs from Los Piñares. They give information to the cartels about who they can kidnap and extort, and then they get a cut.” Even as this came as a surprise to Beti, Jorge seemed to know much more about what she was describing than the average person. Not long after that we sat on the terrace one night as he explained to me, with a kind of certainty that made me feel he was exaggerating or trying to impress me, the way gangs and criminal bands fit together as pieces in a hierarchized system. “A lot of the conflict between gangs comes from this problem—some of the gangs are independent, like we [Once Dragones] are, and they live in their own world in their barrios. But others are ambitious,” he said. “Their plan is to do jobs like this one, and if they are good, maybe one day they become part of the cartels.” “But the people we know are not capable of this kind of violence,” I said. “Most of the kids are like us,” Jorge said. “They aren’t prepared for the violence that the cartels can do.” Of all the Dragones, Jorge was the least enthusiastic about Beti’s desire to make them look good in the eyes of the community. He was consumed by the death of Jael, and being from a big family with three surviving brothers and a sister, he was bitter that none of his family was avenging the murder. Jorge buried his anger. When I had a chance to sit down with Jorge’s father, months after having met Jorge, he shook his head, reminiscing about Jorge’s childhood and transformation into an adolescent. He was the most vibrant child. You can see that he can sing and dance, that he is full of life—all of this started when he was young. But what happened to Jael . . . we all have to get over that. No one can change what has happened. We have to ask ourselves, what is the next step in each of our lives? But all Jorge does is dream. He is one of the young people who wants it all, right now. Even justice for Jael, he wants it now. And if it doesn’t happen, he says the police and everyone are cowards. How can anyone hate the police who, in the middle of this corrupt society, try to do their jobs and may even lose their lives? We don’t know what to do with him.

One night on the terrace Jorge took out his wallet and held his brother’s photo in the palm of his hand. “I saw the kids who killed him,” he began. “They were muchachos from Brisas del Norte, across the river. I saw the gun they had. It was a big revolver. It was so big that when they shot him the bullet came out of his neck and punctured our water tank. All the water drained

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out and mixed with the blood and ran down the street. For weeks afterward the drainage canal was stained red.” But they had come to the wrong house. “They wanted revenge for something that happened at a soccer field earlier in the day, when there was a fight. But they got some bad information and came to the wrong house. Jael never hurt anyone. He was one of the founders of the Dragones, but he was good. Better than me and better than Gerson or the others.” Jorge said his mother and father hardly spoke for a year. The house was silent. “I used to have dreams that I would see one of [the shooters] walking alone, and kill him—boom,” he said, pointing his finger like a gun. During the day people were at school or working, but I gave up normal things like that and started hiding by the river. I would lie in the weeds where no one can see you, close to the path to the buses. I must have done that every day for six months. That is why I was kicked out of school and why nowadays no one asks me to work for them. I would steal for money and then spend my days by the river or just walking around looking for that guy. Then one day they tell me that the one who pulled the trigger was riding his bicycle on the beltway and hit by a bus. He was dead. That was it. He escaped.

The accomplices weren’t important to Jorge; it was the shooter he was after. But when the shooter was gone and the opportunity for revenge was lost, he was left with rage. At different moments I saw it expressed toward his family, the police, the indifference of those who hadn’t helped find the shooter, and the abstract principles with which the larger community held him in check, judging his emotions. In his study of Genet, Sartre notes that across Genet’s works one finds the “eternal couple of the criminal and the saint,” two forms of antisociality that Genet sought to wed.9 Each, Sartre points out, considers itself “elect.” And as a result, each divorces itself from the world. While the saint “challenges the human condition in its totality” through direct connection to God, the criminal rejects the world that has rejected them. And while spiritual life of the saint is based on transcendence, for the criminal there is no transcending the world—only transforming it. The saint attains entry to heaven, while the criminal changes the world through their life, externalized as crime. Their felonious career is the visible expression of their criminality, cultivated over time as an active rather than passive existential condition. Crime is exile, and exile is the horizon of difference, the unknown, and the possible. During the time Jorge stayed at the factory, he was in exile. He refused to rejoin his family at home, and we spent nights on the rooftop, smoking

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cigarettes and listening to his portable cassette player. Jorge’s favorite recording during that time was “Eaten Back to Life” by a heavy-­metal band from Florida known as Cannibal Corpse. The cover of the album, which we stared at often, is a painting of a zombie in the middle of a cemetery tearing open his chest cavity and waving his limbs in a frenzy. The music is a blast of down-­ tuned guitars that sound like they are being played through sludgy swamp substances, backed with drumming that bursts forward like a jackhammer rather than carrying a beat. The vocals are guttural and choppy, the lowest register of vocalization, as if a monster were rising from an abyss. Cannibal Corpse’s distortion of the idea of music nurtured the intuition that another world was possible that we could only glimpse through the broken headphones, pressed to our ears, as the cigarette smoke rings dissipated in the light of the nearby streetlamp. Each song was a landscape of another place in much the same way that the Once Dragones were on another plane of experience that was beyond Los Piñares, a place where Jael’s death had not silenced Jorge’s household and where grief and desperation were not the substrates of everyday life. With time, as Beti tried to reconcile the Once Dragones to the community, Jorge pushed them further into the space of fantasy. He was a skilled freehand artist and copied illustrations of dragons from an English folk tale book at the library, reworking them into iconic drawings that appeared on the factory walls, the outer door, tattooed forearms—phantasmic impressions of what Los Piñares was for him in the most abstract sense. Beti laughed at the drawings. “Like kids vandalizing the desks at school,” she said, before telling Jorge that the Exiid garment factory was hiring. Please, she begged. Her brother knew that several workers had been fired and there were positions to be filled. She offered to shine his shoes and pay for a taxi so he wouldn’t have to walk through the dust. He could get there early, she said. Maybe, he replied. That was the last time I heard Jorge consider working in a legal setting. I realized later that he had already made up his mind. If the surrounding society was failing him then breaking with it was imperative so long as he wanted to live. And every time he mourned his brother, he also asked how one might live differently. Our friendship was possible because I was living as an ethnographer, wherein daily activity was often aimless. My disengagement from the familiar pursuits of social and economic life complemented his routines, which that particular summer were about avoiding a job at the Exiid plant. As he stalled and hung out on street corners for long hours, it seemed he regarded work a greater threat to his life than the MS-­13 or Barrio 18. “The people who work [in the factory] see the same thing every day. You sit at the same table. Sew the same stitch. Make the same shirt. You’ll make millions of them if you stay for years. The same shirt every time, every day, like you’re going crazy.

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And the supervisors are like police. You can’t talk. There aren’t even any windows, so you don’t know what time it is. It’s fucking horrible. I can’t go there.” During the day while I walked between the factory building, Víctor’s courtyard at the library, and the bus depot to get a newspaper, Jorge accompanied me. He looked for easy work, short-­term gigs whose termination was guaranteed, and guarded his mental energies. Instead of making shirts he was chatting up older guys who were always visible in the barrio but who kept their distance, barely acknowledging me in the streets when we passed several times a day. I realized later they were the source of all the local cocaine in Los Piñares, Brisas del Norte, and across the road in La Pradera. At night when Jorge slept on the terrace, I assumed he fell asleep listening to music and pondering his life. We would lock the doors around nine and spend a few hours on the roof, and when the conversation slowed I would leave Jorge lying on his back, empty cement bags for a pillow, staring at the sky, and collapse on my bed in the old storage room. One evening I fell asleep on the terrace and woke up to a dog barking. The streetlights had been shattered in previous weeks by kids throwing rocks, and as I sat up I could see the dark streets lit by moonlight where a group was walking quickly toward us some fifty yards away. Jorge seemed to fly across the terrace. Before I could react I was crushed beneath him, his hands covering my face. Then the voices were getting clearer. I felt my body freeze. Slowly Jorge let go of me and made a sign to be silent as he crept to the ledge of the roof. Below us a group of silhouettes moved in unison, maybe fifteen in all, with bulbous arms and shaved heads. Several carried machetes that swung rhythmically in the air as they walked. Jorge watched them with the attention of a student. They reached the corner and turned down the hill. “If they had seen you, we’d be in trouble right now,” Jorge said. “That was the MS from Campo Sagrado?” I asked. “Every night they come by, right around this time,” Jorge said. “They patrol here?” “They run this barrio, all the way from Campo Sagrado up the hill.” “How do you know?” “I know.” “Who are they?” “MS. Some from Campo Sagrado. Four of them lived in LA before. The others are just locos [crazy dudes] from La Rosa.” “Have you talked to them before?” “No. But they drink in Ronald’s cantina in San Francisco.” I knew that place because Jorge’s aunt lived nearby, at the end of an alley. On the other side of her house was the cantina.

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“In her house there is a gap between the wall and the roof,” he said. “You can climb through it and get into the alley. There’s nothing in there but a space maybe a meter wide, filled with trash and rats. But you can see through the wood planks in the cantina wall, and these dudes meet there almost every night.” Visiting his aunt sometimes in the evening, he had listened to several of their conversations, some of which involved plans to move money, cocaine, and weapons from one location to another. “What about the police?” I asked. “They only come through on two patrols,” he said. “You’ve seen them.” “So they don’t do anything?” Jorge laughed at me. “They make sure the streets are clear,” he said. I looked at him and felt scared. He knew how it worked. “This is why you sleep on the roof?” I asked. Jorge smirked and looked back over the ledge at the empty street. “I know their movements,” he said. “But they don’t know me. I promise.” After a few minutes I made my way downstairs where my cot awaited in the dark. I slept until dawn and went up to check on Jorge, but he was gone. I had the only key to the outer door. Images of Jorge scaling the outside wall flashed through my mind. I could see him vanishing like a shadow down the murky street. There was no way to ask if he had joined the local MS-­13; the question was too compromising. But if he had, it would make him a spy against his own community in Los Piñares. It would also mean that the terrace was more than our crow’s nest over the barrio—it was also his surveillance tower, as he kept watch not for the gang but over them. I could recall many nights hearing him whistle from the terrace as I lay in the dark. I had assumed he was just having fun, emitting a screeching whistle into the somber night. But why give away his location, if the mara didn’t know he was there? Back downstairs as I swept the main room I paused and stared at the dragons Jorge had drawn on the wall. They were so delicate, imaginative, and filled with desire. I began to realize I had not taken them seriously and, like Beti, dismissed them as kitsch. But they were markers of a threshold, monuments to transgression that stood-­ in for speaking outright, embers of gothic sovereignty that would soon burst into flames.

9

Storm

In Los Piñares, Jorge was not alone. There were probably fifteen others who joined the MS-­13 from up the hill in Campo Sagrado. New MS graffiti along Víctor’s street hinted at changes that, by night, you could observe in real time. The gunshots were no longer at a distance, and sometimes the firefights were just outside your window. Groups of people passed at all hours speaking in low voices. Cars with darkened windows crept in and out until the early morning. “It’s a silent occupation,” my neighbor Rosa said as she hung clothes to dry on her terrace. She lived across from the factory building, and each summer when I arrived she liked to catch me up on what I needed to know. This time it was Jorge she was concerned with. “Have you seen him yet?” she asked. I had not. “Be careful,” she said. “He and a number of the other boys are with the maras now.” I nodded. It had been a long time coming, at least for Jorge. “You know what they have to do to join these gangs?” she asked. Of course I had heard that they had to commit murder, in cold blood, of an innocent and unsuspecting person, criminalizing themselves to be trusted. That was the lore. But speculation about the gruesome possibilities of gang life was common. I never knew what to believe but looked at such accounts as a vital feature of gangs’ self-­mythologizing. Stories of unthinkable transgressions established an aura that was forbidding, foisting the maras outside the everyday experience of the mundane and familiar. Gangs were surrounded by prohibitions that, like everything protected by taboo, magnified their features and imbued them with mystery and power. Nonetheless it was also the case that there were murders every day in the city, and certainly in many cases the initiation rituals were merely factual. Many accounts came from gang defectors rather than the imagination of certain publics. “I bring it up,” Rosa concluded, “just to say that he has enemies now. Take precautions when you’re with him in the street.” “I will do that.”

“It was dark around us and the ground started shaking.” Photo by the author.

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“One day it will be his turn, and you don’t want to be standing beside him.” After several summers staying at the old factory, Víctor built a small room for me on the side of his house, as if he too were luring me away from spending too much time with Jorge. The room hung over the riverbank on stilts, and I slept to the sound of rushing water that, when low, emitted a septic stench that was unbearable, infiltrating my dreams and leaving me in a daze by morning. Living with Víctor disassociated me from Jorge at a crucial moment. They were worried I would find myself implicated in the intensifying mara activities around Los Piñares or swept up in the Mano Dura raids. The nightly raids by military brigades had seemed to only steel the resolve of the maras to defend their territories. During that time gangs organized in Los Piñares to collect what they called a “war tax” from local households. Each Friday young men would circulate through the barrio with notebooks in hand, collecting money that buoyed their conflict with the military and police. “The gangs didn’t start this until the state came out here,” Víctor said. “Each one acts like they own this barrio, and meanwhile all of us are caught in the middle.” But it wasn’t just their sense of ownership of the barrio that deepened. The maras were also becoming strict about their membership. It was wartime, after all. Each summer Víctor wondered how much longer he could continue in his role as community ambassador to the kids who joined gangs. It wasn’t like the old days when you could intervene and young people appreciated the effort, he said. Now you could lose your life for interfering in gang activity. He worried most about Jorge, who, despite being involved with the MS-­13, regularly came by the house, knocking discreetly in the evening, usually to borrow whatever money I could give him. He was squirreling it away, he said, to hire a guide and go north to Canada. There was a community from Los Piñares in Toronto, and he said they were waiting for him. Elena was an astute observer of such things and said she could see his fear that he was no longer in control of his life. He was regularly seen leaving the barrio late at night in strange cars, long after the streets were vacant. No one knew more about it, but the image alone was unsettling. Víctor also lent Jorge money even though he had little to spare. Each morning Víctor arrived from his job as security guard at the library and then went by bus to work all day at the lighting warehouse. Elena washed and ironed clothes for local families who had no access to running water, charging a pittance. “Out here, it’s better to be generous,” she said, splashing clothes in a vat beside the river. “When people are under pressure they can blame you for their problems. We help neighbors anytime they ask, even if it’s difficult. When you’re already poor, the last thing you want is conflict.” Víctor, on the other hand, viewed such generosity less as a social invest-

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ment than as a matter of ethics, which he called “el don de los pobres,” the gift or talent of the poor. “Rich folks can be stingy,” he said. “Having millions of lempiras and they won’t loan you even the smallest amount without worrying they will lose everything. Out here we say the most generous are those who know what it’s like to have nothing.” That was the ethos that made Víctor an effective community activist who gave his time and energy to local teenagers as if they were his own children. Years later many of them treated Víctor as a father figure. One afternoon, as we shepherded a group of teenagers to a Red Cross workshop on disaster preparedness, he explained. When the smaller gangs first began in our barrio, it worried a lot of people. But the kids were having fun. Riding bikes, fighting with each other, and trying to have a reputation. I mean, look around. There aren’t opportunities to become something out here. We don’t have those kinds of opportunities. So they played the fantasy game. But at the end of the day, you could talk to them and they were kids who were just scared. They wanted to become something and life is difficult. But today it’s different. The maras are more like a religion than gangs. The kids who join it aren’t creating something new, like the Dragones and Vatos Locos when they got started. Now they’re joining something that already exists somewhere else, with its own rules and codes. See, someone like me can’t intervene anymore because the group gets upset. They say you’re trying to take away their family and making them look weak.

Although Jorge’s family had expelled him from the house at the time he joined the Once Dragones at seventeen years old, now they were fighting to win him back as the maras laid claim to him. Since Jorge was not around much after joining the MS-­13, I spent afternoons with his family, talking in the courtyard of their house, as his mother made tortillas and his father chopped kindling. His father, Don Mauricio, was strict but soft-­spoken and his eyes filled with tears as he recalled driving Jorge out of the house. We don’t know how everything with the gangs got started, but they say the gang members left Honduras with their families when they were just children. They had no business growing up in a city like Los Angeles. Look what they learned! They say that the places where the Hondurans lived in Los Angeles during this time were like a war between gangs and the police. I don’t know because I’ve never been there to see it with my own eyes, but I think all of us from my generation were surprised that they could return here and create what they created. It’s not just a social club, like we had when I was growing

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up. It’s another reality completely. And kids who are in trouble or who have problems can go there and they feel at home. A boy like Jorge is troubled. Since his brother’s death he has not been the same. He needs a family to care for him and to say to him, “Boy, we love you.” But instead the gang tells him that. They say, “You can leave all of this behind and have another life.” They tell them they can be someone else, that you can be powerful and independent, that you can have whatever you want in the world, while none of us have the life we would truly want for ourselves. That’s a vision that is hard to resist. Who can say no? It’s so powerful that they have to deploy the army to try and stop it. Do you think that years ago we imagined that there would be so many of our children joining these gangs that the state would have to intervene?

By the mid-­2000s Los Piñares was targeted under Mano Dura operations, and armed brigades were deployed there several nights each week. After sundown their trucks would appear at the top of the hill and camouflaged squads would stream through the unpaved streets with weapons drawn. They shot flares into the sky that lit the streets like a weak sun and forced their way into houses while occupants protested and shouted, dragging teenagers with their hands tied to transport vehicles to be hauled away. As the raids became more frequent, being in public spaces was risky, and the streets were often empty. Nightlife in the barrio had ceased almost completely, as police used ordinances against noise as a pretense to raid almost any type of gathering. In response to the changes to public life, Víctor and Elena wanted to create an indoor space where the community could gather, and they decided to rent the old factory to convert it into a restaurant. Víctor built an oil fryer out of an old metal sink basin. His sons made wooden tables from scraps scavenged from the rubbish by the river, and his daughters mopped the floor, wiped down the tables, and sliced yucca with blades ground from scrap metal. Within days they had converted the old factory, and on the night it opened, all of the seats were taken and the food sold out. Soon they expanded the menu, acquiring a refrigerator for soft drinks and a business license to make everything official. What they didn’t expect was that the Mano Dura troops, after searching the barrio top to bottom, would stop in at the restaurant for dinner. The soldiers sat together as a group, machine guns on the table, speaking to no one and not being spoken to. All of the squad members wore black masks even as they ate—a comical but intimidating sight. Elena was unsettled by the new wave of law enforcement. It’s unusual to have police out here all the time. When people first moved to this place there were no police at all. If we had a problem the community

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solved it ourselves. We felt like we owned all of this and it was up to us to take care of it. I don’t know what happened, but Mano Dura is not about protecting people. It feels more like an assault on our neighborhoods. We live in fear of gangs and now we have to fear these soldiers? . . . If you ask me these operations only make people afraid of their government.

One of those nights, as the officers ordered their meals downstairs, a neighbor named Félix dashed into a storage bodega on the terrace to hide himself. He had been a member of the Barrio 18 gang for many years, and though he defected there was no guarantee the squadron wouldn’t detain him for his tattoos. With Mano Dura brigades, what happened after detention was always uncertain. Some detainees were beaten and left on the side of the road. Some ended up in prison awaiting trial for months. Others went missing. I took a beer and a cigarette to Félix to pass the time. He groaned, sitting back on a mop bucket, and invited me to stay. “They tell me you were at the Marriott Hotel this morning,” he said. I had spent the day at an academic conference on gangs and media sensationalism in Central America. “How did you know?” He laughed. “People talk. But listen, they tell me that President Zelaya gave the opening address.” It was 2006 and Zelaya had just taken office. Recently he had proposed shifting the Mano Dura policies away from commando raids and back to more localized preventive work. His remarks indicated a shift in tactics that included a proposal to hold roundtables between gangs and the government. “It’s good that he is interested,” Félix said. “But what does Zelaya know about gangs?” I shrugged. “If you want to know you can ask me. Didn’t Víctor tell you that I was there when it all started?” He laughed. I told him I didn’t want to pry. “Get out the recorder and I’ll tell you,” he said. Félix talked for over an hour as he waited for the police to leave. It really began in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch. Just imagine, it was a few weeks after the storm. You know how it was—everything destroyed. Everywhere you looked, there were people suffering. It hurt everybody, rich and poor, and everywhere our brothers, Hondurans, were covered in mud and crying after losing what they had. But then people were sick from contamination. People were fighting over fresh water. Horrible. Well, my cousins lived in the market and I used to bike there from Los Piñares to hang out with them. There were always things to do. Well, a year before Mitch we had formed the first 18 gang in Tegucigalpa. We didn’t know what we were doing because we were just kids, fucking around, fighting with other gangs in the zone but just

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fist fights, right? No one got seriously hurt back then. But then the hurricane hit. It destroyed everything in the market. There was garbage and water everywhere. We were doing our best to help out, but there was so much to be done. Well, we heard somebody was coming from the north coast and there was going to be a meeting of all the Barrio 18 in Tegucigalpa. Nothing like that had happened before. We were just groups of kids and there was no unity. We were supposed to find a place to meet, but the market was still flooded and the only dry place was the cemetery. I don’t know who organized it, but we all went to the cemetery and, don’t forget, back then it was surrounded by MS territory. So all of us were there, like a hundred kids, and nobody making a sound! Then, like they had been teleported there, these two guys showed up and we knew it was them. Some of the older guys introduced them. Genio and Criminal. None of us will ever forget them. I mean, these guys resplandecía [were glowing] like extraterrestrials or angels or something. You just knew they were different. And you could see they were tough, but they didn’t have tattoos. They looked like anyone on the street. You wouldn’t think they were gang members. So we were waiting and then they started talking, and when they spoke you knew they were real. They knew everything. They were from the original maras, in San Pedro. They had lived in Los Angeles during the ’80s and been deported here, just like all the stories in the media say. They said they went without tattoos because they were like special forces with specific missions and having to blend in. They were the soldiers to the leaders at the top and had been sent to Tegucigalpa on a mission to bring us together as one group. They said the hurricane had paralyzed the city and while the authorities were figuring out how to rebuild the country, it was our moment. This was a test for us, to see if we had heart. To see if we were real mareros. So they gave us instructions, like a plan with all the details laid out exactly. They said first they had to recruit soldiers. Where would we do that? Well, the Red Cross and other charities had built shelters for storm victims where families from across the country were living. By the thousands. If you saw those places, they were horrible. They had no water or electricity. There was mud and sewage everywhere and nowhere to wash. Everybody was sick. Well, it turned out that Genio and Criminal were not just there to talk. These dudes went to the shelters and got registered as refugees and started living there. Each of them carried a backpack and inside were banded stacks of money, baggies of cocaine, a pistol, and ammunition. They just walked around that place, and again, it was like they were not even from this earth. They would see kids in dirty clothes, kids who were hungry or sniffing glue, and they would take them aside and say, “Clean yourself up! Don’t you have

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any pride?” They would tell them, “Come with us and nobody will be able to hurt you. You want protection? You want new clothes? You want respect?” Everybody was miserable, man. And here were these two guys with new clothes like they just came from another world. Who wasn’t going to join them? When I think about it now, it still amazes me. These guys, just two people, created the gangs of this city just like that. They knew what they wanted to do. They had a vision and made it into reality. Everyone who watched them learned a valuable lesson, that you can use your mind to change the world. But you have to watch and read all the signs and know the right moment. These dudes, Genio and Criminal, didn’t want something small, either. They said, “We want you to take over the city.” Like, all of it under our control, in all the barrios. And then, you make money moving drugs and managing prostitution. After that we started collecting money for protection and stopping buses and taxis for rent. We had kids, like fifteen years old, taking money from bus drivers, taxi drivers, delivery trucks, even teachers, whoever came through their barrios. And as soon as we had control, the leaders in San Pedro gave us the connections to buy drugs in bigger quantities, marijuana and cocaine, and after that, we bought better weapons. I mean, I look back and I’m amazed that all of that happened. But at the same time, I was there, and I know there was nothing in the world that could stop it.

When Félix defected from Barrio 18 they hunted him down in Los Piñares, abducted him and drove to a nearby lake basin, and hacked him with machetes before chopping off his right arm at the elbow and leaving him for dead. Víctor had told me the story several times because his survival was considered a miracle. The gang interpreted it as an act of God and granted him immunity from further harm. This was what gave him the liberty to speak, he said. Otherwise, an account like this was hard to come by. “These are like sacred histories to the gang,” he said. “No one will just recount it when you ask.” I could understand this better by hearing the narrative itself, premised as it was on the urgency of a world-­transformative spirit gangs claimed as a mandate, one that seemed conscious of its place in a singular historical unfolding. The narrative was a long way from the common refrain of Christian pastors that gangs furthered the collective disempowerment from which they arose in the first place. Instead, while catastrophe held the country in suspended animation, gangs were visited by underground missionaries who gifted them a vision. Félix recounted the moment gangs of Tegucigalpa saw themselves in the mirror, where the past and the future connected and the transition from gangs to maras in the capital was no longer arbitrary

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but marked with historical specificity. So described, the maras were an underground social movement redirecting the historical trajectory of their city by the late 1990s. Such visions of alternative historical unfolding are not uncommon in the aftermath of natural disasters when the organization of power is demonstrated to be fragile in the face of natural, disorganizing forces. Genio and Criminal and their travels around the country were part of a broader context of intervention in historical time in which the formation of gothic sovereignty can be situated on a spectrum of social agitation alongside other movements advocating for worldly transformation. Gangs in that context are more than social groups trapped in mindless misanthropy, the nadir of alienation that Émile Durkheim calls “anomie,” the central concept of his book on suicide that he describes as a negative limit condition where social bonds disintegrate and antisocial action has no personal meaning or consequence.1 By definition, then, those actions have no investment in social reality. But gangs, at least in Félix’s rendering, were nothing if not innovators of social life whose insubordination was a destructive but generative force. This interpretation evokes the anarchist antecedents of Durkheim’s generation, particularly the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who was renowned for his theory of revolutionary destruction.2 Against the grain of Marx’s historical materialism, in which societal upheaval unfolded in a gradual and historical process, Bakuninists advocated destructive action as the engine of societal transformation. The infamous “propaganda of the deed” reframed terrorist attacks as a spectacle whose affective resonance had the power to shift the political persuasion of bystanders. Bakuninists thus approached destructive acts as a contagious negation that could inspire visions of other social, political, and economic configurations. “Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life,” Bakunin declares. “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!”3 For Bakunin, the aftermath of destruction is the space from which to reimagine the totality of shared existence. The Bakuninists also figure into Eric Hobsbawm’s history of nineteenth-­ century social movements, Primitive Rebels, in which he notes that they were uniquely evangelical. Like Genio and Criminal the Bakuninists traveled the country with a vision, in their case rural areas of Spain in the 1870s. They arrived at remote hamlets like “apostles” bringing along “some piece of news, some portent or comet proving that the time had come.”4 Unlike Marxist revolutionaries with a plan for overtaking the state apparatus, Bakuninists “did not regard it as their function to plan political agitation but merely to make propaganda, so that action in fact occurred only when the peculiar ground-

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swell of village opinion . . . made it virtually inescapable.”5 Bakuninists did not plan the world-­to-­come but rather fanned the flames of creative and conspiratorial sociality until it spilled over into revolt. What that revolt would produce would depend on the newly liberated spaces of the imagination. The potential of messianic destruction is also a central element of Walter Benjamin’s critique of Marxist revolutionary theory, though his focus is historical time rather than material reality. For Benjamin, messianic destruction is an abstract concept if not a metaphor for disruption of the ideological density of a given era that might “make the continuum of history explode” or “blast a specific era out the homogeneous course of history.”6 Though this macho vision of Marxist critique reached its pitch in the figure of the historical materialist who “remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history,” Benjamin imagines the messianic as a potential that is diffused across the social world, “a secret agreement between past generations and the present one” that informs the consciousness of the masses no less than the historical materialist. “Our coming was expected on earth,” he writes. “Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.”7 The act of blasting open historical time therefore means creating an opportunity in which the past that was visible only through refractions of ideology might be redeemed or known in itself, the condition for a future otherwise. And so thinking with both Bakunin and Benjamin, who regarded material and abstract destruction as a creative force of historical intervention, a catastrophe like Hurricane Mitch might be regarded as both destructive and generative, obliterating the material world such that time’s unfolding spun in place like a top. I imagine gangs in Honduras, then, as communities that have occupied the gap opened between ideology’s past and future, estranging that present long enough that the world could not return to what had been. David Graeber has argued that the residual destruction and disordering of natural disasters has often been the crucible for new and creative interventions in the world. “Insurrectionary moments occur when the bureaucratic apparatus is neutralized,” he observes. “Doing so always seems to have the effect of throwing horizons of possibility wide open. This is only to be expected if one of the main things that apparatus normally does is to enforce extremely limited ones.”8 The state of emergency has a prismatic position in Benjamin’s work because the disruption of a legal system by the very system itself is a paradox that in lived time renders legible those ideological and economic structures that are otherwise naturalized into the everyday. But outside of the power of modern sovereignty, Benjamin emphasizes the potential for societal transforma-

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tion that follows episodes of natural destruction, which he regards as ahistorical forces thwarting the struggle of humanity for civilization.9 Catastrophic events suddenly shook loose the mythology of a social totality petrified into everydayness as natural history, and the events created space for reconceptualizing human collectivity within the natural world rather than exiled from it. Benjamin imagined both the suspension of the law in the state of emergency and the suspension of structures of experience in the natural catastrophe as clearings “shot through with chips of messianic time,” or a present available to reconfiguration.10 Hurricane Mitch was powerful enough to transform Tegucigalpa physically, and it also transformed the city as a space of social potential. Even a decade after the storm, the destruction of Mitch was still apparent in the canyon behind Víctor’s house—vegetation stripped from the canyon walls, industrial machinery half-­buried in the sand, and foundations of destroyed houses slumbering in the grass. Víctor’s was one of them, the stone foundation where his previous home stood for twelve years gesturing silently to two decades of improvised urbanization at the city margins, where ecological destruction was no less horrific for being predictable. Hurricane Mitch developed as a tropical storm in the Caribbean, strengthened into a category-­5 hurricane three days later, and approached the north coast of Honduras with forty-­foot waves and winds of more than two hundred miles per hour. It passed slowly over the country before moving north toward Yucatán, but rainfall continued for a week, with thirty-­six inches recorded in a single day. In Tegucigalpa the usual problems quickly turned critical as garbage blocked street drains and subterranean piping. Flash floods shut down transportation, and everywhere the saturated soil was quickly eroding. Barrios on precarious slopes disintegrated into landslides that poured into churning rivers coursing through the capital. In central Tegucigalpa debris coagulated and dammed the flow beneath the principal bridges, which were torn apart as crowds gasped from the shore. The river spilled over into Comayagüela’s low-­lying market district, flooding it to the second floor of most buildings and filling the streets with wreckage. The next few weeks 150,000 people crowded into temporary shelters in Tegucigalpa as the United Nations reported more than 600,000 people displaced and more than 7,000 dead nationwide.11 On the night of the hardest rain, President Carlos Roberto Reina (1994– 1998) elected to open the floodgates of the reservoir uphill from Los Piñares to keep the dam from crumbling under the weight of the water. Water roared down the canyon, sweeping up almost everything in its path. Earlier that evening Víctor and Elena had taken the kids up to the community center of Los

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Piñares, which residents converted into a refuge for those already flooded out of their homes. But Víctor returned to the house, convinced he could salvage some of the valuables—birth certificates, high school diplomas, photographs, and heirlooms, all of which he found soaked in waist-­deep water. The river was inside the house and the water was almost to my chest. There were no lights and the whole house was shaking. I just turned around and climbed to high ground and sat, listening to the sound of the water. The government gave no warning they would open the dam, at least not that we heard. So first we heard a faraway sound, like helicopters. It was dark around us and the ground started shaking. We thought there was an earthquake, and Don Pedro [a neighbor] started praying. Then the water came toward us and there was the worst sound you can imagine. I thought I could hear screams, maybe of people or animals. Pedro shined a light into the water, and the first thing I saw was a bus flipping end to end. There was so much material moving so fast I can’t really say what I saw, but it was like looking into hell. And then he shined the light on our house, and it was gone. Where it had been there was nothing but water. I ran up the hill, and when I got to the community center I tried to tell Elena but I couldn’t talk. She just said my complexion was white. So I sat in a corner, and honestly I don’t remember anything from the rest of that night. But in the morning we went to the bottom of the hill and the water was still high. All over the ground were pieces of homes, cars, and materials from the factories that had been washed out by a landslide.

The calamity Víctor witnessed in Los Piñares was part of a larger history of dispossession and displacement that had created residential zones of extreme risk in the urban peripheries. If the relation between state and community had ever been ambiguous for squatter barrios around the south side, the storm demonstrated that the communities were expendable in the name of preserving minor infrastructure. Along the Guacerique, Víctor told me, the decision to open the dam produced a sense of shock. Out here we always felt independent from the capital. No one in Tegucigalpa could care about what happens here. But when they opened the dam it was like they were saying to us that our lives valued nothing. They gave us no warning. There were bodies in the river the next morning and we were the ones who removed them, identified them, and contacted their families. And then we hear the city denied that anyone had been injured! When we heard that, more people came down to the river to look at the damage with their

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own eyes. I would guess there were more than one hundred people there, just from Los Piñares. They were astonished, looking up and down the canyon where all the houses had disappeared.

The shock Víctor describes was the disintegration of one ideological field and the beginning of another, in which the storm’s destructive power combined with the government’s abandonment of the district to transform what it meant to live in Los Piñares. Elena put it this way: After all the years that we struggled to make this place our own, they decided to wash us away just to save a small dam, which is not even the biggest one they have around the city. We fought for years to build this place with our own hands! And now we realize what we made doesn’t have any value to the government. This is what they mean when they say no one was hurt when our neighborhoods were washed away in the river. It is their way of saying that to them we aren’t people. I think they would like to wash us away completely, all of the poorest people who live in this city. The poor like us don’t make demands on the rich in this country. All we ask is for them to allow us to survive. And they can’t even do that.

In the aftermath of opening the dam, Los Piñares and the stretch of the Guacerique up to the reservoir became sites of a new historical awareness. The dream sleep of neoliberal, capitalist utopia lay strewn over the landscape in the form of state machinery and factory debris as the materialization of historical disjuncture. For Víctor the jolt in perspective manifested as susto (fright, shock) that lasted for weeks. His hands and legs trembled, and he started seeing figures that were not materially there that he claims were spirits of the drowned. At first it was a small group downriver, knee-­deep in the mud, looking at the sky. Then it was a faceless man on the cliff across from the house, staring down into the water. “It kept happening, and so I decided to see a healer,” he told me. “She lived in a house behind the market, and I walked there but lost my way because there was so much destruction. When I did find her house, what did I see? There were people lined up out the door. The same thing, too. Almost all were seeing the dead or wanting to find them.” The sudden loss of so many whose whereabouts were impossible to determine had a widespread social impact. The aftermath of the storm was haunted not only by the collective desires of the poor to live in safety and free of want but also by their dead, whose souls wandered the rubbish and debris. In her work on supertyphoons in the Philippines, Christina Sornito examines these changes to everyday experience in the wake of disaster, where entire

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landscapes are converted into mass graves.12 When Typhoon Haiyan made landfall in 2012, more than six thousand were presumed to have perished, most entombed in the storm’s ubiquitous wreckage. As a result, the once-­ familiar landscapes of local towns and agricultural plantations became sacred spaces, potential gravesites for lost loved ones. Sornito notes that shamans and mediums became newly important after Haiyan not only for facilitating communication with those lost suddenly and without ritualized burial but also for divining changing weather patterns that signal future disasters. In this wedding of ecological and developmental crises, Sornito highlights the desire for new modes of perception that can divine the future as much as untangle the past. In Honduras such modes of perception included not only those of shamans but also those of the Pentecostal pastors and congregants for whom the storm was an act of judgment. In the streets I often stopped to talk with the local Baptist pastor, Selvin, who was explicit about what the hurricane meant for his church. He did not refer to Mitch as un huracán (hurricane) but una tormenta (storm), an English cognate that carries with it the Old Testament spirit of vengeance against a fallen earth. Selvin and his congregation interpreted the storm as punishment for the institutional and social corruption of the city. “We call Mitch a castigo [punishment],” he said. “After the storm people came to our church, afraid of the power of our Lord.” Selvin told me his congregation nearly doubled in size after the hurricane. It’s not just the tormenta that let us know that the final days were approaching. You can look around and see. Everywhere there is delinquency and crime, all of this corruption. So the people join our church to protect themselves. They want to know where does this evil come from, because our barrios were not always like this. Well, it comes from people who break the law of the land and who break their contract with God. The maras didn’t invent corruption; it was here long before them. But they are the children of corruption, of a government that steals from its people, of police who close their eyes when there is a crime in our streets, of corporations that come here to ruin our beautiful rivers and forests, and of foreigners who come from other countries to lie with underage girls and boys. All of that is what creates a marero. For us a marero is not just a young man with a gun; it is someone who believes they can take this world as their own. We have prayer, and they have the gun. We accept God’s plan and prepare for the next world, but the marero challenges God’s plan. The marero rejects it and wants to fulfill their desires here and now. So when a Christian from my congregation sees a marero, it is another lesson in faith. We realize they are the ultimate test within God’s

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plan. They are part of the imperfect world that tempts us to have it all now, to betray our Lord and think we know better. The marero was born of corruption, to tempt us to give in to our outrage. The mareros may not know it, but they are the acolytes of Satan himself. This was what Satan always offered to the people of God—pleasure now, suffering later. And this is what the mareros tattoo on their skin. You’ve seen it because usually they write it in English: “Laugh now, cry later.” What further evidence do you need that this is una guerra spiritual [spiritual war]?

Anytime we ran into Selvin in the streets, Víctor ridiculed him behind his back. “Everything is God’s plan,” Víctor once began. “They have their congregation of brothers and sisters and abandon the rest of us. They criticize the world, and sure, there is a lot to criticize. But they won’t help us when it comes to fixing our community. If someone can’t wait to get to the next world, how can you rely on them to help fix this one?” It was common to hear the Protestant movement criticized for dividing the barrio, creating insular congregations that rejected the existing world as a fallen place. But evangelicals also had a direct impact on this world as they popularized allegorical interpretations of the present, insisting that gangs were vectors of literal evil. Each day at dusk in Los Piñares pastors preached in the streets, clutching their Bibles and shouting with their eyes squeezed shut, casting out devils from the barrio. They begged God to purge the streets of evil, to bring young people into the house of God. They preached about mareros and delincuentes as if they were an occupying force possessed by evil. In turn, young people theatricalized that condemnation to the point of paradox. Kids with occult and satanic tattoos didn’t embrace evil as malevolence but as a means of purification, a stand against the economic and social conditions of the present no less than the ostracism they experienced from local religious leaders and their congregations. By the early 2000s, when occult figures were the dominant motifs in gang tattoo art, pastors walked the streets and preached from the Book of Revelation, known also as the Apocalypse of John of Patmos, decrying the tattoo images as vectors of evil that arrived like a plague to contaminate the flesh of local youth. Those images were the very substance of evil whose origin was the teleological horizon of apocalyptic damnation that underwrote the theology of original sin. But when the pastors described that evil as contaminating the world, they were not wrong, as the embrace of evil as moral righteousness possessed a deconstructive force that left little in its place. In Tegucigalpa it reframed state violence against the poor but also the religious conviction that such violence was unquestionable as God’s design. When pastors and con-

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gregants prayed for the return of the savior who would wreak destruction on the corrupt world, Hurricane Mitch and Mano Dura became signposts that the temporality of Christian millennialism was reaching fulfillment. As Selvin would sometimes say, “First it was the flood. Next it will be fire.” For Genio and Criminal, recruiting in the Red Cross camps was easy because of the lack of safety. The camps were unsafe for women and young kids, with virtually no law enforcement. With weapons and strength in numbers, gangs were among the first community security forces in the post-­Mitch era. The Red Cross and international donors had sent the materials to build the refugee camps, and much of it was of a low quality and falling apart, sometimes collapsing on families inside. Víctor helped construct the eastern camp and was able to negotiate his own building materials, which he brought back to Los Piñares to rebuild his house. He used four posts as stilts and supported the floor by dragging rocks from the riverbed and piling them beneath the house. There was no money for anything more, as the economy was paralyzed for months. Later Víctor installed a concrete floor that would buckle with cracks the length of the house. By the early 2000s the whole structure was tilting, the walls uneven, and the floor disintegrating. But these intimate accounts of the storm are now overshadowed by quantitative data and popular narratives that put different parameters on the event and its impact. Immense amounts of data were available—on river flow back into the Atlantic and Pacific; on landslides and soil erosion; on washed-­out roads and bridges; on cost projections for infrastructural repairs, and so on. Assessing the wreckage immediately after the storm, President Reina remarked, “In seventy-­two hours we lost what we had built, little by little, in fifty years.”13 But in Elena’s estimation, as she surveyed her daily life in the 2000s, the impacts of Mitch were “más allá del analysis” (beyond analysis). Hurricane Mitch was an event in the Deleuzian sense, reshaping the material and conceptual arrangement of the city and forging new connections that altered it socially, institutionally, and ecologically. Over time and through to the present, the storm’s impacts have continued to change what it is to live in Tegucigalpa. Many I spoke with reflected on scenes of solidarity that still produce optimism about what the country was or might be, such as the collective effort to dig out mud and debris from streets and public areas. Hundreds took to the streets with shovels, to be immortalized by international photographers and seared into Tegucigalpans’ memory of the storm. But locally, around Los Piñares, there were other scenes. One afternoon Elena recounted to me how a chapter of the Vatos Locos showed up out of nowhere to rescue neighbors stuck on the river’s edge.

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On the other side of the canyon here there used to be small houses on the banks, and when this area flooded, the people didn’t leave. After the water rose, they were stranded and hanging onto the small plants that grow out of the rocks. We were all crying because we thought they would be washed away. But the Vatos Locos came down from Buena Vista, and they had a long rope and inflatable tubes from an auto garage up the hill. They climbed down and brought them across the river on inflated tubes. They took no fewer than twenty families to safety. I mean, it took all day. And then for weeks afterward they helped us relocate families and all of their belongings because there were Vatos Locos in all the barrios. They were like a little Red Cross. And when we needed security at night, they patrolled the streets. Everyone here was proud of what they had done, but these aren’t the stories you hear about gangs now.

But afterward there were also scenes that eroded a sense of recovery. “In the city so many people were sick from contamination,” Elena said. “We had to boil our water, and one by one I would say we lost half of our trees for firewood during the first year. It took that long for the water to return to normal.” Meanwhile, downtown, states of emergency empowered vigilantes, private security, military, and police to lay siege to the market and riverfront area. The wave of state violence terrorized homeless youth and pushed their social collectives underground to carve out their own fugitive geography in the sewer pipes that would become the subterranean commons of multiple generations of criminal youth. And further, as emergency policing was normalized, the storm eroded the legal infrastructure of several years of demilitarization efforts and lay the groundwork for militarized forms of urban security of the 2000s, a transformation of law enforcement that dovetailed with the new preeminence granted to investment capital. Government economists and the US ambassador hailed expanding free trade as a development strategy to pull Honduras out of the Mitch-­era depression, and their utopian rhetoric shocked Elena as she and Víctor were slowly rebuilding their house. “It was not even two months after the hurricane when we started hearing about the new things that would be happening to the country. Many of us were still recovering! But the world keeps moving forward even if you’re not ready. We had lost everything, but we still had hope that things could be better. Mitch was a chance to start over in Honduras.” As Elena described it, Mitch both annihilated the world they inhabited and the past they had known, leaving behind a sense of anticipation that opened the future more broadly than before. This imbrication of catastrophe and hope is fundamental to Benjamin’s historical materialism, in which redemption of

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experience as much as of history itself is mediated through the ruin as a repository of socioeconomic relations embedded so deeply as to crystallize. Fundamentally the ruin is the remainder of an economic world in which technological advances in production required a new inbuilt obsolescence of the commodity, leading to hypnotic cycles of production and consumption that inaugurated a “dream sleep” across modern Europe, the collective structure of forgetting that enables a progressive view of historical time. “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things,” Benjamin posits in an often-­cited line, proffering the ruin as a site of interpretation in which the fragment exposes the tenuous coherence of a false totality structuring lived experience.14 Likewise, the ruins of Hurricane Mitch were silently revelatory, coagulated wreckage that produced a critical gestalt of Latin American urbanism of the 1960s and 1970s. Every poor barrio that slid off steep hillsides on the southern periphery was scattered and splintered by rushing currents before it was reassembled under the Mallol Bridge in central Tegucigalpa as formless monuments to shantytowns and slums once occluded but now centered in national history. Their debris blocked the river and flooded Comayagüela as far back as eight avenues, where later newspaper photographs showed bystanders struggling fruitlessly to disentangle the wreckage. These massive coalescences of debris made a visual montage of economic production of different eras, where consumer plastics tangled with wire, rusted metals, and massive wooden beams. Hurricane Mitch was a terrifying act of nature and a dialectical catastrophe, producing a collective experience of “development” synonymous with collapse and ruination. When the floodwaters forced Genio and Criminal to hold their meeting in the city graveyard, the possibility of a different kind of underworld was born. The story of gangs in Honduras has been told from many different perspectives, by writers and by gang members alike, but none have focused on this moment of historical rupture that a storm like Mitch could produce. Within it the gang emissaries who arrived at the city like prophets hijacked the hurricane’s aftermath and occupied its rupture long enough that the world did not return to the way it was. Their plan was not a one-­size-­fits-­all template from San Pedro Sula but a message specifically for Tegucigalpa. For kids languishing in the rescue tents of the Red Cross shelters that within weeks would grow into new slums, Genio and Criminal offered an alternative. They took the shock of mass destruction and harnessed it, offering young people a new confidence that they cultivated by transforming their bodies. Instead of the rudimentary tattoos done with a needle and an unsteady hand, the appearance of professional-­grade tattoo machines began to refine gang tattooing.

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Tattooing pushed laceration to its limits, transforming the bodily surface as the city itself had been transformed. Amateur tattoos were covered over with new images drawn with crisp lines and often extending over the upper body like a pictorial shell. They turned the body into an infernal kaleidoscope of naked figures, zombies, skulls, demonic faces, devil horns, and the number 666, occult images transmitted through gothic underworlds as ruins of other criminalized communities. While politicians failed to respond, it was religious leaders who asked if the destruction of the physical world mirrored that of the spiritual world and the growth of gangs was literally a sign of the final battle between heaven and hell and their illustrated bodies harbingers of apocalypse. Marking themselves as outsiders and hunted by police, gangs cultivated an occult fugitivity that seemed washed ashore by the storm. Their bodies became a critical apparatus, a prismatic concatenation of worlds submerged by teleologies of capitalist realism—the sense that capitalism’s triumph is integrated so deeply into the present that it is impossible to imagine a coherent substitute.15 In the cauldron of anthropocenic and capitalist crises, the maras’ occultism harnessed the power of the negative as that alternative.

10

Rubbish

Nearly a century after its publication, Frederic Thrasher’s 1927 book The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago is still one of the most lyrical texts on gang communities.1 The book was Thrasher’s dissertation under Rob­ ert Park in the newly established Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Thrasher was among a cohort of graduate students doing fieldwork across the city, analyzing the changing face of the industrial metropolis as refugees from the Great War streamed into the city alongside migrants from the Jim Crow South, their accounts producing classic scholarship of early human ecology and urban sociology.2 While his colleagues wrote on dance halls, blues music, and freight-­hoppers, Thrasher turned his eye to the margins of the city where children roamed freely to escape the cramped living quarters of new ethnic enclaves. In chapters such as “Wanderlust,” “The Dime Novel,” “Nicknaming,” and “Junking and Railroads” he argues that an account of the imaginative potential of youth psychology was critical to understanding what gangs were, where they were found, who joined them, and what was to be done about them. Thrasher followed kids through industrial junkyards, movie houses, and abandoned lots as they gave each other nicknames, recited urban legends, and swore oaths of solidarity to their gangs. He situated the child’s imagination in an almost endless urban landscape from which they were structurally excluded but where they invented worlds that invigorated social life: “He sees in a broken sewer a sea on which sails the Spanish Armada. A sour basement becomes an ogre’s cave; a dank areaway, a glorified castle. To him the piles of rubbish in the city dumps or the mud hills along the drainage canal are mountain fastnesses, while stretches of wasteland become the Golden West. He hoists the ‘skull and crossbones’ over an old boiler as a perfect pirate ship.”3 Eventually those areas ossified as political geographies, he observes.

“The last we saw him, he was in the pipes.” Photo by the author.

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The broad expanse of gangland with its intricate tribal and intertribal relationships is medieval and feudal in its organization rather than modern and urban. The hangout of the gang is its castle and the center of a feudal estate which it guards most jealously. Gang leaders hold sway like barons of old, watchful of invaders and ready to swoop down upon lands of rivals and carry off booty or prisoners or to inflict punishment on their enemies. Sometimes their followers become roving lawless bands, prowling over a large territory and victimizing the community. . . . In some respects these regions of conflict are like a frontier; in others, like a “no-­man’s land,” lawless, godless, wild.4

Thrasher’s penultimate chapter introduces policy recommendations and a warning about the desires that animate juvenile worlds. Its title, “Attacking the Problem,” gives the impression of a diagnosis and prescription in the style of juvenile delinquency studies that took off in sociology and criminology in the 1950s. But having demonstrated the creative capacities of youth, Thrasher is emphatic in his assertion that such imaginative riches required structured activity and social integration if they were not to lead down a path of exuberant “demoralization,” which in his time would have meant cycles of recidivism. In the worst-­case scenario, however, those creative capacities would be noticed and preyed upon by organized crime groups recruiting from younger gangs. A number of measures could redirect those energies into socially productive or healthy expressions such as public education reform, boys clubs, penological reform, young men’s Christian associations, and parks and playgrounds.5 Thrasher’s conclusions foreshadow his later work on public schooling and the psychological impact of comic books on children, all of which he organized around a concern for the creative lives of young people.6 During the time that I was volunteering at the Vida de Paz shelter for homeless youth in Tegucigalpa, 1999–2003, I thought about the richness of Thrasher’s account, how he admired the creative world of adolescents as much as he worried about their vulnerability outside of formal institutional surroundings. I started volunteering at Vida de Paz after I read its online reports on the rising statistics of young homicide victims in the late 1990s, most written by a young employee named Dunia, whom I was starstruck to meet on my first day there. She had just graduated from the National Autonomous University with a degree in psychology and thought deeply about child homelessness in the city. “No matter how complete our shelter is,” she said to me that first day, “most of the kids will never come here. The street is their world and that’s where they feel at home.” On the wall of her office she had a photograph of Oscar, one of the homeless kids who visited occasionally, and she became distressed when

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he disappeared for periods of time. After I got to know Dunia over the course of several months, she invited me to go with her to look for Oscar, whom she had not seen in more than a week. “He stops by every few days,” she told me. “I just have the feeling something is wrong.” We stopped by Ramón’s office on the way out. He was one of the lawyers at Vida de Paz. “I haven’t seen him either, but I’m happy to leave this behind,” Ramón said, pushing piles of paperwork to one side of his desk. Vida de Paz was being sued for defamation by two police officers whose names came up in children’s testimonies, and Ramón was fielding all of the paperwork. Dunia and Ramón made a great duo, a psychologist with immense empathy for children and a seasoned if somewhat depressed human rights lawyer. Dunia led us on a tour of Oscar’s favorite spots, fast-­food places where he begged for meals and parks where he lounged in the afternoon shade, but still there was no sign of him. We went the long way up the pedestrian mall and then sat for a while in the central plaza beneath the statue of Francisco Morazán, where Oscar’s name was scratched into the foundation. “He’s been on the streets since he was six or seven years old,” Dunia said, “and when people tried to help he always ran away again. Oscar is one of those who won’t accept much that you give him.” We walked from the plaza to the nearby Galería Nacional de Arte, where homeless kids gathered day and night. A group of kids there pointed us to the river. Oscar had been living in the ruins of an old house gutted by Hurricane Mitch, they said. We circled by the old Casa Presidencial and descended the hill to the river where the Mallol Bridge crossed into Comayagüela. We could see a crowd gathered halfway across the bridge, stretching their necks to watch what was happening on First Avenue where police lights were flashing and people were shouting. They were gathered in front of the derelict buildings on the riverfront in a sting operation to evict homeless kids living inside, but the youths had barricaded the door. Several had climbed to the terrace and started a fire and were hurling flaming debris into the street and onto the police cruisers. From the terrace they wielded makeshift weapons—slingshots, stones, and chimbas, homemade guns that fire actual bullets. The police took shelter behind riot shields, hands on their revolvers. As we got closer we could see the kids on the roof had painted their faces. They peered over the ledge through masks of black and red pigment, and several wore body armor made of plastic and metal from the refuse heaps along the river. Even though two years had passed since Hurricane Mitch, the destruction along the riverfront still looked apocalyptic. The buildings were shorn of rooftops, their walls crumbling, and their exteriors barricaded with immense rubbish heaps. A stone block crashed through a window of a police cruiser, and seeming

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not to know what to do, police stormed inside the building. The kids fled, jumping terrace to terrace, and scattered across the riverfront ruins. Then the kids came streaming over the Mallol Bridge, weaving through the crowd as people recoiled and clutched their bags. They ran between cars and along the rails that hung forty feet over the river, and when they reached the other side they ran through a steep incline of weeds and hoisted themselves into a sewer pipe protruding from the hill. Beneath the bridge kids circled around a dumpster, clutching bottles of glue to their lips to get high and cheering them on. I had heard from some of the kids that the piping extended hundreds of yards underneath the city where communities of youth made their homes. Before realizing this, there were a few times walking in the central district that I had seen a head popping up from sewer grating and drainage pipes and thought I had hallucinated. The people who had gathered on First Avenue shook their heads in disbelief, having seen a gang of kids get the better of a police tactical unit. From their home in the ruins, the kids ruled a fiefdom inside the city. “Things are getting worse down here,” Dunia said, as we turned to walk back to Vida de Paz. “We’ll have to come back later to check on Oscar.” “But thank God they were able to escape,” Ramón said, looking back at the pipe. “The police won’t forget that damage to the cruiser.” In the early 2000s such confrontations were dramatic but routine for young people living on the streets in Tegucigalpa, and for anyone with limited knowledge of policing in the central district, the conflicts along the riverfront theatricalized the excessive force used against homeless kids. For years the confrontations had taken place under the cover of night, but after Hurricane Mitch they were public spectacles that generated crowds watching from a safe distance. The ravaged riverfront had been the epicenter of the hurricane’s destruction, and its structures were slated for eventual demolition. Still by the early 2000s young people took shelter in the ruins, scavenged the debris for resources, and forged community despite the lethal harassment from police. Why they were a target of routine violence was the question on everyone’s mind at Vida de Paz and across the city. Dunia and Ramón said it was the outsized influence of a few individuals in the police force who were holdovers from the Contra era. “They were trained by the CIA and other groups to terrorize the public,” Ramón explained. “They were made into sociopaths, and it would take a lot of therapy before they are no longer a danger to society.” For Ramón the history of counterinsurgency was inseparable from the asymmetrical force used by police, and the tactics of resistance invented by homeless children had evolved in response to it—armor made of rubbish, gory face paint, and skeletonized buildings turned into a living theater before a crowd of spectators.

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With every battle against the police, young people seemed to threaten more than the security of urban space. It was clear that their challenge was also to the authority of police, which was undermined each time their weapons were pointed in the direction of children. Homeless youths lived in fugitive communities of their own making, abandoning the society whose governing logic antagonized them, and their perseverance flouted not only the police who hunted them down but the state that legitimized that use of force. For decades, public security in Honduras had been contested ground between civil and military police institutions. After the 1963 military coup that brought General Oswaldo López Arellano to power, Honduran political life had been controlled almost exclusively by the military, and the modernization of police institutions during the 1960s addressed a military rather than civilian police corps. Military influence remained strong across the 1970s despite several changes of power until civilian government returned with the election of Roberto Suazo Córdova in 1982. But even during Suazo’s civilian presidency, leaders of both the National and Liberal Parties were forced to grant the military veto power over cabinet appointments and exclusive control over domestic and external security policy, along with exemption from investigations into corruption and human rights violations.7 In the early 1980s, US military aid to the Contras increased exponentially, and for a decade the Honduran armed forces remained hegemonic in the administration of public life, a condition that would not change until US policy shifted under the George H. W. Bush administration in 1990. After a decadelong buildup of the Honduran armed forces, the United States urged demilitarization and alienated a military establishment that was not prepared to relinquish influence. Calculated attacks and brutal policing operations in rural and urban areas followed, prompting President Rafael Callejas (1990–1994) to remake military intelligence (Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia) into a civilian force (Dirección General de Investigación Criminal) in 1993. That effort was expanded in 1998 when President Carlos Reina (1994–1998) transitioned the military police, Fuerzas de Seguridad Pública (Public Security Forces), from military to civilian control and established the National Police. For all these changes, however, abuses and disappearances continued through the end of the 1990s. Even as the civil wars were long over, Honduras was still awash in perhaps as many as one million high-­powered weapons,8 and as the Callejas and Reina administrations struggled against stringent austerity measures from multilateral lending institutions, Hurricane Mitch brought everyday life to a standstill in 1998. The Honduran GDP plummeted, and a deep recession paralyzed economic and bureaucratic institutions as state mechanisms for oversight floundered to contain government graft and abuses

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of power. As the state struggled for legitimacy despite rising indices of corruption, a new wave of bank heists, drugs and arms trafficking, kidnapping for ransom, assassinations, and white-­collar crime demonstrated that organized crime cartels were swiftly consolidating power at the national level. By the early 2000s the open conflict at the center of Tegucigalpa seemed a symptom of multiple crises, as regular confrontations between homeless youth, police, vigilantes, and private security forces staged the contested nature of state authority. On the destroyed riverfront in Comayagüela this public struggle between competing forms of sovereignty made the Weberian notion of a state monopoly on legitimate violence seem a rather anachronistic sociological fantasy premised on an idealized notion of Western statehood. In contrast, the contemporary anthropological studies of the state often focused on its margins, where sovereignty’s uneven authority was contingent and dependent upon situational performances of legitimacy. An example of such work is Dennis Rodgers’s analysis of street gangs in Managua, Nicaragua, in which he asks how the informal authority of gangs arose in zones where state influence was weak: “Gangs in mid-­1990s Nicaragua can be said to have institutionally organized local collective life . . . providing micro-­ regimes of order as well as communal forms of belonging to definite, albeit bounded, collective entities.”9 Rodgers argues that inconstant state presence in such areas was not evidence of what some called a “weak” state but depended upon extreme forms of policing. Instead of being centered around the low-­level law enforcement activities often constituting police work, these policing strategies created intermittent states of exception. Suspending law in the name of security, police brigades sacked residents’ homes, illegally detained suspected gang members, and terrorized local populations rather than protecting them. Rodgers contends that the putative absence of the state in urban barrios of Nicaragua was not a neoliberal retreat of the state but rather a new mode of governmentality.10 Within an emergent politics of “urban security,” the authority of both gangs and the state relied fundamentally on the ability to declare states of exception and suspend the law. Rodgers’s work demonstrates that forms of popular sovereignty such as gangs may arise at the margins of the state but that those places did not remain marginal. When formal sovereignty mirrored popular forms that arose in its absence, the margins were foisted to the cusp of evolving practices of social control in which the state’s own lawlessness and creation of zones of exception rendered “the state as a gang.”11 But in Nicaragua the national police described by Rodgers had a significantly different history that limited the forms of violence and corruption that hamstrung policing institutions in Honduras. After the Sandinista Revolution

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in 1979, reform of the national police was a priority for the revolutionary government, and since that time a tradition of oversight and reform has structured the evolution of Nicaraguan law enforcement. This history is often cited to explain why street gangs in Nicaragua typically have been smaller and less lethal than those across northern Central America. Honduran police institutions historically have been subject to less oversight, rendering their connection to organized criminal groups far more heterogeneous than in Nicaragua. Gangs in Tegucigalpa have diversified this heterogeneous authority even further, latching onto organized crime and corrupt policing for their own survival while at the same time resisting the violent excesses of those organizations by cultivating their own forms of power. For this reason gangs of the 2000s were not simply a one-­dimensional expression of structural problems in government but often regarded as antiheroes whose transparent participation in criminal activity hauled those secret operations into the light of day. What has made gang life lethal is not intergang violence but the ability of hegemonic crime groups to cull the lower ranks of the criminal world through assassinations, locking the secrets of their occupation in silent graves. It is no wonder that by the early 2000s the oath of secrecy in gang communities was widely known as “la tumba,” the tomb. Since the early 1990s Vida de Paz had attained an international reputation as a homeless shelter for youth as well as the foremost whistleblower in Central America on police death squads. In Tegucigalpa, Vida de Paz was among a handful of organizations compiling evidence about escuadrones de la muerte (death squads), social formations of power in which criminal and state entities are indistinguishable. Vida de Paz filed a lawsuit against the military police in the early 1990s for abduction and murder of homeless children, but the filing in 1997 of legal charges against members of the armed forces and police for the torture of more than sixty juveniles resulted in bomb threats and anonymous calls to the shelter and its employees.12 In the two years following Hurricane Mitch in 1998, when more than 350 homeless youths were murdered in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, Vida de Paz’s work garnered international attention that threatened the legitimacy of the sitting government.13 Based on forensic analysis, Dunia and Vida de Paz estimated that 30 percent of those victims were tortured and executed by military police. During my first few months as a volunteer, I watched Dunia pull long afternoons summarizing the forensic findings that ended up as a formal complaint to the Inter-­American Commission on Human Rights. From international donations Vida de Paz was able to expand its facility into a fortress-­like compound occupying an entire city block at one end of the central district, with high perimeter walls and an advanced security system. The architecture and

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layout of the facility were designed to feel like a world apart, secure and yet insular. Inside were dormitories, recreational areas, educational and art programs, free clothing, and a staff of around twenty Honduran and ten international volunteers including a doctor, nurse, social worker, psychologist, and coordinator for transfer to group homes, international sponsorship, and adoption. Dunia had an office in a small corner of the complex where she kept boxes of files, photographs, and audio recordings from youths who stayed in the shelter. We spent hours transcribing testimonials that often veered into eyewitness accounts documenting off-­duty police and military squads patrolling the central district and detaining homeless juveniles. In a lockbox were photos of bruises, burn marks, and injuries sustained by young people in confrontations with the police. For Dunia, democracy did not stand a chance in Honduras without a full accounting of police and military personnel who perpetrated human rights violations during the 1980s and rather than facing justice were promoted within the bureaucracies of new law enforcement institutions in the 1990s. In her office were separate files on each of the known members of the squadron known as Battalion 3-­16, a US-­trained counterinsurgency brigade responsible for assassinations and disappearances of supposed leftists across the 1980s.14 While media focused on marginal barrios where gangs and community vigilante groups struggled for authority, Dunia was on the riverfront gathering stories and testimonials about the city’s death squads whose members and operations kids could describe in notable detail. Dunia was sure that the violence against juveniles in the post–Cold War could be tracked up the chain of command to a small group of individuals trained in Battalion 3-­16. “They’ve been abusing authority since the early 1980s. What I’m talking about is a sickness inside of our institutions,” she said, “one that has to do with certain people who think they are still fighting a war.” Dunia’s older sister had been at the National Autonomous University when four students were arrested by Battalion 3-­16 in 1982, interrogated, and executed.15 “That case shaped me,” Dunia said. “When I was just a kid I knew I would study psychology. I wanted to know how people can commit these crimes, but I also wanted to know how people survive them.” Ramón, a lanky figure with a well-­dressed but disheveled appearance, was at the other end of the compound in legal services. As a young lawyer his first case had been the infamous massacre in 1995 known as the Four Cardinal Points, and the case’s impact on Ramón led him to quit law for several years.16 The massacre happened on July 15, before the Independence Day parades, when the military police set up a sting operation next to the national stadium and detained 128 young people on unspecified charges. Four were retained on

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suspected gang membership. Records at the Seventh Precinct show they were incarcerated overnight, then taken away the next afternoon. No further information was given until a day later, July 17, when their mutilated bodies were found dispersed on the highways to Danlí, San Pedro Sula, Catacamas, and Valle de Ángeles, each of the four directions leading out of the capital. Forensics showed they had been tortured and then executed at close range. “I was so engrossed in it that I couldn’t sleep,” Ramón recalled. “When I did sleep, I had nightmares. I had to put myself in the killers’ shoes, try to figure out their motive, and when a crime is this sadistic you have to be careful how much you let it inside. They went after us when they called us communists, and now they’re going after young people just because they can. These are people who enjoy killing, understand? That’s why you’ll hear the kids refer to them as monsters.” I had never heard anything like that, I told him. “On the tapes in Dunia’s office you can hear it when we ask them to describe the officers who commit these crimes,” he said. “They call them vampiros [vampires], bestias [beasts], and hombre lobos [werewolves]. The psychologist here tells us it’s because they have a child’s imagination.” He looked at me and furrowed his brow. “From my perspective that’s incorrect,” Ramón said. “Sometimes children see things with clarity. These are people who don’t live by the same rules that we do.” Battalion 3-­16 had been an arm of empire for the United States and anticommunist hardliners from across Latin America. From Dunia’s and Ramón’s perspective, the squadron cast a long shadow over the country a decade later. The ongoing violence of death squads in Tegucigalpa is a form of what Ann Laura Stoler calls “imperial debris,” the traces of empire that continue to act on a society long after the mechanisms of colonial rule are undone.17 Stoler describes the traces of imperial debris as animated by ongoing relations of force, those that “harbor political forms that endure beyond the formal exclusions that legislate against equal opportunity, commensurate dignities, and equal rights.”18 Her interest is in the opacity of these relations of power and in the “dissociated and dislocated histories of the present, in those sites and circumstances of dispossession that imperial architects disavow as not of their making, in violences of disenfranchisement that are shorn of their status as imperial entailments and that go by other names.”19 Death squads during the Cold War were not a new phenomenon in Tegucigalpa. The administration of the strongman Tiburcio Carías Andino (1933– 1949) was known for police violence against labor leaders and political adversaries. Likewise the military junta of General Oswaldo López Arellano (1963–1971, 1972–1975) had a secret police apparatus that was widely

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feared by the public. Cold War death squads, however, were different, as they were an international project. The birth of Battalion 3-­16 is dated to 1980 when twenty-­five Honduran soldiers were flown to a US military base in Texas where they stayed for six months receiving courses in tactics of counterinsurgency. Those tactics had been honed by US special forces and the CIA, drawing from the Project Phoenix covert interrogation and torture program in the US war in Vietnam.20 The same tactics were to be tested on domestic conflicts in Central America. After the CIA and FBI oversaw the courses on surveillance and interrogation techniques, graduates were flown back to Honduras, where they led courses for the intelligence division of the Honduran army. As the Contra war gained momentum, the CIA opened a base in Lepaterique where the ongoing courses were taught by interrogators from Argentina’s Battalion 601 of the Dirty War and Chilean veterans of Operation Condor, an anticommunist campaign that spanned the Southern Cone of South America.21 In 1982 the chief of the Honduran armed forces, General Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, uncle of Minister of Security Oscar Álvarez, inaugurated Battalion 3-­16 in a private ceremony in the town of La Lima. Over the next several years, in the name of preventing a leftist insurgency, the battalion conducted its deadly campaign, torturing and killing no fewer than 184 student activists, labor leaders, teachers, and other civilians suspected of being leftists. Not even the battalion’s own members were immune from violence, as it executed defectors and potential leakers within its ranks. Much of what is known about Battalion 3-­16 today comes from former members who fled abroad, fearing that suspicion would result in execution.22 General Álvarez was ousted from command in 1984, and without his leadership Battalion 3-­16 was rumored to have disbanded. But in the next few years, sporadic assassinations and other violence raised suspicions that 3-­16 was still active. In 1988 a spokesperson for the Honduran armed forces said the group had dropped the name 3-­16 because of “negative publicity” but that “functions of the battalion as a unit were still carried out in a number of military brigades.”23 Insiders attested that by 1988 the founding members of the group continued to operate from clandestine offices, one in Tegucigalpa “near a soccer field up a dirt road about half a mile from the First Battalion garrison.”24 When another group emerged in 1994 known as the Grupo Civil para la Ejecución de Delincuentes (Civil Group for the Execution of Delinquents), its core members were assumed to be former 3-­16 operatives.25 Other groups emerged—­ Batallón de Contrainteligencia (Counterintelligence Battalion) and a group known as “16” in Tegucigalpa, Comando Papá (Papa Commando) in San

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Pedro, and Justicieros de la Noche (Night Avengers) in Olancho—­targeting poor adolescents and suspected gang members as well as human rights and environmental defenders.26 While the Callejas government pushed for more stringent oversight, some former members of Battalion 3-­16 integrated into new police and military bureaucracies. Others from 3-­16 took their government and military connections and joined the private sector in the country’s first wave of security contractors. The private security industry boomed in the mid-­1990s as guards were hired for the banks, fast-­food chains, and new shopping malls that flourished with new international investment. The business model for private security firms was hailed as a market-­driven product that answered to the notorious lack of professionalism of state security groups. By the end of the decade there were as many as two hundred private security companies across the country, though only forty-­three of those were registered with the Ministry of Security. The remaining 80 percent were categorized as “ghost” companies—operations that either act without official registration or oversight or exist in name only, as shell companies.27 Investigative pieces in national newspapers reported that there were more private security personnel than the standing army in the country, and critics warned that the private sector had created a mercenary force that could easily carry out a coup d’état. Across the 1990s the enduring return of death squad veterans thrust the political dynamics of gothic sovereignty to the foreground of national debate. One had to ask which, not whether, death squads were responsible for the ongoing violence in the capital and around the country. By 2002 the head of police internal affairs, María Luisa Borjas, denounced officers thought to be involved in death squads in Tegucigalpa, describing a group called Los Magníficos (The Magnificents) as a new generation of police trained and emboldened by death squad veterans inside of police institutions. Borjas was subsequently fired from her position, and the suspected ringleader of Los Magníficos, Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla, was promoted within police ranks. Even as the controversy elevated demand for private security contractors, by 2005 the Unidad para la Investigación de Muertes de Menores (Unit for the Investigation of the Deaths of Minors), overseen by the Minister of Security Ricardo Díaz, reported that it had identified 150 private security officers operating a death squad in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. “They are dedicated to exterminating gang members with high-­caliber firearms, and they move around in luxury vehicles,” the report states. “The squad surveils its victims, detains them in raids, executes them at gunpoint, and disposes of their bodies in isolated areas of our largest cities.”28 The tall grasses along the banks of the Río Choluteca were the best hiding

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place for most homeless kids. It was rare to see vigilantes descend from the bridge to take their chances in the muddy and overgrown floodplain. Ramón took the tall grasses as his route in the early evening, comfortable along the riverbanks after spending time there as a kid when it was cared for as a recreational area. Around us was refuse from Hurricane Mitch, large pieces of wood lodged in the mud and industrial metal parts half-­submerged in pools of water. When we reached the ruined buildings of First Avenue where we were to meet Dunia for her nightly rounds, the expert scavengers among the homeless kids were sorting through refuse thrown out of the city market and cantinas. On good days they would have made rounds and returned with tortillas and beans, maybe some rice and avocado, cabbage, peppers, and onions. They would have grabbed onto city buses and gone to other districts where they had family or foster guardians. And they would have passed most of the hours by Mallol Bridge in the tall grasses. By night they gathered in the ruins of the old electric company building and the buildings of First Avenue in small groups, distributing what they had collected through the day. Dunia was already there with her backpack open, rubbing alcohol onto the kids’ cuts and scrapes, bandaging wounds, clipping their nails, and cutting their hair with shears. The shears stalled on patches of cobbler’s glue that police would smear into the kids’ hair if they found them sniffing, and even as Dunia labored to remove it, almost all of them clutched plastic bags or small baby food jars with the noxious substance inside. At the heart of the destitute strip along First Avenue were houses that had been washed out by the floodwaters, with open rooftops where the second floors had been swept away in the flood. Inside, men and kids stood by open fires to keep warm. Though the district was known for its historically significant architecture and family homes, the impact of Hurricane Mitch had been so severe that much of First Avenue was beyond preservation and had been condemned for demolition. Still five years after Mitch, it remained largely the same except for the modifications of the ruins by the kids themselves. The mud- and debris-­filled buildings had been dug out mostly by hand, and inside were metal barrels for fire that were used to keep warm or cook meals and ladders improvised from found materials that accessed the terrace. The interiors and exteriors of the buildings were covered in graffiti of names and faces, insults to the police such as “Chepos Basura” (Pigs/Cops Are Garbage) and geometric symbols to communicate among the illiterate, as most homeless youth had not completed primary school. The kids’ nickname for the area, Los Lugares Feos (The Ugly Places), was written in large, green letters on a white wall facing the Mallol Bridge. In letters and opinion pieces in national newspapers, Tegucigalpans urged

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the city government to do away with the district as soon as possible, not just as a matter of public safety but because its status was a disgrace. The historic district had been trampled, occupied by delincuentes who scrawled foul messages on the walls, set fires, made the strip an open-­air market for illicit goods, and gleefully damaged anything that Mitch had left intact. Though the district was commonly referred to as “las ruinas de Mitch” (Mitch’s ruins), a designation that hearkened to the meaning of the historic district in the hearts of the older generation, for the kids it was a material shambles full of vitality despite the ongoing repression. It was what Gastón Gordillo, in his ethnography of the Argentine Gran Chaco, differentiates from ruins as “rubble,” the product of destruction and decay.29 While ruins and rubble often exist side by side, Gordillo argues, ruins are an abstraction that renders material life into a coherent whole, a positive object whose meaning and value is generally defined. Rubble, on the other hand, escaped meaning-­making and lacked the disposition toward history and its past-­ness that renders ruins coherent, filled with latent intention of its creators. Rubble is an outcome of natural processes outside of historicity, without signposts that establish a chronology of time relative to the present. Rubble is immanent to human communities and acts on them through sensuous rather than abstract relations. Rubble’s negativity, then, is tied not only to its lacking as a linguistic sign but also to its capacity to denaturalize existing symbolic and ideological structures. Ruins are grounded in a particular understanding of history, self, and time, but rubble’s negativity potentiates multiplicities of social and political difference for communities in its midst. The historic district of Comayagüela, for example, had meaning for certain publics across Tegucigalpa that was undermined as it disintegrated into Lugares Feos, a process that took place at the hands of the most vulnerable and rejected members of the nation-­state. The disgust directed at the district itself was also extended to its inhabitants, whose dirt-­covered bodies were powdered and smeared in national history, returned to dust. As Dunia worked, the kids circled around and murmured accounts of the previous twenty-­four hours. There had been an early morning raid, but no one was captured or hurt. They spent the day watching for the vehicles to return. Their bunker was an old furniture store that had survived the storm with all four walls intact, on which they had improvised a door from weathered boards and metal wiring. Inside was a pile of produce scavenged from the nearby garbage heap, mostly old cabbages and onions they boiled over a fire in battered pots and old paint cans. A wooden pole served as a ladder, positioned

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to give access to a hole in the ceiling where kids on the roof kept lookout for approaching vehicles. The vigilante trucks they feared the most were unmarked gray vehicles with tinted windows and no license plates, intended to be inconspicuous but easily spotted at a distance by the kids. “Sometimes they don’t even get out of the vehicle,” a fourteen-­year-­old named Electra said, scratching her arms nervously. “They drive up and point guns at us from inside the car.” Other times military police arrived in large transport vehicles and flooded the area, grabbing as many kids as they could. Most were taken to Renaciendo. Some remained missing. Dunia was the most dedicated outreach person at Vida de Paz and kept her visits to Lugares Feos on a schedule so the kids knew when and where to expect her. “It took me a while to understand,” she said, “that most of these kids are never coming to the shelter. They won’t even enter the door for a change of clothes. Some of them would rather go hungry than come inside.” I asked why they did not accept the help, since Vida de Paz was a secure building with abundant resources. She responded, Charity is complicated. When I was in university, I had a religion course in liberation theology, and . . . [we were] reading Gustavo Gutiérrez, the priest from Peru who focused a lot on the idea of charity. When he criticized poverty, he criticized the roots of inequality. He insisted that Christians, before they went out providing the poor with charity, had to understand suffering from a social and political perspective. That is the mentality at Vida de Paz. We look at the total system of oppression, not just the symptoms. We try to understand the social and political causes of violence and to offer help to the young people who are traumatized by it.

The concept of charity that influenced Gutiérrez and others in Latin American liberation theology came from Augustine of Hippo, who in the fourth century wrote on the notion of charity, which he called “caritas,” drawing from the Apostle Paul.30 Hannah Arendt has noted that Augustine differentiated between the love of sensuous desire, which he viewed as too self-­interested to build community, and caritas, which put the needs of another ahead of one’s own. Caritas, for Augustine, was the path to individual liberation from the senses and like Paul’s use of the Greek term “agape,” would serve as the charter of a Christian community of love and friendship.31 And so Dunia was correct that in practice, charity is complicated. Kids entering Vida de Paz were often fearful of being sent to reformatories or sold

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to human traffickers, as there were news reports of human trafficking inside of adoption rings around Central America. “But they refuse to come here for other reasons too,” Dunia said. “For example, I can see it when we split them up from their groups. At night boys and girls have to sleep in separate dormitories. When kids go to see a counselor or doctor, they go alone. For many of them this is a problem because on the street, they never separate. They are bound together like families.” The term agape, used by Paul, is found in Greek literature as early as Homer, described in contrast to other forms of love, particularly eros. Plato wrote extensively about eros, which he describes as a self-­interested love that longs to possess its object and so renders the individual capable of extraordinary courage, poetry, and insight.32 Homeless youths living together on the streets of Tegucigalpa clung to each other for safety, nourishment, and well-­ being, with the group as their object of desire. It was an object in which they took pride while rejecting the label of helpless victims and the paternalistic subtext of charity. Desire for their chosen family liberated the idea of familial love from the narrow confines of the nuclear family and externalized it as the basis of community desiring together. A shelter like Vida de Paz offered many practical resources to homeless kids, but for many their home was the company and security of each other, and they clung to that home because their lives depended on it. If this streak of independence was a surprise to those who volunteered at the shelter and expected children to behave as innocent and helpless lambs of God longing for the protection of a guardian, those volunteers were shocked by the depth of experience many of the kids had accrued in their short lives. Not only did they live together without adult guidance, blindly exploring their curiosities with each other, but they also faced each day knowing their community was targeted for elimination. So eros in the world of homeless youths is also desire coupled with negation that burned all the brighter for coexisting with death. Such a duality of desire and mortality is the substance of Georges Bataille’s writing on eroticism, the central concept in a wide-­ranging work that converges on the issue of the human disquiet underlying our condition as discrete beings trapped in physical bodies and always separate from one another.33 What makes Bataille’s work of fundamental interest for anthropology is the question of human sociality and its connection with death, which he regards as the only path out of individualized existence and into sensuous communion with the universe. For Bataille, eroticism means “assenting to life to the point of death,” that is, invigorating the lived experience by way of gaining intimacy with one’s own finitude.34 For homeless youths in Tegucigalpa who were fending for their lives against

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an unbeatable adversary such as the police, the fusion of intimacy and death elevated their communities beyond mere survival and into a space of communion—with one another and with the spirits of the dead. The names and faces of their dead were the ones painted on the walls of Lugares Feo, haunting the city as a graveyard of restless souls. The day I finally met Oscar, for whom Dunia had been searching for weeks, Ramón and I were visiting Comité por Los Desaparecidos (Committee for the Disappeared), a human rights group founded on the first legal cases of families whose relatives were disappeared by death squads during the Cold War. Ramón had spent an hour with the group’s legal expert, Gerardo, reviewing paperwork for their next submission to the Inter-­American Commission on Human Rights when the buzzer from the street rang. Gerardo peered at the security camera. “It’s Oscar!” he shouted into the hallway. Someone let Oscar in, and he found his way to the central lounge and sat down as if home. He was skinny with large eyes and a jumpiness that was nearly cartoonish. But he spoke with the lawyers and staff like friends. Ramón asked him where he had been, and Oscar shrugged. “Just trying to get by,” he said. The secretary gave him a cup of coffee, which he sipped slowly as Gerardo finished the paperwork. When he was done, Gerardo gave Oscar one hundred lempiras, and before we could stop him he was going out the door again. “We all knew Oscar’s parents,” Gerardo told me. He pointed to their photos on the wall of black-­and-­white portraits of martyrs and the disappeared of the Contra war. “He was just a newborn when they disappeared in 1983.” Oscar’s parents had been part of the Guevaran foco movement, which, drawing from the tactics of the Cuban Revolution, focused on educating peasants in rural areas to join the liberation movement that would eventually accrue massive numbers and surround urban strongholds of the ruling class.35 In Honduras the foco-­inspired resistance groups took up arms against ranchers in rural provinces during the mid-­1970s. For years they evaded authorities by hiding in underground networks in the rural expanses of Olancho and Gracias a Diós. “But his parents came back to the capital from time to time,” Gerardo continued, “and on one trip they came to meet with some university activists. That night all of them disappeared. Five students and three militants. None of the remains were ever found. But there was algo positivo [something positive]. They had traveled to Tegucigalpa on a motorcycle, which meant they had to leave Oscar behind. That’s how he is still alive.” After his parents disappeared Oscar grew up in the care of relatives, but no one had enough money to support him once he was ready for primary school.

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He ran away from home when he was seven or eight, and over the years he lived with everyone at Comité por los Desaparecidos but always went back to the street after a day or two. Oscar and the other kids in his group called themselves roqueros (rockers), as they were fans of heavy metal and dressed in black, pierced their ears, and grew their hair long. In Tegucigalpa roqueros were often middle-­class kids who could afford to buy records and guitars and were frequently suspected of being stoned and dabbling ironically in the occult. But Oscar’s life had been about survival. He never went to school but learned to read and write at Vida de Paz. Oscar treated Vida de Paz like a home base and stopped by from time to time to change his clothes and spend a few hours in the art supplies room. After knowing him just a few months, Dunia realized he was a skilled cartoonist and wanted him to produce a comic-­book guide on city resources for the homeless to distribute to illiterate minors. But Oscar was never around long enough for the project to begin. He and the other roqueros lived for years in the underground pipes, where they felt safe from vigilantes. After Mitch, they moved to the Lugares Feos. Weeks after seeing him at the Comité por los Desaparecidos, I ran into Oscar in Vida de Paz, and he explained some of what had happened. Mitch filled the pipes with garbage and we couldn’t get around anymore. You would go all the way down a pipe and find it blocked with garbage. Some of the kids stayed there to clean it out, but we left and started living in Lugares Feos. For a while it was good, but these days we can’t live there anymore. The police do anything they want to us. Every day they show up with their batons and weapons and even if a crowd of people is watching, no one intervenes. To them we are desechables [throw-­away people]. Now they want to change the laws so that even minors can go to prison. They say that in court we should be treated like adults because we are dangerous to the public. But we are the ones they can kill without any consequences. And for us there’s no funeral. No one is sad for us when they hear we are dead. To them we are basura [garbage] to be cleaned off the street. So now we live in the cemetery, where you’re not out in the open like this. People can’t find us in there. The only day you’ll see us is Sunday, when the families are there to visit their relatives. We get paid to clean all the garbage and weeds and make it look nice. It’s like an enormous garden, and we are like kings and queens there.

Gerardo told Ramón that Oscar was living in the cemetery, and the following Sunday Dunia and I went to find him. I had only seen the Cementerio Gen-

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eral (General Cemetery) from the bus window on the ride back to Los Piñares. It looked like an enchanted forest, trees hulking over the twenty-­foot-­high perimeter wall. In 1875 the Italian architect Emilio Montessi designed the cemetery on eighty-­six acres, with a wide promenade and mausoleums, tiny chapels, castlelike fortresses, a pyramid, and crooked gravestones all around a cone-­shaped hill in the center.36 In the early 2000s the cemetery was unattended and considered perilous, as many of the tombs had been ransacked for valuables and it was known that there was a sizable itinerant population living in the overgrown thickets. Among them, Oscar and his fellow roqueros watched over the site for miniscule wages, paid each Sunday when attendants arrived to open the gates to the public. They pulled weeds, closed the opened tombs, picked up garbage, scrubbed graffiti, and fed the family of donkeys that had appeared there the previous year and grazed the tall grasses. Dunia and I walked through the open gates and empty guard booths into the interior where the brick promenade stretched out in front of us to the tomb of ex-­president Marco Aurelio Soto (1876–1883), a small castle with a minaret built in miniature to give the effect of distance. To our right and left several columbaria had been forced open, and their seals lay in pieces on the ground. Two women walked arm in arm under a parasol, slowly making their way toward the hill. Dunia paused, looking over her shoulder and then into the far reaches of the graveyards. We were almost to the castle when a boy appeared, waved to us, and vanished into the waist-­high grass around a row of mausoleums. Dunia followed him, turning a corner and bringing us to a plaza of Asian architecture adorned with Chinese characters, surrounded by corridors of tombs of the Chinese community of Tegucigalpa. Past overgrown mausoleums with faded plastic flowers and opalized portraits of the dead, we arrived behind the red brick castle where Aurelio Soto was entombed. When we looked up we saw as many as ten children sitting on a low branch of a guanacaste tree, as many girls as boys, and several barefooted with crude tattoos on their arms. They had been watching us while they kept an eye on the cemetery entrance. Dunia knew some of them from Vida de Paz. “Has anybody seen Oscar the roquero?” she asked. They waited for an older boy to speak. “Last we saw him he was in the pipes,” he said, pointing back toward the market. “Which one, my dear?” Dunia asked. “Outside the gate in the ravine,” he said. “It goes to the riverfront, so he might be there.” Outside we found the ravine, which appeared to be a sinkhole that had

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snapped in two a pipe nearly five feet in diameter. Several kids stood around the opening, taking turns feeding a bony, black donkey in the muddy bottom. Dunia whistled and waved for them to come up, but instead they looked at us for a moment and vanished one by one into the pipe. We took a seat on a bench nearby, and Dunia borrowed my notebook and pen. She sketched a map of the cemetery, with a tree where we had spoken to the boys. Beyond the perimeter she drew the ravine and pipe. She put a small star for each child, located where we had seen them, and on the reverse side short descriptions of each. In her office such maps hung on the wall, each with a date and the nicknames of kids listed at the bottom. She tore out the pages and slipped them into her bag. “We won’t find Oscar here,” she said, “but we should come back tomorrow.” “You think he’ll be here?” “I don’t know. But in the meantime, we need to find out more about who is living out here. If you know their world you can understand how to help. Most of them are too skeptical to ask. They don’t trust us, and we don’t live in their world. So this is all we can do.” Dunia had been listening to the kids in Vida de Paz long enough that she had an idea of the shape of the labyrinth in which they moved around. “From what they’ve told me,” she said, “it’s as if some of the modern sewer piping connects with tunnels used by the Catholic clergy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They say there are large, dry tunnels that start under the Iglesia Auxiliadora and go all the way to the San Miguel cathedral in the central plaza. That means they go under the rivers. But I don’t doubt it because there are tales about tunnels used by the priests, who never had to go outside. People say they still exist, but I won’t go down there.” It was late afternoon a week later when Oscar and four others arrived at Vida de Paz, asking to spend the night. We had seen him in the shelter only a few times, and the staff moved quickly to get him and the others checked in. The five of them were nervous and insistent. After dinner, while several kids watched a Hollywood film dubbed in Spanish, Oscar went to the arts and crafts room with the staff psychologist. Dr. Fred, as he was known, had studied anthropology at the University of Chicago in the 1960s with Sol Tax, who founded the school of “action anthropology” as a pragmatic and social justice–­driven praxis. Fred had been in Tegucigalpa for more than ten years, offering trauma therapy to young people in institutions like Vida de Paz. When Dunia and I joined them, Oscar was explaining what had happened. They had evacuated the Cementerio General, he said, then turning to Dunia and me. “We saw you there,” he said. “But we couldn’t talk to you because the MS had been there earlier in the day. That’s how it is now. They come around all

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the time, looking for us.” That was why the kids followed us, making sure we were safe and didn’t deviate from a secure route. “They followed you all the way to the Mallol Bridge,” Oscar said. “Who?” Dunia asked. “The boys in the pipe.” “What happened in the cemetery?” Dunia asked. “Like I said, the maras are making problems for us. They were coming through, every few days, telling the kids that we can join the mara. We said no, but they came after midnight and we were sleeping. Everyone ran, but they chased us. There were six who didn’t make it.” His voice trembled. “Now there are some of us who don’t have the stamina anymore. We need help if you can help us.” “How many are in your group?” Dr. Fred asked. “The Murcielagos Blancos [White Bats] are seventeen.” “Murcielagos Blancos?” Dr. Fred asked. Oscar smiled and we all laughed. “That’s what the kids in the Lugares Feos called us because we spent so much time in the pipes that we turned pale.” “You’re not serious,” Dunia said. Oscar laughed. “We got no sunlight sometimes for days. So every time they saw us they would say, ‘Here comes the Murcielagos Blancos.’ We didn’t like the name, but then when we moved to the cemetery, we started sleeping in the branches of the big guanacaste trees on the side of the hill because no one would see us up there. One night there was a bright moon and the light was almost like daytime, and I was looking at the other kids sleeping in the tree, and I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s us. We are the Murcielagos Blancos.’” Dunia handed him a towel and bar of soap. “Tell the Murcielagos Blancos that it’s time to bathe and get ready for bed by ten.” Oscar nodded and walked back to the common area where the others were falling asleep in front of the television.

11

Evil

The first time I saw a gang member with a tattooed face, I was so astonished that I was frozen in place. Equal parts spellbound and alarmed, my thoughts went blank. I was in Los Piñares, standing in the street with Teodoro as he fixed the engine on his truck. As the figure approached, I saw him out of the corner of my eye. He was alone and walking quickly toward us. As I turned my head I could make out the blue ink over his face. A frigid sensation raced through my body from head to toe, and my vision blurred. Suddenly my legs were concrete. Time slowed to a crawl as my body fought to manage the panic. Visions of my violent death floated through my head like dream sequences. I watched as if outside my body, as he walked past and continued up the road to the barrio San Miguel. A few moments later Teodoro broke the silence. “Son of a bitch,” he said under his breath. “I didn’t see him coming.” “These mareros are just walking around in broad daylight now. That’s not good.” “What do you mean?” “When you tattoo yourself like that, you should be hiding somewhere. They know it’s not safe for them to walk around here. The military was here just last night.” “Yeah.” “One way of understanding this situation with the maras here in Los Piñares is this. That guy walking through here is a problem because when you are that crazy, it’s like a virus.” “A virus?” “Because it’s something so extreme that everyone remembers it. It gets in their head,” Teodoro said. “I know what you mean.” “Alucinando la mara [dreaming the gang] is what we say. Thinking about the

Everyday sacrilege. Photo by the author.

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maras all the time. That’s what happens with young people who join them. It’s like they are part of a new religion,” he said. I can remember my neighbor Dilsia dreaming the gang for years. She was in her late teens, skinny with curly hair and green eyes, and lived in the center of the barrio. After her high school classes she would spend much of the afternoon sitting on a wooden bench at the intersection of two dirt streets, where men played cards into the night. With an ink pen she drew designs of facial tattoos into the wood, as if the faces of countless mareros had been flattened into the weathered planks. She was one of a handful of women in the barrio who joined the MS. Teodoro and I sat on the benches several days later, watching foot traffic come and go from Los Piñares, when Dilsia appeared with teardrops tattooed on both sides of her face. Seemingly at once the men playing cards gasped, then murmured quietly as women waiting for a bus held their breath in shock. What she had done was unfathomable, especially as a young woman, in a barrio whose community was still socially conservative. To look at the tattoos was both pleasing and unsettling. There was an aesthetic delicacy to the small drops around her eyes that were tinged deep blue, a turquoise that glittered in the sun. But their beauty was also contradictory, as the droplets marked the arrival of a dangerous social world that would swallow her life. Immediately Dilsia was marginalized by other women in Los Piñares and then avoided by neighbors and their children. She was the subject of gossip and conjecture about her relationship to the gang and sexual favors she might have performed to stay alive. I had heard such rumors about widespread misogyny in these overly male gang communities, but Dilsia rejected these personal insinuations outright. “I know it does happen,” she told me later, “but not to me. I don’t sell myself just to belong.” Nevertheless, her social isolation in Los Piñares was significant and generated a negative sacred aura around Dilsia no less than that of others who defaced themselves and at whom one was forbidden but compelled to look. The seductive gravity of the tattoos wasn’t limited to the images themselves but arose from their relation to time and mortality, “the language of flowers” that Georges Bataille describes as beauty’s finitude and proximity to death.1 “I think they are beautiful,” Dilsia said, looking into a makeup mirror as we sat on the bench. She couldn’t stop looking at them. They seemed to levitate off her skin. When Jorge’s cousin Armando had his face tattooed, Jorge and I visited him the following day at their grandmother’s house. They were in the rear courtyard under a mango tree, where Armando was sitting shirtless in a plastic chair. The new tattoo covered the skin around his left eye, and the artist had colored it black to resemble an empty eye socket of a skull. Jorge blew canna-

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bis smoke over the swollen skin as occult medicine. Armando looked up at me from behind the haze. His body was covered in images that seemed to creep up toward the vacant space on his face. Seeing his body engulfed in tattoos made him seem far away from us. He was locked inside the gang now. No one would ever hire him again for a job, the community would recoil thinking him a violent criminal, and as soon as the police spotted him they would have him in state custody. The police would give him the option of working in their criminal rackets, and if he did, he would be released and we would never know. If he refused, they would remand him to the National Penitentiary, where he would live in the MS-­13 barracks, from which point the gang would replace his family. Watching him bask in the sun, the ink still wet under his skin, Jorge and I both knew we were also saying goodbye to him. Anthropological writing on gangs in Central America has largely ignored the importance of tattooing in gang life, a curious omission given that in Honduras tattoos were politicized under Mano Dura as the foremost criterion for determining gang membership. This is to say that the tattoo could determine whether one lived or died in the hands of authorities, not to mention in the carceral system or on the streets. It was, therefore, much more than a simple marking of the skin. To be tattooed with gang-­related images was to throw oneself into exile. It was to forfeit the individual rights that shielded you from the sovereign violence of the state. But it was also for these reasons that tattooing was an exquisite pleasure that opened a new relation to law itself. To accept one’s criminalization under law so completely as to cultivate it further is what Gilles Deleuze, in his study of Masoch and de Sade, calls “masochistic humor,” an insolent obsequiousness and rebellious submission that exposes a gap between the letter of the law and its consequences.2 Here transgression is not a dialectical negation of law but the performance of an irresolvable contradiction within it. In his classic interpretation of Sadean philosophy, Pierre Klossowski describes that, for de Sade, the dilemma proposed by the concept of evil was exactly this—“the misfortune of being virtuous in crime and finding oneself criminal in the practice of virtue.”3 From this perspective the subject of tattooing becomes critical to a political anthropology of gangs and their competing forms of sovereignty, in which sovereignty founded on the force of law is the condition for another, which liberates the self from the legal, not to mention economic and social, ends of state life. The second form of sovereignty interests me, as it is generative of new sociopolitical relations, a revaluation of the term taken up by Bataille in his nomadic anthropology of vitalist traditions in human communities. When he was coming of age in the early twentieth century, the social world of

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Bataille’s youth was organized by the three pillars of European modernity— utility, rationality, and efficiency—which the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Victorian morality had enshrined as the organizing principles of social life in western Europe. These ideas were the scaffolding for social forms that tightly controlled the vital energies of human communities perhaps to the highest degree in western European history. Existential sovereignty, for Bataille, was the liberation of human vitality through ritualized practices that undermined those cultural forms. “The sovereignty I speak of has little to do with the sovereignty of states,” Bataille wrote in 1949. “I speak in general of an aspect that is opposed to the servile and the subordinate.”4 The question of sovereignty, then, is what individual and collective transformations would take place when collective life was not subordinated to principle of utility and expressed otherwise. Beyond utility and instrumental reason lie the social phenomena to which Bataille returned across his career. For Bataille, laughter, excess, sacrifice, and laceration are the elementary forms of transgression that dismantle instrumental reason without dialectical synthesis. These liberate experience from worldly orientations that Bataille’s colleague Michel Leiris has described as a “sacred grown cold.”5 In the background of Bataille’s work is the persistent concern that if anthropology could not address the fading vitality of social life, then the allure of fascism would grow stronger, with the antiliberal promise of an ethnostate driving nationalist fervor to its pitch. Bataille’s notion of sovereignty, in contrast, yokes together an array of divergent social phenomena, each undoing the purposive and forward-­thinking approach to life embedded in modern capitalist societies. The economic philosophy of scarcity underwriting capitalism presumes a limited supply of material goods and wealth in the restricted economy that required discipline and abstinence from wasteful spending as the basis for survival. But for Bataille the general economy is composed of the limitless matter and energy of the existing universe, in which abundance and destruction reinforce one another as the interminable mechanics of a natural world. Waste and prodigious loss are the foundation of existence itself in the general economy and its destiny, wherein death is the universal condition uniting all living forms. If the restricted economy is one in which utility and prudence attempt to defer death as the ultimate destination of frivolous and wasteful activity, then the general economy is one in which dizzying expenditure, beautification, leisure, and pleasure come face to face with death so that one might embrace the experience of life in its fullest. “The sovereign world is the world in which the limit of death is done away with,” Bataille writes, “Death

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is present in it, . . . [but] it is always there only to be negated, never for anything but that.”6 In the marginal barrios like Los Piñares, gangs were a paradox, both fugitive and theatrical. They were secretive and yet aggressively occupied the center of the public realm, clandestine but curating themselves for display. Their visual presence in the barrio was jarring. Broadly speaking it was an unexceptional setting—houses made of dull wood planks and gray cinderblock, unpaved roads, intermittent electricity and running water, and everything tinged with the monochromatic beige of dust blown around on windy afternoons. The roqueros, the Once Dragones, and the maras all cultivated their aesthetic styles and seemed to float against the mundane backdrop. Mareros were the most extreme, not just modifying their dress but inventing dramatic gestural and body languages that seemed to simultaneously spell out and scramble messages from the underworld. Their aesthetics of gothic sovereignty mashed up the styles of Mexican bandit cinema, narcocorrido music, and hip hop from the United States into a vivid flair that attempted to transcend the structural obstacles of working-­class life. Growing up in Los Piñares meant ridicule from the cosmopolitan classes in Tegucigalpa as personas vulgares (common folk), prejudice when applying for a job, suspicion that one was a thief, and eventual resignation and acceptance of it all as inescapable conditions of life. Dreaming big set barrio residents up for disappointment and ran counter to their everyday experience. But gang worlds promised a chance to live with other expectations. They fabricated a realm of unknown potential opening from the claustrophobic confines of structural poverty, and this transformation of the phenomenological world made mareros more than common criminals. Their tattooed legions wielded a powerful capacity to disrupt the accepted constraints of everyday life, and tattooing the face was the peak of this power. Tattooing was not uncommon in the barrios but became transgressive when it reached the face, assailing unspoken conventions of beauty. Around Los Piñares and probably more broadly across the country, there was an unacknowledged consensus that the face is sacrosanct. To disrupt it is to violate the symmetry and definition that generated feelings of connection, trust, and shared membership in a social domain. Once it inscribes images, text, or patterns on a person’s face, tattooing becomes much more than disfigurement. It becomes an attack on the very mechanisms that render possible the social itself. Tattooing the face was the starting point for a metonymic chain along which criminality became antisociality, and an attack on the social itself that was perceived in the most radically negative terms available. Such audacity was the mark of either evil or monstrosity, claims that were

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exaggerations though ones the maras also took into their own hands. Using villainous aliases and crafting a cosmos of mythology around themselves through rumor and clandestinity, the maras embellished evil and monstrosity with layers of artifice. That artifice was the outer skin of communities that harnessed the social away from the restricted economy of daily life in the barrios and toward the general economy of the illicit world, which included the underground economy, its criminal communities, and the promise of an abundance of wealth and collective vitality. Gangs were vehicles for the jubilant and wasteful expenditure of self no less than the material wealth circulating in the general economy of globalization. The symbol of the devil emerged as a portal opening to a nomadic exteriority, invented and reinvented through the collective effervescence of criminal communitas. This Dionysian social reality attracts the eye of the isolated and self-­ determining liberal subject, whose curiosity could easily change shape first to envy and then to hatred. The mantle of evil was both the mark of collective violence toward gangs as much as the revaluation of that mark as the seductive veneer of gang experience. If tattooing the face all but guaranteed violence from adversarial gangs, police, and mercenary death squads, it was also to gamble publicly with one’s life. The unlikelihood of survival made the embrace of evil a wager of everything that one had, the wanton expenditure of one’s life in the name of short-­ term pleasures. Gothic and satanic tattoos mediated this wager as figures of excess, figures of pleasure and pain, in which vitality, death, and eroticism converge as a collective project. That project meant refusal of a restricted economy, its requisite forms of labor, and its conservative practices of self-­ preservation and strategizing for a future. It meant the embrace of the surplus of the illicit economy whose lethal reality made it also the consumption of one’s own life. I call this collective endeavor a politics of sacrifice, premised on the institution of sacrifice as it was described a century ago by Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert. Their short but dense analysis of sacrifice describes the act of sacrificial destruction as rendering the sacrificial object holy, a negation that ruptures the threshold separating the embodied material world from that of universal immanence.7 The violent repression of gangs in Honduras, in turn, emboldened their communities not because they intended to overthrow the state, a matter left to revolutionaries, but because self-­sacrifice of its members rendered their bodies and memories into something sacred. The aura that surrounded the maras was the insistent incandescence of their legions of dead, and under Mano Dura the aura of criminal and state power squared off, with the state’s sovereign power also backed by its own legions of dead. This being so, as long as the state’s

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efforts to control gangs was premised on violent repression that reduced the existence of gang members to what Giorgio Agamben has called “bare life,” a status of sheer vulnerability before the law, then the glow of gangs’ aesthetic and mythological insurgency could only burn brighter.8 In their book on the early years of the MS-­13 in Los Angeles, California, Oscar Martínez and Juan José Martínez give a historical dimension to the figure of the devil in MS tattooing. They describe the fanatical admiration that gang members had for kitschy heavy-­metal bands, especially those using occult and satanic imagery, to argue that members of MS picked up satanic motifs from the LA metal scene.9 Such images circulated in their tattooing for years before becoming ubiquitous across Central American barrios in the 2000s. It is important, however, that these be regarded as more than merely surviving practices from the LA period. They are not copies of gang life in Los Angeles so much as repositories of historical experience that travel from other criminalized communities and across time. Their hackneyed and clichéd features are ruins, shorn of the potential for personalization to render the images autonomous totems of collective life. Deleuze’s anti-­Platonism renders this most clearly: “We produce something new only on condition that we repeat— once in the mode which constitutes the past, and once more in the present of metamorphosis.”10 Here kitsch subverts itself, and the void of banality is overwhelmed with abstract potentiation for becoming. This depersonalized potential diffuses metonymically across a life until reaching what Jacques Lacan calls a “quilting point,” the moment an endlessly signifying chain is arrested into a signifier that provides the necessary illusion of stable meaning.11 Gang tattoos in Tegucigalpa curated the fragments and ruins of other criminal worlds into dynamic and new configurations that were assembled within the immanent relations of their own historical moment. Deleuze continues, “Repetition is never a historical fact, but rather the historical condition under which something new is effectively produced.”12 In other words, it was not the cultural hegemony of gangs in Los Angeles but rather the pervasiveness of neoliberal austerity, state violence, and the illicit economy that generated the creative force that defined gangs of the early 2000s. The history shared between gangs in Los Angeles and gangs in Tegucigalpa did not converge on tattoos as lifeless cultural artifacts but as markers of underground community. What seem individually like stale reproductions are instead collective compositions of multiple bodies, constellations that flash like a beacon through the din of late-­capitalist violence as affects of another world. Though tattooing had been popular among gangs for several years, it was not until 2004, when the prison burned in San Pedro Sula, that their images

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would be absorbed into political life. It was a mass-­mediated catastrophe in which the spoken testimony of witnesses was overshadowed by visual documentation of maimed and dead bodies whose tattoos seemed to say more than the witnesses could. The prison complex caught fire early in the morning, but when firefighters arrived they were unable to enter the exterior gates, which were locked from the inside. Unlike other prisons that are often distanced from public view, the San Pedro Sula prison was constructed in the middle of a dense residential district. As the building burned, neighbors in adjacent houses climbed to their rooftops to see into the prison yard and later reported seeing a masked squadron assembled on the lawn, shooting and stabbing inmates who managed to escape the flames by beating their way through the cinderblock walls.13 There had been another fire a year earlier at El Porvenir prison outside of La Ceiba that took the lives of eighty-­six inmates suspected of membership in Barrio 18, so the cause of the San Pedro Sula fire was immediately in question.14 After emergency workers were allowed entry and lined up the victims’ bodies on the lawn, photographers captured images of corpses arranged in an orderly grid, the first of many details that created a public furor. The treatment of the bodies was far too rational and technocratic in the wake of a chaotic, brutal blaze. Prison authorities assured reporters that the fire started in an illegal refrigerator unit in the gang barracks, but as survivors provided accounts to journalists, they recounted being moved into isolation, smelling gasoline, and panicking as their holding tank was consumed in flames. When victims were admitted to local hospitals, the country watched as television coverage of nurses treating their burns captured graphic images of the victims’ blistered and discolored flesh. The final body count was 127, all of whom were suspected members of the MS-­13. The graphic images and the testimony of eyewitnesses shook the country, and widespread criticism of antigang legislation decried the government’s demonization of gangs as the condition for flagrant acts of violence against them. As nurses applied salves to gang members’ swollen skin and caressed their forbidden tattoos, gang members looked less like pathological monsters and more like helpless victims assailed by an asymmetrical force. Nurses were giving sponge baths to young men covered in blisters, their devils and satanic symbols carefully cleaned and bandaged by healing hands. Funeral processions for the dead started some days later in which mothers heaved themselves over caskets that held their lifeless children cradled in silk, their tattooed faces behind garlands of flowers. Mass mediation of the scenes on television and in newspapers was explicitly allegorical, playing on the paradox of demonized figures who flickered between being criminals and victims or between mon-

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strosity and saintliness, whose violated remains lay in repose as the world debated their basic humanity. News coverage of the fire showed how far underground the aesthetics of gothic sovereignty had come. From the full-­page newspaper portraits of the injured and deceased I recorded the tattoo images in my notebook as a running list: X’s tattooed on the eyelids, a pentagram between the eyes, the numbers 1 and 3 on each cheek, the letters M and S across the forehead, gravestones in a field of grass, skulls on the earlobes, darkening around the eye sockets, a woman in a Panama hat, circles with lines through them, a clown face kissing a woman with long hair, hands with long black fingernails, a Mayan temple, horns emerging from the top of the head, a brick wall, skeletal hands, an inscrutable male face with a mustache, a pitchfork, a grinning skull, a chain-­link fence, a prison surveillance tower, a #8 billiard ball, a Mayan priest in ceremonial dress, a screaming skull, a laughing clown, a snake around the ear, marijuana leaves, a devil with a cigarette in its mouth, storm clouds, a parrot, naked breasts molested by demon hands, a cadaver holding a scythe, flowers on a vine, a leopard with eyes shut, a woman sticking out a forked tongue, a spiderweb, a hand of playing cards, a clown with long hair, prison bars, a dead tree, a laughing mask, slashed skin, overlapping faces, a pair of bat wings, melting faces, a grinning set of teeth, a devil’s tail, teardrops, a bald clown, and hands in prayer. Thought-­images of gang tattooing fractured the official narratives of the fire that sought to establish false coherence over the event and challenged the sovereignty of what Achille Mbembe calls “necropower,” a violence “to which nobody feels any obligation to respond.”15 Mbembe continues, Necropolitical power proceeds by a sort of inversion between life and death, as if life was merely death’s medium. It ever seeks to abolish the distinction between means and ends. Hence its indifference to objective signs of cruelty. In its eyes, crime constitutes a fundamental part of revelation, and the death of its enemies is, in principle, deprived of all symbolism. Such death has nothing tragic about it. This is why necropolitical power can multiply it infinitely, either by small doses (the cellular and molecular modes) or by spasmodic surges—the strategy of “small massacres” inflicted one day at a time, using an implacable logic of separation, strangulation, and vivisection, as we see in all the contemporary theaters of terror and counterterror.16

But the theater of terror and counterterror and the abstract authority of state violence that underwrites it were defamiliarized as tattoo images juxtaposed them with scenes of worlds in which they are least sovereign: under-

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ground life in Los Angeles, the precolonial past in Mesoamerica, and a netherworld in which death was eroticized as laceration and recuperated from the banality of extermination. In the crucible of sovereign violence, each image entered a state of becoming, shrouding the victim’s body in a nontotalizing countermythology that denaturalized the state’s abstract legal right and mundane obliteration of bodies. The images elevated the victim into a transhistorical subject constituted of dissimilar historical fragments whose assemblage defies the sense of inevitability that underwrites modern states. Fallout from the fire in San Pedro Sula was significant. For the first time since its inauguration in 2002, the Mano Dura policing initiative was put into question, and the moral high ground that the Ricardo Maduro administration occupied in the fight against organized crime shifted. The fire also subjected the baroque style of gang aesthetics to mass mediation through photojournalism so that such images were no longer concealed within clandestine channels of fugitive existence. For a moment, it was as if gang members were heard from within their submerged strata of political life. They gave few interviews, but their tattoos were magnified, extensively documented, and contemplated by diverse publics across the country. The exposure challenged the idea of the pathological gang member that most of the public might have held in mind, but the deconstructive power of the images did not assert any other concrete trope in its place, either. Overall the fire was not as easily summarized as official narrative purported, and that official narrative was submerged beneath new questions in which the one-­dimensional notions of gangs, incarceration, and justice were subject to revaluation. In Los Piñares and elsewhere there was new interest in the subject of gangs generally, a refreshing receptivity to thinking backward and forward with the event as a new space of reflection. Conversations about the fire took interest in a closer analysis not simply of the purportedly mechanical causes or the logistical approach of rumored assassins but also in the bombastic rhetoric about behavioral pathology and criminal justice that laid the foundations for such an egregious act of violence. Friends discussed the variation in gang life rather than its supposed monolithic sameness, the harsh conditions in national prisons to which the gangs had been subjected and many without due process, and how the fire would change government and public perceptions of the war on gangs, including its foundation in moralizing discourses about crime that seemed detached from the routine graft and white-­collar crime that had become a secondary structural feature of both government and economic life. In summary, the San Pedro Sula fire was historically important because it escaped easy appropriation by state spokespersons and, from a Deleuzian perspective, actualized the divergent potential of gang communities as a creative

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force.17 The event of the fire did not serve to reinforce categories of identity that had made violence possible in the first place, but it created differences that escaped the categories and unsettled the prevailing ideas of law, justice, and criminality. In popular memory the event continues to shake the ideological foundations of those ideas in Honduras to this day. Here gang tattooing countered the empty discourse of state officials with a flow of images whose juxtapositions offered allegorical narration of the historical juncture without specifying an end. Images undercut empty explanations and animated discontent with the cultural and phenomenological pres­ ent such that the authority of the state and of the criminal was inverted, the state becoming criminal and the criminal sovereign, opening the path to an allegorical experience of time and history. While gangs had been called evil by religious and secular leaders alike, in the event of the fire evil was itself overshadowed by the brutality of death squad soldiers whose impunity was the sine qua non of state sovereignty. Evil freed from the Manichean reading of good and evil in Christian theology entered a state of becoming, and as a symbol, a concept, or an array of fragmentary affects, it amplified and allegorized the contradictions of the present. Evil harnessed facile binaries along with the hypocrisies that sustained them, to invert the terms against common usage. This inversion calls to mind Walter Benjamin’s claim in 1929, during his period of “gothic Marxism,” that studies of gothic literature, criminality, and mental illness had become more important to the Surrealist critique of bourgeois modern life. “One finds the cult of evil as a political device,” he writes, “however romantic, to disinfect and isolate against all moralizing dilettantism.”18 Indeed it was moralizing dilettantism that was sidelined, in the wake of the fire, as human rights organizations rushed to the maras’ defense, attention they usually reserved for noncriminal populations. In Los Piñares there was no one whose personality and lifestyle challenged moralizing dilettantism more than Peri, one of the sector’s infamous outcasts. He grew up in Los Piñares alongside Jorge and the others and lived near the top of the barrio in a small house with his mother, Ángeles. Peri learned to defend himself early in life, as his father was largely absent except when he came by to bully Peri and his mother after long hours in the local cantina. Peri inherited his father’s alcoholism, and after falling in with an older crowd in his teenage years his substance abuse became regular. At first he and his crowd would roam the barrios night and day, breaking into houses and businesses, but within a few years they were mugging people on the streets and then robbing people at gunpoint. When he was fifteen Peri joined the MS-­13 and began selling cocaine in Los Piñares. He used the money to support his mother, who suffered from diabetes and could no longer venture far from the house.

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Víctor introduced me to Peri as we passed the street corner where he hung out with friends during the late afternoons. He was twenty-­two years old, drunk, and disinterested but still cordial with Víctor. Later Víctor told me, I always speak to everyone, even those like Peri who have done harm in our barrio. It’s not smart to judge people when you haven’t lived their life. I knew Peri when he was little, back when his mother was healthy. It’s painful to watch people grow up like he did. But if you ever want to help people, you have to have empathy. That’s most important. Otherwise they have no reason to listen to you. I mean, it’s difficult with Peri because he can be gruff. But there are people here who want him to disappear, and if people see me talking to him in public, at least it gives them the impression that there is something to redeem in him.

But Peri was a problem in the neighborhood, and it wasn’t easy to make the case for him. He was a heavy drinker, and with the addition of cocaine his binges could go on for days. When I saw him on the streets he was usually intoxicated, always with a long-­barrel revolver tucked in the sagging waistline of his jeans. Peri had the gun since he was fifteen, Víctor told me. I had been in the streets numerous times when shots from his revolver erupted through the air and people ducked into houses and pulled children off the street. He would shoot it anywhere, anytime—into brick walls, into the river ravine, through the roof of his mother’s house. In Los Piñares the crack from his revolver was a familiar sound, a consistent element of the barrio soundscape. But it was also a provocation. Each shot was the sound of one person’s long struggle with trauma that only grew more complicated with age. The sound of Peri’s war against himself was a rumbling backdrop to life in Los Piñares, where stories of his violent outbursts were a common thread in conversations about local life. He was despised, called a son of a bitch even in polite company, but his rage was something close to a work of art—an emotion so powerful it had defined the barrio atmosphere for years on end. Then one day Peri was gone. Not even his mother knew what happened, and after a month most of us assumed he was dead. Word finally came that Peri was in the United States, somewhere in the Southwest. Everyone hoped he would stay. The local streets felt like another place without him. It was nearly six months later that Víctor and I were sitting in his house watching television when his youngest son, Wily, appeared in the doorway out of breath. “Perico is back,” he said. “You saw him?” Víctor asked. “He’s up by Lincho’s store, on the corner with some other guys.”

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Víctor and I walked up the hill. At night the streets in Los Piñares were mostly dark, with pools of light beneath the flickering streetlamps. We could see a small crowd gathered in front of the store, and as we got closer I could make out Peri at the center of the circle, dressed in baggy denim pants and a jacket, with new white trainers and a flat-­brimmed baseball hat. I had spoken with him only a few times in the past, and since he was usually drunk, I had no expectation he would remember me. I was wrong. “Do you see,” Peri said loudly to the group of ten or so friends gathered around, “do you see who are the only people from this barrio that come to greet Peri after he’s been away for so long?” He hugged Víctor, and then hugged me, asking when I arrived and how long I would stay. “We’ve got to talk sometime,” he said. “I was in your country, in Texas. What a great place.” I asked which parts he had seen. Peri replied, I lived in Houston, in the suburbs where there are houses and more houses, all the most expensive kind with two levels and some with swimming pools. I lived in a house where there were a few Mexican families too, and so we could get by. I loved those areas. There was so much space, and when I was walking in the street no one paid me any mind. I could walk around like anyone else. Unlike here, where they call me a piece of shit. “There goes Peri the piece of shit,” they say.

I could envision suburbanites walking right past him. “But Peri, you are a piece of shit, right?” said Carlos, a chubby guy in cut-­off khakis and an oversized jersey. Carlos’s physical stature and appearance allowed him to joke with most anyone without repercussions. The machete scar across his face, from one eye and across his nose down to his jawline, made him look intimidating even when he was joking and laughing, as he often was. “But maybe Peri has changed,” he said, turning to the rest of the group. “Maybe he just wants to go back to his Texas barrio where everything is so nice.” Carlos was laughing. Peri cut him off. “I’m trying to talk to my friends here,” he said, glaring. The group quieted down. “The other place I saw was a park called Big Bend.” “Yes, I know that one,” I said. “On the border.” “That’s where we crossed from Mexico.” “How long did it take you to arrive?” “Weeks! Are you kidding? We left Tegucigalpa with a coyote, but once we got to the train we were on our own. The train moves quickly, but you don’t just take one. You have to get off and switch sometimes, depending on where the immigration police are. All the time people are looking out for mareros, making sure they don’t get robbed.”

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“What about you, asshole?” Carlos laughed. “They weren’t afraid of Peri?” “We weren’t bothering anyone,” Peri replied. “All the people on the train are desperate. It infuriated me to see them getting robbed, but on the migrant trail that’s how it is.” To anyone he met along the way, Peri’s tattoos would have made him seem a threat. On one arm were two long and slender clowns, grinning and standing back to back with pistols in hand. On the other was a pentagram surrounded by thorned roses and the numbers 1 and 3 and a spiderweb on his elbow. Train passengers would have recoiled. The tattoos marked him not only as a marero but as an international fugitive. Peri told us, When we arrived in northern Mexico we stayed on a ranch for two weeks. There were maybe one hundred other people, the rooms were crowded, and people were really anxious. Then one morning they told a group of us to come and get into a bus, and we drove for nine hours. They told us we were in this tiny town called Santa Elena, right on the border. On the other side is the park, but we couldn’t see shit because it was dark and pure wilderness, no lights or anything. It’s a park where gringos go camping, right? Well, there we slept in an open field, and the next night we crossed the border in little boats and then started walking. The guide knew where to go, so we hiked until the sun came up. After that it wasn’t long until we were at a house. An older gringo man let us inside and gave us food and water. He didn’t talk much, but you could tell he was a good person. But then the next day they put us in a big cargo truck and drove for hours. When I got out we were in Houston.

After hearing about his trip I hadn’t expected to continue talking with Peri. But by then I was renting an apartment in the middle of the barrio, and each morning I walked over to have coffee at Víctor’s house before he left for work. As I rounded the corner I would hear a whistle from the top of the hill, where Peri sat outside his mother’s house, waving me over. Usually he was shirtless, letting the sun cure his hangover. The revolver lay beside him on a wooden table, and his hands were covered in streaks and specks of glue that I supposed he had been sniffing during the night. Across his chest was a palimpsest of scars, some old and some new. The first morning I visited him, I was startled at his directness. “Why do you keep coming back here, year after year?” he asked me. I explained a little. He asked, “And so these people that live here are going to explain to you what’s happening in the country?” He chuckled. “Do you think they know?” I asked what he meant.

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Look, I’m been a marero ever since I was fifteen. Since I’ve been with the MS this whole thing has changed. In the beginning, we were nothing. But now the maras here are connected with a lot of different groups. We are everywhere. But the people out here? They will always be out here living in the dirt. What do they know? What the Liberal and Nationalist Parties say on television? Pure papadas [nonsense]. But if you are involved in what we do, you start to know how this country works, understand? You know which politicians, which pastors, and which police are involved. But it can be too much. What you know is dangerous, and that’s why you see so many mareros dying young.

From where Peri sat, national politics were distant and for the most part inconsequential. But the arc of history cut through the underground, where unrecorded struggles for agency and self-­determination were creating a future when it seemed the state had abandoned the idea of a dignified life for the poor. The frequency of gunfights, mutilated cadavers, and police raids was merely the visible edge of an economy that was concealed from view but consequential for the rest of the country. I walked to Víctor’s house, catching him before he left for the bus, and told him what had happened. “See if he’ll open up to you,” he said. Most mornings I helped Elena with housework, washing dishes while she hung wet clothes on the branches of the mango tree. “You have to watch out,” Elena said. “You don’t want to be near him for very long.” “It’s not him that’s dangerous to you,” said Margarita, who lived next door. “He probably likes you. But people are unhappy he’s back. That’s who you have to think about.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “We’re not sure what they’ll do,” Elena said. “But it’s good to keep a distance anyway.” “You mean other gangs?” I asked. “No. The good people who live here,” she replied. That evening Víctor phoned the members of the neighborhood council. There was already concern that unknown gang members had been seen coming and going from Ángeles’s house, according to neighbors. They suspected that gang operations were about to expand into Los Piñares, and Peri was their entry point. Víctor told them to slow down and that he would take care of it. He would talk to Peri about possibly leaving Los Piñares for good. He suggested the best way to get rid of him was to raise money for a coyote (guide) who could take him north across the US border. The best way to convince him to accept the deal was to pay for it themselves. Víctor volunteered to

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go house to house collecting small sums of money from everyone in the barrio who would like to see him gone. Víctor thought that was better than taking actions they would eventually regret. This was the first time I realized that the ostensibly respectable members of the community were also willing to do violence to Peri, if it came down to it. But how? I supposed there were many contract killers around, but utilizing the criminal economy, to commit murder no less, all in the name of upholding the law, had my mind reeling. “People are serious about this,” Víctor said after hanging up the phone. “They don’t want to hurt him, but it’s clear they don’t want him here, either.” The first week he was back Peri spent mostly at his mother’s house. But then he started going out at night. I didn’t know where he went, but in the morning as he just arrived home before sunrise he always waved me over, as Ángeles had made coffee and sweetbread. As we sat and talked, Peri could be more or less coherent, talkative or sullen, but always willing to continue our conversations. One morning Ángeles sat and asked if she could ask me a question. What was I really doing there, she wanted to know. “Now you’re hanging out here with Peri,” she said. “But for years you never came to visit with us. Only the good people, right?” I explained I had been intimidated by all the gunshots. We laughed. “When I was growing up in Olancho,” Ángeles said, “young people who picked up a gun used it to defend their land. My father was one who died in Los Horcones.” I was shocked. Los Horcones was the site of one of the most brutal massacres against peasants organizing for land reform in 1975.19 I told her I had seen the photos of the martyrs on the wall in Comité por los Desaparecidos. Peri, who had been sitting quietly, interjected, And look how much money they have made, holding up pictures of the dead and the martyrs for thirty years! They say those human rights groups receive donations from all over the world. How much do they get from international donors with deep pockets? And while all of us have to leave the country and walk across Mexico, they get visas and fly to New York City and Washington. They did this for years, but now whose pictures are they holding up? Ours! Pictures of mareros, burned alive in the fires in San Pedro Sula and La Ceiba, and they say they want to fight for our human rights. I’ve heard folks say they are good people, but you have to ask why we never see any of that money. They travel all over the world telling people about injustice in this country, but still every day we wake up out here and have to fight to survive.

Since the day he had arrived back as a deportee, Peri had been planning to return to the United States. In the barrios he was sure his life would be cut

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short, but living in Texas had shown him a different side of himself. One morning he described how that happened. We arrived to Houston and the coyotes stopped the van and yelled at us “Get out now!” Well, it was a bus station, and all I knew was my friend Omar from La Orucuina was supposed to meet me. I saw him immediately. He was careful about me because he knows who I’ve been in the past. And he said, “Peri I met you here because you deserve a chance, but you only get one.” So he introduced me to his Mexican friends living in the suburbs. They worked at hotels and in construction, so I went with the men the next day and they started me on one of the construction sites. I knew how to mix cement since a long time ago, and they could see I was a hard worker. It was good for weeks. I was making money, sending it back to my mother, but then one day they saw my tattoos and I thought they would throw me out. I was desperate to stay. I swore to them that I was not active in gangs anymore and that all I wanted to do was live a clean life and send money to my mother. When I was saying this, tears came out of my eyes and I started crying. It was really humiliating, but they could see I wasn’t lying. And after that they chose to believe me. I don’t know if I’ll see them again, but they were the first people to really trust me, the first people to really see who Peri is inside.

If he planned to go back north, Víctor told him one afternoon when we crossed paths in the city market, he should get his tattoos removed first. There was a program for gang rehabilitation just outside Tegucigalpa near Valle de Ángeles, where they used a tattoo removal laser to burn off the ink as part of reinserción social (social reinsertion). There was a practical side to it, but Víc­ tor gave him fair warning that this was a religious organization and the counselors were dogmatic. The body, they were fond of saying, was purified by cleansing it of indecent images. With each flicker of the laser and drop of ink boiled out of the pores, the body was returned to God and the soul restored. “You’ll have to tell them you are saved,” Víctor said with a smile. Peri looked skeptical. “I can do that,” he replied. But still at night the sound of Peri’s pistol ripped through the cool air and echoed across the barrio. There was no mistaking it. The long-­barrel revolver produced not so much a gunshot as an explosion. After his return there was a new regularity to it that felt like a message, opaque but at the same time so simple no one could misinterpret it. When he arrived after a long night in Tegucigalpa, Peri would fire the gun once at the front of the barrio, announcing his arrival and no doubt clearing the streets, and then again from the top of the

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hill, where often he would empty the cylinder, firing several shots until there was a distant clicking sound beneath the fading echoes. As I lay in bed listening, for me the gunshots became a kind of intimate language. Each explosion was a way of expressing what remained inexpressible in our conversations, the sound of his frustration being home and returning to who he had been, after the Mexicans in Houston had chosen to trust him. Peri’s return to Tegucigalpa had been difficult and not just because he knew the barrio was unhappy to see him again. Each night Carlos and Jorge stopped by to take him out, and it went without saying that they were into something illegal. There was no other reason to be out at night unless one was active in the underworld. As much as he seemed to loathe Carlos and Jorge involving him in their misadventures, Peri was no stranger to it. He himself was one of the reasons that other people locked their doors at night. As long as I had heard Peri’s name, I had done everything possible to avoid him. He seemed unreachable, at some distant summit where the expectations and mutuality that the rest of us held in common were nonexistent. But as we spent mornings talking over the course of four months, I found him vulnerable and introspective and in some ways trustworthy. Throughout the day I would think about our conversations and wish for more time, for a more secure setting, and for more skill as a conversationalist to open up our exchanges as far as they could reach. Many mornings when he arrived in the predawn darkness he would whistle as he walked past my apartment, and I would walk up the hill to his mother’s house, cautious that the streets were so empty but knowing too that he was watching from his perch. Years before I would not have gone out at such an hour, for fear of seeing Peri in particular, but there I was, walking toward him as he sat silently on his wooden bench. After many conversations when there was less urgency to speak, there were long silences as the sun came up, a deep red and then vibrant orange, as we smoked cigarettes and his mother’s donkey brayed occasionally from behind the house. With the passing of weeks it seemed that each morning Peri had more glue on his hands, smeared and dried from passing around a bottle the night before. He picked at it slowly, wiping his hands on his sullied jeans. “Don’t ever try glue, ok?” he said. I didn’t answer. “Ok?” “Ok,” I said. “It’s the devil,” he said. “When you inhale this stuff, the things you see and think . . . that is for people like me. Not you.” “What do you see?” “The worst of who you are. The glue turns all of this into an inferno,” he said, motioning with his hand. “And you realize that there is a beast inside

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you, and that is who you really are. It’s in all of us, but most people never have to see it.” “What does that mean?” “You inhale glue, right? Well, you inhale the fumes long enough and your head is spinning. You hear a roar inside your ears, you open your eyes, and it’s there. You look down and see yourself covered in mud and filth, like you were rolling on the ground. And soon a feeling comes up from your gut, and you think you might vomit. But when it reaches your head it is all images. They fill your mind with images of hell. Of an inferno. When you open your mouth you can only say foul things, things you shouldn’t say. Then your whole body gets warm and then hotter, until you think you are going to catch on fire. This is what we call the odio [hatred], and it fills your body everywhere. The hatred, you can almost see it. It has a certain color, a red color.” “What do you think, when that happens?” “You feel hatred. Only hatred. And not toward other people. Other people are far away, like shadows or like air. You can hardly see them anymore. Because all of the hatred you are feeling is hatred for yourself. It is a concentrated form of el mal [evil].” “Evil?” “So powerful that even sometimes people want to see it again. And so they inhale more glue.” “Why would anyone want to see it again?” “Maybe because part of it is something profundo [deep]. Part of it is true. At the same time part of it is false, like a hallucination. But there is also something true, and for that part you have to be strong. Some people see it over and over. Having that experience makes them feel powerful. But for me, I don’t need to see it anymore. That’s what I was thinking, this morning.” I didn’t know who else was privy to what was happening with Peri as he struggled with being back in his old barrio, where there were fixed ideas about who he was. Given that each morning Peri was eager to talk, I doubted he had mentioned it to Carlos and others who accompanied him into Tegucigalpa by night. Since arriving back, Peri had treaded softly in the barrio. After long nights on the streets he slept most of the day and had not ventured into the center of the barrio for several weeks. But one afternoon as Víctor and I were repairing broken plumbing under his house, rapid gunfire nearby startled us so badly that we both dove to the ground and lay face down in the dirt. It was the sound of an automatic military-­grade weapon, and we were sure there was a surprise raid on the barrio. A group of children ran past, giggling and shouting that Peri was in the street with a gun. We followed the sound of the gun-

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shots. The streets were empty and several neighbors peered out from behind curtains. We found Peri, Jorge, Fausto, and Carlos at the precipice of the river ravine, firing an AK-­47 rifle into the foliage on the opposite side. “Let’s keep walking,” Víctor said, waving as the four smiled and waved back. That evening Víctor texted me to meet him at the community center. I found him midway there, at Doña Lucero’s house, where she was cooking stew over an open fire. Ramón, who was among a crowd eating from plastic bowls, asked where we were headed. Víctor gave him a non-­answer, which was my first indication that something was off. When we arrived, the door to the community center was locked, but Don Fredo quickly appeared and let us in. Inside were twelve neighbors from Los Piñares, some of whom I knew and others who were only acquaintances, sitting in a circle talking quietly. Don Fredo locked the door and turned on a television in the corner of the room, raising the volume, to blot out our conversation to anyone who might be listening in. The group pulled their chairs into a tight circle and leaned forward. “We all know why we are here,” one of them began. “And we invited you,” he said to me, “because we know you have a certain perspective on this problem and maybe you can tell us what you think.” I nodded. Doña Luz spoke next. “We have got to think carefully about this. We are talking about dealing with a certain person who has been causing problems in Los Piñares for many years.” She looked at me, then at Víctor and the rest of the group. “Now, we’ve had to plan like this before, and this is what has kept our barrio safe. The question is how we approach this. There is an individual, but there is also a group to think about. You can’t just deal with one.” At that point I realized they were talking about Peri. And more generally about Carlos, Jorge, maybe Fausto, or even MS members from up the hill. Plotting like this was dangerous and almost unheard of. “A few years ago we had the same problem, but you weren’t here at that time,” Don Ignacio said, looking at me. “A group of neighbors confronted some young people around here with our own form of justice. You understand?” A local pastor was also in attendance, and he motioned for silence. “Let’s see what he knows and go from there. Agreed?” the pastor asked. The group nodded and looked at me, waiting. An hour later when we left the community center the streets were empty, and we parted ways without goodbyes. I had been caught off guard. I knew there was disappointment about Peri’s return but had never heard about a vigilante group in Los Piñares. “People are serious about this,” Víctor said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what was happening, but you needed to be there tonight, and I was afraid you

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would be nervous. People didn’t understand what you were doing up there talking to Peri every day.” I was surprised that my visits to Peri’s mother’s house had been the subject of conversation since their house seemed so remote from the rest of the barrio and my visits were so early. “I’m not sure what they thought before,” Víctor continued, “but tonight you convinced them this is just how your research is done. I could have said it, but it was better coming from you.” Víctor said that several times someone had stopped him in the street to ask why he and I acknowledged Peri like any neighbor in Los Piñares. His philosophy of nearly unconditional acceptance of young people in gangs was widely understood, but there was less empathy for Peri. But by the end of the meeting Víctor had intervened effectively, and whatever plan was taking shape to get rid of Peri was postponed. Víctor suggested again that we send Peri away ourselves, collectively buying his exile as a community project. He explained how we could raise money by going household to household and asking for small donations. He had already done the math— nearly three hundred families in Los Piñares and Brisas del Norte, at two hundred lempiras (about ten dollars) each. That would cover the basic cost and Peri could cover the rest. The group was patient and acknowledged the idea might work. But the offer would be presented to Peri with a few conditions, they argued, mainly that he wouldn’t speak of the agreement and that if deported, he would take up residence in another part of the city and not return to Los Piñares. How they would enforce that demand was left unexamined, though their willingness to go to extreme measures was already established. A week passed before Víctor spoke of it again, and I realized he was dragging his feet. My visits to Ángeles’s house continued, though Peri seemed tired and unable to focus on a topic for very long. Ángeles was making us breakfast with eggs and avocado each morning, which we ate outside looking into the barrio where I was sure we were being watched. Víctor said periodically that he needed to start canvasing the barrio for donations but that he didn’t know how we could convince those who were morally opposed to doing favors for Peri. “If anyone makes a fuss in public, we’ll look like idiots,” he said. “It won’t take much for people to accuse us of treating criminals better than neighbors who are leaders in this community. In the past we have only done this when someone dies and the family can’t afford a coffin.” As the days went by, I wondered if Víctor had been serious about his plan at all or if it was merely a way to buy some time and hope that things cooled down. We did not speak of it again until Peri arrived one afternoon on a motorcycle, made a loop in the center of the barrio, and rocketed up the hill, careen-

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ing chaotically through the unpaved street. The next morning I saw it up close, a green Kawasaki motocross bike with less than a hundred miles on it. He had probably bought it with the large sums of money I had seen on the table inside the house on certain mornings, as if his mother had been counting it. As I checked out the motorcycle Peri removed his shirt, basking in the warmth of the morning sun, and I saw the outline of a new tattoo on his back, extending from top to bottom. It was the signature tattoo of the MS, the devil hand, slender fingers with long black nails clutched, with the pinky and index fingers raised high like a pair of horns. “Whoa,” I gasped. Peri turned and laughed. “Yeah, la garra [horns of the devil],” he said. “Who did it?” I asked. “An artist who lives in the destroyer.” Destroyers were gang hideouts, something between collective living spaces and bunkers. When police raided them they usually came away with stockpiles of money, drugs, and arms. “Why la garra?” “La garra is protection,” he said. “Sometimes we’ll put it on our back, where we can’t see what is happening. La garra watches your back.” It took a few days, but eventually the garra image was complete, colored with dark blues and the fingernails dripping in blood. After long nights of posing for the artist, Peri returned to Los Piñares and spent the morning hours shirtless, letting his swollen skin breathe in the cool air. I could see the extent of his scarring and body art. His upper body was covered in dots and lines, haphazardly drawn with a sewing needle. There were freehand images and letters that were amateurish and fading. A scattering of scars covered his forearms and shoulders, and on his upper arms and chest were burn marks. They were fragments of a life that was organized around self-­torture and laceration, markings on a threshold separating him from the rest of the world that had been breached countless times. Each poke or slash refused common limitations for life, drawing together histories of bodily transgression, intoxication, and self-­mutilation. These were different accounts of a life, not testimonies or life histories but condensations of contradictory forces of sociality in the barrio and in the material conditions of Peri’s youth. The contradictions were so forceful that they created outsiders such as gang members, deportees, and victims of state violence, who swarmed together as an underground. Peri’s tattoos, cuts, and burns were images with mythic force exceeding the body itself, markers of exteriority that distorted the flow of progressive history in the arc of temptation, loss, and redemption that structured Christian subjectivity. Peri’s skin may have disoriented the average onlooker, and I was certainly among them. The visible surface of the underworld was not a “social skin,”

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as described by Terrence Turner, in which adornment situates one into social roles and the discourse of cultural norms.20 The criminal skin is not organized with such symbolic coherence but rather amassed together the traces of laceration as an ontological threshold. It is on the criminal skin that the bodily knowledge of transgression is legible as a series of folds, internalized aspects of local life that become irresolvable contradictions in the life of the subject and manifest outwardly. Incinerated in carceral wards and exiled from its barrios, criminal skin has survived the negative dialectics of sovereignty as the flesh of postliberal futures. It is on criminal skin that permutations of laceration map the interminable flight of fugitivity in which one is always becoming otherwise. Peri’s outbursts, always pathologized by his critics, were an outward display of the existential violence required to surpass demonization and moral righteousness, backed as they were with resigned acceptance of the violence of late-­ capitalist governmentality.

12

Corruption

I was having coffee with Peri outside his mother’s house when the story of Robert Seldon Lady appeared on the morning TV news. Lady was a CIA agent and a fugitive from Italian justice who had been on the run for several months. Peri craned his head as the news anchor said that sometime in the previous twenty-­four hours Lady’s cell phone had pinged a tower just outside of Tegucigalpa. “What did I just hear?” I asked. Peri laughed. “Gringos always come to Honduras when their police are looking for them.” “Not just gringos—anybody,” Ángeles added. We walked inside and sat by the television. Peri’s motorbike was parked next to the couch and filled the house with gasoline vapors. The report was the morning feature with a long segment on the US CIA extraordinary rendition program that Lady led inside of Italy. “Sounds like rapto [kidnapping] to me,” Ángeles said. “Is that really legal?” Lady had arrived in Honduras after fleeing Italy, where his team’s abduction of a Muslim cleric was condemned by the Italian government as a violation of its sovereignty. According to reports that I read later, Lady’s team abducted Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr and flew him to a clandestine prison, a “black site,” in Egypt where he was tortured and interrogated for two weeks. The team determined he had no information to offer and released him blindfolded on a street in Milan. In the meantime, Italian authorities had ransacked Lady’s home. The plush villa was strewn with evidence of the posh lifestyle enjoyed by US covert agents on assignment abroad. As we watched the news, we heard the thundering rhythm of helicopters in the distance. Three military helicopters approached and then hovered high over Los Piñares and neighboring barrios for several minutes. Peri brought out a pair of new high-­powered binoculars, complete with night vision, and

Becoming clandestine. Photo by the author.

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scanned the sky. I laughed, but the sound of the helicopters was drowning us out. “They’re sitting in the door of the chopper with guns,” Peri said. “And some of your countrymen.” He handed me the binoculars, and I could see the Honduran and US soldiers plainly, looking over the landscape with large weapons swinging from their shoulders. “Maybe they think that gringo is hiding out here with the Mara Salvatrucha,” Peri joked. Several minutes later they flew low over Brisas del Norte, and Peri nudged me and waved goodbye as he vanished down a footpath behind the house, escaping their view. I trotted down the hill to see Víctor, suspecting he had heard the news about Lady already. Víctor was one of many people I knew who relished discussing the different forms of imperialism that affected the everyday lives of poor Hondurans. Los Piñares could feel both far away from the larger forces that shape history and also intimately bound up with them. US and Honduran military forces on training exercises or a rogue CIA agent on the lam were not just news stories but the actualization of a present built on long-­standing historical conditions. There was a sense that the sovereignty of the Honduran state was compromised by powerful international interests in the present and that it had been for a century or more. In Los Piñares the story of US imperialism was usually confined to three well-­known episodes: early banana barons investing heavily in the north coast plantations; anticommunist Cold Warriors investing in the country as a counterrevolutionary stronghold; and the DEA and Honduran armed forces acting as a single entity in the war on drugs. But the country was also well trod by Chinese, Canadian, and other foreign capitalist conglomerates that in the previous twenty years had funded development and extraction projects with direct impacts on local communities. The result of it all was a general atmosphere of negation in which biological life and social realities were routinely dismantled for the profit of spectral international interests. Resistance was almost always met with violence by state or private security groups that ensured the efficacy of international corporate imperialism. Such reminders of foreign influence were particularly strong with the footprint of US militarism that approached international relations as a means to an end, objectifying Honduras as a geostrategic convenience more than any economic, development, or extractive interest. Between the US embassy in Tegucigalpa, the US troops housed at Soto Cano Air Base in central Honduras, and the DEA drug interdiction program on the north coast, US influence in Honduran affairs could feel as consistent as the self-­determination of the Honduran government itself, whose day-­to-­day business was always scrutinized by the US embassy. Such political relations

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involuntarily foregrounded contradictions in familiar narratives of progress and development theory that were endorsed by the country’s political and economic elites, those for whom short-­term economic gains were worth the price of entry to a global economy that structurally diminished Honduran national autonomy. The structural adjustment programs from multilateral lending institutions and the business-­friendly conditions of international trade agreements were prominent features of globalization’s imperialist gambit, but the clandestine nature of US intelligence, antidrug, and law enforcement action in the country created a greater awareness of the structural ambiguities at the core of state sovereignty in Honduras. The effects of those activities on the present were magnified not only by their clandestine nature but also through the machinations of gothic sovereignty that extended the historical arc of the Contra war as a colonial military project. The Contra war inaugurated a qualitative transformation in public awareness of US military strategy to utilize the country’s geographical centrality in the isthmus to the United States’ own ends.1 But it also exposed a diverse coalition of mercenaries whose loyalties were split between the US government and a clandestine international network of anticommunist activists.2 Overall, it rendered visible the structural antipathy of US foreign policy toward Honduran state sovereignty and the improbability of Honduran sovereignty if backed by US imperial power. Skepticism about US paternalism was nothing new in Honduras at the time of the Contra war, but across the 1990s and 2000s, as the US war on drugs and subsequent war on terror sustained US official presence in the country, skepticism about imperialist motives increased rather than abating in the wake of the Cold War. These secondary and tertiary theaters of clandestine militarism uniquely cemented the history of covert action into the subtext of everyday life in Honduras. Prior to the Contra war, US covert action groups had been in retreat for a decade. The defeat of US forces in Vietnam inspired deep cuts to military spending during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, and Presidents Nixon and Carter had reduced the size of the CIA’s covert action wing by some fourteen thousand employees.3 The cuts had a significant impact on military and intelligence practices, and as many operatives left their agencies for work in consulting, lobbying, and private security, the first wave of private intelligence contracting carried US covert action beyond the walls of government. As a global fear of communism continued through the 1970s, these new for-­profit groups expanded into a network of well-­connected but unauthorized actors. Before the Reagan administration took office, reports already indicated that funding for Contra forces was arriving from a network of parastate actors

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whose ambition and zeal attracted other military entrepreneurs to the country, as they cobbled together funding for the war from numerous sources. Some of those sources were nascent narcotrafficking groups in Colombia seeking hassle-­free access to military landing strips.4 Their operations played a role in bankrolling the war effort, and ranking personnel among the Contras enabled them to utilize Contra infrastructure as they moved their product internationally. These business relations are often relegated to footnotes in conventional histories of the Contra war, but they are widely known in Tegucigalpa, as the most prominent cartel leader in the country, Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, consolidated his cartel as an associate of the Colombians and became a notorious antihero around the capital. For many Tegucigalpans the continuity between anticommunist paramilitarism and the contemporary narcoeconomy can therefore be drawn as a straight line. The scandalous relations between statecraft and organized crime in Honduras was cemented during the Contra war, and by the early 2000s the iconoclasm of gang communities drew its incandescence from the silence surrounding this contradiction. Simply put, the spectacle of gang life in the 2000s could not be easily dismissed and was in fact engrossing because it challenged normative oversimplifications of criminality precisely by magnifying this contradiction’s capacious haunting of the present. Each morning as I had coffee and watched the news on Víctor’s television, national crime reports gave the impression that there were more criminal events across the country than one could keep up with. In Tegucigalpa there were gang arrests, political crimes, sexual abuses, homicides, customs and immigration scams, and any number of street crimes. On the north coast there was all of the above plus cartel violence along the smuggling corridor that ran from Nicaragua to the border of Guatemala. In central and southern regions there were bandas (criminal groups) that carried out bank robberies, kidnappings, assassinations, and smaller smuggling operations. The world of organized crime seemed too large to comprehend, and Robert Seldon Lady’s appearance added another dimension to it still. He was a globe-­trotting spook, likely highly educated, who was professionally trained to deceive and evade at least the lower tiers of law enforcement. His privilege and impunity before the law could not have contrasted more with the lives of Víctor, Elena, Peri, and others in Los Piñares for whom the slimmest chances of getting ahead were embraced as better than none. At the time the story of Lady’s arrival in Honduras circulated Víctor had been going through a bout of depression that led us several times to the public hospital, where he was prescribed a handful of medications that he took three times a day. At least one of them was a heavy narcotic, and after stumbling

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through his routine for several days he had an accident on a forklift at work. He was reprimanded and then furloughed for two weeks. So on the weekends I tried to get him out of Los Piñares, and we would go for long walks through the surrounding barrios for fresh air and to stretch our legs, so long as he deemed them safe enough. But eventually, as with most things involving Víc­ tor, these outings took on a life of their own. Soon we were visiting random barrios around the city as if we were a pair of tourists. We would pick a barrio that had been in the news or that had interesting architectural or geological features or even places with compelling names: Las Torres (The Towers), La Sosa (Lye), El Granero (The Granary), Los Laureles (The Laurels), Carrizal (Reed Marsh), La Laguna (The Lagoon), Los Estados Unidos (The United States), Altos de Canada (Highlands of Canada), and so on. Most neighbors didn’t go anywhere unless they had to, as innocent people were regularly unsafe on public streets in the capital. But Víctor often countered that it was just as dangerous to stay in one place, even just sitting on the stoop of his house at the bottom of the barrio. So far our outings together had been working as a form of therapy, as Víctor took deep breaths from the bus windows and marveled at the sights of the city from some of its highest peaks. But in my time alone I spent many hours in an out-­of-­the-­way cybercafe in central Tegucigalpa, combing through message boards as information about Robert Seldon Lady had been surfacing since his flight from Italy. Each day there was something new, as hackers whose skill was far beyond anything I could visualize pulled what appeared to be official documents from firewalled databases and posted them publicly. There were family birth certificates, professional job reviews, and classified communiques whose legitimacy was difficult to determine. As a result of this deepening obsession, I’d not seen Víctor much that week and suggested we go for another tour of the capital’s barrios on Saturday. To my surprise, he suggested we invite Peri along with us if we could get out of the barrio without being seen together. He wanted to take Peri out of the city for some fresh air, to Santa Lucía, one of the nearby rural colonial towns. “If we can get him alone,” Víctor said, “we can try to convince him to take the offer and go back to the States. We’ll just be gone a few hours.” Santa Lucía was the perfect place—a higher elevation with cool breezes, cobblestone streets, and a sweeping vista that overlooked the Tegucigalpa valley. Even though Víctor had procrastinated in collecting money for Peri’s trip back to the United States, thinking it could backfire and result in hostility toward both of them, he suspected Peri was selling enough cocaine to buy his own way if the plan fell apart. Víctor called Ángeles and told her we would meet Peri at the bus stop in Brisas del Norte at 8:30 Saturday morning.

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That morning we crossed the bridge just as another cluster of helicopters was circling the barrios again. I was sure Peri would be spooked and leave us waiting. When we arrived at the bus depot, Peri had not arrived, but I spotted our friend Andres sitting in the shade in his floppy hat and knee-­high boots, waiting for a bus home to Santa Lucía. Andres is the brother of one of Víctor’s neighbors and a funny if consistently vulgar personality. Andres and his siblings came from a poor farming family outside the city. Andres joined the army and over time made his way into the higher echelons of military intelligence, both in the group G-­2 and the much-­feared Dirección Nacional de Investigaciones (National Directorate of Investigations), considered responsible for many civilian disappearances and assassinations. Going by what Andres had insinuated to me previously, his access to military and police intelligence continued seamlessly in the postconflict era. Sometime in the 1990s he abruptly quit his post and then, years later, resurfaced as a mild-­ mannered poultry farmer in Santa Lucía. At first the poultry farming was a cover, but after several years Andres seemed to have grown into it. Víctor said that keeping up his false identity was the only way Andres could escape retribution from his victims who could identify him by appearance and even from his former colleagues who were likely afraid he would break their code of silence. As we shook hands Andres looked up at the helicopters and smiled. “It feels like the Cold War,” he said, “except we had nothing like this. Those fucking machines are brand new.” On a few occasions we had talked about his previous life, as most of the neighbors in Los Piñares knew who Andres really was. He counted on the likelihood that no one would expose him, as it was suspected he was still well connected and dangerous. We were making small talk when Peri came up the street, a hat pulled down to conceal his face. “Ah, the famous Peri,” Andres murmured with a smile, watching as Peri arrived and sat on a bench away from us without making eye contact. When the bus arrived we all boarded together, Víctor leading the way to the rear, where the windows and breeze would muffle our conversation. I sat with Víctor, and Peri and Andres sat in empty seats across the aisle from each other. “What is this, a fucking retreat?” Andres asked, laughing. “Where you going, Peri?” Andres was not intimidated by him at all, and the tension visible in Peri’s shoulders seemed to dissipate as he looked at Andres and smiled. “Víctor told my mother he wanted to take me on a tour of my beautiful country,” he said. “So why not?” Andres craned his neck slowly to look at Víctor, and grinned. “What the fuck are you up to now, you son of a bitch?” he asked. “Just showing him the sights,” Víctor said, smiling back. Andres looked

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out the window and a few moments later turned to me. “You heard about that gringo who’s supposedly in Santa Lucía?” he asked. “The CIA agent?” “Who else?” Andres laughed. “I’ve been looking at a lot of information about him,” I said. “What do you know?” “Nothing, of course. No one wants to talk about it. But it’s like I tell my wife, these pícaros [scoundrels] just can’t stay away from our country. They love Honduras, and that’s always been our problem.” “Right?” Peri said with a laugh. “The types of people spend their careers meddling in other countries, but when they get in trouble, what do they do? Come to Honduras, where there is no law.” Andres smiled. “But the question I ask is why? Why come here?” Andres said, almost condescending to the three of us. “You’re the one that knows everything,” Peri said. “You tell us.” Andres leaned in and softened his voice. “I guarantee you that gringo has connections here that go back to the 1980s,” he said. “That’s probably right,” Víctor said. “That’s why they love this country,” Peri said, “because no one here enforces the law. I would know.” Andres broke into a big smile. “Who said this kid is not a genius? Not only that, he speaks from experience!” We all laughed as the bus rumbled onto the beltway, which in a few miles would exit onto the windy mountain road to Santa Lucía. We stared out the window for a while until Andres tapped my leg. “If this agent, whoever he is, was in Honduras during the ’80s then he still has connections, right? This is a place that people all over the world know about. And they come here to hide.” I nodded. “But it’s not just hiding,” Andres said. “You can do that almost anywhere. Honduras is distinct because here you can get anything in the world. Documents, weapons, drugs, you name it. I’ve been on my farm for over a decade, but if you needed a falsified birth certificate or a passport, I bet I could get it with one phone call. Just one. I could have it for you tomorrow. And if that’s how it is for me, at my age, imagine what these guys can do when they get here.” “I was going to tell you,” I said, “I read online that the guy was actually born here.” “So he’s not a gringo?” Andres asked, taken aback. I explained the dark web as a digital netherworld where virtually nothing was safe from hacking and that documents had been available recently that included Lady’s birth certificate, which was issued in Tegucigalpa in 1954. Andres thought it over. “Well then. He’s our countryman!” We laughed.

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The consensus online was that Lady was born in Tegucigalpa but his father was from Arkansas and came to Honduras in the 1940s. He took a freighter ship from New Orleans, landed on the north coast, and traveled through the country panning for gold. By the time he arrived in Tegucigalpa months later, he was already a successful gold prospector. He decided to stay in the capital, with its mineral-­rich hillsides, and he courted investors to start his own mining company. He married a Honduran woman from Tegucigalpa and built several residences across the valley where he kept an eye on his mining investments. “Of course,” Andres said, “there are gringo families out here in the valley that go back generations. That’s why he’s here. He knows this place.” The scenery on the route to Santa Lucía changed with altitude, and within minutes we were surrounded by barren hillsides. Much of it had been deforested for firewood over the twentieth century as the population of the capital grew, and most of the fauna was pushed far out into La Tigra cloud forest. In the 1940s these hills were a dense woodland accessible only by primitive roads and horseback. Birds, deer, wild pigs, and jaguar still lived here in abundance. Andres speculated that Lady had been one of the founding investors in the Rosario mining company, the ruins of which were a short car ride past Santa Lucía. As we passed roadside food stands and large entrances to gated communities, conspicuous mansions sat mysteriously on the distant hillsides. “Hey Peri,” Andres said with a smile, “you see that?” Peri looked. “This is where all the DEA from Tegucigalpa live with their families.” “So?” Peri said. “I just don’t want you to get lost and end up out here, knocking on doors and asking for directions.” Andres was smiling at him. Peri laughed. “Compa [buddy], it wouldn’t be a problem because you and I both know those agents go both ways.” “Wow,” Andres said nodding, “the kid is smart!” “What do you mean, Peri?” I asked. “You know how it is. These guys come here to fight drugs,” he said, “but after enough time they see how much money there is. They investigate drug trafficking, right? So they know how to get involved without getting caught. Who wouldn’t take advantage of that, at least here in this country?” Andres laughed and pulled his hat over his eyes, slumping as if to take a nap. Peri looked away, and Víctor and I shared a newspaper as the bus rumbled on. We looked through the crime stories from the capital. A few minutes later Andres turned around. “That gringo—what else did you find out?” he asked. Peri looked across at Andres and laughed out loud. “Look at this guy—he’s still the police,” Peri said. Andres froze and stared at him, then looked away,

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shaking his head. “You’re right, sorry, compa,” Peri said. I had never heard Peri apologize to anyone. The ease of their rapport, one an intelligence officer and the other a known criminal, was incredible to witness. Andres nodded, as if it was forgiven. “There was a lot of information, actually,” I said to him, “but I’m not sure how much to believe. They could post it because it’s real, or they could post it to confuse people. You never know.” “But you said he was born in Tegucigalpa in what year?” Andres asked. “1954.” Andres laughed. “The year the CIA took down [Guatemalan President Jacobo] Árbenz.” “Yeah.” “You know, I was just a kid in ’54,” Andres said. “But I can remember what it was like in Tegucigalpa then. Guatemalan army marching in the middle of downtown.” “You saw that?” “I was a kid! Just nine or ten years old. They were marching in the streets every day, getting ready. Thousands of Guatemalan soldiers had come across the border trying to get away from the guerrilla. They say that coup was a secret operation, but it wasn’t a secret for anyone in Tegucigalpa. The soldiers were everywhere. Back then I lived with my aunt in a second-­floor apartment in the central district, and every day they would march by. I would watch from the window. You just knew they were going back to topple Árbenz.” Among the information posted online about Lady Sr., Robert Seldon Lady’s father, was an archival photo of his ham radio license from 1952. If authentic, it established that he was one of the first radio operators in the country. Also posted was a pilot’s license signed by President Juan Manuel Galvéz that, if authentic, made him one of the first civilian pilots in Central America. Whether or not Lady Sr. had been a part of the coup in Guatemala was unclear, but he was certainly one of a few North Americans with a reputation across Central America. He was not only a successful mining entrepreneur but also, if posted documents and accounts were to be believed, an amateur geographer who mapped parts of eastern Honduras and Nicaragua, a navigator who took sail-­powered vessels along the Central and South American shorelines, and a botanist and arborist who maintained orchards and gardens at different elevations on his multiple properties around the country. “But that’s the father,” Andres said. “What can you tell me about the guy who is here now? The son?” For a moment I could see Andres as the intelligence agent he had been for years. I explained that the unverifiable documents posted online seemed to demonstrate an imperfect but nonetheless fascinating

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timeline. Robert Seldon Lady supposedly spent the first nineteen years of his life in Honduras. After that he left the country in 1973 and trained in law enforcement in New York City. Next he moved to New Orleans for intelligence training, then joined Richard Nixon’s domestic surveillance apparatus as an agent provocateur who apparently infiltrated activist groups protesting the US war in Vietnam. Documents dated his graduation from the CIA in 1984 and his first official field placement in eastern Honduras. “Where the fuck did you see all this shit?” Andres asked. “The internet,” I said, laughing at the obvious absurdity. “Shit, it makes sense,” Andres went on. “By 1984 when he got here the Contras had total control of the eastern border.” In 1984 the Contra war was at its peak, with more than twenty thousand troops on the Nicaraguan border and regular incursions to terrorize Sandinista strongholds in northern Nicaragua. Honduran property titles posted online showed that Lady Sr. had several landholdings in eastern Honduras, at least one of which was near the CIA base known as Aguacate. “Well there you go,” Andres said. “I could have even met him back then. I knew some of the gringos out there, the ones who didn’t dress like military. These guys were different. We all knew they were CIA. Hell, my division trained with them in Lepaterique. I saw those guys up close.” “You trained at Lepaterique?” I asked, stunned. “We all did! But no one had to say ‘These people are the CIA.’ It was covert action, so you talked about it a certain way. We all knew what was going on.” He could see my surprise. “If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you the manual they gave us with all the tactics—brainwashing the public, interrogating prisoners, all the bullshit for intimidating common people, so no, they don’t help the leftist militants.” “You still have that manual?” “If I can find it, I’ll give it to you. Take it home as a souvenir from Honduras,” Andres said. “But it’s nothing unusual. They tell you that you define an enemy and figure out how to undermine trust in their community or groups. One of my friends is a police officer, and they have the same kind of manual, but now it’s for gangs. It tells you the same things: how to identify the enemy, how to turn people against them, and finally how to break them when someone turns them in.” Peri was listening. “You know what they need, compa?” Peri asked. “A man­ ual to get rid of corrupt police. Until they do that, there will be gangs no matter how many mareros they kill. So many of the guns that gangs have are weapons from twenty years ago anyway. The same AK-­47s you used to fight communists.”

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“Listen to this shit,” Andres whispered to himself. He leaned forward to Peri. “I’m not going to say this again. Understand? Mind what you’re saying.” Peri turned and looked out the window. “Look,” Andres said deferentially, “it’s not just the weapons from the ’80s that we are responsible for. It’s the cartels, but nobody can make the connections, or they don’t want to talk about it. But it doesn’t matter which. The point is the cartels wouldn’t be as strong if they weren’t backed by people with authority, right?” “True,” Peri said. The bus took a right on the road to Santa Lucía, and a breeze filled the cabin. In minutes we were standing next to a large pond with ducks and paddle boats. “There’s a restaurant just around the corner,” Andres said. “You all want to have lunch?” Inside the restaurant we sat at plastic tables looking onto the street. Andres was watching Peri, who seemed lost in thought. Andres looked at Víctor. “So what the fuck are you three doing out here anyway?” he asked. “Don’t tell me you’re here to look at the beautiful church.” Then Víctor came out with it. “I want to convince this guy to go back north,” Víctor said. “To the States?” “Yeah.” “You were deported?” “Yeah,” Peri said. “I was in Houston for six months.” “Doing what?” Andres asked. “I had a job working at a hotel, paying rent, sending money back to my mother.” “You got caught by the police?” “Yeah, deported in less than forty-­eight hours.” “So go back,” Andres said, flippantly. “You did it once. Do it again. What’s the problem?” “I don’t know.” “You enjoy being chased and shot at by the police? Or by Barrio 18?” “What?” Peri asked. “If you like that kind of shit, then Tegucigalpa is a paradise for you.” We laughed. But then Peri made his case, out loud, as if hoping Andres would weigh in. He could keep doing what he was doing in Tegucigalpa, he said. He was making money. But he knew he had enemies everywhere, and enemies don’t go away. “They just multiply,” he said. Andres looked around. “This is no place to talk,” he said. “Come on to the house. My wife is with her family in Tegucigalpa for the next few days anyway. I could use the company. But only if you buy some eggs from me. I’m just a poor chicken farmer, remember?” We laughed and agreed. After lunch we walked almost a half mile out of town on an unpaved road,

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and by then Andres seemed to relax. He was speaking mainly to Peri. “Look, I know that you know that I know who you are. Right? But you also know the reason I’m not intimidated by you, and it isn’t because I used to be police. Before I became a farmer and got covered in chicken shit, I was in this game you’re playing now. We set it up.” “Everyone already knows who you are,” Peri said. “And you were corrupt police. So what?” “What I’m telling you is my group in that business did a lot of things that I am not ever going to talk about, but I’ll tell you some things that might interest you. You want to hear them or not? “Go ahead, man” Peri said. “Go back to the time that I was in my thirties. We had a group that trafficked in stolen cars, and that group was all people from G-­2 [military intelligence]. This operation was big, you understand? We brought cars from the US to Honduras on enormous ships, unloaded them on the north coast, and drove them to Tegucigalpa without a single mistake. You know how? Because we were the fucking authorities. Us. We could bribe customs, and people were scared to talk. We could go into police headquarters and eliminate evidence, and no one would say a word. We were in charge in this country for years. We did this for a decade, and not a single person got caught. Then later, when they were sending the mareros back from the US, the public or the politicians or whoever, all of them were blaming those poor sons of bitches for everything. How many gang members do you know that ever robbed a bank? None. That was us, and all we had to do was wear masks and then flash some gang sign on the way out the door, and suddenly everyone believed it was gangs doing all of it. But here’s my point—we knew when to stop. Not one of us is in prison. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” “Why did you stop?” Peri asked. “Because when time is up,” Andres replied, “you’ve got to know. In this game, there will always be someone bigger than you, so you have to watch how things change. We moved stolen cars and had people all the way in the US erasing the VIN numbers, people in Puerto Cortés to receive the shipment, drivers to bring the cars here, a whole operation. Some of the greatest pícaros in history built this system. But the maras make it easy for the ones at the top—you tattoo your faces and shoot up barrios, and they blame you for everything.” “We don’t hide,” Peri said. “That’s the difference between you and me.” Andres laughed and looked at Víctor. “Well, I’ll give you that. That’s the truth,” Andres said. “I can respect that.

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It’s what makes people uncomfortable about the maras. Some people pretend not to see all the corruption in this country, but the maras exploit it in broad daylight. That’s the new generation.” “Exactly,” Peri said. “That business has been around a long time and some of us want a piece of it.” “I’m talking about cars and bank robberies. What are you talking about?” Andres asked. “Cocaine, what else?” Peri said. Andres laughed and looked up at the sky, shaking his head. “And here I was assuming these mareros believed they had invented it all.” We laughed. “History is important,” Andres said. “For a lot of reasons. Even for illiterate people like you and me.” The movement of drugs along Honduras’s north coast was a century-­old story. As early as the 1930s banana shipping channels were rumored to have carried morphine and heroin from other parts of the world into New Orleans, where it was distributed across the United States by organized crime groups. But Peri’s trafficking world was different, engineered in the late 1970s by Matta Ballesteros, then a young narco-­entrepreneur from Tegucigalpa. Matta was infamous for negotiating a deal between Colombian and Mexican traffickers that shifted cocaine routes to the United States from the Caribbean to Central America and Mexico. It made Honduras the middle point in the journey.5 But Andres’s knowledge on the subject didn’t come from experience as a trafficker. He knew it as a military intelligence officer. He explained, Look, let’s talk history, ok? When [General] Policarpo Paz came to office in 1978, that was a coup. And you know how it is, the US had to approve or disapprove. Well, Paz was anticommunist, and the Sandinistas had almost fought Somoza to a stalemate. So Jimmy Carter gave his blessing to the Paz government. But the problem for the US was that newspapers were saying that Paz was connected with Juan Matta. Everybody knew Matta by then. The newspapers that wrote this stuff were probably paid to do it, but in intelligence we knew it was true. So when tons of cocaine started coming through Honduras by the early ’80s, that was possible for one reason: the traffickers were protected.

To fight Soviet influence in the region, US foreign aid to Honduras increased during the late 1970s, despite the often close connections between politicians and narcotraffickers. Military buildup across the early 1980s was a

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hybrid of US military aid and narcofinance, and in the fog of war both the CIA and Honduran military found themselves in league with a narcotrafficking empire that started in Medellín and ended on the streets of the United States.6 Andres continued, describing the US agents he had known during the Contra years. We thought the US was conducting the war, but no one was in control. There were people coming in and out of the country with money and weapons, and you couldn’t keep track of it. So moving drugs through the country was easy. The US and their allies were building airstrips and bases in eastern Honduras, and if you had money you could buy people off. We knew it was happening, but the focus was on taking down the Sandinistas. We weren’t fighting the war on drugs yet. We were fighting the Soviet Union in Central America.

US funding for the Contras was rescinded in 1985 after mounting reports of their violent attacks on civilians in Nicaragua. But inside Reagan’s National Security Council, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North strategized to continue funding the Contra forces by organizing a global network of anticommunist donors he called “the enterprise.” The network was extensive and international. It brought together covert operations experts marginalized under the Carter administration, including “such states as Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Panama, and Israel, conservative religious organizations like Pat Robertson’s 700 Club and Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, private security firms and arms merchants, retired military personnel, mercenaries, businessmen, ex-­agents of the Iranian shah’s secret police, and international drug traffickers.”7 During Reagan’s final year in office, most scrutiny was on the Iran-­Contra scandal, the illegal sale of weapons to Iran that funneled profits to support the Contras. But over the next decade the more enduring legacy of those years would be the linkages between military and narcotrafficking groups, linkages that have complicated antidrug policing in Honduras up to the present. In the meantime, the careers of key individuals from the Iran-­Contra scandal and the Reagan administration’s foreign policy team continued to advance in Washington. When Robert Seldon Lady became a household name in Honduras after his flight from Italy, he was among a cohort of Contra-­era figures who, after years of laying low as the Reagan controversies receded from memory, began to reenter public service in the early 2000s. Their gothic returns culminated with the appointment of the former ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte (1981–1985) as ambassador to Iraq in 2005, which earned the US invasion of Iraq the moniker Iran-­Contra II. This comparison with the Contra war was not just about Negroponte but rather the sprawling network

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of shell companies and mercenary forces on lucrative contracts from the Department of Defense, shielding the United States from direct responsibility in war crimes. Longtime veterans in the US Department of Defense complained publicly about the military’s increasing reliance on private contractors and its rapidly shrinking bureaucracies in Washington, all of which was changing the battlefield dynamics abroad.8 Similarly, veterans of US intelligence services voiced concerns about privatization of their clandestine trade and seized upon Lady’s flight from Italy as a glaring example of waning professionalism. Lady and his team fled Italy with no time to cover their tracks, and so they left behind the remnants of a posh existence in the field. As rendition assignments required long stretches of waiting, they had exhausted expense accounts in luxury hotels, five-­star restaurants, extended vacations to Majorca, and routine treatments at the best spas in Milan. Even their rendition plane was luxurious, stocked with champagne and red wine, crystal glasses, and gourmet seafood. While the memoirs of CIA agents often present covert operations as an elitist discipline, Lady and his team had clearly enjoyed a pseudo-­aristocratic lifestyle enabled by the nearly inexhaustible US defense budget.9 This illicit and profligate sector of the Defense Department seemed to incarnate all that is suspect about the centralized and secretive powers of government, in which agencies tasked with preempting military conflict could be found as often to fabricate or provoke it, a dynamic evoking Charles Tilly’s thesis that war-­making and state-­making were often indistinguishable from racketeering in organized crime worlds.10 But with each revelation about Rob­ ert Seldon Lady’s life there was a clearer timeline for the history of covert operations in Honduras. In 1954 Lady was born into the primal scene of CIA intervention, as the most mythologized covert operators in history were in Tegucigalpa plotting the coup to overthrow Árbenz in Guatemala. Project Success was conceptualized as more than a one-­off coup attempt; it was to be the blueprint for overthrowing foreign governments elsewhere. Its realization would legitimize the nascent covert operations division and elevate it to a stand-­alone unit within the CIA focused on cutting-­edge experimentation with psychological operations. The importance of covert operations, its agents argued, was that it rendered military intervention anachronistic and freed the Department of Defense from having to defend those interventions as legitimate actions. The coup in Guatemala was conceptualized as a paradigm-­shifting demonstration of such techniques. It was premised on simulating an internal revolt of rebel militants, wherein each day a plane flew out of Tegucigalpa and dropped propaganda leaflets over Guatemala City and CIA-­generated simulated news events were

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broadcast over radio. The head of psychological operations at the time was David Atlee Phillips, a thespian trained in New York City. He produced fictional Guatemalan news shows that were recorded in Miami and Nicaragua. In the Nicaragua studio, members of the covert action team drank alcohol with defected members of the Guatemalan air force and made recordings of a Guatemalan general’s intoxicated ramblings, which they spliced together with other declarations in the voices of familiar military commanders, repeatedly airing the resulting compilation on Guatemalan radio channels.11 The broadcasts were meant to convince Guatemalans that their government had been routed by their own chief of the air force, who had rallied an army in Honduras from exile and returned to liberate the country. In his memoir, Howard Hunt describes the excitement he felt as a member of the tight-­knit covert operations team. “What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign, to terrify President Árbenz in particular, along with his troops,” Hunt recalls, “much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland, Belgium and Poland at the onset of World War II.”12 Hunt’s team used Stuka bombers recycled from World War II and piloted by Taiwanese mercenaries trained in Honduras to conduct select but otherwise simulated bombings of Guatemala City. When not using actual bombs, the pilots dropped Coca Cola bottles, Molotov cocktails, and dynamite from the aircraft, while speakers on the roof of the US embassy broadcast a loop of tape-­recorded explosions and recordings of roaring P-­38 fighters. As John Nutter recounts, Phillips is known to have boasted that after Árbenz fled to the Mexican embassy, he and other CIA personnel went to the country club for a victory round of golf, Phillips proudly displaying Árbenz’s own golf shoes, which he stole from the vacated presidential mansion.13 In Donald Schultz’s 1992 retrospective analysis of Honduran revolutionary politics, the associate professor and Latin American specialist at the US Army War College ponders how Honduras escaped revolutionary violence at the scale of conflicts in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Most military violence in Honduras across the 1980s was characterized by the US government as counterinsurgency and based on methods that evaded large-­scale military commitments by relying on proxy forces and covert action. Schultz reflects on how “lessons of a non-­revolution” could be drawn from Honduras as to shape historical outcomes without visible or official military actions.14 Reliance upon such tactics began in the aftermath of World War II with the creation of the Office of Strategic Services, which became the CIA in 1947 and by 1948 was running experiments in psychological operations in several offshore facilities.15 Project Alcachofa, at the US Navy installation at the Panama Canal, experimented with new forms of interrogation as agents used hyp-

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nosis, forced morphine addiction, and injected chemicals to produce states of amnesia on agents as test subjects.16 Agents consolidated their curricula of tactics for simulation, interrogation, and intimidation during the Korean War and the US war in Vietnam, codifying them into manuals of the kind that Andres professed to own. They set the precedent for violent interrogations at Lepaterique and Aguacate bases, the latter carved into three thousand acres of jungle in eastern Honduras as the largest regional hub for Contra warriors. What Schultz describes as the “experience of ‘non-­revolution’” in Honduras was the work of covert operators whose labors simply appeared as history’s unfolding. By the early 2000s, as maras channeled historical contradictions into aesthetics, it was the submerged effects of ruling-­class hegemony and covert operators that imbued their communities with an untimeliness that bordered upon desublimation. The tension between these submerged histories and historical awakening is resonant with Benjamin’s proto-­ethnographic analysis of the Paris arcades, where he describes the phantasmagoric temporality of modernity at its most narcotic. His allegorical sociology of the arcades drew upon several archetypes familiar to its heyday—the prostitute, the flaneur, the conspirator, among others—each an incarnation of the “dream-­sleep” conditioned by homogeneous historical time. Among them the figure of the gambler was the embodiment of capitalism’s extremes, in which games of chance simulated cycles of boom and bust. The gambler’s instincts were honed to games of chance in which “at the last moment, when everything is pressing toward a conclusion, at the critical moment of danger (of missing his chance), . . . a gambler discovers a trick of finding his way around the table, of reading the table.”17 The gambler and “the destructive character,” in Benjamin’s earlier work, share an intuition for action as opposed to waiting for history’s unfolding, though for Benjamin the gambler’s instincts for historical awakening are constrained by a subordination to capital. He writes, “The proscription of gambling could have its deepest roots in the fact that a natural gift of humanity, one which, directed toward the highest objects, elevates the human being beyond himself, only drags him down when applied to the meanest objects: money. The gift in question is presence of mind. Its highest manifestation is the reading that in each case is divinatory.”18 While the destructive character’s agility of the senses breaks with historical time, the gambler’s is instead mapped onto the logic of economic relations to make of him an allegorical figure of false consciousness. “It is not by accident that people bet on the results of elections, on the outbreak of war, and so on,” Benjamin observes. “For the bourgeoisie, in particular, political affairs easily take the form of events on a gaming table. This is not so much the case for

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the proletarian. He is better positioned to recognize constants in the political process.”19 Here Benjamin’s contrast between the gambler and the proletarian destructive character attests to a shared capacity for intervening in historical time with nearly opposite results, an allegory of the lumpen economy in which Robert Seldon Lady and Peri were such unlikely bedfellows. Benjamin’s gambler suggests to me that in the aftermath of supposed nonrevolution in Tegucigalpa, the narcotrafficking industry harnessed by gangs was unlikely to become an instrument of revolutionary transformation so long as it was itself a ruin of counterrevolutionary history. Long before Matta’s time it was deeply imbricated with counterrevolutionary action against the revolutionary government of Cuba when, following Operation Success in Guatemala, the same group of covert actors reconvened to try their template for regime change on the Castro government. Based on the perception within the CIA that the coup against Árbenz had created a template for the overthrow of other governments around the world, senior CIA official Richard Bissell, one of the coup’s central architects, was charged by CIA Director Allen Dulles with organizing a team to overthrow the Castro government. Bissell recruited largely from the team that had toppled Árbenz, and from a CIA base inside of Guatemala they funded and trained anti-­Castro exiles dubbed Brigade 2506. After traveling by boat from Guatemala, the brigade attacked the military installation at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba, on April 17, 1961.20 Notoriously, President Kennedy withdrew air support at the last minute and left the insurgents outnumbered by defense brigades. Those who survived were embittered and began to engineer the first cocaine networks from South America to Florida to finance terrorist attacks against Castro on their own. Their work was so vigorous that in 1970, of those detained in the largest drug bust in the history of federal law enforcement—30 percent of the heroin and 70 percent of the cocaine sales nationwide in the United States, involving 150 persons—70 percent were veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion.21 They were the epitome of “the disposal problem,” as CIA Director Allen Dulles called covert actors who continued covert operations long after their services were no longer required.22 The day wound down in Santa Lucía, and our conversation at Andres’s house lulled. Peri and Andres watched a soccer game on television while Víctor smoked cigarettes and I took a nap. Later Andres walked us back to the bus. A group of young men dressed in sporting gear came up the road, heading for a soccer field beyond Andres’s house. Andres said they were from the US Peace Corps training facility at the bottom of the hill. “Who needs spies and clandestine agents now?” he asked. “You know you’re colonized when the gringos stop sending soldiers and just send their kids to help the poor.” The kids were pale vectors of imperial sovereignty compared to a revenant like

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Lady himself, but they sustained the resonance of Lepaterique or Aguacate as inverse monuments to a revolutionary past always under erasure. Uncanny returns of the Contra era were not novel but consistently part of historical experience in Honduras. No one could forget the irony that after Hurricane Mitch flooded every landing strip in Honduras and relief pilots circled the country looking for a place to land, the only dry strip was the runway at the ruins of Aguacate. The base’s buildings had collapsed, but drug traffickers maintained the airstrip, a stretch of lawn that locals had renamed Oliver North International Airport. Lady’s arrival may not have even stirred much interest in the end, given that a few months earlier, Negroponte himself visited the country for a security summit, remarking to reporters that Honduras was one of the finest places in the world, perhaps where he would buy land and retire. Víctor, Peri, and I said goodbye to Andres and boarded the bus to Tegucigalpa. A half hour later we got off in front of the US embassy to walk to the central plaza of the city. The embassy was one of the architectural marvels of the city, four stories with an immense exterior wall and narrow windows of mirrored glass. It was a portrait of opacity. Every morning there were no fewer than thirty or forty people lined up on the sidewalk, paperwork in hand, ready to apply for visas to the United States. As we walked, the sun sparkled off the windows of the Hotel Maya, perched on the hilltop behind the embassy as another monument to the era of high imperialism. Among historians of the Contra war and US covert action, the hotel has a certain reputation. Stephen Kinzer, whose reporting on the Contra war Noam Chomsky and Edmund Herman deconstruct in Manufacturing Consent,23 recalls the Hotel Maya with imperial nostalgia: When a country finds itself at the center of world history, it begins attracting spies, mercenaries, war profiteers, journalists, prostitutes, and fortune-­ seekers. Often they gravitate to a particular hotel. In Honduras, which was shaken from its long slumber in the 1980s and turned into a violent staging ground for cross-­border war, the Maya was that hotel. Perched atop a high hill near the central plaza in the capital city, Tegucigalpa, its tinted windows giving it an air of mystery, the Maya attracted a variety of sinister characters. Counterrevolutionaries hatched bloody plots over breakfast beside the pool. You could buy a machine gun at the bar. Busloads of crew-­cut Americans would arrive from the airport at times when I knew there were no commercial flights landing, spend the night, and then ship out before dawn; they said they didn’t know where they were going, and I believed them. Friends told me that death squad torturers stopped in for steak before setting off on their night’s

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work. But in those days, much of what anyone said in Honduras was a lie. That was certainly true at the Maya, and equally so at the American embassy a couple of miles away.24

Víctor joked that we should take Peri to the casino that was still attached to the side of the Hotel Maya, and Peri guffawed a goofy laugh. It was incredible to see him so at ease. “That’s where the real heavies go to spend their money,” Peri said. “I’d like to test my luck against theirs—I’m still alive for a reason, right?” Peri’s enthusiasm spoke to the locale as a monument to the history of organized crime but also his discontent with the impunity that shielded white-­collar criminals. His own criminal trade involved much risk and little protection. We walked until we arrived at the central park and sat on the steps beneath the statue of Francisco Morazán, the regional hero known for his military exploits in the early nineteenth century during the wars of independence. Víctor immediately started recounting the history of the statue as we rested our legs before hailing a cab home. That story is also reproduced in a footnote in the 1971 book Las venas abiertas de América Latina (The open veins of Latin America), Eduardo Galeano’s history of the imperial conspiracy of underdevelopment in the hemisphere.25 The story goes that after Morazán died before a firing squad sometime in the 1820s, Honduran diplomats were sent to France to procure a statue of his likeness to commemorate independence and decorate the plaza. But when the pair arrived at Paris they were overwhelmed with the cosmopolitan atmosphere and spent their entire advance in brothels and casinos of the red-­light district. Not knowing what to do, they wandered the city until they passed a market where they were able to buy a statue at a cut-­rate price of a man astride a horse, wielding a sword above his head. The statue that today commands the attention of Tegucigalpa’s central park is, according to the story, that of the French traitor Michel Ney. Some scholars have argued that the statue is definitively Morazán, drawing attention to the Central American insignia on the buttons of his vest that others believe to have been incorporated after discovery of the statue’s true origins. Ney had been Napoleon’s top official, a military hero of Waterloo, but betrayed Napoleon by joining the Bourbon restoration. He was facing execution at the time the statue was shipped to Honduras, which accounted for the bargain-­ basement price. Before his execution Ney used his Masonic connections to escape France on a boat to the United States, where he changed his name and settled in North Carolina. He became a professor at Davidson College, where he helped design the school’s seal. On his deathbed, the story goes, he confessed his true identity and was buried in a cemetery in Rowan County with

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the headstone inscription, “Soldier of the French Revolution, Under Napoleon Bonaparte.” “So he was an undocumented scumbag, just like me,” Peri said. “What do you think they will put on my grave?” “The best of Los Piñares,” Víctor said. Peri smiled. “Basura [garbage] from Los Piñares,” Peri said. “Thrown out of the country.” We laughed. “But if I ever make it back to the US, I can promise you, I’m going to be someone else.”

13

Lumpen

In 2006 I took a bus to visit some friends in Managua and get out of Los Piñares for a few days. As the bus departed, a woman dropped her bag and several books onto the seat beside me. She was a graduate student from Spain named Greta. We started talking, and I told her that I too was a researcher. “What do you study?” she asked. I cringed. By the mid-­2000s I was uncomfortable telling anyone that I was interested in the gang phenomenon in Honduras, as it was easy for others to assume that I was just another foreigner who romanticized it. But when I told her, her face lit up. She was in Honduras with a team of seven other graduate students who shared an adviser and had a research project about gangs and social class. They wanted to determine why gangs had not cohered into a collective upheaval with demands and goals, as had some of the regional revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s. “So how is that going?” I asked. “To be honest, not so well,” Greta replied. “Terrible actually.” “What’s the problem?” “These gang members are not interested in participating. Everyone is feeling down.” “So you are working with them directly?” “Of course,” she said. “We want to introduce sociological concepts to them and assess the results over time.” She described living in two different barrios where they paid gang members to participate in reading groups. “We give the gang members different things to read, but they don’t read it,” she said. “Even the leadership. None of them cares about social theory.” She said maybe their experiment had shown them what they wanted to know. “But our goal is not just to assess the results. The problem is that gangs form because youth have no sense that things can change. Theoretical concepts are important because they can enable different thinking and different leadership. They can be

Bus massacre in Chamelecón, 2005. Photo from El Heraldo.

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a [revolutionary] vanguard, but that won’t happen so long as they don’t want to learn anything new.” “What did you assign them?” I asked. “We started with Marx, some of the Communist Manifesto,” Greta said. I was astonished. It had never crossed my mind to assign Marx and Engels to a group of gang members, but I told her I understood where she was coming from. There was simply no obvious roadmap for the economically marginalized across Honduras. Progressive movements existed, but it was unclear how they could confront the juggernaut of free trade neoliberalism or the criminalization of gang members. By the turn of the 2000s the idea of revolutionary movements training in the countryside or as urban guerrillas felt anachronistic, and it was difficult to picture gangs in conversation with trade unions or peasant farmers. “They would rather smoke weed and sell coke,” she said, “which actually undermines the political movements that do exist. So they can’t have consciousness of their class position because they all fantasize about having power.” I told her about my friend Mani, a former member of an urban guerrilla unit in Honduras from the 1980s and 1990s known as the Cinchoneros. He owned a small business in the capital and kept a low profile, concerned that retribution for his actions was still possible. We were introduced through a mutual friend just briefly and in passing, but then Mani emailed me. The emails kept coming. He asked about my research, what I knew about gangs, and what I planned to write. During the 1990s, he said, he had high hopes that the maras would spark a political movement, but he had resigned himself to the idea that they would end up serving the interests of narcotrafficking elites and harming working-­class movements. Revolutionary work required an ethical system, he said, and the maras didn’t have one. Instead they were full of resentment. “The problem is they celebrate being lumpenproletariat,” Mani said. “It’s a cycle. They are poor and jobless and feel looked down upon. So they take pleasure in destroying their barrios and scaring people. That’s not solidarity.” “This is the challenge,” Greta said. “Globalization of capital has made it impossible for some people to see themselves as part of a labor struggle. They would sooner flee the country than unite with workers here.” We continued talking and eventually arrived at the topic of gangs in Managua, which Greta described as a less urgent “social problem” than what we knew from Honduras. Nicaraguan gangs were not absorbed into an illicit economy, nor had they developed the gothic features of criminality that made them a shock-­ inducing spectacle that held the public breathless. She said gangs in Managua

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had formed in the aftermath of a socialist revolution that transformed policing institutions so that lawbreaking did not have the same transgressive charge as in Honduras. Gangs in Nicaragua bore the traces of that social transformation, while gangs in Honduras had no such revolution to look back on. Honduran gang leaders were a portrait of brooding opacity and had never to my knowledge mentioned revolutionary theory or its history in the country. Instead they had germinated an iconoclastic revolt that dismantled societal touchstones while offering little in their place. Still it was undeniable that self-­ declared criminality had underscored the economic and political struggles of those marginalized by the global economy and amplified contradictions in that economic system such that gangs’ departure from it felt like a rupture in historical time. What kind of agency was that? I was captivated by Greta and Mani because they both channeled Marx of the mid-­1840s at the time that his writing shifted focus to the theory of proletarian revolution and the class dynamics that animated it. After the French Revolution the general terms “working class” and “proletariat” were interchangeable among socialists, describing all of the working poor. Socialists venerated their suffering and toil but offered them “the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or independent political movement.”1 That is, their immiserated labor was acknowledged but without political agency. By the time Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology in 1846, they differentiated industrial workers from the working poor, using the term “proletariat” to demarcate a group with a shared experience of exploitation in the industrial capitalist economy.2 From the outset they were sensitive to the division among the impoverished of industrial society, especially as concerned the nonworking poor. Marx and Engels offered the term “lumpenproletariat,” proletariat in rags (“lumpen”), to characterize the nonworking poor who scavenged and hustled for survival and whose independence distanced them from the shared experience of exploitation that united the proletariat under a common cause.3 For members of the lumpenproletariat, survival hinged on self-­interest and opportunism, which Marx and Engels regarded as a threat to proletarian solidarity. The lumpenproletariat would be easily co-­opted by the middle and ruling classes as mercenaries and strike breakers, forming a “dangerous class” whose “conditions of life . . . prepare [them] far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”4 However, this theory of the lumpenproletariat as a counterrevolutionary force ran against the thinking of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who viewed the industrial proletariat as already contaminated with bourgeois aspirations and the nonworking poor as inhabiting a social realm filled with un-

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adulterated vigor. He argued that the success of a revolution would hinge entirely on the nonworking poor, whom he called “the flower of the proletariat”: By the flower of the proletariat, I mean above all that great mass, those millions of the uncultivated, the disinherited, the miserable, the illiterates, whom Messrs Engels and Marx would subject to their paternal rule by a strong government—naturally for the people’s own salvation! . . . By flower of the proletariat, I mean precisely that eternal “meat” (on which governments thrive), that great rabble of the people (underdogs, “dregs of society”) ordinarily designated by Marx and Engels in the picturesque and contemptuous phrase Lumpenproletariat. I have in mind the “riffraff,” that “rabble” almost unpolluted by bourgeois civilization, which carries in its inner being and in its aspirations, in all the necessities and miseries of its collective life, all the seeds of the socialism of the future, and which alone is powerful enough today to inaugurate and bring to triumph the Social Revolution.5

As we reached the outer limits of Managua, Greta asked what I thought of the massacre at Chamelecón, a shooting of a passenger bus that occurred two days before Christmas in 2004 in which twenty-­eight people had been killed.6 Two years had gone by, and still the event was a lurid and unresolved mystery. The shooting was believed to have been a staged spectacle, a dizzying and layered event in which state authorities impersonated gang members impersonating the Cinchoneros supposedly attempting to terrorize the country. That is, the shooting was believed to have been conducted by police who dressed as gang members who were themselves pretending to be a revived revolutionary cabal. The shooters left a bizarre note written on a long strip of red paper that claimed the Cinchoneros would conduct another massacre if Congress implemented the death penalty. The most popular interpretation of this was that it had been intended to empower the Nationalist Party, whose recent presidential candidate had campaigned on instating the death penalty for gang members. The shooters expected the country to react with outrage and in turn support the death penalty for this and other gang-­related crimes.7 The day after the massacre, police arrested several gang members and charged them with the crime, but by afternoon members of the MS-­13 spoke with journalists directly and said that members of the police had attempted to contract them for the shooting, which they refused. In turn police impersonated them as gang members impersonating Cinchoneros. The theatricality would be ridiculous if it weren’t already tragic. “What do you think happened?” Greta asked. I said I wasn’t convinced the gangs knew enough about the Cinchoneros to impersonate them, and besides,

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the letter they left was filled with profanity and grammatical mistakes unlike the Cinchoneros’ old communiqués. “Well, if the maras would only get organized, then they could respond,” she said. “It’s easy to frame them for crimes when none of them know what the other is doing.” In Managua I spent a few days in Barrio Nuevo #2, where there were rumored to be numerous pandillas, though I noticed nothing out of the ordinary. When I returned to Tegucigalpa, I arrived home after dark and had just settled in when there was a whistle from the street. It was Jorge, wanting to hear about my trip. We talked for a while. Finally he mentioned what was on his mind—gang recruitment was picking up in Los Piñares. He, Peri, and two others had planned to flee to the United States as soon as possible because neighbors would surely blame them even if Jorge was not, at least to my knowledge, directly involved with the MS-­13 as yet. To make matters worse, the sergeant in charge of the local police station had been rotated to another district, and his replacement already made his intentions clear. “Peri said the sergeant had two of the palabreros [senior mara leaders] arrested and brought them to the precinct, where he told them what was up,” Jorge said. “He’s got plans for this area, and we’re not sticking around. There’s nothing for us here.” I had no way of knowing at that time, but this development was the beginning of escalating extortion practices across the barrio. Previously in Los Piñares the MS-­13 did not have enough foot soldiers to collect extortion without reprisals from the barrio residents, but in a few months and with aggressive recruitment, that would change. This was not what Greta meant when she talked about getting organized. I gave Jorge some money for the trip and went to bed with visions of the four of them moving across borders, hiding in trunks of cars and the luggage compartments of buses, and walking with tired footsteps along well-­worn trails in arid landscapes. The next morning I went to Jorge’s parents’ house and told them he had been too sad to say goodbye. They nodded stoically, saying he would be better off if he could make it over the border and find Abel in Atlanta. “My boys keep running away,” his mother told me. A week later Abel called. “I need you to tell my parents that Jorge is here. Just to keep them calm. My mother’s heart can’t handle this,” he said. I did what he asked, but no one heard from Jorge for a month. When I stopped by the house his mother was usually sitting on the couch watching television, seeming to grow thinner by the day. Four weeks after they left, I was walking from the bus and heard a whistle, and there was Jorge, leaning against a wall in the shade. It was his first deportation, and he seemed to be in shock. So much had happened in such a brief time. We stood in the shade and caught up. He told me what happened.

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We left from this barrio, together, the four of us. We took the bus to Siguatepeque and met Amilcar’s cousin. He knew the route. But we got caught up in Mexico. The train was full of people, una turba [a mob] of Central Americans. We were on the train for only a few hours when the maras were on one end, robbing the passengers. It took them all day to get halfway down the train. That night they got off, but the next night we passed the bridge where the Zetas are active. We felt the train slowing and suddenly these cars turned on their headlights in the middle of the darkness. The Zetas took a bunch of hostages, but we climbed underneath the train and held onto the bottom. When it pulled off we climbed back out, thinking we were going to die. The next day we were still on the train and feeling lucky, but there was a thunderstorm. It was night and in the middle of nowhere so all you could see was the lightning. The train slowed down too, but we hit a curve and something happened and the train flipped sideways. I fell off and landed on my head and lost consciousness. When I woke up there was a guy whose legs had been cut off at the thighs, I guess by the train. He was dead but all of us survived. We were lucky. Anyway we walked for hours and slept in open fields without any water. There was nothing, nothing. But after two days we found an old house made of mud, and there was an old couple there who took care of us for more than a week. I had a huge knot on my head, but it started to go down. We stayed until the old man told us “Let’s go” and drove us to the nearest town, but as soon as we were in the plaza we got caught by police. We were in jail for two weeks. But for real it was easier in that Mexican jail than living in Los Piñares. We had food every day and they took me to the hospital to look at my head. We could play soccer; nobody was threatening anyone else. I don’t know why people complain about it. I’d go back and live there. For some of us it’s better to be in between than to be here.

In the month that he and Peri had been gone, the barrio had been flooded with cocaine. No one knew why, but suddenly there were different youths selling it on the corners as if no one would challenge them. Jorge said this was what he and Peri had been talking about. Now it was happening. The new police chief was not only involved in the narco-­economy but the only one left in the seven barrios that constituted his district. There were five closed police stations in contiguous districts across the southern rim of the capital. An exodus of officers happened gradually over a year as those at these other stations began a work stoppage, demanding more pay for such a dangerous job, but were then dismissed. The police precinct above Los Piñares had been

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assigned to cover all of this additional territory, empowering the new sergeant in charge. Peri was also back in Los Piñares but had not left his mother’s house for several days. “The problem here is the new sergeant has connections,” he said when we finally spoke again. “They say he’s connected to the military and that’s bad for us here.” Military connections were the most powerful in the drug world, meaning they knew when raids were coming, could target enemies with military violence, and had access to foolproof smuggling in and out of the country. In Los Piñares you could already feel the change. “I’m gone for a month and suddenly all these kids are selling in the streets?” Peri asked, shaking his head. After thinking it through, Peri chose to hide out, knowing the sergeant would be looking for him. So that day we sat inside the house, where his motorbike leaned against the wall reeking of gas. He and Jorge were planning to leave again for the United States, Peri said, because if they refused the new sergeant he would look weak, and they would be killed to preserve his own business reputation. They were even being forced out of the illicit market. What remained for them? If the barrio could be said to have a subproletariat, they were it. A few days later when I arrived again, Peri had dismantled his motorbike, and the parts were spread all over the house. He was scrubbing each engine piece with detergent, drying it off, and putting it back together. I watched him take apart and reassemble the entire engine, preparing it for night races out on the beltway around Tegucigalpa. Peri said there was a gambling circuit, and a few nights earlier he had won a big race. There were police, military, and sons of some of the elite families there, betting large sums of money, he said. So this is a way to make different connections. If I win a race they see I can maneuver this bike and then tomorrow they say “We have a job for you,” and we become business partners. These are powerful people, ok? So the jobs are not small. They are jobs that people like me can’t pull off. You have to have impunity to do this kind of shit. But see, my view is, all this racing is to find people who can get away after the job is done. They’re grooming people, and at the same time they try to win money.

Two days later there was a bank heist in Comayagüela that involved four assailants on motorbikes. They timed the robbery for the late afternoon, when traffic would be snarled to a halt on the main arteries of the city. After the robbery the assailants split up on motorbikes and whisked between cars stalled in rush-­hour congestion. When I saw Peri next he was putting ointment on a

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burn on his leg from the exhaust pipe, and his bike was newly scuffed in several places. The license tag had been removed. I wasn’t going to bring up the bank robbery until Peri did. “You heard about that, right?” he asked. I said I had. “It wasn’t me. But I know it was a hit against a business owner who won’t cooperate. Right now they just tell me to keep racing. There are unos grandes [some powerful people] now who come to the beltway at night, and what do they see? Peri is winning races. No one can beat me.” “Who are the people?” “Traffic police, state detectives, sons from powerful families in this city, and a lot of middle-­class kids with cars that have low-­rider lights on them,” he said. I had read an investigative piece in the newspaper about the gambling rings that set up on the highways at night and wondered what was happening. Tegucigalpa by night was a frightening place to move around, but to race on an empty beltway with so much money on the line was unfathomable. That particular amalgam of lower- and upper-­class individuals returned my thinking to the lumpenproletariat, which is often used as a synecdoche for the subproletariat class but in Marx’s and Engels’ writing is actually a concept that bridges the lowest and the highest social tiers and hence transcends familiar class boundaries. The common ground between them is their parasitical relation to the surplus of the economic system.8 Marx’s case study of this phenomenon is The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which examines the rise of Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte as president of France in 1848.9 His campaign exposed the bourgeoisie as a fractious rather than monolithic social class in which the differences between the industrial and financial bourgeoisie caused significant tension. The industrial bourgeoisie depended on an economy of production and consumption, while the financial bourgeoisie made wealth from market speculation, capital gains, and banking. Owing to their manipulation of market value, the finance bourgeoisie was ascendant. By cheating the economic system, the finance aristocracy united the high and low of the socioeconomic world into the figure of the lumpen-­aristocracy: “Clashing every moment with the bourgeois laws themselves, an unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of bourgeois society—lusts wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes crapuleux [debauched], where money, filth, and blood commingle. The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society.”10 During the early 1850s Marx’s work continued to follow the political career of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, who, as his term of office ended in 1851,

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dissolved the National Assembly to retain power. Marx’s account was focused on the lumpenproletariat as Bonaparte’s secret weapon, which, as resistance to his coup mounted, assembled into a vast mobile guard overtaking the city. Contracted as mercenaries and backed by industrial elites, they fought bloody street battles against the radical workers of Paris. Marx describes Bonaparte as “chief of the lumpenproletariat,” a figure whose power derived from nepotism, familial inheritance, and membership in political secret societies.11 [I]n all big towns [the lumpenproletariat] forms a mass sharply differentiated from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu [men without hearth or home], varying according to the degree of civilization of the nation to which they belong, but never renouncing their lazzarone character—at the youthful age at which the Provisional Government recruited them, thoroughly malleable, as capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices as of the basest banditry and the foulest corruption.12

Marx puzzled over the coup of 1851 in part because the lumpenproletariat not only disrupted the materialist dialectic at the center of his revolutionary theory but also appeared to be the class most amenable to class consciousness and thereby historical transformation. Some of Marx’s most colorful passages are attempts to describe the heterogeneity of the lumpenproletariat as it brought together “vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème [bohemia].”13 And what is la bohème if not the flashy world of the illicit economy, with its glamour and transgressive affects and intersection of high and low that is often called “the underground”? This interface of the very powerful and the least powerful persons of the social world in Tegucigalpa made the underworld an extraordinarily lethal place, as Jorge’s and Peri’s desire to flee Honduras for the United States attests. Jorge had been avoiding me and finally explained one evening, after I’d run into him outside a local store, that he was trying to keep me safe. “We’ve known each other for almost ten years,” he said, “so it’s not my choice to avoid seeing or talking to you. But right now things are bad around here, and if something happens, you don’t want to be near me. My life doesn’t count

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out here any longer. Someone can come for me tomorrow, and they’ll never pay a price for it.” Later that night as I tried to sleep I thought about this deep insecurity that Jorge felt, his total dislocation from any form of solidarity other than the criminal networks that he and Peri attempted, somewhat clumsily, to navigate. So I was surprised early one Saturday morning when Jorge knocked on my door, clean-­shaven and in crisp new clothes, a small cut and bruise over his left eye, claiming he had a surprise. It was just after dawn and the streets were still relatively empty, and we walked swiftly over the bridge into Brisas del Norte. At a house with a long brick wall he knocked at two large steel garage doors. A small girl opened them revealing a lot with various cars and trucks, mostly new models. She disappeared and returned with two mountain bikes, both brand-­name and seemingly unused. She shut the gate and a heavy lock resounded from the other side. I had no doubt the bikes were stolen. “Relax,” he said, “we’re just borrowing them for a while. Let’s take a ride. I want to show you something.” Brisas del Norte was Barrio 18 territory, and as the streets grew busier with neighbors going to the corner stores and walking quickly to catch the local buses, Jorge should have been nervous. As a member of the MS he could be killed and me with him. But nonetheless he rode seemingly without a care. On the corners and sitting in the doorways of local residences were young men who were surely, in my mind, Barrio 18, and yet they watched us and did nothing. It was moments like those that answered the questions I would never ask Jorge in interviews. Immunity in Las Brisas meant that he had moved up a tier in the illicit world. We crested a hill and on the other side, coasting with the wind against our faces and rippling through my T-­shirt, Jorge smiled and we began laughing. At the bottom of the hill we hit the paved road that cuts through the south side past the airport. “I’ve been coming here for all these years, and I’ve never seen Las Brisas,” I said. Jorge winked. “You’re going to see more, too. Follow me,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t stop.” The road curved past undeveloped tracts where the forest was thick and the air clean and humid, the sound of rushing water somewhere close by. We pedaled fast past the entrances to the barrios La Laguna and Reparto Oriental where teenage boys stood up and glared. Around a corner Jorge took another right and slowed down where the houses were a bit larger and the road was interrupted by roundabouts with shady roble trees. Finally he took a left and stopped, out of breath and smiling. “You tired?” he asked. We sipped water and he gestured toward a long security wall on the other side of the street, painted white with blue trim and electrical security

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wiring on top. A truck was backing out of the steel security doors, and we could see the façade of the house and a lawn with small statues. It was a modernist ranch-­style house, and through the windows was a wooden dining set and light cascading from an interior courtyard. “You know whose house that is?” he asked. “An ex-­president?” I said. He laughed. “No. Guess again.” I had no clue. “This is Matta’s mansion,” he said, referring to Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros. “It is?” “His family still owns it,” he said. I had seen photos of the house from news stories of Matta’s capture in 1988, and it was a shock to be standing in front of it. The house was iconic in Matta’s prime, a symbol of the booming outlaw economy of the 1980s. “Wow,” I said. “You didn’t know it was here?” “I never thought about looking for it,” I said. Jorge explained, I wanted to be the one to show you. Why? Because you want to know all this stuff, and for us Matta was the beginning. He started everything. In school you learn about presidents and everyone who they say is important, right? Well Matta is the one who made Honduras important. Before Matta, Hondurans were just farmers and peasants serving the banana companies. But when we got cocaine, the country became a different place. Now you say “Honduras” and people think of this wild place, a country that no one can control.

I stood looking at the house, still recovering from our bike ride. “He wasn’t the first to bring cocaine here,” Jorge said, “but Matta took it away from the rich people who controlled smuggling during the ’70s.” “How do you know all this?” I asked. “Because Hondurans know this. I also had a newspaper story about Matta from years ago, and me and my brothers used to read it all the time. Before Matta, only the elites in this country could make money from crime. For the rest of us, you had to pay. Matta changed that.” “How so?” “He invented everything that the gangs and cartels are doing,” he said, looking up at the sky. “Not every kid can tell you about Matta, but the maras and all of this? It’s the same empire he built more than twenty years ago.” “You feel part of that?” “There are still traffickers in Tegucigalpa who worked with Matta. Most of them are retired but you know who they are.”

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After that day I spent time digging up everything I could find on Matta, who was sentenced to three life terms in prison and served many years in solitary confinement in ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, until in late age he was moved to the federal penitentiary in Canaan, Pennsylvania.14 Biographical information about Matta was scant. He was born in Tegucigalpa in 1945 into humble circumstances. Some accounts had him coming of age as a money collector on the public transport bus of his adopted father, and others described the life of a homeless pickpocket. Still others claim he came of age in the Soto neighborhood on the fringe of Tegucigalpa near major marijuana dispensaries and became known at a young age as one of their local dealers. But at sixteen, he left for the United States.15 Matta first found work in Texas as a farmhand before traveling to New York City, where he settled into a barrio with immigrants from across Latin America and married a Colombian woman. He supported their family as a street vendor and a supermarket clerk.16 In the late 1960s Matta was detained and scheduled for deportation but claimed his country of origin was Colombia. He arrived in Colombia just as cocaine production was becoming an international industry and the trafficking syndicates in Bogotá and Medellín were consolidating into the business models today known as cartels. Matta settled in Medellín as the first large-­ scale laboratories for cocaine production were set up. Official records of his activities are silent until he was arrested in 1970 for smuggling twenty-­five pounds or more of cocaine into Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC.17 Matta was incarcerated at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, a minimum-­ security facility from which he escaped the following year.18 Until the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, narcotics trafficking in the Americas was fueled by the high demand for cocaine in Cuba, where gambling, prostitution, and leisure industries proliferated across the early twentieth century. Cuban buyers traveled to Peru’s Huallaga Valley, where they met with cultivators and their intermediaries and smuggled the product back to Havana as well as to New York City, where there was growing demand in the flourishing jazz scene.19 A history of cocaine in the Americas must also account for the impact of the Cuban Revolution, alongside the effects of the US-­initiated Bay of Pigs invasion. The new revolutionary government of Cuba ejected or nationalized foreign capital, shuttering casinos and pleasure-­ tourism industries, thus eliminating cocaine’s consumer base. Cuban exiles across the Caribbean rerouted those supply channels into US markets, while anti-­Castro militants were recruited by the CIA for covert actions to destabilize the Cuban government.20 After Matta’s escape from Eglin Air Force Base, he traveled to Mexico

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and began collaborating with the Cuban exile Alberto Sicilia Falcón, an influential affiliate of the Cali cartel of Colombia that controlled cocaine traffic through Tijuana, Mexico, into the United States. Meanwhile, Félix Gallardo was attempting to expand the Guadalajara cartel as the most powerful in Mexico by uniting drug-­trafficking groups nationwide under a single organization. Importantly, at that moment, it was Matta who facilitated a connection between Gallardo and the Medellín-­based cocaine entrepreneur Pablo Escobar, a watershed moment in the history of drugs in the Western Hemisphere as the Guadalajara cartel promptly shifted focus from marijuana distribution to that of cocaine.21 Gallardo’s network moved more cocaine into the United States per month than any smuggling operation in history and funded a rapid expansion of production back in Medellín that turned producers into the first narcobillionaires in the hemisphere.22 And then Matta connected the Medellín cartel with the Ferrari family in Tegucigalpa, whose longtime smuggling operation moved emeralds, cocaine, and arms but most importantly, had direct connections to the Honduran military that afforded them near total impunity.23 Initially the war on drugs was a popular talking point for the Reagan administration but not a top priority. The creation of the South Florida Task Force in 1982 brought together the FBI, Army, and Navy and stymied the momentum gained by narcotrafficking groups across the 1970s. Task force agents patrolled international waters, conducted raids and field operations against drug producers, and perhaps most critically, investigated and froze US bank accounts connected to suspected narcotraffickers.24 When these new interdiction measures shut down trafficking routes through Caribbean waters, the flow of cocaine shifted entirely to the routes of Matta, Falcón, and Gallardo. Among cartels the new route was called “the Mexican trampoline,” as shipments bounced from Colombia to Mexico and into the United States. With Matta as middleman, shipments were routed through Honduras, where his partners in the Honduran military allowed access to landing strips and customs clearance. By 1985 Matta’s organization was estimated to have been smuggling sixty thousand pounds of pure cocaine into the United States each year.25 By the late 1970s Matta had shaped Honduras as a trafficking-­friendly country and waystation between Colombia and Mexico. Head of state General Juan Alberto Melgar Castro (1975–1978) was blamed for increasing government corruption and military involvement in narcotrafficking, and in 1978 he was removed from office by a military junta led by General Policarpo Paz García, whose connections to the Ferrari cartel in Tegucigalpa were well established. As the Ferraris introduced Matta to their military network,

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Matta’s principal contact became the chief of army intelligence, Colonel Leo­ nidas Torres Arias. Despite his connections to the growing narcotics trade, Torres Arias’s strong anticommunist position earned him CIA support. He connected Matta with Manuel Noriega, chief of military intelligence in Panama, whose connections with the Medellín cartel were already strong, and facilitated contracts between Matta’s seemingly legitimate businesses in Tegucigalpa and the CIA during the buildup of the Contra war.26 The CIA’s preferred air courier by 1983 was SETCO, a Honduran airline founded by Matta as he laundered illicit profits into registered businesses and investments. SETCO doubled as a US-­contracted airline shipping support to the Contras on the Nicaraguan border and a cocaine-­trafficking fleet covering routes between Colombia, Honduras, and Mexico.27 Across the early 1980s, Matta was one of the most successful traffickers in Central America. In Tegucigalpa he was renowned for opening his mansion to the public on weekends and doling out money to those in need as he sat by the swimming pool. León, one of my neighbors in Los Piñares, told me that when he was a boy his father, a public schoolteacher, was arrested by the Directorate of National Intelligence as a suspected leftist. He was missing for days and returned home with a broken leg from interrogation. After several weeks in repose, León’s father lost his teaching job. When he was able to walk again, he went to Matta’s mansion. León recalled, He took me so that the man [Matta] would see him not just as a teacher but as a father. Everyone had heard stories about Matta giving away money, but my father had pride. He would never ask for money from a narco like that. But these were bad times, and after what happened, I don’t think he was ever the same. He was not even a leftist—he had been a supporter of the Contras and feared the Sandinista government. But the police in those days didn’t care. All it took was someone to say, “That guy is a communist,” and you could end up dead. So when we went to see Matta it was a Saturday, and the big doors to his mansion were open, with military guards on each side. You had to stand in line for like three hours in the sun. The line was to the end of the block, maybe sixty people, and when we got to the door the guards patted you down, even me, and I was only six or seven years old. I was looking around and I had never seen anything like this. Our house had a dirt floor, and this was a mansion with floors of marble, furniture made of dark wood, and big rugs with trained dogs sitting straight up like a person. Well, I saw that and I thought the man was a king. When we got to see him, there he was, at a small table by the pool and

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another table with banded money like you see at a bank. He had on a polyester suit with designs on the pockets and shiny boots. My father took off his sombrero, and his hands were shaking and he couldn’t look him in the eye. He told his story, but he was looking at the ground, and Matta waited until he was finished and then he says, “Sir,”—he called him sir—“look here at me.” And my father looks up. “You are a teacher,” he says, “and that makes you a leader for our nation. Be proud of who you are.” It was something simple like that, but I saw my father with tears in his eyes, smiling and nodding his head. Matta waved to his assistant who gave us 2,000 lempiras [about US$200 then], and until my father found another job that money kept our family from starving. My mother was conservative and never talked about all this, but me and my siblings always felt like this man had saved us. When the US took him a few years later we went into the streets outside and yelled “Gringos go home!” over and over.

Matta was arrested by US marshals in 1988, for suspected involvement in the 1985 kidnapping and assassination of Enrique Camarena, an undercover DEA agent in Mexico. Much had changed by the time of his arrest. Reagan’s presidency ended and George H. W. Bush’s began. A ceasefire had been negotiated between the Sandinista government and the Contras, and the Honduran military was under scrutiny for complicity in cocaine trafficking. Though Honduran law did not permit extradition, which had attracted Matta to settle there after living abroad, the head of the Honduran armed forces, General Humberto Regalado Hernández, allowed Honduran military police to arrest Matta and deliver him to US marshals in the Dominican Republic.28 After a decade of US military occupation, the public considered Matta’s extradition a gratuitous breach of Honduran sovereignty. Protesters marched in the streets demanding Matta’s return, throwing Molotov cocktails at the US embassy and burning down the US consulate building across the street. Four protesters were killed by Honduran police. My friend Mani vividly remembered the day of the protests: Before his capture, I had heard about Matta. But he wasn’t someone I aspired to be. I was at university and around that time I was joining the Cinchoneros in Tegucigalpa. We didn’t know what we were doing, but there were more experienced people and we didn’t know who did the kidnappings and bombings. Well, we thought we were something, but then the whole narco thing happened, and we started seeing cocaine at parties everywhere. Something new was happening and Matta was the guy you heard about. He had ­fashion—nice clothes and hair. For us, Che Guevara was symbolic, you know,

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the image of his face with the beret. That was important for us. But Matta was too, in a different way. He was very Honduran. I’m not sure that as a gringo you can understand, but Matta was like Honduras incarnate, and to see him arrested? We were livid. The Honduran government sold him out, delivered him to the gringos in the Dominican Republic because here we had laws against extradition. I was supposed to keep a low profile because of the stuff we were involved in and 3-­16 was still out there, but we became emotional. We walked across the city in a mob of people, and we fought the embassy guards and the police all night. The next day the newspapers had us on the front page. . . . After that night Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros was not a person anymore. He became a myth, an anti-­imperialist myth. In Matta we see the machismo and the autonomy that is the real Honduras, and at the same time he was an outlaw, a narco.

Matta’s reputation as a narcotrafficker was mostly confined to Central America and did not reach international celebrity comparable to that of Pablo Escobar, whose extreme wealth and eccentric tastes have fueled voyeuristic interest in the Medellín cartel. Matta’s historical mark has less to do with the size of his fortune than with his centrality in the Iran-­Contra scandal. Matta and his airline were a point of convergence for international smugglers, Honduran military officers, Contra mercenaries, and US covert operators. The network combined different forms of state and nonstate authority with an organizational fluidity that easily outmaneuvered state and international law enforcement. The membership and machinations of that network were clandestine, and evidence of their actions was cast as a secondary history of the Contra era or as conspiracy theory. Matta himself was a public outlaw. His visibility and fame in the region made legible the imbroglio between narcotraffickers and state authorities no less than its concealment within the antistructure of a covert proxy war. While Marx’s theorization of the lumpenproletariat clarifies somewhat the social structure of converging social worlds from high- and low-­class positions within the Matta network, Georges Bataille’s elaboration of the lumpen concept resonates most with the gothic sovereignty of an emerging narco industry.29 Bataille was writing during the 1930s as fascist politics in Europe enabled surprising political alliances. Bataille was concerned that when lower classes were not incorporated into revolutionary organization, that exclusion all but ensured their seduction into fascist politics. For this reason he renounced his membership in the Communist Party of France, whose notion of a pure proletarian revolution he rejected as idealist, a critique he also leveled at the notion of beauty guiding André Breton and his Surrealist followers of the

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same period. Bataille argued that a refined notion of beauty censors the abject and scatological viscerality to which it contrasts. In his reworking of historical materialism, he contends that it was not only material production that propelled human history but also the desiring drives of the body. Bataille’s “base materialism” wed Marx and Freud to claim that exclusion of lowly forms from political economy as much as aesthetics instilled an irresolvable contradiction at the core of their most important conceptual formations. Marx’s writing of the 1850s contends that the lumpenproletariat was likely resistant to historical transformation and therefore counterrevolutionary, while Bataille argued against the sociological definition of the lumpenproletariat in lieu of an affective one. The lumpenproletariat was hetero‑ geneous in both its makeup and its impact on social reality. Its members aggregated from high and low stations in society, untouchably elite or abjectly poor, their lived realities an exception to the realm of industrial productivity. The lumpenproletariat includes, in Bataille’s estimation, “the numerous elements or social forms that homogeneous society is powerless to assimilate: mobs, the warrior, aristocratic and impoverished classes, different types of violent individuals or at least those who refuse the rule (madmen, leaders, poets, etc.).”30 Lumpen politics, Daniela Gandolfo writes, is not a cohesive political movement aspiring to revolutionary upheaval but a dispersed social force that unmoors the ideological underpinnings of political representation and economic productivity.31 Bataille asserts, “Heterogeneous reality is that of a force or shock. It presents itself as a charge, . . . a force that disrupts the regular course of things.”32 From this perspective, little separated the aesthetic force of Peri’s enormous back tattoo, Juan Matta’s polyester suit, and the garish lifestyles of children of the Honduran ruling class. Each called attention to an exterior thriving beyond the social and legal limits of the current social edifice. The next weekend Víctor and I walked up the hill to the house of Doña Marta, who made crab soup for neighbors on Sundays that they ate in the courtyard of her house. Most Sundays her brother Pedro was there with a pad and pen in his front pocket to take notes for his essays on Honduran politics that he self-­published online. Pedro had been part of the agrarian reform movement of the 1970s, occupying land overtaken by cattle ranchers and facing state and mercenary repression as a result. Víctor asked what he was working on. “Something about the private plane parked at the airport,” he said. A week had gone by since a private jet landed at Toncontín Airport in Tegucigalpa after the airport was closed for the night. It was a Gulfstream G-­II, a luxury jet that had taken an unusual route from Venezuela to Mexico, Guate-

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mala, and finally Honduras. The pilots told aviation officials the plane was for a potential buyer, but the next morning they departed on a commercial flight to Mexico, leaving the plane on the runway. Many speculated it was filled with drugs or contraband, but none was found. President Zelaya impounded the jet, and the next day he was photographed lounging in its plush leather interior, suggesting it be used as the official presidential aircraft. “They say the paperwork is registered to a Mexican banker,” Pedro said, “but no one can contact him. He doesn’t care his plane is here? None of it make sense unless it’s a gift.” “A gift?” I asked. “A bribe, at the highest level, right in front of our eyes.” It turned out that Pedro was right. In 2015 the pilots were again interviewed in Mexico by an investigative reporter and admitted they had delivered the plane as a gift from the head of the Mexican Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, to one of the highest functionaries in the Zelaya government.33 “And here the president wants to keep it for himself,” Pedro added. “Imagine our president, flying to Washington and Buenos Aires in a narco jet.” We laughed. “I can understand why we have gangs in this country,” he went on, knowing I was researching them. “There is so much money in narcotrafficking that even the president gets his cut.” Doña Marta’s son brought soup out to our table and then raised the volume on the television in the corner of the courtyard, where a news program ran the old footage of the massacre of Chamelecón and then an interview with the former Minister of Security Oscar Álvarez. He was in Texas, where he relocated in the final year of the Ricardo Maduro administration, claiming that organized crime groups had put out a bounty on his life. Álvarez announced he would be returning to Honduras to testify in the upcoming trial of the accused shooters. “You know Julia Espinoza?” Pedro asked. Julia was a local success story, a neighbor who earned a law degree from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras and had risen professionally to become a prosecuting attorney in San Pedro Sula. “She told me that she saw the note that was left on the bus,” he said. “By the ‘Cinchoneros.’” Pedro made air quotes with his fingers. “You don’t think it was the Cinchoneros?” I asked. Víctor and Pedro laughed. I heard Marta laugh, from inside the house. “Man,” he said, “this was death squadrons.” “How do you know?” “Because gangs can do horrible things, but they don’t kill their own mothers and children like that. They are criminals, not psychopaths.” “What’s the difference?” I asked.

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“The difference is this. One rejects the society around them, and that’s where their violence comes from. But the other terrorizes the community to dominate it. Look, the gang members who were interviewed after the shooting said that someone high up in the government had offered them money, weapons, and transportation if they did it, right? Well, I believe them. Gang members never deny that they did something. To them, you commit a crime on principle. They didn’t do it, so they denied it. It’s really that simple.” “So who did it?” “The order came from high up.” “You believe what they [gang members] said?” “There are politicians who want more security, right? So, they make it look like gangs are out of control. They bring up the Cinchoneros because they want people to think that maras are going to try and destabilize the government, just like the Cinchoneros.” “Yes, I follow you.” “But what gets me is the bigger picture—a death squad, standing on a dirt road waiting for the bus. They are acting like gang members who are supposedly impersonating a revolutionary group that no longer exists. How’s that for a farce?” “A farce?” I asked. “They even decorated their note, making it look like a Christmas card. Can you imagine these soldiers huddled together making this like an art project. Julia said that at the bottom they had two machine guns in an X shape, surrounded by flowers. Something about the maras has made these very powerful people lose their composure and do very stupid things.” “Why do you think that is?” I asked. “Because they want to show the maras who has the most power.” “But isn’t it obvious the state has more power?” I asked. “But we’re not talking about the state now. We’re talking about the underground. All of them—the police, the politicians, the squadrons—they have all been running it for years but always quietly. Then along came the maras and they exposed it with so much bulla [ruckus]. They might be desgraciados [scumbags], but they are not liars. That is what makes them powerful.” We finished our soup and said goodbye to Marta and Pedro. We were in the door when Marta stopped us. “We’ll see how they decide to get rid of these mareros,” she said. “The grandes [powerful people] in this country won’t give up what they have built. That’s what Mano Dura is, you see?” Pedro nodded with approval. “Mark my words,” he said, “in ten years we’ll see who won the underworld. The maras have the numbers, but the cartels have the real power. But unless

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the maras have a plan, they will just become recaderos [errand boys] for the cartels.” As we walked to Víctor’s house he recounted the conversation, telling me to write it all down, as he had never heard the massacre at Chamelecón theorized so clearly. It was unusual to hear anyone speak of the underground’s complex intersectionality, though in Santa Lucía we had witnessed it in real time as Andres and Peri relaxed with each other across the afternoon and commiserated over their shared experiences that others rarely glimpsed. The lumpen economy was not just an overflowing and excessive public secret but a public secret at the center of prominent national events, forming a vertiginous current of red herrings, theatrical fabrications, and silences that made everyday life feel like a prism of multiple worlds. So much depended on the power of one’s story and means of amplifying it. It was no wonder that gangs had focused so much effort on tattooing, which hijacked the media’s magnification of criminality to tell a story within that story. The voices of gang members could be silenced, but the tattoo images were sovereign compositions whose fragmentation and affective force arrested the prismatic dissociation of everyday experience with its own historical time. It was late afternoon the day after Mother’s Day, and a small crowd gath­ ered on the street corner in the center of Los Piñares watching a card game that had gone on for several hours. Jorge had been scarce in recent weeks, but he stayed with his family on Mother’s Day and spent the following day around the barrio like old times. No one thought much of it when a car with tinted windows drove up and Jorge got inside. Later that evening, after I had gone to Víctor’s house for dinner and watched the televised news, a police cruiser pulled through the barrio and asked where to find Jorge’s family. His body had been dumped from a moving vehicle about a kilometer away. His hands were tied and his face was disfigured. Whoever had been in the car had beaten him and shot him at close range. The next evening Dilsia and I were at the community center, where there was a small vigil for Jorge, his body in a closed casket at the front surrounded by candles and weeping relatives. I saw Dilsia step outside, and so I followed her. She offered me a cigarette, and we smoked in silence. I was still in shock. To this day I am extremely resistant to thinking about what happened in that car. Then Dilsia started talking. “When they stopped to get Jorge I heard what they said to him,” Dilsia said. She had been the one sitting closest to the street. “They said they were going to do another one of their trabajitos [small jobs]. They told him to get in the car, but it was like they were speaking to a child. I had seen that car before, and whoever those people were, they were always bruto [rough] with him.” I asked her why this had happened. “Jorge was MS,

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but he was working on the side,” she said, “with a banda. That kind of thing is forbidden—to have double alliances. The gang would have come for him, but it was the banda who got him first.” “But why would they go after him?” “I don’t know, but you were his friend, so you know Jorge was always curious about organized crime,” she said. “If you are with the gang, you know who you are working with. But the bandas are different, and they can involve anyone—police, military, rich families—you might never know. So sometimes you find out a lot about how things work, and it’s just a matter of how much they trust you. If they don’t? That’s just negocios [business].” Negocios in this context meant eliminating risk, and the knowledge of the underworld was all the more dangerous the deeper one forged. The bandas were especially dangerous, Dilsia said, because they were all business. Gangs, at least, had a collective spirit. “I don’t know if he understood that,” she said. “The maras are different. It’s organized but it’s also a family. The maras can protect you from the power of these other groups. But what Jorge was doing, he was doing on his own, so no one could protect him.” A week later Peri didn’t come home after a night out. His mother, Ángeles, called Víctor, panicking. He may have had an accident on his motorbike, rac­ ing on the beltway, they agreed. Police were uninterested, so Víctor, Teodoro, and I went to the highway where the races were held and searched high and low for skid marks on the pavement or fragments of Peri’s bike in the surrounding ravines. We found nothing. The next day Ángeles said Peri must have gone back to the United States and that surely he was alive, so not to worry any further. A month went by before a morgue called from northern Mexico. They claimed to have found Peri’s identification on a body recovered from the shallows of the Rio Grande along the border. But Ángeles had no money to ship the body, and our efforts to collect money locally failed. Still, we assisted her in holding a funeral in the community center to which only his closest friends came. Just as we were ready to lock up and go home, members of the MS-­13 arrived, confirmed that there was no body, and left. “What did they want?” I asked Víctor. “I think they must believe he faked his death, to escape,” he said. The next day Ángeles removed the bench where we used to sit and planted a row of flowers in its place. I continued to visit with her but stopped after a few weeks, thinking I was too much a reminder of her loss. Several months passed until one day Peri was sitting again outside his mother’s house, drinking coffee in the morning sun. I sat with him as he told me he made it to Mis-

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souri, where he lived with two brothers from Los Piñares before driving home from a quinceañera celebration when he was pulled over in a traffic stop, arrested, and deported. A few days later I had stopped by to speak to him in the morning and sensed his unease but brushed it aside. An hour later he was standing in the doorway of his mother’s house when a boy no older than fourteen or fifteen walked by and shot him with a revolver six times at close range. That time there was no funeral. Within a week Ángeles had relocated, abandoning the house without leaving word where she was going.

Part III

Justice

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it. But—criminals are remote from you— as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Theirs smells of sweat, sperm, and blood. In short, to my body and my thirsty soul it offers devotion. It was because their world contains these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil. Jean Genet, Thief ’ s Journal

14

Community

In the final section of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish he reaches a paradoxical climax. Foucault describes the reformatory for minors outside of Paris known as Mettray and the young boys who lived there. For Foucault it was not Mettray’s opening ceremony in 1840 that marked its completion but “that glorious day . . . when a child in Mettray remarked as he lay dying: ‘What a pity I left the colony so soon.’”1 Its completion was the moment that the reformatory itself had become its own social world. Mettray is more vividly portrayed in Jean Genet’s memoir Miracle of the Rose, in which he depicts his formative years there. The memoir is focused on the tension between the adolescent effervescence and the disciplinary regimen of the reformatory as well as the secretive acts by which children redefined what the facility was—much as Genet would later experience the French penal colony in Guiana.2 But Mettray, for Genet, was primary, a theater of subversive and transgressive performances invigorated by the strict atmosphere of rehabilitation. Discipline and Punish and Miracle of the Rose must be read together, as the figure of the penitentiary saint connects the poetic transformation of the self with the transformation of the carceral interior whose walls were inscribed with children’s poems of love, hate, and fantasy, secret scripts that interrupted the continuity of prison time with the force of passion and violence.3 Though modern punishment would make of prison a secular successor to the monastery, Genet’s memoir describes a cauldron of transgression fueled by discipline that made of criminality a sacred, ritualized, and communal ethics. The first modern prison in Honduras was built in Tegucigalpa in the 1880s, replacing the penal outpost at Fort San Fernando de Omoa. The fort had been a coastal stronghold in the country’s defense against Caribbean piracy and functioned largely as a penal colony built and maintained by indigenous laborers conscripted from across the country. The Penitenciaría Central (Central Peni-

“But there are many tunnels beneath these walls.” Photo by the author.

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tentiary) was modeled on architectural blueprints for Auburn Prison and Walnut Street Prison in the United States whose designs, by the late nineteenth century, had circulated through much of Latin America as models for the modern prison as a rational institution.4 The modern prison swept away dungeons and arbitrary violence to make way for the science of penology and reform of the individual, in which prison served to domesticate criminality by tightly controlling hygiene, sexual impulses, and the structure of daily activities.5 Located in the center of the capital, the penitentiary began as a one-­floor prison that held fewer than two hundred inmates. Forty years later it was expanded during the authoritarian regime of President Tiburcio Carías Andino (1933–1949). Carías focused the efforts of his administration on the project of modernizing, formalizing, and expanding governing institutions and basic infrastructure across the country. One of those institutions was the Central Penitentiary, which was already pushed beyond capacity as more of Carías’s political opponents were jailed. With the prison’s inmate population surpassing four thousand, Carías’s administration added features of modern penality such as ramparts for constant supervision, vocational programs, and educational curricula for societal reinsertion.6 In Foucault’s well-­known terms, the prison was shaped by and productive of discourses of power that generated biographical and statistical knowledge as measures of a “dangerous individual” whose potential lurked inside each modern subject.7 A half century later the quest that began in the Central Penitentiary to profile and predict social deviance would produce yet another dangerous individual as it cohered around the figure of the gang member, a specter dwelling in the social fissures and shadow economies of late modern life. The first time I saw the interior of a prison was in 1999, after Hurricane Mitch in 1998 had pushed the Río Chiquito over its banks and eroded the foundation of the perimeter wall and main structure of the penitentiary, causing the building to collapse just after evacuation of inmates to the national soccer stadium. As I stood in the street below ogling the exposed cross section of the structure, its enormous wooden beams and stone blocks echoed from the nineteenth century. I felt my vision drawn into the prison interior, feeling I was seeing something forbidden, the historical site of an antisociality so concentrated that it haunted the imagination of those who still possessed the freedom to move about as they pleased. Since the early 1900s, when the modern prison in the United States ceased to be an institution open to a curious general public, many have been constructed in inconspicuous locations that conceal modern penality from view. But the modern prison nonetheless persisted with a nightmarish spectrality in my imagination, a phantasm promising not only isolation from the wider community but a slow and permanent process that

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defiled the subject with the shame, abjection, and irreparable trauma. Seeing inside the Central Penitentiary summoned that latent terror, though today its ruins have blended with the landscape of urban Tegucigalpa, crumbling and overgrown with weeds as urban developers and historical conservationists struggle to determine its fate. Construction on the Penitenciería Nacional (National Penitentiary) began in 1994 adjacent to the small hamlet of Tamara west of Tegucigalpa, to centralize different carceral institutions into a single complex with separate facilities for men, women, and juveniles. Several years before I met Miriam Blanco and began fieldwork at the prison, I had gone with Víctor to visit a friend of his serving a short sentence for burglary. I found its atmosphere somber and unremarkable, a sterile and out-­of-­the-­way setting that seemed more tedious than threatening for those locked inside. At the time it housed no more than two thousand inmates, and the most powerful criminal entities inside were figures from regional drug-­trafficking outfits who could buy release and usually served brief sentences. But by the early 2000s the National Penitentiary had been transformed from a drab outpost to a riotous spectacle of gothic sovereignty expressed in colorful murals, fearsome tattoos, and overcrowded barracks that consumed the public imagination across social and political divides. Under Mano Dura, life at the National Penitentiary became newly visible as journalists and politicians condemned conditions of overpopulation that pushed well beyond the designed capacity of 2,500 to nearly 2,900 inmates.8 I had little to no knowledge then of the National Penitentiary but heard about new efforts in “co-­governance,” in which prison authorities collaborated with inmate councils to administer much of daily life in the prison interior. Inmates organized prison life and ensured inmates’ compliance but also financed renovation of failing infrastructure with funds from illicit networks beyond the prison walls. From the outside the penitentiary seemed utterly perilous, a place where criminal power operated in the open with consent from state authorities. For people I knew, the prison was an abject institution, one that housed figures whose demonization was critical to governmentality under Mano Dura.9 The legal theorist Carl Schmitt argued in the 1930s that “political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy. The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.”10 The prison thereby had become an island of its own, a place where the predatory capacity of criminal groups was amplified, where inmates observed visitors passing through the prison gates, and where visitors became visible to a criminal world that they usually avoided at all cost. But it was not only the

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reputation of inmates that created this perception. Killings and arson inside the prison demonstrated it was both the material instantiation of law and a zone of legal exception. Most people I knew were convinced that the deadly prison fires in 2003 and 2004 were acts of arson intended to demonstrate that Mano Dura was but a euphemism for bare life of those perceived as belonging to gangs. The pretrial detention of suspects under Mano Dura ensured there were victims at the ready whenever further demonstration of this power became necessary. Giorgio Agamben argues in his analysis of states of exception in Western democracies, “The history of the state of siege is the history of its gradual emancipation from the wartime situation to which it was originally bound in order to be used as an extraordinary police measure to cope with internal sedition and disorder, thus changing from a real, or military, state of siege to a fictitious, or political one.”11 Following the Contra war, the lawless sovereignty that had been confined to secret bases such as Aguacate and Lepaterique was enshrined into Mano Dura, where it was appropriable even by nonstate groups so long as their target was the gang world. For these reasons, by the early 2000s most gang members I knew in Los Piñares were dead, hiding, or fleeing the country. Jorge and Peri were still around, but I was certain that the imprudence of asking about gang life had only intensified in recent years. If I was interested in finding out anything about gangs at all, it seemed to me, I would have few options beyond visiting gang members incarcerated at the National Penitentiary, where they lived in isolated dormitories and by their own terms. On my first unaccompanied trip to the prison as a researcher in 2006, I took a bus and got off at the highway’s edge, then walked a kilometer along the access road. The road was bordered by empty pastures and abandoned adobe houses, as if the poisonous effects of the prison had cleared the landscape of any signs of life. When I arrived and entered through the large steel doors, guards pointed me to the director’s office in an administrative complex with manicured lawns and brightly painted buildings. Director Antonio Reyes was a lieutenant and career military officer who greeted me then and on several subsequent occasions as I struggled to explain why I wanted to gain entry to the yard housing the general population. I was requesting a formal letter that would satisfy the requirements of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at my university, but Reyes consistently diverted our conversation to talk about his time living in Georgia when he trained at the US Army School of the Americas. I explained to the IRB staff back home that the director himself was a man feared by many across the country, and his name was published in the list of graduates from School of the Americas during the Contra era. He was a decorated serviceman whose career was interwoven with US military operations in the region, im-

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plying that he operated with exceptionalism in Honduras. After the previous director was fatally gunned down in Tegucigalpa, Reyes’s reputation counterbalanced the growing power of criminal organizations in the prison. He was cordial but aloof and after a few visits decided that for my own safety I would not access the prison yard. Back in the capital I was catching up on emails and read a report on the National Penitentiary from a listserv on human rights in Honduras, written by the journalist Miriam Blanco. I knew about her from a news article that profiled her collective of underground journalists called Báalam (“jaguar” in Yucatec Maya). She had been recently celebrated by an international organization as one of the most important journalists in Central America for articles she wrote on charity groups that laundered donations sent for gang rehabilitation at the National Penitentiary, where all such programs had been stopped. I emailed her, introducing myself, hoping at least to correspond a bit. Miriam replied within the hour. “If you have been in the country as long as you say, then why don’t I know you who you are?” I was embarrassed that I had raised her suspicion and wrote a long reply explaining that my research was very localized and I did not spend much time with nongovernmental organizations or networking with professional journalists. She replied within minutes. She had hosted a roundtable on policing in the community center of Los Piñares the year before, with good turnout, and heard nothing about me. She asked for scanned copies of my university ID and the email address of a university contact, which I sent. A week went by, so I emailed her again. She replied within minutes, saying she was busy but would reply later. Another two weeks passed. I emailed again. She replied within the hour with a phone number. “Call me at 7 p.m. tonight,” it said. That night, Miriam answered after one ring and started talking. She asked me several questions about myself, spoke faster than anyone I had met in Honduras, and then wove several interrelated narratives about police and government corruption that were so dramatic I thought she may have been making them up to test my credulity. I reloaded my phone three times with calling cards, and after Miriam had spoken almost nonstop for two hours, she abruptly told me we should talk in person and to wait for her the next morning on a specific street corner in central Tegucigalpa. “I’ll be there at 9:30 a.m.,” she said. “How will I know it is you?” “I’ll honk my horn.” The next morning I realized the corner was a taxi stop where taxi drivers honked their horns repeatedly to solicit riders. I waited for two hours and then called her. She had been called to another appointment but offered to meet

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again. This time I waited on the corner of a busy boulevard for an hour, then went home. This happened three more times until one evening she told me to wait in the food court of the Metro Mall. To my shock, Miriam arrived, accompanied by Tomás, a man probably in his forties, who was one of her investigative collaborators. She started off without small talk, as if we had known each other for years. As she spoke her phone rang repeatedly, buzzing atop a thick binder of papers. Miriam explained that her work required being careful, which was why she needed to avoid me until she could get more information about who I was. I listened as she described being harassed by the police, members of the US embassy, and a visiting scholar from a university in the United States. Tomás interjected several times that police were afraid of her, but there was no time to ask questions. After a half-­hour, Miriam said that she might have time to visit the penitentiary the following week and would be in touch. I caught a bus back to Los Piñares, thinking it would be smarter to give up and move on. But three days later Miriam emailed. “I need a favor,” she began, and then listed several names. “Search everything you can about these people and send what you find.” I Googled. Two were a white, middle-­class couple residing in the northeastern United States. Another was a single, middle-­class male living in Tampa, Florida. I sent her the information and the next day she wrote, “Translate these emails and do not share them with anyone. This is serious.” The emails were in English, communications between the people I had been researching and a Honduran named Julian. They were cryptic but obviously about arranging for a financial exchange. I sent the translations. “Let’s meet tomorrow,” Miriam said on the phone. The next morning I saw Miriam and Tomás approaching in a nondescript car, and both of them were laughing. I got in the backseat. “See what you did?” Miriam asked, handing me a newspaper. The headline was “Washington Cuts Funding for Institute,” and the article described the theft and sale of a hard drive of classified information from the National Institute Against Organized Crime. Miriam and Tomás both worked at the institute and had been tracking their supervisor for months, convinced he was selling information from the institute on the black market. They had collected evidence and then submitted a damning dossier to both the US Embassy and a national newspaper. According to their reports, the hard drive had included a database of information about narcotrafficking interdiction in the country and deeply compromised the antidrug efforts in the region. The emails I translated were a primary source of evidence in the case. Miriam and Tomás were suspected by their superiors as authors of the dossier and dismissed from their positions as soon as the report was published. All morning we drove office to office trying to collect their severance pay.

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At each stop I waited in the car, and Miriam told me to lock the doors and honk if anyone approached the vehicle. I sat in the heat and scribbled field notes on their version of the events they had been recounting all morning. I tried to absorb the turn of events by which I was inside what seemed a high-­ profile whistleblower network. After noon we stopped for lunch, and then Miriam asked me to drive as she made calls to lawyers, journalists, human rights advocates, and state agencies. Her network seemed to go in all directions, and she spoke with a verve that was unusual. She had an obvious knack for putting together details into a narrative that was visual and memorable. Around 4 p.m. Miriam said we’d make a final stop, and I pulled into the parking lot of a tall building with a mirrored-­glass exterior. “Come on,” said Tomás. “Miriam will wait with the car.” I hesitated. “It’s a travel agency,” she said. “Tomás is going to Mexico for a conference. Stretch your legs a little.” Inside, the hallways were empty. We went up a stairwell to the second floor, where there were travel posters of white sand beaches and snow-­covered mountains. In the office at the end of the hall were several people at computer stations with desks strewn with documents. Each eyed us as we walked to the back, where Tomás knocked on an open door and greeted a tall man in a suit who appeared to be putting all of his belongings into a cardboard box. There was a revolver on the table in front of him. Tomás introduced me as an investigator from the US embassy assigned to his “case.” “Julian,” he said, introducing himself. It was his emails I had been translating. Tomás made small talk that turned contentious and then said he’d be collecting his severance pay or else he’d be back. He waved me out the door again. Back in the car we drove for several minutes before Miriam asked what had happened. I told her that Tomás had lied about who I was and that they could drop me off by the soccer stadium where I’d get a bus home. To my surprise she lashed out at Tomás and apologized. “Wait for us here, tomorrow,” she said as I got out by the stadium. The next morning when Miriam picked me up, she and Tomás were more formal. Miriam asked me to drive, and we switched seats. “I want to show you my office,” she said. “Where do I go?” “To the penitentiary. You know the way?” “I thought we were going to your office.” “That’s where it is,” she said, laughing. She said that police vandalized her facility in central Tegucigalpa, and she took all her backup files to the prison, where a friend living in Casa Blanca, the most infamous barracks in the country, offered her a room in the basement. “It’s got a heavy lock, it’s surrounded by people I trust, and it’s the only place in this country where the police can’t

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get to me. Here,” she said, handing me a laminated ID for Báalam, with my name and a perfect copy of the photograph from my university ID on it. “Use this at the prison. Never leave your real identification with those guards. I backdated it so they will think you’ve been around a while.” “Thank you,” I said. “You passed our examination,” she said with a laugh and a wink. Miriam was part of the network of human rights workers in Tegucigalpa, a web of interconnected lawyers, journalists, and activists, but she was also her own entity. Visiting the offices of well-­known organizations I always felt welcome, but getting to know Miriam was distinct, fraught with suspicion that at times felt insurmountable. The Báalam collective was assembled around practices of sharing secret information as a group, and their community depended on a trust that had been cultivated over many years. It recalled for me the political philosopher Robert Esposito’s etymology of the word community as “cum” (with) and “munus” (obligation), a social form that springs from a fundamental feeling of debt owed to another that expands into a social institution.12 But, Esposito notes, there is also a shadow of such affirmative social desire that he calls ­“immunity”—or “in” (not) and “munus” (obligation). Immunity is the preservation of life through severed obligations, a negative social desire expressed uniquely by each community as an impulse to protect itself.13 With the Báalam collective, that impulse was fierce because their community was not just a group of journalists but also extended deep into the social institutions of illicit worlds. I would find out later, talking to other people about my experiences with Báalam, that the collective was considered paranoid and somewhat rogue, having crossed too far into the illicit worlds they relied on for information. As we descended the mountain highway to the Tamara Valley, where the penitentiary was located, Miriam talked about her work with international journalists who came to Honduras on assignments usually to cover the topic of gangs. It’s a bigger topic now than anything else, as if nothing else is happening in this country! But I play along, and toward the end I always bring them out to the PN [penitentiary] to speak directly to members of the MS and 18. They don’t want to come because it takes half the day and they expect prisoners to be uneducated, but then they realize that the leadership of the maras are different. They are like politicians. Most of the time they read the newspapers and follow what is happening in national politics, and they know how to speak about the big picture. You should see these journalists afterwards, when they realize that the prison is like the headquarters of a political party. Even some of the more powerful ones out there donate to well-­known politi-

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cians in this country, by proxy. But no one suspects this, you know, given the image that prisons have in the media. And it’s true, if you don’t belong to a gang or to the mafia, there is nothing there for you, not even a bar of soap.

The National Penitentiary was, like many carceral facilities around the world, a site of collective abandonment. Though the construction of the massive carceral complex was an ambitious project to modernize the national penal system, the head of the Bureau of Prisons confided to me one afternoon that the construction had gone over budget and thereafter not received enough state appropriations for upkeep. When Mano Dura began the first wave of mass incarceration in 2002, the facility eroded under the pressure of overpopulation. By the mid-­2000s it was materially dilapidated and administratively dysfunctional, and pretrial detainees often spent years in legal limbo without proper legal counsel, alimentation, or medical attention. The prison complex’s attrition was what Elizabeth Povinelli might call a “quasi-­event” quietly shaping the backdrop of late liberalism: If events are things that we can say happened such that they have a certain objective being, then quasi-­events never quite achieve the status of having occurred or taken place. . . . I am interested in forms of suffering and dying, enduring and expiring, that are ordinary, chronic, and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisis-­laden, and sublime. . . . I am not interested in these quasi-­ events in some abstract sense but in the concrete ways that they are, or are not, aggregated and thus apprehended, evaluated, and grasped as ethical and political demands in specific late liberal markets, publics, and states, as opposed to crises and catastrophes that seem to necessitate ethical reflection and political and civic engagement.14

Povinelli asks how social projects emerge from within sites of exhaustion and exclusion, where capital and liberal governmentality offer little more than exclusion from the rights enjoyed by others. The National Penitentiary was one such zone, though it was also a place where certain social projects were accruing, where gangs were stoic communities facing both the extreme violence of the state and the malfeasance of its bureaucrats. Accusations of embezzlement and mismanagement of funds followed director after director; even the US embassy, which occasionally floated the idea of sponsored programs at the penitentiary, had not yet followed through. Systematic neglect made the complex a symbolic node of criminal self-­determination, where the targeted and the powerless reassembled a world of their own from the ruination of state and social abandonment.

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When we arrived we passed through the outer gates without even a pat-­ down from the guards, who greeted Miriam like a friend. The director, who received us immediately without the usual half-­hour wait, also behaved with an obsequious deference, and on Miriam’s request, he produced the letter that my university IRB had been requesting. He facilitated her entrance to the prison as his eyes and ears. The penitentiary was undergoing the first shift to co-­governance, though Lieutenant Reyes could not admit it publicly without the risk of enraging a public for whom prisons were already “universities of crime.” But across the hemisphere such conditions were de facto arrangements in prisons with overcrowding and minimal staffing.15 Inmate councils assigned dormitories and bunks, provided soap and toothpaste, and cultivated their own food to supplement the prison diet. Miriam told Reyes who his allies were, how to sustain morale, and how to distribute resources without being accused of favoritism. After a full day in the prison yard she came back to his office and reported what she had observed as Reyes took notes. For the next few months, as long as I kept the car filled with gas, Miriam and I would spend between four and eight hours several days a week at the penitentiary. Each morning she would pick me up on the side of a busy boulevard where the traffic was always at a crawl, and we would drive up the hillside behind the market where her godmother and cofounder of Báalam, Dolores, waited with breakfast, coffee, and questions about the prison. Dolores lived with her sister and granddaughters in a large wood-­plank house in a barrio where MS-­13 kept watch, and though Miriam was concerned about safety everywhere else we went, in Dolores’s barrio she let her guard down. Leadership of the MS-­13 and Barrio 18 were familiar with Miriam and Dolores as figureheads of Báalam for more than a decade and gave them a pass into their barrios. Báalam did deep research on state corruption, through gangs, and passed it to journalists of major newspapers. This relationship shielded Báalam somewhat, though they were most respected in the gang world for going on television and reading aloud the names of police involved in death squadrons in Tegucigalpa. Few actions could be more dangerous and selfless. Dolores was about fifteen years older than Miriam, and both came of age in El Chivero, the barrio leading up to the cemetery behind the market. Back then the barrio was picturesque. “You could pick flowers almost anywhere you walked,” Dolores said. “This city was one of the jewels of Central America. It was smaller than the other capital cities, and it had the feeling of a little town with shady streets and good people. There were more birds back then, colorful parrots that sang all day in the fruit trees.” Miriam got a degree in journalism from the National Autonomous University in the mid-­1980s. At that time the number of homeless youths was increasing as families fled the Contra war. She

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took a small loan from her father and started a library in Comayagüela next to the School of Fine Arts, with two computers for public use. By the early 1990s she focused her efforts on kids exposed to drugs and violence and created a music studio in the back room, where they could record music albums as a form of music therapy. Kids congregated there and converted the adjacent public square into a skateboard park. By the 2000s Miriam’s work was known as distinct from the religiously oriented rehabilitation programs across the river in Tegucigalpa. The US embassy took note and provided funds for several additional computers, an administrator, and professional counselors. As investigative muckrakers, Miriam and Dolores concealed their journalistic activities within Miriam’s highly regarded gang-­rehabilitation work based out of an office in central Tegucigalpa. They were meticulously careful about safety. But just before I met Miriam, their office was ransacked. Before the break-­in Miriam received threats and preemptively moved all the valuable data to another location, leaving only decoy hard drives in the office. But soon intruders came for her in her own house, which she escaped by jumping from a rear window. She was offered protective measures by human rights organizations that paid for a bodyguard to accompany her during the day, though she found that cumbersome at best. “Many of the former Battalion 3-­16 are bodyguards for narcos. What does that tell you? If you want an effective bodyguard in this country, that person has to have been a killer first,” she said. “I won’t pay someone like that, so for me, information is my weapon. I find out what the inmates know about police, politicians, upper-­class families, and anyone who threatens me, and that’s my ventaja [leverage]. If something happens to me, I have people who can release all the evidence we have on many, many so-­called good people.” For Miriam the penitentiary offered her a means of survival in which her performative familiarity with the fearsome complex kept her adversaries wary. There was no way of anticipating what she could know if her informants were members of the criminal underworld themselves. Entering the prison she carried with her only a few items: a voice recorder for oral testimonies, a notebook, and a folder of legal paperwork for inmate cases. Weekly, all that information was passed to confidants who stored information in a constellation of hard drives. On our first visit to the penitentiary we spent all day in the Module 2 barracks, known as Casa Blanca (White House). Inmate coordinators explained that the name was a nod to the presidential residence in the United States, as a seat of power. The barracks were infamous, traditionally housing the most powerful underworld leaders in the country. The barracks were led by a cabal from regional crime groups that spanned the country’s geography and had united three years earlier in a revolt against the previous leadership. The com-

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bined power of their criminal outfits ensured that any attempt against them would result in swift retribution to families of the perpetrators. Ovideo and Alex were the leaders, while the others played more subtle roles in managing the complex that I could not determine. But at twenty-­seven years old, Ovideo was the youngest coordinator in the prison, charismatic and gregarious, with a tiny portrait of Che Guevara on a chain around his neck. He was serving time for holding a police officer hostage in Puerto Cortés. “The local police were corrupt,” Ovideo said, “and organized to take our family’s land. I couldn’t go to the authorities, so I did what my gut told me to do. I went after their families like they were coming after mine.” After his arrest the beating and interrogation left him with a scar over his right eye, a disfigured lip, and a badly healed broken finger. But Ovideo smiled constantly and kept notebooks of personal writing, much of it poetry, about his conversion into an outlaw. On the first day as we spoke in the barracks, I was shocked when he introduced me to his personal assistant, Oscar, who arrived with a pail of water to wash Ovideo’s dog. It was the same Oscar I had met years before, at Vida de Paz. Ovideo had taken Oscar under his wing because of his family’s history in the Communist Party of Honduras, though Oscar knew little about those times or his family’s role in them. Alex, on the other hand, was in his late forties and more socially reserved. He was a former cocaine trafficker from Tegucigalpa whose former status still afforded him clout in the prison. He was rumored to receive regular payments to foreign bank accounts from his well-­connected trafficking colleagues, some of whom were congressmen, who continued paying him to serve as a fall guy after their heroin network was investigated in 2003. He and Ovideo organized the coup in 2003 that toppled the previous coordinators in Casa Blanca and rebuilt the barracks with funds from the illicit networks of the most powerful residents in the barracks. They doubled the size of the perimeter wall, remodeled the courtyard with a bulldozer, and rebuilt the interior of the barracks with independent contractors from outside. On the front of the barracks Ovideo contracted a twenty-­foot-­high mural of Che Guevara. “We painted it there so that when the authorities raid our barracks and the newspapers take photos of us lined us up with our legs spread and our hands against the wall, in the background is the face of the revolution.” The renovations protected against explosives being hurled into the courtyard from the outside and created a safe space for receiving visitors with a covered seating area and a large garden of sunflowers that greeted them at the entrance. Around the barracks were projects to supplement the rice and beans served by prison authorities three times a day, including a muddy turtle farm, a duck pond, a concrete tilapia tank, and roosts for hens and fighting cocks.

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There was a recreational court with bleachers, an open-­air Protestant church, and a weight training area. Inside the barracks they had removed nearly all the cell doors, covered the walls with murals and portraits of previous inmates, and torn down the surveillance tower at the center of the original design to create a central pavilion surrounded by galleys on all four floors lit by Plexiglas skylights. The interior of the panopticon was repainted as a tropical forest, at the top of which were large scorpions and a banner that read “Más Vale Morir de Pié Que Vivir de Rodillas” (Better to die standing than to live on your knees). Ovideo and Alex treated Casa Blanca as their personal project and felt a sense of ownership over the barracks, as it was the first in the country to be refurbished with illicit financing.16 So doing, they had reconceptualized the carceral experience. The project attracted defectors from other units who requested reassignment and submitted themselves to the Casa Blanca leadership, turning over any weapons they owned and paying a small fee each month as a tax. Casa Blanca was no longer considered property of the prison alone, but a hybrid project in which the shell of the state was occupied by inmates. Ovideo, Alex, and the other coordinators formed their own community in the paradoxical Hobbesian tradition in which danger of mutual destruction would be the condition for peace.17 Inmates’ potential for violence was surrendered to enable the authority of the coordinators, who formed a council with veto power over any plebiscite and ruled by majority vote on all disciplinary actions. Miriam’s office was in the basement, previously a maximum-­security wing for solitary confinement. Down a bright yellow hallway with blue steel doors, she had two computers that were wired to cellular phones for internet signals, three filing cabinets, and a small conference table. Miriam filed paperwork with folders for different individuals, of whom I was one. In my folder were handwritten notes from our phone calls, printed emails, enlarged photos of my university ID, a photograph taken with a cell phone picture while I was talking to Tomás during our first meeting in the mall, and printed pages from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research that described my research project. “We are the real FBI,” Miriam said with a laugh as I flipped through the file in disbelief. We were in Casa Blanca most of the day, and with an hour left we walked back through the heavy gates and into the administrative sector. The only cells in the administrative sector were those with security concerns: inmates under psychological observation, those facing threat of assassination, and maximum security. Miriam headed to the maximum-­security wing, where two guards sat by an alley with twelve doors. Though most sentencing remanded prisoners to

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facilities in their regions to ensure emotional and material support from families, the maximum-­security prisoners were transferred from other regions to ensure their isolation, making it a financial burden on their families to visit. The inmates’ isolation from their families and home communities seemed the only part of the carceral system as described by Foucault that remained intact at the penitentiary. Noting that incarceration dragged families to financial ruin with legal fees, loss of income, and familial abandonment, resulting in delinquency and recidivism, Foucault argues that the prison’s failure ensured its longevity. “For a century and a half,” he contends, “the prison had always been offered as its own remedy: the reactivation of the penitentiary techniques as the only means of overcoming their perpetual failure; the realization of the corrective project as the only method of overcoming the impossibility of implementing it.”18 But not everyone in maximum security was taking a financial loss, nor was everyone who they claimed to be. There were prisoners under false identities who were paid to serve time for others, for whom living in the prison was a job in itself, the same as there were prisoners who served time for others because their families had been threatened if they were to refuse. “For example,” Miriam said, “in cell number two is supposedly a major businessman from San Pedro Sula. But talk to the people who are in there and you realize they are farmers who can barely read and write.” Meanwhile, she said, businessmen who make such arrangements leave the country with fake passports and return when their surrogates are released. “It’s simple enough to just look up the newspaper articles and compare these prisoners to the photos, but here no guard is paid enough to risk their lives reporting it.” The prisoners in cell 4 told her they were abducted and made to serve time for someone who threatened their families if they refused. In cell 8 were farmers from the rural north coast who were framed for drug possession and had their land overtaken by expanding palm oil plantations. In number 12 were farmers from central Honduras accused of terrorism who had simply protested the initiation of a hydroelectric project that in turn displaced their entire village. But, Miriam went on, there was the occasional guilty party, like El Terrible (Terrible One) who lived in cell 13 and wrote an entire book by hand, detailing the multiple homicides he committed. I had heard detectives talk about the manuscript in the antigang unit of the criminal investigations agency. “I gave it to the police, but they never had it printed,” El Terrible told me one afternoon, passing me a slip of paper with a phone number. “Call that number and bring it to me.” As the sun was setting, Miriam and I walked over to a small concrete cube next to the psychiatric ward, with narrow windows and a single, barred door. Lino, a nineteen-­year-­old gang defector, greeted us. In the gang world defec-

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tors were called pesetas, literally a coin of the lowest denomination, as they were deemed worthless in the world of gangs. Lino and eight other defectors lived in la jaula (the cage) that Lino had engineered. Six months earlier, Miriam said, she and the Casa Blanca leader Alex arranged for Lino to meet with the director. Lino was living with all the other defectors, isolated from the general population in an open green space beside the prison medical clinic, sleeping under plastic tarps hung with string. Reyes heard him out. Lino argued that since they were all under death threats from either of the maras and had only a single guard, they were sure to be killed. That would be more paperwork for the director. He suggested they build a concrete cube with small windows where at least ten of the most threatened could live safely. One of his core group had an uncle with a cement business and could procure cement and rebar. The director conceded, and the cube was built as an impregnable fortress. They positioned the front door to face the main gates, and Lino kept a notebook for Miriam’s records—of the military officials who visited the director, the evangelical groups that visited the prison yard, and appearances of Frankie Stearns, the ex-­Marine turned evangelical pastor. With the mention of Stearns’s name, two faces emerged from the rear of the jaula. “Miriam, do you remember me? I met you one time in Nueva Suyapa,” one of them said. “What’s your name?” “You know,” he said. Miriam looked at him. “You’re Manuel.” “That’s me.” Manuel was arrested with Erlan Colindres as his bodyguard. I recognized him from the photos. “And you are Junior,” she said to the other boy. He was Erlan’s brother, arrested months after the shooting of DEA agent Markey. Junior and Manuel had turned eighteen at Renaciendo and been remanded to the National Penitentiary. “How long have you been here?” Miriam asked. “A few weeks,” Manuel said. “We keep them in the back so no one can see them,” Lino said. He laughed. “All we need is the fucking Chelito in here and we all die in flames.” Junior grimaced. “But what about anyone else? Anyone come to see you?” she asked. “The missionaries and the human rights people, but they just want photographs,” Manuel said. The dystopic interior of the prison was documented periodically by human rights organizations that used the images in their publicity, but they rarely challenged the conditions at the prison complex. Lino said it would be different if they were political prisoners, and I suspected he

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was right—that the criminalization of young people was so off-­putting that even those who would risk their lives for justice felt their cause contaminated by it. “If they assassinate a corrupt congressman in Tegucigalpa there are parades in his honor,” Lino said, “and the human rights people investigate it too. But we are basura [garbage]. No one gives a shit.” “Killing a defector is nothing,” Miriam said. “No police will investigate, no one will avenge the crime, and their families will be powerless to do anything.” “More than that,” Manuel said, “people say we deserve it.” “On pesetas it’s the luz verde [green light] all the time,” Miriam went on. “At least inside here we can see from all directions who is coming,” Lino said. “For now each of us is better off here than outside on our own. At least here there are guards everywhere. On the street there’s no one to stop them.” The buzzer sounded for afternoon lockdown, and we said goodbye to the young men and passed by the other pesetas under tents of faded plastic, as a single guard sat distractedly in a broken school chair. He was their only defense. One of the inmates I knew from Los Piñares, and we stopped to talk with him. Elvis was almost seven feet tall, and as we spoke sweat dripped from his nose, and his hands shook with nerves. Miriam gave him a hug as I sketched a map of the layout. There were no fewer than thirty people in four plastic shelters in the open with practically no protection. “We have a guard here,” Elvis said, “but if they come for us they’ll pay off the guards to let them through. The maras have money, so for us it is a matter of time.” “What about the director?” Miriam asked. “Can’t he find a better place for you?” “We’ve asked, and they can’t move us,” he replied. Though the modern prison of Foucault’s analysis had been dismantled in Honduras by criminal power, the pesetas’ open-­air camp had installed within it the institution overlooked in Foucault’s genealogy of modern statehood. Agamben argues that the “camp” is an institution integral to modern sovereignty in which the state of siege is liberated from military operations and imbricated into practices of detention, where biopolitical and thanatological power coincided.19 The gang defector’s corner of the prison may appear as the camp’s opposite, where lax controls permit prisoners to live rather than organizing their annihilation, though here the camp meets late-­liberal austerity and mass incarceration as necropolitical abandonment. At the penitentiary the gang defectors were corralled in open air, where their lives were subject to the highest bidder from professional assassins in the criminal world. Here late-­ liberal authority was subordinated to the multiple sovereignties of the criminal world, rendering murder the work of both sovereign and criminal actors,

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the state and the zone of its exteriority, simultaneously. The power deployed by the prison ceased to be that of solely a panoptic system but became parasitical to the diversified sovereign force within the history of antigang emergency measures.20 In his genealogy of Western sovereignty Agamben tracks this mutating legitimacy in which power is always somewhere between murder and right, to argue that the citizen with rights was always presaged by the figure with no rights. Homo sacer was exiled beyond the city wall into an exterior realm that was subject to the state of nature and pure force. “Man is a wolf to men,” the Latin proverb goes.21 Agamben notes that this human-­animal hybrid of the wolf-­man is found across many early Germanic and Anglo-­Saxon legal writings in which the figure beyond the wall is portrayed as a bandit and a wolf. He comments, “What had to remain in the collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city— the werewolf—is therefore, in its origin, the figure of the man who has been banned from the city.”22 The wolf-­bandit is a figure at the threshold of law and at the center of the legal system. “We have seen that the state of nature is not a real epoch chronologically prior to the foundations of the City,” Agamben notes, “but a principal internal to the City.”23 Hence the figure with no rights embodies the very condition of sovereignty of the modern state, radical alterity to be subdued in its different forms across varied historical emergences and forms. Expanding on Agamben, Jacques Derrida notes that in the trope of the werewolf, the unleashing of sovereign power transforms the sovereign into an animal, but in so doing infuses historical time with the conventions of a fable. Sovereignty is dependent upon this fabular prosthesis, an image that is nourished by panic within the state of siege.24 In Honduras that fabular prosthesis came into focus as two faces representing the duality of late liberal sovereignty: the state assassin with a hood and the gang assassin defaced with tattoos. The defectors’ life-­and-­death limbo was a new institutional reality in which the unmediated force of state violence was withdrawn, establishing a legal no-­man’s-­land where death was unremarkable but also the condition of life as a community. The defectors’ community was not premised on immunitas—the Hobbesian state of mutual fear that surrenders to an overarching power—but rather on communitas, which Esposito describes as “a contagion caused by the breakdown of individual borders and the mutual infection of wounds.”25 Here the social intimacy that bound the camp and the jaula into communities beyond the metaphorical walls of the city was premised on the promise of annihilation, a mutual wound held open in the face of the unspeakable as the condition of solidarity in the deepest spaces of exile from the law.

15

Sovereignty

By the time Ricardo Maduro Joest’s presidency ended in 2006 and José Manuel Zelaya Rosales of the Liberal Party took office, Renaciendo juvenile detention center at the National Penitentiary complex was immiserated by years of neglect. Some sections of the facility had been abandoned and sealed off with padlocks, while others held such highly concentrated populations that the walls were crumbling, pipes ruptured, and foam mattresses reduced to fragments. Sewage pooled in the center’s recreational spaces, and the professional counselors and medical staff’s presence was inconstant. Renaciendo was a disowned outpost where children were left in the custody of just a few guards at the end of a solitary dirt road. But a short distance away at the men’s prison the difference in atmosphere could not have been starker. The maras had drastically changed the experience of incarceration and defined it on their own terms. Their modified prison barracks were featured in national and international media with splashy photos of murals that covered the structures inside and out in a fantasia of images. As they would not have been ceded explicitly to the maras without mass public criticism following the 2004 prison fire in San Pedro Sula, the barracks were monuments to the excesses of state power. But they were also more—galleries of the foremost artistic works of a criminal community that rose from homo sacer’s ashes with a radiant display of moral and legal inversions. The first time I saw the barracks of the MS-­13 it was an unplanned detour as Miriam, Tomás, and I had taken a day off to visit colleagues in Tegucigalpa and were about to part ways when Miriam got a call. I saw the color drain from her face. She stammered and then snapped her phone closed, telling me to drive to the penitentiary as fast as I could go. She cursed and stamped the floor of the car. “Someone set me up!” she exclaimed. When we arrived at the penitentiary it was getting dark. The guards were packing up but let us through, and we ran up the pavilion where a guard was

Carceral beauty. Photo by the author.

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already locking the door to the upper yard. “I can wait ten minutes,” he said. On the other side the yard was empty, everyone already in their barracks for the night. When we reached the barracks of the MS-­13 we checked in with two soldiers who sat twenty feet from the entrance, as if keeping their distance from the dormitory. They waved us through. The official entrance to the barracks had been rebuilt and narrowed to prevent a siege from the outside. Two doorkeepers asked Miriam what she wanted, and she whispered in one’s ear. He went inside and five minutes went by as Tomás made jokes and tried to lighten the mood. As we waited there, time seemed to stand still. The barracks felt impossible to approach. Just standing at the threshold made me feel strangely placid and detached, as if I were repressing intense fear. Finally, a large figure squeezed through the doorway followed by two others who looked like bodyguards. The man in front was shirtless and wore a gold MS-­13 medallion hanging over his belly. I recognized his face from mugshots and “most wanted” posters in the newspapers as Acertijo (Question Mark), one of the founders of the MS-­13 who was in prison for bank robbery though he claimed he was framed. It was a surprise to see him in the flesh, as he would be one of the most difficult people to find in the entire country. “I was waiting all week for you to get in touch with me,” he said to Miriam. She stammered again. “We’ve been so busy with the investigation—” she began. “You have time to visit other people out here,” he said, gesturing to Casa Blanca. Miriam started to respond but he interrupted. “I just need to know that you will be there tomorrow.” “Of course! I would have come today to prepare the case with you, but someone gave me the wrong date of the trial.” He nodded, chewing a toothpick. “Someone tried to sabotage us,” she said. Miriam went on for a few minutes as Acertijo seemed to study her. “That’s all for now,” he said suddenly with a dismissive wave of the hand. Miriam was still talking as he signaled the guards to close the gate and we heard the lock flip from the inside. The next day Miriam was to testify in court to Acertijo’s rehabilitation. The ride back to Tegucigalpa was dark, and I watched the road as Miriam and Tomás argued over how best to present their case. Miriam was going to attest that he was not an active gang member but maintained his residence with the MS as her contact in the prison. I knew Miriam enjoyed toying with the truth, but I couldn’t understand why she would put her reputation on the line for Acertijo’s sake. He was still clearly a leader in the MS, and no one could have risen to his position without getting blood on their hands. “But Jon, I’ve known him since he was a boy,” Miriam replied, “and since I’ve been

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a journalist he’s been loyal to me in ways I can’t explain to you.” I still couldn’t process what she was saying. I thought of the MS around Los Piñares, and what kind of threat they posed to everyone’s peace of mind. I was interested in gangs, objectively speaking, but the idea of liberating one of the MS leaders seemed almost criminal in and of itself. It would do nothing but embolden the MS-­13 across the city and make life unsafe for those around them. As I said so, Miriam laughed and looked at Tomás in disbelief. “So what you’re saying is that you don’t understand what the maras are?” We rode in silence for a long moment. “What does that mean?” I asked. “When you look at the morning paper and you see all the dead bodies with stories about gangs, you think it’s the maras who did that?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe not.” “Well, listen. Most of the time, it’s police and their assassins.” “So what does a guy like Acertijo do, then?” “Number one, older guys like Acertijo keep the younger generation in line. Number two, if Acertijo is out and people know he’s on the streets, the police won’t harass me and they won’t harass you,” she said. “Acertijo has been doing this a long time and he understands how the police think. You need somebody like that, to keep order.” “How does he do that?” I asked. Miriam scoffed impatiently. “Look, Acertijo is more than what you think. He’s been around and he has connections. If he walks away free tomorrow, this city will be safer. Ninety-­ nine percent of the time this is a psychological war.” “What is a psychological war?” I asked. “Staying alive,” she said. “The gangs. Everything in this fucking city. What did you think I was talking about?” The next morning I got to the Corte Suprema de Justicia (Supreme Court of Justice) in Tegucigalpa early. People were standing around outside, checking each other out, no doubt wondering who was up early for the trial of one of the founders of the MS-­13. Acertijo’s lawyer arrived in an iridescent purple suit that sparkled in the sun. He was an ex-­member of the MS whom the gang sent through law school as their private defense counsel. I sat by a wall where an older man with a golden dragon medallion was talking quietly with a boy who looked to be his son. The man and I made small talk for several minutes before Miriam arrived. I went to help her with a bundle of paperwork. She introduced me to Acertijo’s mother and wife. His mother passed a baby to me as she signed off on the forms Miriam produced like a machine from her filing folder. We were admiring the baby when the kids who had been washing cars for spare change stopped and watched a police cruiser rumble into the com-

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plex. In the back was Acertijo, handcuffed to the truck and shivering from the mountain air. He smiled to his mother and wife, who pointed to the baby in my arms, which I realized must be his, conceived during one of his wife’s conjugal visits to the prison. Tomás and I sat in the back of the courtroom with Acertijo’s mother and wife and watched for the first half of the day as the prosecution and defense stated their claims and several witnesses were credentialed. The process took a few hours with witnesses brought in and out of the courtroom inside wooden boxes on wheels to hide their identity. Tomás joked that the boxes looked suitably like coffins. The first state’s witness was not hidden. He was Marcos Salgado, a detective from the inner circle that established the Directorate of Criminal Investigations in the early 1990s out of the ruins of its predecessor. Salgado started the agency’s antigang division and authored a state manual for policing gangs. The bailiff led Salgado and Acertijo to a sealed chamber for an examination of Acertijo’s tattoos. I imagined their intimate exchanges, police and criminal caught in a dialectical loop, each crucial to the other’s realization of self as if fated to finally find themselves one on one in a room alone. They returned after ten minutes, and Salgado took the stand and described the images on Acertijo’s body: a dragon, three spiderwebs, a naked woman with a flame in one hand, a crucifix, the face of Jesus, a woman’s name, and on the back of his hands, an “M” and an “S.” The judges asked if Salgado thought Acertijo was still active in the maras. He said yes, because Acertijo had not crossed out the gang initials on his hands. Anyone who had left the gang would put a visible X over them. Acertijo whispered to his lawyer but showed no reaction. It had taken all morning to get to this point, and a judge dismissed us for lunch. Tomás and I bought empanadas from a woman who said she recognized me and asked my name. Tomás interrupted and ushered me away. “Best not to talk too much out here,” he said. “There are a lot of spies. The MS already knows who you are, so it’s not them that’s asking.” “Who would be asking?” “Let’s hope it’s Barrio 18 and not the police,” he said. After lunch four police witnesses related the story of Acertijo’s arrest, in which they raided a house where several members of a narcotrafficking group were drinking together. Three witnesses faltered under cross-­examination, failing to link Acertijo to the traffickers. For their last witness, the defense called the owner of the house—the man I had met outside after arriving in the morning. Santos “El Dragón” Olivero was the trafficker around whom all of the trial had been circling. He explained that the drugs were hidden on his property by someone else and that their meeting with Acertijo was just a

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gathering among neighbors. When he left the witness stand, Tomás whispered that the only charge left, if they wanted to hold Acertijo in detention, was that of gang membership. During a short recess I stepped out to the restroom. Outside the kids who had been washing cars in the parking lot were sitting in the low boughs of the trees like owls, watching the courthouse. “They are the eyes of the mara,” Tomás said. “They are going to let everyone know what happened here today.” The trial continued until it was dark outside, and finally Miriam took the stand around nine o’clock. When the judges asked her age, marital status, and other personal information, I watched as each of her answers contradicted what she had told me in the past. She was lying either to me or to the court. But why should she tell anyone, much less me, the truth about herself? Looking at my indifference I realized at some point I had stopped linking unrestricted honesty with trust. Miriam started her testimony by stating that she was there to attest to Acertijo’s rehabilitation as a colleague within her collective of investigative journalists. She had worked with him for nine years, she said, and she presented the judges with Acertijo’s identification card from Báalam and a file from her archives that showed his involvement in rehabilitation dating back to 1997. The prosecutors asked why, then, Acertijo was living with the MS-­13 at the penitentiary and had not crossed out the M and S on his hands. Miriam said Acertijo was her primary contact inside the prison, making possible reports by CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera. He also assured the safety of those journalists in the national prison system. But how could Miriam vouch for his rehabilitation, the government attorney asked. Miriam went through her investigative work, which included a decadelong relationship with the US embassy and close working relations with several ambassadors. She also talked about multiple international awards she had received. “But would you say that the defendant is an active member of the maras?” one of the prosecutors asked. “By my assessment,” she said, “he passes all criteria for rehabilitation and should be released.” As she spoke, the rear door to the courtroom opened and three photographers snapped pictures of her and of the audience in the courtroom. The judges erupted and stood up at the bench, stopping proceedings until the photographers were removed. A few minutes later it happened again, and they were escorted out of the building by security. “These are not media,” Tomás said, adding, “They are police documenting who is here.” The judges truncated Miriam’s testimony, and moments later Tomás and I met her in the lobby. The kids sitting in the trees were gone, and we walked to the car through an empty parking lot. Miriam checked beneath the car, inspected her

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tires, lifted the hood and checked the motor, and then got in. We headed for the highway. Miriam was sweating and talked fast. She was also laughing, and Tomás handed her an orange juice we had been saving since lunch. The whole trial was a sham, she said. El Dragón knew all of the guys in the antigang division. When they were sitting in the witness quarters behind the bench he had given them each a watch, along with several thousand dollars in banded cash. “They did it right in front of me,” she said. Then she turned to Tomás. Why hadn’t we sat with anyone other than Acertijo’s mother and wife? He fumbled for an answer. “Look, now the police have photos of you sitting with Acertijo’s family.” She turned to me. “They will try to find out who you are, so be ready.” “So what should I do?” I asked. “The first thing is to stay close with us from today onward.” “Why?” I asked, feeling claustrophobic already. “To avoid suspicion. You are going to have to convince everyone that you are not from Homeland Security or the FBI or whoever the US sends here to find out about gangs. You have to give the impression that you aren’t here to spy or do anyone harm. You also have to move out of Los Piñares. MS controls it now, but the leaders there are changing. You need to be in a place Acertijo can control. I’ve spoken to Dolores and she agreed. There is an apartment near where Tomás lives. We can put you there.” “Thank you, really,” I said, “but I have friends in Los Piñares. They look out for me.” She scoffed and insisted that it was not just a problem with the maras, but the police too. “Look, the problem is that you don’t have the instincts for what is coming,” she said. “Acertijo is not just any marero.” “I know. But that’s all I know.” “You really don’t know, do you?” “Know what?” I asked. She laughed and drove in silence for a while. “You don’t know that Acertijo is the nephew of Luz Baja?” she said. “Who is Luz Baja?” I asked. Later, when I had a chance to Google his name, I realized that Luz Baja (Low Light) was the nickname of José Francisco Valle, also known as El Payaso (The Clown), and easily recognizable for his drooping left eye. I had heard about him from time to time. Valle had been many things in his life— a Contra fighter, a member of the Honduran army, and the head of an organized crime group that moved stolen cars from the United States to Honduras and probably, therefore, close to Andres. But most famously, Valle was the bodyguard of Matta Ballesteros, working with him for more than a decade until Matta’s arrest in 1988.1 After the arrest, the president of Honduras him-

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self ordered Valle incarcerated, but he managed to escape. Across the 1990s Valle became an iconic architect of the illicit economy, but in the early 2000s he went underground and reappeared in Spain a year later. “Between Luz Baja and El Dragón, Acertijo is not going to stay in prison,” Miriam said. “They have all the money you could ever want, and they make sure everyone gets paid. It’s no accident he’s one of the heads of the MS. You understand? He inherited the businesses his uncle and Matta created.” Miriam texted me the following morning that Acertijo was acquitted and released, and then all of us took a few days off. That weekend Víctor and I roasted beef kabobs by the riverside for his mother’s birthday, and the following Monday I met Miriam at a coffee shop. She was hardly recognizable in a hat, glasses, and dyed hair. Before leaving for the penitentiary she said we had to start visiting the MS regularly. Each day that we visited Casa Blanca was an opening for people to drive a wedge in her relations with the MS-­13. “Someone already tried to sabotage me,” she said, “giving me the wrong date of the trial. It looked bad, but we got through it. So as long as the gang will let us in, it’s good to show respect and hang out there even just in the courtyard. You have to understand, there could have been consequences if I missed that trial.” “But you said El Dragón paid off the antigang division,” I said. “Yes, but you can’t just buy your way out. You have to have the appearance of justice. It only worked because I was there to argue against Marcos [Salgado],” she said. “And you’ll have more cases like that?” “Probably not. Most of the MS who live in the PN [penitentiary] are happy to live there with their group. It’s just that Acertijo is a leader, and he needs to be in the streets. If you lock him up, it looks like the state is in control of things.” Miriam was speaking as if the law were simple to negotiate, as if the MS made their individual decisions and then reverse-­engineered them legally. “If there are some out there whose cases were a mess, you wouldn’t know it by the way they talk to me. Now, Casa Blanca? That’s another story. Everyone there says they are innocent,” she said, putting up quotes with her fingers, “and when they see me, they think I can fix it.” “But you do,” I said. “No, every now and then the police or prosecutors make a mistake and we get lucky. But just think of the mural on the second floor of Casa Blanca. How does it go?” I could picture it. I recited the slogan: “It says ‘La ley es como una telarana; atrapa los pequeños pero a los grandes la rompen’ [The law is like a spiderweb; it traps the little ones but the strong break it].” Miriam laughed out loud.

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“Very good, professor,” she said. “But see, I don’t know who they’re talking about. No one in Casa Blanca is breaking free except the narcos who just pay to escape. The only people in that prison who are powerful enough to go to court and walk away are the maras, and I’m part of that process whether I like it or not. But in Casa Blanca there are so many with botched legal cases, it’s also my work to help them.” Every day thereafter that we visited Casa Blanca Miriam set aside an hour to provide legal counsel to inmates unconnected with organized crime. Most of them did not fully understand the legal proceedings of their trials, others had served their time yet remained incarcerated because of clerical negligence, and still others had not even received a trial date after being incarcerated for a year or more. With each consultation, the inmate hoped that his legal predicament could be untangled, and Miriam took notes that she would use back in the city, where she carried up to thirty cases at a given time. She worked tirelessly for them, and from time to time a prisoner was released based on her efforts. She would sit at a wooden table in the middle of the garden of sunflowers with the Che mural in the background, and there seemed to be little difference between that reworking of revolutionary iconicity in the mural and each inmate’s hope that his case could be set right. The hope was premised on the idea that the miscarriage of justice could be righted and the legal system could one day serve the well-­being of all, that justice was a horizon beyond the legal entanglements of the present. Flowers swayed in the garden as I contemplated the power of redemption as an illusion, a fantasy whose false promise felt inexhaustible. Each inmate, I came to understand, was at the threshold of legal power, much like the old man in Franz Kafka’s well-­known parable “Before the Law.” The old man arrives at the “door to the law” asking for admittance or, metaphorically, assimilation to its abstract principles.2 The doorkeeper tells him it is possible but not at the present time. “The Law, he thinks, should be accessible at all times and to everyone, but when he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper . . . he decides that he had better wait for permission to enter after all,” Kafka writes.3 The man sits at the door for the duration of his life, and when he begins to die he asks again, “‘Surely everyone strives to reach the Law . . . so how is it that no one but me has ever begged for admittance?’ The doorkeeper responds, ‘No one else could ever be granted admission here, as this gate was just for you.’” Seeing that the man is dying, the doorkeeper declares with finality, “Now I am going to close it.”4 In his analysis of this parable, Jacques Derrida highlights the temporality of a legal authority that is inaccessible in the moment but defined by anticipation.5 Elsewhere Derrida also argues that the authority of the law derives from

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distance, this suspended state in which justice is always “yet to come.”6 In the interim, expectation and possibility mold heedful subjects who are deferential to the protracted temporality of justice. How many generations of sunflowers would grow in Casa Blanca’s garden before justice might become a reality for those waiting in hopes that Miriam might untangle their legal quandaries? Such waiting was markedly absent from life inside the barracks of the MS-­13. Leaving Casa Blanca, we would walk past several unremarkable dormitories housing small-­time offenders and round a corner where the brilliant colors of the exterior murals were visible at a distance. On the walls they had painted Mayan temples with native chiefs and gang members in postures of lament, tropical birds, waterfalls, and fields of marijuana leaves. Miriam was usually welcomed as a visitor despite the maras’ general opposition to visitors other than family. They considered philanthropic activists to be overly entrepreneurial, evangelical groups too instrumental in their quest to save souls, and the Catholic Church too caught up in aristocratic power and hypocrisy. The first day Miriam and I visited after Acertijo’s release, I was recognized by Guillermo, one of the kids who grew up frequenting Vida de Paz. The guards called down Jochito, who had known Miriam for a long time. His pock-­ marked face had a natural scowl. For years he had been head of the MS-­13 in the city market area. The market was patrolled heavily by police, and Jochito was famous for either eluding them or keeping the peace with them. Guillermo vouched that I was not police. “We know who he is,” Jochito grumbled. “Come inside, but if you leave the courtyard I can’t be responsible for you.” Crossing the threshold for the first time was like walking through an electrical current, where one body of law recedes and another begins and where the surrender of oneself as subject to that law is absolute. It was a thought exercise for all visitors, making the act of going there participatory rather than voyeuristic. Entering was an experience of loss; one was stripped of legal protection and instantaneously vulnerable to unfamiliar institutions with their own relations to violence. In his essay on Kafka, Derrida ponders the commonly held notion that law is a form of prohibition: “this does not mean that it prohibits, but that it is itself prohibited, a prohibited place. It forbids itself and contradicts itself by placing the man in its own contradiction (which in itself supposes and therefore produces transgression): one cannot reach the law and in order to have a rapport of respect with it, one must not have a rapport with the law, one must interrupt the relation.”7 The maras guarded themselves with watchmen at the entrance and on the roof surveilling the road to the highway, where military vehicles could be spotted well in advance of an assault. Inside the barracks, the threat of an-

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other massacre was palpable. Journalists, missionaries, and most outsiders were considered a risk, and even if Miriam’s relations with many gang members went back to childhood, our visits over the months were spent in the courtyard talking with them superficially. Across the courtyard was a soccer arena, and behind the dormitory were picnic tables and a tiki bar built of bamboo. Everywhere the hue of blue tattoo ink moved kinetically over human skin. Manchados (stained ones) were revered in the barracks and the tattoo images considered taboo to touch. Striking manchados’ tattoos physically was considered punishable by death. Manchados moved about the barracks with the magnetic appeal of “crowd crystals,” figures that Elias Canetti, in his writing on crowds, has described as “comprehended and taken in at a glance.” They possess a “clarity, isolation and constancy of the crystal form” that produce “an uncanny contrast with the excited flux of the surrounding crowd.”8 The manchados’ tattoos were stories within stories, a theater in which clowns, screaming skulls, open wounds, grim reapers, and dragons hovered in a space not just against or outside the law but beyond it. Cemeteries tattooed across the upper body were more than mementos of loved ones. They depicted a place where the pariah exterminated by the law was venerated by those who lived outside it. Each tattoo removed the marero further from the social world that had violently purged them from its ranks and cultivated alterity that was other to the law’s other. This modification of the gang member’s body, specifically tattooing that rendered the body sacred rather than a profane target of annihilation, inoculated the body from rehabilitation that would carry it back into formal relation to the law. In his work in a penitentiary in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Chris Garces has described a protest event in which prisoners staged their own crucifixions, literally nailing themselves to crosses in a familiar Christian idiom to publicize substandard conditions inside the prison.9 But what of this reversed saintliness in which the maras defiled their bodies with taboo, criminal, and obscene images that made them repositories of transgressive snares, luring the eye into criminal flows that alter the senses? In Christian sacrifice the wound was redemptive, but gothic sovereignty held the wound open, displaying it not for the sake of recuperation but as an end in itself. This embrace of death and obscenity was the breaking point for most well-­intentioned activists struggling to rehabilitate the maras against the veneration of the wound. Such a crisis in translation leads to a key moment in Giorgio Agamben’s genealogy of the figure of homo sacer in which he attempts to “clear away a certain misunderstanding.” For Agamben that was the concept of “the ambivalent sacred” in Durkheimian, not to mention Bataillean and Cailloisean anthropology.10 Agamben describes the collapse of positive and negative va-

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lences of the sacred as a religious reading of what was, originally, a political relation. He argues that the concept has traveled as a “mythologeme” across the social sciences, mystifying the analysis of bare life and sovereign power. But Agamben misses the point that for both Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois the boundary separating politics and religion is always blurred. In particular Bataille’s work on torture, mentioned briefly in Agamben’s text, brings political violence and religious experience into a single frame, in which torture and dismemberment are not the meaningless annihilation of homo sacer but the condition for communities premised on laceration. The text is but one episode in Bataille’s lifelong pursuit of the question of violence in human community, in which violence reinscribed through sacrifice is a vitalist practice crucial to the experience of his notion of existential sovereignty.11 Bataille sought to ­recuperate violence from the banality of annihilation in the era of both world wars, a banality that would inspire Agamben’s many meditations on the camp.12 While the afternoons waned and we watched inmates playing soccer, doing laundry, and constructing new pavilions in the back of the barracks, the necropolitical configuration of the barracks as a defenseless holding pen imbued the mundane with poignancy around which clustered a community in sheer exteriorization from the law, and from the self.13 Considering that for Bataille communion of the self and other was facilitated through the rupture found in experiences of excess such as intoxication, violence, sex, and laughter, it is not surprising that in the wake of the two prison fires gang communities were more spirited than ever. Tattoo and mural images of graves, mummies, and the undead filled the void of their refusal to communicate, and each researcher, missionary, or reporter who approached the maras navigated the negation of their own desire to know as it brushed against the anti-­idealist epistemology of the maras—the experience Bataille calls the “solar anus,” an “erotic movement that burglarizes the ideas contained in the mind, giving them the force of a scandalous eruption.”14 Rather than translate sacrificial violence into political agency, as in the protest described by Garces, automutilation at the center of life in the maras’ barracks only deepened the chasm between criminal and liberal subjects. One afternoon I asked Jochito whether the number of recruits to the maras had waned because of the prison fires. He laughed and shook his head. “No,” he said. “We have more kids trying to join than even a few years ago when the maras were on television shows around the world. The police can’t stop them because all this security and Mano Dura has the opposite effect. The kids see how many died in the streets in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, and they still come to us. We can’t even tell them no. They won’t listen.” In their

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barracks, alucinando la mara (dreaming and fantasizing about the gang) was immediate, the work of defining the community for itself in the face of annihilation. Rarely did anyone approach Miriam about the details of their legal cases. Instead we were awash in the baroque image and slang that circulated like “chips of Messianic time” that, for Benjamin, inaugurate the gale of divine violence against the mythical violence of the state.15 While mythical violence of state power was reasserted nationwide through the unsolved killings of gang members, the gang’s ritualized transformation of the body and of their own political subjectivity subverted the categories and narratives by which mythical violence was historically integrated. In Derrida’s essay “Force of Law” he contrasts his idea of a justice yet to come with the immediacy of the messianic in Benjamin’s thought, the “weak Messianic power” Benjamin regards as available to every generation.16 Divine violence is that which deposes law but leaves no new fetish in its place, a disruption of the present that is then filled with human action.17 Derrida calls Benjamin’s temporality a “messianicity without messianism,” a force that reroutes human community without defining new practices of politics, sociality, or possible futures.18 The practices cultivated in the barracks of the maras had a similar deconstructive gravity, dispensing with broader political and legal forms such that the circulation of their photographic images alone mobilized affective resonances shifting political and criminal debate instead of seeking recognition within it. The maras’ scatological skepticism made clear that whatever mode of political organization was to follow their millennial disruption, the maras would remain apart. In the late afternoon the gang members charged with tending the maras’ rabbits brought them onto the barracks lawn to scamper in the sun. Both rabbit tenders were among the most illustrated of the mareros, with devil horns tattooed onto their scalps and skulls over their eyelids. The rabbits were domesticated albinos, and while other barracks across the penitentiary kept animals for consumption or to sell to guards and administrators, the maras had no farm animals. The rabbits were ornamental, to be fawned over and adored. Likewise, Barrio 18 kept only ornamental pets, among them an albino husky that was immaculately bathed and brushed. I watched the rabbit tenders’ tattooed fingers comb through the animals’ white fur as their attention to beauty and adornment brought the new economy of gang life into view. In Michael Taussig’s work in rural Colombia of the 1970s, he has drawn attention to “devil pacts” that emerged among agricultural laborers with the introduction of the wage economy, a world-­transformative change in the rhythms of life that eclipsed unalienated labor with new economics hostage to the abstract risk of liberal markets.19 Here likewise, the diabolical materi-

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alized as mediator not only in the transition to globalization’s imbalanced geography of labor exploitation and mass consumerism but also of the world-­ transformative aftermath of 9/11 in which states of emergency took aim at criminalized individuals with the full force of state sovereignty. And like the devil pacts whose monetary yield for Colombian peasants was cursed to undermine the most sensible financial investments and facilitated only conspicuous consumption, the economy of gang life offered only immediate gratification in the face of a future significantly stunted by perils of the illicit world. The diabolical economy was therefore a space of immediacy, where enjoyment outran self-­denial to create baroque practices of beautification, bodily enjoyment, and the sensuous proximity to death. Booming from their barracks, the maras’ high-­fidelity stereo broadcast the promise of illicit ventures at a volume that shook the body, announcing an economy that was not limited to street dealers but imbricated with congresspersons, military brass, and elites with private airstrips whose properties were perennially exposed as infrastructure for drug trafficking. In Elana Zilberg’s work on the MS-­13 of El Salvador she writes of publics for whom gangs were tenuously but suggestively associated with the memory of the vanquished sociopolitical projects of the revolutionary Left of the Cold War, constellations of memory that evoked the utopian potential of collective action.20 But in Honduras, where such large-­scale revolutionary projects did not materialize, gangs evoked different associations. Instead of the foreclosure of revolutionary optimism, the maras summoned to consciousness the scandalous and furtive overlap between illicit industries and statecraft. “What really scares politicians about the maras isn’t all the violence,” Miriam would often say. “It’s what they can tell you about how this country truly works. That’s what they really mean when they say gangs are dangerous.” Through their own experience in the illicit world, gangs possessed secret knowledges that could expose the connections between upstanding figures in national life and the underworld of criminal communities. But they were not the only ones, as the inmates in maximum security also hoarded information and did so for their own safety, the same as Miriam. In their ward they shared that information through holes punctured in the cinderblock walls that ran the length of their cell block, ears and lips pressed together in the chipped apertures that connected them as an outsider community. “They put us here to keep us quiet, but it doesn’t work that way,” said El Humilde (Humble One), who had been convicted of murder. By his account, a police officer burned his girlfriend alive in her car after Humilde refused to sell cocaine for him in barrio Carrizal. He said,

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In here we know everybody’s story. We know who is guilty and who was set up. We can tell you about each one of the corrupt police who framed us or who are actually guilty of our supposed crimes. And all of us know the details of each other’s cases. But why are we so open about it when everyone else in this place keeps their mouths shut? Because anyone could kill us in here if they want our silence—just throw a grenade over the wall and everyone in our cell is blown to bits. So, we say, if they kill one of us they have to kill all of us because if you kill one we can still tell his story. We have cell phones here like everyone else, and we can call the newspapers anytime we want to create a scandal in this country.

Humilde often joked with me that they had informers on every block in the capital, which I took as an exaggeration, but despite the isolation of the penitentiary, information traveled in and out of it with remarkable speed. During my first visit, many of the inmates already knew my name after I had been in Casa Blanca most of the day. And although their units had no windows other than an aperture in the door for distributing meals, they knew what car Miriam drove, what dormitories we visited, and what we had eaten for lunch, as Casa Blanca and the maras had their own cooks. Some days they even knew our daily rounds in the capital when we didn’t visit the penitentiary at all. It was only when I went into the cells’ interiors that the small tunnels through the walls, the negative infrastructure for circulating an entire market of materials and information, brought this surveillance into focus. Almost anything could be transmitted from one end of the complex to the other. The structural perforations made the complex a mobile economy of money, medicine, marijuana, alcohol, daggers, correspondence, phone numbers, love letters, Bibles, DVDs, and other items. And despite the administration’s attempts to patch the walls and prevent such flows, the deteriorating materiality of the penitentiary allowed for appropriation of the complex as the very vehicle of material exchange that bound the illicit community. Months after Miriam and I started going to the penitentiary I woke up one morning in Los Piñares to the sound of neighbors outside. I found them gathered around my truck, with the hood up, staring inside. As I moved through the crowd, I could see the empty engine cavity, where the entire motor had been removed. My friend Teodoro was an auto mechanic and pulled me aside. “How did they do this and the dogs didn’t bark?” he asked. “Work like this would take over an hour even in the daylight.” He looked up at the cliffs on the other side of the river, where several people were watching us. “Whoever did

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this is looking at us right now,” he said. “We have to get this fixed and get you out of here,” Teodoro said. “It’s just some thieves,” Víctor said. “We can build a barrier wall around the house.” “Then why are the tires punctured?” Teodoro asked. I had not noticed that all four tires were flat. I asked Teodoro if he could help me get the truck running again somehow. For the next three days Teodoro and I went across the city from junkyard to junkyard finding the right parts. We worked day and night, knowing the engine could be pillaged again if we left the truck out overnight. Teodoro reconstructed it completely, to my utter amazement. Finally, when the engine started and the tires were replaced, I drove up the hill and out of Los Piñares with all of my belongings in the back of the truck. A sociologist friend who lived in barrio Manchen in central Tegucigalpa offered me the writing cabin on the terrace of her house, and I moved in, reeling from vertigo at the sweeping view of the Tegucigalpa skyline. The cabin was built as a sunroom, with expansive windows on all sides, and if I had been relatively invisible in Los Piñares, where no one visited me and Miriam had never heard of me before we met, on the terrace I was practically in a public terrarium. The cabin was visible from the street, and on one side was the US embassy and on the other Casamata, the headquarters of the National Police. Miriam insisted that what happened to the truck was related to our visits to the penitentiary, and I tried to connect the dots. “You can never know who the maras or any of the maximum-­security inmates are connected to,” she said. “When we show up, powerful people in this city worry that they can be exposed. So someone was paid to get you out of your barrio. The question now is whether they are satisfied with scaring you.” A few days later Miriam, by that time concerned about leaving me alone for very long, accompanied me to another mechanic in central Tegucigalpa who did some touch-­up work on the engine. He nodded as we made small talk while he cleaned the carburetor, but then stood up and looked at me. “If you don’t mind me asking, why did you buy a red truck?” he asked. I said no particular reason, I had gotten a good price. “You should paint it gray and tint the windows, to blend in,” he said. “That’s how all the trucks of the undercover police are.” I nodded. “The way it is now? You drive by and they say, ‘There goes that one who knows the maras.’ And that is how things like this,” he said, pointing at the engine, “can happen.” When he was done with the engine Miriam was on the phone, and he and I spoke privately. “I don’t know you, but from what I gather, just listening to her, you need to think.” “About what?”

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“The maras can protect themselves. They know a lot about the criminals running this country, and that’s leverage,” he said. “But who’s going to protect you?” That night as I sat at a desk in the cabin typing notes from the last few days, my phone rang. It was El Humilde. “How’s your new apartment?” he asked. I had not seen him since the truck was vandalized. “It’s ok,” I said. “How’d you know?” “We hear things. That’s too bad, what they did to your truck. We’ll find out who it was.” The next week, calls from the prison got more unpredictable. People I had not met would call just to talk about banalities. Usually they seemed bored or lonely and invited me to come see them in barracks other than the ones we normally visited. But other times the caller was pointed. “What book are you reading?” one caller asked. “I’m just sitting around.” “No, you are reading and writing in your notebook. You should turn off your light and get some sleep.” “Who is this?” “Just a friend,” said the voice. “Don’t be scared.” I stared at the darkness outside but could see only my reflection in the window. “Don’t be scared?” I asked. “They say you are a good friend,” the voice said. “Is that right?” “I think so,” I said. “Then there’s no reason to worry. Friends look out for one another.” In the silence that followed, the call expired.

16

Apocalypse

Miriam, Tomás, and I were in the central park of Tegucigalpa having coffee before leaving for the penitentiary, relishing the moment. The sun was bright with a gentle breeze, and the morning air was clean and breathable. We knew we would be in the barracks of the MS-­13 within the hour as we sat in the sun listening to the birds squawking from the large ceiba trees in the park. The prison was demanding and draining, and certainly part of that effect was caused by the opacity of the maras. I was always guessing where I stood, what was going on. Suddenly we could hear a distant shouting, car horns honking, and all of it getting closer. Miriam reached for her handbag as if gang members or police might come around the corner and we would need to run. Miriam asked a shoeshine boy with a wooden box of shoe polish slung over his shoulder what was happening. “There are some people over there that say they worship the Antichrist,” he said without a smile. “They’re coming this way.” And then around the corner came a slow-­moving group of some fifty people. They held signs with “666” and placards depicting the crucifixion of Jesus inside a circle with a slash. They carried a banner with the group’s name, “Creciendo en Gracia [Growing in Grace], de Miami, Florida,” with a photo of their leader, José Luis de Jesús Miranda. He claimed to be the second coming of Christ and preached against the concept of original sin, which in his view was a misinterpretation of Christian theology. Miranda’s doctrine argued that Jesus died on the cross, absolving humanity of original sin and lifting the law of Moses and the Ten Commandments off the Christian community. What remained was a state of grace in which one’s salvation was no longer measured in works but in faith. Sin would be an anachronism that religious institutions maintained in order to keep parishioners in submission. So long as people had faith, their actions were guided by the spirit, and offending organized religion in the name of the true faith was an imperative.

Clowns, zombies, nymphs, revolvers, and eyeballs. Photo by the author.

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The group passed the National Cathedral of San Miguel in the central plaza, waving their middle fingers at the crowds following them. Many had tattooed “666” on the inside of their wrists and said the number was a reference not to the devil but to the Antichrist and an expression of their rejection of the teachings of the Catholic Church. That night Miranda would take the stage at the largest arena in the capital before an audience of nearly five thousand. When we arrived at the penitentiary we went first to maximum security to drop off some flip-­flops for an inmate who had no shoes. El Humilde stuck his head through the small aperture in the steel door and shouted, “Where have you been?” Miriam asked what was wrong. “There were people here, like ten of them, who wanted to give us tattoos and said they worship the Antichrist. They should know better than to come here! Some of us are criminals, but we don’t play around with God!” Others had peeped their heads out of the doors as well, and there was a general aura of alarm, as if the devil himself had visited them. Miriam told him about the parade and couldn’t hide her amusement. “It’s not funny,” El Humilde said. “They were serious!” “About what?” she asked. “They said there is no such thing as sin. That we were forgiven and so sin doesn’t matter. How can you say that? Don’t they have any morality?” “Did you get a tattoo?” Miriam asked. “I told them no thank you, I have some already!” Finally he laughed. “Look, I believe in God! Those people scare me.” Later when we visited the MS-­13 we found Jochito walking the courtyard. Had Creciendo en Gracia visited them too, Miriam asked? He smiled. “Yeah, they came here. I personally told them ‘no visitors.’” “You did?” Miriam asked. “The doorkeepers called for me, and there they were with their tattoo machine and all their posters and bullshit. I’m like, what do you want? They say they just want to talk. Then they come out with all of it: the Catholic Church lies to you, sin doesn’t exist, all that. They’ve been here before. I think they don’t understand who we are.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “They come here because they think we are people with no principles, that we are people who want to be evil, right? They see our tattoos and think we want to be like devils ourselves, as if we were putting on a costume like little children.” “What don’t they understand?” I asked. I rarely asked Jochito anything. He

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was always guarded and aloof. But that afternoon he had something to say, and he was saying it to me. “That we have to be serious about our lives,” he answered. “You have to be serious about your lives?” I asked. Jochito stared at me, squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them again. “I’m going to ask you something, and you be honest,” he said. “Ok.” “How many people would cry tomorrow if all of us in this place were dead?” he asked, gesturing all around us. “Very few, I guess,” I said. “Ok. So all this you see here,” he said, pointing to the mural and to the tattoos on his arms, “this is not a joke. This is reality. You understand?” I nodded. “Good. So why did I have to tell you?” he asked and walked away. By the mid-­2000s the maras were in possession of professional tattoo machines, and experienced artists could craft masterful images. What seemed to bother Jochito that afternoon was the superficial reading of those corporeal texts. Bats on the upper ear, graves and a sickle moon on the chest, gothic script on the lips, and all manner of beasts in tormented postures—they were individual illustrations as much as a collection, narrative fragments in tension with one another as a pictorial shield over the maras as a single body. If one read them as discrete pictures, they were overdetermined with intention and preconceived meanings, though as a montage they were no longer representational but affective, with allegorical interpretations animated. In this case the images had neither beginning nor end, were a composite portrait, and became a field of self-­deconstructing associations. What Foucault terms “the body of the condemned” was no longer the body defined by the symbolic violence of punishment but a nonlinear charter for late liberalism’s elsewheres.1 Envisioning the elsewhere was a vital practice—both speculative and, following Jochito, thoughtful. In fact, tattooing was such a prominent feature of gang life during the mid-­ 2000s that it raised the question of why scholarly writing on the maras often veered away from it, seeking linearity instead of montage, clarity rather than fragmentation, and rehabilitation of gang members as knowable subjects rather than fugitive shadows too nimble to apprehend. As I look back over more than twenty years of struggle to define gang communities across Central America, I find myself interested less in what individual gang members wanted from gang life than in, to think in W. J. T Mitchell’s terms, what their images “wanted.”2 From my narrower anthropological perspective, the heterotopia of tattoo images wanted nothing less than to infect my ethnographic writing

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and storytelling and to upset the notion of history that grounds analysis of the gang crisis and its trajectory into the present as a linear, intellectually domesticated phenomenon. For the maras, however, this was a history written in blurry and sometimes exquisite images, forged under emergency power and narrated onto the skin. While it was true that within a few years gangs would largely forgo tattoos so as to hide in plain sight like other crime groups had done for decades, tattooing had already summoned a vitality that demanded something of the present. Perhaps it was their kitschiness that kept tattoos out of sophisticated analy­ ses by scholars and journalists, but this vitality demands a consideration of gangs as more than background noise to neoliberal globalization. It demands that gangs be interpreted as more than Gustave Le Bon’s “crowd” or an antisocial movement rebuffed by the worthy “multitude.”3 The images invite consideration of the maras from within their particular struggle against sovereign power, in which fragments of outlaw tattoos inspired an imagination with the power to transform image-­work into new economic, social, and political practices. After the prison fires of 2003 and 2004, gang worlds were newly legible through the veil of criminalization, in photographs of their literal wounds but more so through affective encounter with their tattoos, which refused the banality of state violence even in death. I can never forget Víctor’s reaction as we spoke on the phone during the gruesome news coverage of the second fire. I could hear him chain-­smoking and boiling over with rage, estranged from himself as he defended the maras who made him practically a hostage in his own home in his daily life. “They think they can get away with this, just because everyone hates gangs? No one has the authority to do this,” he said. “We don’t have a death penalty in this country.” “Why is that?” I asked. He scoffed. “Because who is fit to decide who lives and dies? Look at the authorities. If you let them kill mareros they won’t stop there. We already know that from experience.” “When?” I asked. “The Cold War, when death squads killed whoever they said was a danger to the country. We don’t allow that anymore. But this is no different.” In the wake of the fires, three distinct changes took place. First, barracks were reorganized so that the maras lived autonomously. At several carceral facilities around the country the maras were moved to dedicated units to which only the maras would possess the keys. This gave them the ability to lock themselves inside for their own safety and made it more difficult for assailants to storm the gates. Second, human rights groups became, for the moment, cham-

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pions of the maras. Human rights organizations questioned the findings of the official investigations, pushed for more evidence, and rallied for criminal charges against the perpetrators. Third, the maras closed their doors and developed a new attitude toward rehabilitation. While they had been in dialogue with rehabilitation groups for years and did not always object to tattoo removal, after the second fire the maras developed a highly distinctive antiliberal aesthetic that marginalized them from charity and nonprofit groups that advocated for them for years.4 After the maras were initially moved, months went by as advocacy groups and journalists scrambled for evidence and testimony of survivors. But in the process nothing seemed to come together. As a result, gang advocates I had known for years were frustrated and speculated why the maras didn’t come forward and why they seemed disengaged with this potential legal battle. My friend Angela, a journalist and human rights activist who worked with the maras for years, said that suddenly they went silent. “We tried to help them, and now when we go there they don’t want to talk to us,” she said. “It’s as if they live in their own world now. They just turned their backs on us.” The fires were a national tragedy that shocked even the most extreme critics of gang communities. Government and prison authorities who steered the investigations were widely criticized, but still the maras did not come forward with official witness testimony. They broke away from the rehabilitation centers that had been their advocates for many years, where they had trained in computer literacy and occupational skills to enter the formal economy, received therapy, and had their tattoos removed, all for free. Isabel was one of Angela’s interns. She came from Italy after the prison fires to join gang rehabilitation efforts. Isabel said, I saw it on BBC news, and I just decided to come here and help out. At that time global news and different journalists were everywhere. People were fascinated by the maras and their tattooing. There were a lot of activists trying to take their photos, and then those photos were published widely on the internet. Certain photographers and organizations got a lot of donations that way, but the maras are not stupid. They could see the hypocrisy. It was around that time that their leadership became really arrogant. They instructed younger members not to talk to us, as if these organizations had not done anything for them!

With a space to call their own, the maras were not incarcerated in the National Penitentiary so much as occupying the southwest corner of the carceral complex. The complex itself was deteriorating but the gang barracks sparkled

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with new paint. Mareros sprinted up and down the central pavilion hauling construction materials for renovations. Fresh murals on the exterior wall announced the place as their own, and the interior of the barracks was painted from top to bottom in an expansive fresco of personalized tombstones that infused the structure with the spirits of the dead. The tombstones named the victims of the fires and of vendettas and deceased infamous gang leaders— Lucifer, El Mal (Evil), El Diablito (Little Devil), El Terror—all of it anchoring the barracks in a semiotic field of remembrance and revival. The visual compositions brought gothic sovereignty into focus for the maras as much as for others, but even as international photographers arrived to the penitentiary to document what was happening, the maras retreated into the barracks. They offered little commentary and nothing in the way of well-­formulated declarations. As the mareros refused legal action in the wake of the fire and even denied the public their highly anticipated side of the story, the visual spectacle of their prison confines monumentalized an immanent critique of state violence and the law that permitted it. In Walter Benjamin’s writing on emergency powers he argues that the theatrics and staging of sovereignty create volatile atmospherics of crisis that could overturn the mythical power of the state as easily as confirm it. He began this work in his earliest writing on the Baroque, but in his later writing on montage and avant-­garde cinema Benjamin developed a notion of history and image that contrasted the chronometric historical time with the aesthetics of shock. Therein images are not to be transcribed or decoded but understood as affects that spontaneously rework the relation between ideology and revolutionary action that disrupted it. Obviously the images favored by the maras were diabolical and occult, but they also included Christian symbolism and the occasional reference to Biblical verse, polarities that evoked an allegorical struggle between good and evil but escaped overdetermination as a cohesive text. Together they generated moral inversions that unsettled the symbolic realm, meaningfully incoherent thought experiments that were affectively destructive to the moral and legal pillars of everyday life, whose coherence seemed to be inversely related to its semiotic force. The mareros’ provocative and transgressive works call to mind Jacqueline Rose’s writing on messianic nationalism in which she gives an account of the first prophet of Zionism, Shabtai Zvi, who hacked down the locked door of a synagogue in Smyrna in 1665 and delivered a blasphemous sermon that violated sacred law. Zvi’s legend inspired the imagination of the Jewish community worldwide as consorting with evil and breaking sacred law created the possibility of an antitheological but nonetheless messianic sinning saint. Rose contends, “It is central to Jewish messianism—to the consternation of official

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Christianity—that messianic hope is material and carnal as well as spiritual, fully embodied in political time.” Jewish messianism contrasts with the inwardness and certainty of Christian belief and inhabits the world rather than transcending it. “It must be visible, not unseen,” Rose concludes.5 In the penitentiary, cultivating Christian inwardness was the only path out of a gang other than through death. If a marero claimed a calling to serve God, the gang deferred to the calling but scrutinized the conversion experience for authenticity. The calling to serve could not be as simple as a practical decision to join a church for one’s own safety; the conversion had to involve a radical rupture at the level of the psyche, demonstrated through public testimony recounting the experience in all its authenticity. Religious activists and evangelical congregations understood mareros’ skepticism and spent time in the prisons and in rehabilitation clinics witnessing to gang members, attempting to set a calling into motion, and offering them safe passage back to a community of the law. In the National Penitentiary religious groups young and old, dressed in formal attire, often scoured the grounds for souls to save. Prison administrators welcomed them as a cheap substitute for nonexistent rehabilitation programs, and Christian groups gladly filled the void as witting surrogates for social workers, criminal psychologists, and public safety personnel. When conversions occurred with members of the MS-­13 or Barrio 18, the individual was coached by missionaries to harness the story of their fall from grace as the beginning of the conversion. Conversions were stories qua stories, in which discursive momentum in improvisation and the meaningfulness of the account were mutually reinforcing and culminated in a vision of religious election. This loquacious effusion contrasted with the profane daily life of the MS-­13 and Barrio 18 in which narrating one’s life as such was taboo. Public speaking was the privilege of ranking palabreros who did the talking for the mara. The maras did not plumb the depths of language as missionaries whose discursive frenzy aimed for existential certainty but restricted language in lieu of the image. Doing so both guaranteed security and forestalled nostalgic reverie for redemption. Although gangs frequently allowed missionaries entry into the barracks, there was also an unbridgeable gulf between them. That divergence was the difference between the evangelical spirit of the Gospels of the New Testament, which sought to produce a sense of connection that built religious congregations and communities of worship, and the apocalyptic spirit of the Book of Revelation, in which imageiric violence overturned the spirit of brotherly love with that of sacred vengeance. Such images in the gang world were sites of interpretive labor and never defined by a narrow existential revelation. Their coarseness in content and technique affected an indifference toward the

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humanizing impulses of rehabilitation, as they did not surrender to a higher power but seemed to seek power itself, disrupting the work of humility and the individualized path to redemption and defamiliarizing the subject rather than revealing its true inner self. Standing in courtyards of the penitentiary where young men covered in satanic script conversed with evangelicals clutching their Bibles, the biopolitical architecture of domination became an allegorical theater of gothic sovereignty in which Christian love and the maras’ satanic vitalism generally spoke past one another. The codes of silence in gang life and mareros’ expression through fragmented and nonlinear imagery also contrasted with scholarly and popular writing that told the story of gang members by focusing on defectors’ life-­ history interviews and personal testimonies.6 The life-­history interview has been a staple of academic literature on juvenile delinquency and gangs because it reduces the existential exteriority of gang life to a legible, interiorizing narrative of the self. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe the difference between such interiorizing impulses and the “nomadism” of exteriority as that between the ego and affects, in which “feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a ‘subject’ to be projected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity.” That velocity renders such feelings “a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects.”7 As theologically inspired missionaries and faith-­based rehabilitation organizations swarmed the gang world of the early 2000s, it was not religious conversion that was miraculous but rather the gangs’ aesthetic refusal. “Affects transpierce the body like arrows, they are weapons of war,” Deleuze and Guattari contend.8 Turning their backs on lawyers and religious activists, the maras began intensive anti-­Christian image-­work that criminalized them further in the eyes of the justice system and flouted the spirit of the Gospels that had become the text of rehabilitation and redemption. Taking refuge in prisons that were the most unreachable and stigmatizing locations in the country, the maras transformed their hostility, hardening a politics of vengeance that rejected the world as such and offered no path to redemption in return. Their spirit of revenge was that of a powerless collective before an unvanquishable sovereignty, and their fantasies of revenge grew deeper and more passionate the more they were suppressed. In short time it seemed revenge had surpassed the evangelical spirituality of the Gospels and became its own form of sacred ecstasy. In the years ahead, the destructive impact that gang communities would have on neighborhoods, families, and individuals demonstrated not a desire to abandon that world but a desire to render it unlivable for everyone else. The apocalyptic world created by gangs took the ashes of the prison fires and spread

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them to the ends of the social world in the form of cities paralyzed by criminal violence, families pulled apart, and countless people forced to flee for refuge in the United States and elsewhere abroad. Though they were covered in diabolical images, their politics of vengeance must not be mistaken as satanic. It was deeply Christian and rooted in the final chapter of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, Apocalipsis (Apocalypse). One of the most provocative analysts of the book of Apocalypse was the writer D. H. Lawrence, who not long before his death in 1930 penned a short essay examining the book’s unsettled fullness.9 In the New Testament the chapter is a marvel, standing in contrast to the Gospels’ expansive elaboration on the philosophy of Christian love and the elegant teachings of Jesus. With its abrupt shift in tone, the book makes a jarring conclusion to the New Testament, its text built around revanchist visions, clumsy symbols, and the “pompous unnaturalness” of a gratuitous frenzy.10 Lawrence begins with a sociology of his hometown, remembering the importance of the book of Apocalypse to the uneducated and coal-­mining families who were electrified by it. Lawrence’s debt to Nietzsche’s writings on Christianity is obvious as he parses the different styles of Christian thought that held the book of Apocalypse in tension with New Testament theology and “popular religion as distinct from thoughtful religion.”11 The Book of Revelation is a collective theology rather than inward and individual and outlines the faith of those whose destiny is not postponed as in Nietzsche’s subjects of ressentiment, but fulfilled through destructive action. It is not a love that, in Nietzsche’s words, “grew out of hatred, as its crown,”12 but rather an open and impassioned will to power, the triumph of weak but chosen people that must manifest the annihilation of the powerful who reign over the corrupt and fallen world. Lawrence observes, “The longer one lives, the more one realizes that there are two kinds of Christianity, the one focused on Jesus and the Command: Love one another!—and the other focused . . . on the Apocalypse. There is the Christianity of tenderness. But as far as I can see, it is utterly pushed aside by the Christianity of self-­glorification: the self-­glorification of the humble.”13 In gang rehabilitation of the 2000s, the love invented by Christ was effete and refined, a path to individual transformation that led out of the maras. But the path that led further inside the maras, to the space of ecstatic veneration of the wounded body, was that of the Apocalypse—a vengeful, collective, and monstrous theology. That was the religious spirit grafted onto the skin of the maras in the aftermath of the fires, gathering signs that displaced a single theological narrative with visions of other possible worlds. Lawrence’s analysis moves through these Nietzschean themes to suggest that the book of Apocalypse is not a single theological vision but rather an archaeological

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site where multiple messianic traditions are overlain and the influence of pre-­ Christian pagan religion is far more visible than in any other part of the Bible. The authorship of the book of the Apocalypse is regularly disputed, though it is often attributed to the Apostle John, who is also credited with the fourth Gospel and the Epistles. In rebuttal Lawrence asserts, “It cannot be that the same man wrote the two works, . . . [as] they are so alien to one another.”14 Lawrence suggests that it was not the Apostle John who wrote the text but rather John of Patmos, an obscure figure thought to have been exiled by the Romans to serve years in a prison on the island of Patmos. In prison John started the text as a screed against the Romans and finished the book in his late years in 96 CE. He was an apocalyptist who composed the text in the style of his time, and given the scant details of his life, it is unlikely he would have known anything of the legend of Jesus or that he would have read the Gospels. Lawrence emphasizes the unusual symbols of the text as the influence of pagan traditions that surrounded John of Patmos at the time of the writing but also of the writings of Jewish prophets whose messianic texts had been in circulation for two or three centuries.15 These texts came about after Roman oppression of the Jews had fully dismantled any belief that the chosen would have their day to rule on earth, and religious texts that promised as much had lost authority as it became clear that Judeo-­Christian destiny would be postponed. “It was no longer a matter of prophecy: it was a matter of vision,” Lawrence claims. “God would no longer tell his servant what would happen, for what would happen was almost untellable. He would show him a vision. . . . That was what the apocalyptists set out to do: to vision forth the unearthly triumph of the Chosen.”16 Jewish prophets had lived alongside the cults, but they were no longer of them. Yet those who sought a smiting power grand enough to destroy their Roman enemies found inspiration in the frenzied potential in the pagan cosmos.17 Per Lawrence’s reading of the text of the Apocalypse, the early Jewish prophets anthropomorphized and disguised pagan cosmic forces and inserted them into allegorical frames beneath which are vestiges of pagan religious experience. In his reading Lawrence sees anew the symbols that he ridiculed as a young man and finds in John of Patmos’s writing a “brutal paganism” that taps the vitality and potency of the pagan religious cults. Lawrence sees these symbols not as evidence of a second-­rate theological parable but as nonrepresentational traces connected to divine power. Though Jewish prophets had incorporated pagan myths into their writings, John rewrote them without suppressing their influences. Most importantly he retained the movement of sensory consciousness that gives primacy to images instead of words. These Lawrence describes as “rotary-­thought-­images” as opposed to the modern progressive thought of his own time.18 He writes,

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[O]racles were not supposed to say something that fitted plainly the whole chain of circumstance. They were supposed to deliver a set of images or symbols of the real dynamic value, which should set the emotional consciousness of the enquirer . . . revolving more and more rapidly, until out of a state of intense emotional absorption the resolve at last formed; or as we say, the decision was arrived at. As a matter of fact we do very much the same in a crisis. When anything very important is to be decided we withdraw and ponder and ponder until the deep emotions are set, working and revolving together, revolving, revolving, until a center is formed and we “know what to do.”19

In his work examining the rehabilitation of gang members in Central America, the sociologist Robert Brenneman describes a threshold of reintegration into the world of law and mainstream life. As gang defectors publicly recounted their life stories and testimonies of the calling to surrender their lives to Christian service, the authenticity of that account was often tied to a breaking point of uncontrollable weeping and trembling.20 To manifest this intimate contact with the Holy Spirit was to prove one’s relationship to a higher power, satisfying the gang as much as the congregational community. But that full narration of one’s life history could occur only outside the maras, as a solitary quest of redemption that contrasted with the collective apocalyptic spirit inside of them. That collective and destructive ethos was the obverse of the faith of the Gospels in which Jesus was a lone individual, surrounded by disciples but never the figure of vengeance they wanted him to be. But as Judas would become essential to Jesus’s spiritual realization, so too the Book of Revelation would remain within the New Testament “to give the death kiss to the Gospels,” offering ontological drift and flow against the bounded ego found in the rest of the New Testament.21 On Lawrence’s essay Deleuze comments, “If we are steeped in the Apocalypse, it is rather because it inspires a way of living, surviving, and judging in each of us. It is a book for all those who think of themselves as survivors. It is the book of Zombies.”22 Deleuze found the rotary-­thought of the pagan symbol a “process of action and decision” that opposed the overdetermination and linearity of allegorical thought. “It has neither beginning nor end, it does not lead us anywhere, and above all it has no final point, nor even stages. It is always in the middle.”23 The rotary symbol built what Deleuze called “connections,” opening the flow of life to radical transformations that challenge the boundedness of identity and perception structured by an ideological field. Inside the National Penitentiary, tattooing was image-­work that took aim at the subject as an artifact of legal and political interpolation. The incoherence of montage, inscribed on the skin, opened the subject to an emergent

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relatedness between the self and the collective that was conditioned by the materiality of incarceration, creating an ethos within gang life that refused the arbitrary violence of sovereign power by virtue of community’s very endurance. The social material and mechanics of the gang world thus were not represented by tattoos but were the tattoos themselves, making them an essential archive and repository of gang history and experience. Though it is the case that redemption narratives of gang defectors have created their own literature, one that assimilates them to recognized identities governed by the liberal state, the pagan cosmological countermagic embedded in crude and cliché skin art remains still a potent rotary-­thought-­image ready for interpretation that unsettles the history of state campaigns to define and eliminate criminal subjects. Their apotropaic force resisted not only the violence of sovereign power of the 2000s but also the convenient interpretations of gang life in the present— those that pathologize the negative dialectics of exteriority so as to reinstate a subject whose relation to the law leaves both the law and the subject intact.

17

Trust

Ever since Miriam and I started visiting the maximum-­security wing, cell number 7 had been vacant. One afternoon I could hear the sound of a television inside. I could see a figure lying on a thin mattress in the blue light. “Hello?” I said. The figure leaped up and trotted to the door, the stub of a marijuana cigarette in his mouth as tattoos billowed like hallucinatory clouds across his shirtless upper body. “Are you a new detainee?” I asked. “No,” he said with a chuckle. “I’ve been at my trial for the last two months. Are you a lawyer?” I could see someone else inside. “Marco is here too,” he said. “I’m Carlos, or the one they call Pantera [Panther].” It was Pantera and Chele Sula, the two gang members convicted for the bus massacre in Chamelecón. I didn’t know what to say, so I reached in to shake his hand. “How are you doing?” I asked. He laughed. “I thought when I said my name you would be scared!” “No, we are just checking to see if we can bring anything next time we’re here,” I said. Guards were coming down the corridor, locking up doors for the night. Miriam called my name from the entrance. “Tell her to come back and we’ll talk. Miriam Blanco, right?” He said with a wink. “Tell her we are innocent.” I gave him my cell phone number. “Do you have a phone?” “No, but just call El Humilde and he’ll pass his phone to us.” When we were in the car Miriam asked why I was so slow to leave. “Who were you talking to?” “You’re not going to believe it when I tell you,” I said. As I explained, Miriam became ecstatic. “I cannot believe they put those two in maximum security where they can have visitors! They should have put them in El Escorpión [Scorpion].” Escorpión was the most restricted unit in the prison. “Look,” Miriam said,

“I ran through the gates but there was nowhere to go.” Photo by the author.

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“I know they’re innocent. Can you imagine if we overturn their conviction? What a scandal for the minister of security and the district attorneys!” She called Dolores and said we had a surprise. It was a shocking turn because Pantera and Chele’s trial had been hyped by the minister of security as the most important event of the Mano Dura years. Though the evidence against them was scant and contradictory, each was found guilty and sentenced to 840 years in prison. As a spectacle of state power, the trial established not only that gang members were capable of inconceivably monstrous acts but that even the most hardened among them could be brought to justice. At the same time, however, almost everyone I knew suspected that the police, if not the security minister himself, had arranged for the gruesome shooting and set up Pantera and Chele. When we arrived at Dolores’s house she was standing in the doorway and laughed as we climbed out of the car. “Tell me who you met today,” she said wryly. “What do you mean?” Miriam exclaimed. “Come inside,” Dolores said. Miriam explained that Pantera and Chele had returned to the National Penitentiary and that tomorrow we would hear them out. “They want to talk to us,” she said. “You know gang members didn’t commit that massacre.” “You are not going to touch that,” Dolores responded without pause. Miriam was dumbfounded and protested, but Dolores insisted it was forbidden. “First, there is so much brujería [sorcery] on you that I could feel it through the telephone. I can hardly be in the room with you right now. Second, let’s start with the premise that these two mareros didn’t do the shooting, ok? Well, they were convicted. Have you forgotten what that means? Someone wants them to stay there. But where I would leave it alone, you believe there has to be justice. But why? Just because they were framed?” Miriam was silent. “You have to be smarter than that or you will cause problems for them and for yourself.” “Why do you say we are covered in brujería?” I asked. “Because anytime you come back from that prison excited, you need to ask what happened,” Dolores said. “You both know that you have to be careful, that most people out there are trying to take advantage of you because they have nothing. No family to visit them, no girlfriend, nothing. Then you two show up, wanting to listen to them and be their friends. They have to be clever to survive, and they know how to put a spell over you.” “Yeah, Pantera was very charming,” I said. “And you talked to him for five minutes only, but now both of you are ready

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to jump into this despite the fact that it’s probably the most dangerous case in the country. You have to watch for this.” Dolores’s invocations of sorcery were frequent. Months after we met, she told me that when we were introduced I was covered in so much sorcery that she nearly ran the other way. I’d never thought much about sorcery outside of anthropology classrooms, where it seemed more a mental exercise than anything concrete. But as I reflected on the openness that ethnographic research on gangs demanded, I realized I had spent years undoing my instincts for self-­ preservation, suspending my critical capacities so that preconceived fears and ideas could not direct my behavior. I had cultivated letting my guard down as a skill, as a manner of building trust with people like Peri, Jorge, and Dilsia, even the kids at Vida de Paz. I had never thought of this radical openness as naïve but as socially and mutually productive. Alphonso Lingis explains, “Once one determines to trust someone, there is not simply a calm that enters into one’s soul; there is excitement and exhilaration. Trust is the most joyous kind of bond with another living being. But isn’t it true that whenever we enjoy being with someone, there is a factor of risk there, and also a factor of trust, which gives our enjoyment an edge of rapture?”1 While skepticism and opacity seemed to animate Dolores and Miriam’s inner circle, they were nonetheless a community held together by trust. The stakes were high—if that trust were broken, it would almost certainly result in someone’s death. As I became closer with Miriam and Dolores, I realized how difficult it was to extend trust while living in an atmosphere of conspiracy, violence, and desperation, and I began to understand sorcery as an oppositional force that undermined trust. If I interpreted Dolores’s comments correctly, what she wanted was for Miriam and me both to remain autonomous, clear-­thinking, and conscious of Báalam as a group rather than following our own agenda. Dolores’s treatment for the sorcery that I carried with me for years was a medicinal bath every other day for a month, consisting of a fermenting liquid she made and stored in a bucket with a lid. I poured it over my body in the rustic shower on the back of her house and let the wind air-­dry it on my skin. During the day I would find organic debris in my hair or stuck to my skin, like a membrane of Dolores’s own thoughts. As she had always lived just above the city market and was a master haggler, Dolores came home with clothes she insisted that I try on: first shirts, then pants and shoes, and finally a hat, overhauling my wardrobe completely. I felt I had layers of sensuous armor, material expressions of Dolores’s skepticism that I could feel all over my body, the different cut of the clothing shaping my movements while the thin layer

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of fermented medicine dried onto my skin like an additional organ that began thinking and acting on its own. After a month Dolores said we were done with the baths, but she gave me a photo to paste into my fieldwork notebook. “He will look after you,” she said. “He looks after us.” I asked who it was. He was a Honduran surgeon from the early 1900s, she told me. He had visited Dolores in the hospital years ago when she nearly died from a viral infection. “He came in the room with his white coat and put his hand on my head and looked at me in the eyes,” she said. She would later recognize him in a fading portrait that hung in a gallery of the hospital founders as Dr. Benicio Sarmiento, deceased in 1926. Even after the cleansing Dolores insisted that the sorcery from the prison was still strong and required treatment. She gave me a ring to wear and asked for printed photos of my family that she kept on a shrine next to a portrait of Dr. Sarmiento. I would take my truck back to the apartment in Manchen barrio, where, some nights a black donkey that was skin and bones would be in the middle of the narrow lane where I lived, blocking my entrance. Other nights it stood right in front of the house in the empty street and sometimes right by the door where I had to squeeze past. Occasionally during the day I would see it in other parts of the city, eating garbage from overflowing dumpsters or walking sluggishly on the side of the outer beltway. When I told Dolores, she inhaled sharply. “Have you touched it?” she asked. “No, but it smells terrible,” I said. To Dolores the donkey was not a donkey but el mero punto (the very point) for all the sorcery that followed me for years in the barrios and months in the penitentiary. I had stuck too closely with gang members and thieves, she said, and this was their energy that now followed me. Their enemies do everything in their power to protect themselves. I’m not talking about brujería of the kind that someone who is a brujo [sorcerer] practices. I’m talking about emotions. Between the gangs there is so much enimistad [enmity] that it becomes something else. Hatred is more than a feeling. Hatred is a powerful substance that turns one’s life into una maldición [a curse]. And most of the gang members who are the most experienced have it like a disease. They will visit curers—they’ve even come to me on occasion—because they don’t know how to control it. They might try to practice magic of their own, for protection, because they want to stay alive. It might ward off bad magic from their enemies, but you don’t know any of this. You have to consider that you’ve been talking to people with many, many enemies. You’re not in a gang, but that energy is stuck to you like your shadow. Even

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if we removed it from you it’s still around you. You’re with me now, and I’ve cured you, but now it’s not in your body anymore. That’s why you see it literally now like the donkey in your street.

When I asked Dolores what she thought I should do, she replied, “You are free to live here if you need to. That donkey won’t come near this house.” I had almost no capacity to believe what she was saying, but the donkey made me uneasy, and as it turned out, leaving the apartment in Manchen was not my decision to make. A week later the owner of the house met me on the street and told me to get my porquerias (filth) off her roof. It was a strong word, and I asked what she meant. “All of your newspapers and files up there, all of your shit.” She was referring to the piles of newspaper articles about gangs, corruption, and police that were stacked everywhere in the room. She had to have been put off, seeing all of it together, everything abject about life in Tegucigalpa that one could assemble into a collection. The articles directly engaged everything the social world voided into prisons or obscured into the collective unconscious. As she spoke to me with a tone of disgust, I looked around for the donkey, but the streets were empty save for a few neighbors listening in on our conversation. Looking back, ever since Miriam and I visited Erlan Colindres and my passport was stolen, my personal life and focus on my work had felt out of my control. I just never connected it all. Some afternoons I would arrive to the carpark to find dents and scratches on my truck, but the night watchman would shrug his shoulders. “Nobody’s been in here but me,” he said. “It had to happen somewhere else.” Dolores suspected he also knew of my work with gangs and wanted me out of his carpark. Meanwhile, messages and folders in my university email account had been deleted, as if it had been hacked. Nighttime calls from the penitentiary were more common, mostly from people who didn’t identify themselves. They would ask mundane questions, such as what I was reading or if I had done my laundry, and then remain silent for uncomfortable lengths of time. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking I had heard something on the terrace outside, then lie in bed afraid to get up. I had repeated dreams of a creature made of knotted rags sitting outside, then in another dream it was inside the room. A few nights later it was on my chest, sucking the air out of my body with the force of a gale as I lay paralyzed and unable stop it. That morning I sprang up from my cot and found myself staring at dish towels drying on a clothesline outside, fluttering in the breezy dawn. Dolores insisted that I move in with her when she saw these events as forces coming together around me, “like thousands of birds flying in circles” over my

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head. Even when I thought things were returning to normal, as the US embassy had reissued a passport to replace the one stolen at Renaciendo, the following day the Ministry of Immigration refused to stamp the empty passport with a new visa. The immigration clerk entered my name in the database but found no record of me ever having visited Honduras, though I had come and gone from Honduras six times by then. The clerk was equally puzzled, as she confessed to recognizing me from other occasions that I had come through customs. But being in the country without a visa was a crime, she said, and she would have to call the police. “I know this must be a mistake,” she said skeptically, “so I’ll give you a few minutes to leave before I make the call.” It would take another four months to get a visa. Dolores insisted I stick closer than ever to Miriam, who could handle the police if ever my documents were demanded in a traffic stop or otherwise. I decided to move in with Dolores, and as I unpacked my belongings into a bureau beside the couch where I would sleep, Miriam asked me to come and see the shrine in Dolores’s bedroom. In the corner was a large picture of Dr. Sarmiento surrounded by red, blue, and yellow candles. “And that is where I live,” Miriam said, pointing to a corner where a cot and a small table glowed beside a small lamp. She explained that she had not lived at her actual house since the break-­in that she fled by leaping from her back window. “So we will both live here,” she said. “It does simplify things somewhat.” We returned to the living room and sat with Dolores, who poured us each a cup of instant coffee. “So now you see the real Miriam,” Dolores said, laughing. “She hasn’t been home since before you met her, but it will be safe for her to return soon, now that Acertijo is out.” As we spoke and the night wore on, Dolores urged me to consider that everything that was happening was connected with the visit to see Erlan Colindres months earlier. We had gotten close to Frankie Stearns, she said, and though he was no longer officially connected to Renaciendo, none of that mattered anyway. He was dangerous, she said, part of the underworld, but it was Renaciendo itself that concerned her most. “It’s a labyrinth of brujería, from the desperate kids you met to the corruption of the administration, and you walked right into the middle of it,” she said. “Erlan Colindres is a little boy sitting in the center of that labyrinth, and there is more sorcery around him than I know what to do with.” Dolores spoke with a kind of certainty that I was not accustomed to. She spoke in declarations that were often jarring, as her insights almost always revealed a blind spot in Miriam’s or my own perception of people and events. For several months I spoke much less and spent most of my time listening and pondering, as I was almost certain she knew what I was thinking before

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I could even say it. Nonetheless, Miriam brought up Stearns’s connection to organized crime and speculated why no one had published an exposé on him in the national newspapers. “Have you listened to his sermons?” she asked. It was true that Stearns’s public sermons were often a virtual map of gothic sovereignty’s historical returns, as he described his journey from the US military to covert operations and into the underworld, all of which had led to his spiritual redemption. I had only seen him being interviewed on television and leading Christian worship services in the central park of Tegucigalpa. He was obviously charismatic, spoke fluent Spanish, and had perfected telling the story of his redemption. “But what Stearns doesn’t tell those audiences is that he got into the underworld because he was head of security for the biggest security firm in the world,” Miriam said. “What firm?” I asked. “Blue Raven. Stearns used to be head of security at Blue Raven,” she said impatiently. Blue Raven is an international security contractor and at least in Honduras at the time, the biggest name in security services. It was so large that Andres joked that when its employees got involved in organized crime, which was not uncommon, they had to decide how to rob the same armored cars they were contracted to protect. Stearns recounted in sermons and interviews that his journey to Blue Raven started as a young man when he joined the US military. In the late 1970s he graduated from the US Army Ranger School in Fort Benning, Georgia, and later joined the Blue Raven Corporation. Blue Raven was founded after World War II, by former FBI agents in the first wave of privatization of US military and intelligence services.2 Stearns joined in the early 1980s just as Blue Raven won a government contract for a weapons-­development program that would be based in a facility on the sovereign lands of a First Nations community in the Pacific Northwest.3 Placing the facility on Native land complicated the jurisdiction of US federal law and allowed Blue Raven to pursue ends that would have been illegal in the territorial United States. Stearns joined the team just as the lab began developing experimental weapons intended for the Contras. Edén Pastora, a former Sandinista revolutionary leader turned Contra and known internationally as Comandante Cero (Commander Zero), personally attended a demonstration of their newest weapons at the facility shortly after Stearns arrived. But across conspiracy theory webpages online, Stearns’s name was more often associated with one of the great Cold War-­era tales about a cabal of ex-­ CIA and ex-­FBI agents who during the late 1970s conspired to acquire and

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sell classified government information to international bidders. The cabal escaped serious repercussions largely because of timing, as they had direct ties to Reagan surrogates who had carried out the “October surprise” of the 1980 presidential campaign. Those surrogates facilitated the transfer of $40 million to Iranian officials who delayed the release of US hostages to coordinate with Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981. Potential investigations of the initial cabal were not pursued, and their illicit gains were concealed within accounts of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), an international banking entity designed to escape regulatory control and shield finances of criminal networks across the world.4 As Stearns’s career unfolded, he was integrated into this network in which covert actors and state intelligence engaged with transnational criminal organizations. But before he could advance within the network’s ranks, relations soured at the covert facility that had been Stearns’s base for several years and he disappeared abruptly from the United States. One journalist investigating the history of the covert facility was murdered at home and all of his research notes stolen, while another who attempted to track Stearns abroad seemingly hanged himself in a hotel room in Managua, and all of his belongings went missing. Following these events, there is a nearly twenty-­year gap in Stearns’s story. But as Miriam recounted to me in 2006, it was sometime in 2002 that Stearns arrived in Tegucigalpa claiming to be an evangelical pastor whose life’s mission was to save the souls of youths caught up in gangs and drugs. Alongside his wife, the daughter of a well-­known South American military general, and his young daughter, Stearns immediately began establishing himself as a public figure. He seemed to have unfettered access to the country’s political elites and quickly became a regular face in newspaper coverage of the city’s most exclusive social galas. Before long he was hired as a consultant to First Lady Aguas Santas Ocaña Navarro, who in Miriam’s version of the story was looking to establish her image as first lady. She found in Stearns a flamboyant collaborator with whom to mount a campaign to improve the lives of orphans in the care of the Honduran state. International adoption was illegal in Honduras, but Ocaña managed to adopt two children and take in more than ten others from shelters across the country. Ocaña appointed Stearns a consultant to Renaciendo, and nearby he built an ostentatious home in the style of the US suburbs—no security wall, a grassy lawn with a grill, and a driveway full of late-­model cars. For Miriam and Dolores, whether all of Stearns’s background lore was factual was less important than acting as if it were. When I got into the details

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of those conspiracy theories, they would wave their hands and tell me to stop being academic about it, that simply he was capable of doing harm. Nothing more to memorize. “That’s the difference between us,” Dolores said. “You still have faith in right over wrong, that all this conspiracy should be exposed. First, that’s a dangerous path. And second, until you see that right and wrong are just illusions you will never understand how to handle someone like Frankie Stearns.” It was painful for Dolores to point out that I was clinging to liberal pieties when they regarded commonly held notions of right and wrong, justice and human rights, and crime and authority as nebulous platitudes that had little coherence in actual practice. For them suspicion of pieties and interpersonal trust were mutually reinforcing and coalesced to make their circle of activists unusual adversaries of cruelty, corruption, and discrimination. Until one had a concept of the good that embraced the flux of lived experience as its core principle, one would struggle against the same abstract and institutional contradictions in a self-­defeating cycle. In their minds the way that Stearns used religious tropes as a means to an end was hardly exceptional, alongside police and politicians who practiced bad faith as if it were an art. But for the moment he became a heuristic device that brought their suspicion to bear on the events taking shape around my ethnographic fieldwork. Each day as I purified myself with shamanic baths and allowed Dolores to pick my wardrobe, I sensed my thoughts and perceptions changing as well. I could see that Miriam and Dolores had not just abandoned all pretense of liberal goodness but that they had invented in its place an ethical system nimble and flexible enough to thrive in the mutability of law and power in Tegucigalpa. This was also what street gangs had been doing for years, and it seemed ironic but also the case that gangs and muckrakers like Miriam and Dolores were engaged in nothing less than the reinvention of justice itself. That notion of justice would have to build off of a nontranscendental foundation if it were to satisfy either Miriam or Dolores, whose adversarial relation to injustice found vitality in the double negative. It is the starting point for rethinking core values of human community when, Nietzsche writes, [the] art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man. Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself—in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity—is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.5

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Miriam and Dolores did not frequent human rights offices to lodge legal complaints against their enemies. Instead they relied on information from the underworld in their quest to unmask societal ills around them. Dolores’s barrio had three entrances, one of them between a used-­clothing shop and a Chinese restaurant where a gang member named Ciempiés (Centipede) was often peeping over the terrace parapet to flash signs to kids on the corner a block away. Centipede was famous in the capital after escaping a gunfight with police in which a bullet went through his jaw. He returned to the underworld months later with reconstructive surgery that gave his jawline the appearance of a centipede, for which he received his new alias. At another entrance facing the city market was the family of Jochito, who had been head of the MS-­13 in the zone of the cemetery and had avoided arrest until his recent capture by bribing officials of the antigang division of the criminal investigation agency. At the third entrance was Gregorio, a member of that antigang division who spent afternoons disguised as a drunkard in the local cantina, where he mined people for gossip on gang life. Anytime we came and went, we took one of these entrances, where the streets were strewn with rocks to force any vehicle to a crawl. At any of the entrances Miriam would motion for me to stop the car to speak with Ciempiés, Gregorio, or Jochito’s younger sister, Albertina, trading information with each of them and often passing information between them. Miriam was a collector of information as well as its conduit, as gangs passed information to the police about their gang adversaries and police returned the favor by sharing useful intelligence of their own. Often the boundaries separating the two worlds seemed superficial. To muddy matters further, there was no denying that even amid this quid pro quo, Gregorio wanted to rout corrupt agents from his detective unit, much as gangs wanted to pin down leaks in their organizations. When police were involved in criminal activities, the gangs were usually the first to know about it, and when enemy gangs bought information from police about their rivals, the antigang detectives were the ones they spoke to. So communication was open, contradictory, and also a matter of survival. Stearns had his own information networks, however, and Alex from Casa Blanca was familiar with his approach. As Stearns established himself as a well-­known foreign evangelical in Tegucigalpa, he was a consultant for Renaciendo but also stopped by the men’s prison to give sermons inside the most notorious barracks. As Alex recounted, he seemed to enjoy preaching from the cavernous center of Casa Blanca, where the panoptic tower had once stood before renovations. “Look,” Alex said, “when this Stearns guy comes to our barracks, we are

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nice and show him around, but we don’t make deals. We wanted Casa Blanca to be autonomous. But I’ll give him credit for one thing: he knows how things work here. Everyone had heard about my arrest in Tegucigalpa, and he was the first to come around, offering me protection. But he wanted me to talk, and I don’t talk. So after we blew him off, he would spend most of his time with the pesetas because they are the most desperate.” Alex was familiar with Lino and his cellmates and at Miriam’s request had kept an eye on them in recent months. Among them was twenty-­one-­year-­old Fernando, who had large, detailed tattoos on his upper arms and shoulders. Fernando was one among thousands of detainees in pretrial detention at the penitentiary. He had high cheekbones and a charismatic manner and was recruited by Stearns as a spokesperson for his growing organization, which by that time was a residential faith-­based rehabilitation center. The penitentiary director gave Fernando conditional leave, and Stearns promised to pay his legal bills. Fernando said, Frankie would come here [the penitentiary] every few weeks just to see who was new. He would talk to us and sometimes pick people to join his organization. He said I was good-­looking and would make a good front man for his group. He wanted to hear my story, and then he made suggestions about how to make it more exciting. I just did what he said because he was the one helping me, right? Then he and his colleagues there said I needed to look more fearsome, so their guy gave me a few more tattoos on my neck and on my hands, so you could see them even when I was dressed in a suit.

For gang defectors, Stearns was hard to ignore because he made big promises to kids who were in the most desperate situations. To Fernando he promised protection from the maras and the police, as he had business relations with both, and he promised his connections in the Honduran Department of Justice would see to it that Fernando’s case was dismissed. Fernando worked with Stearns for two years, dressed in new clothes and traveling the world. When you lived at his rehabilitation center and things were good, Frankie made sure you had everything. I had a closet full with new shoes, brand names like Nike and Reebok. He gave me special treatment because I knew how to tell my story to people. I became a superstar, part of a group that travels with him to other countries. We would tell people about what happens in Honduras, and then the assistants would ask for donations for Frankie’s work. I got to see places I would never see—Chile, Brazil, and Colombia. Everywhere we went we stayed in the nicest hotel and ate in expensive restau-

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rants so Frankie could meet with people he does business with. We didn’t ask about that; you just knew not to. And as long as you behaved, Frankie would keep his word. I lived like a king.

Fernando said Stearns trusted him and would send him into the basement of the center, where other youths were not allowed. In the basement he said there were crates of weapons, including firearms and grenades. Fernando regularly picked up Frankie’s mother from a clandestine military airstrip twenty kilometers away where Stearns had access to the runway and exemption from customs enforcement. He watched as Stearns’s mother deposited jewelry and banded cash in a wall safe in Frankie’s bedroom and on separate occasions, as business partners delivered cocaine by the kilo—some of which was shared with interns. If anything went wrong at the ministry, Frankie sent interns back to the penitentiary. Others were assumed to have been killed and buried in the rural hillsides where Stearns took long hikes. Fernando never told me what happened in his case, but he was returned to the penitentiary and now lived through each day expecting the worst. Among the defectors someone always kept watch, peeping through tears in the plastic sheathing they hung over the only door to the jaula day and night in rotating shifts. Miriam asked Alex from Casa Blanca to keep his eye out for the defectors, and he did. As a leader in the co-­governance council of inmates, Alex went back and forth to the director’s office several times a day and would stop to ask what they needed. But Alex was approaching the end of his sentence. He had served three years and, on good behavior, was up for release. One afternoon we found him in his bedroom on the third floor of Casa Blanca, red-­faced and talking quickly into his cell phone. His lawyer was slow to have him formally released, and as each day went by, Alex was increasingly wary of those with whom he shared governance of Casa Blanca. They may grow nervous that his early release was due to giving information to the police, in which case they could easily take his life as a precautionary measure. Miriam and I visited his lawyer in Tegucigalpa and accompanied him to the Supreme Court building to push the paperwork along. Back at Casa Blanca Miriam and Alex discussed the case, and I gave them privacy, following Ovideo as he checked the different production sites around the barracks—the duck and tilapia farms, the shoemakers who worked like nineteenth-­century cobblers, inmates who spun rope from hand-­powered spindles, furniture makers, and the team that kept the immense water basin clean and filled in case of a shortage. With Alex being released, Ovideo was worried for his own safety. Each day as I left and when Miriam’s back was

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turned, Ovideo put a small bag of marijuana in the front pocket of my jacket, in one fluid motion with a wink and smile. I tried to appear grateful but realized he could send word to the front gate and I could be arrested if ever he felt mistrustful of my intentions in Casa Blanca. Ovideo was one of the most powerful figures in the prison, and for a little money on the side, the guards would do what he asked. The first step to finding out if he could trust me was to find out if I trusted him. One afternoon all of the leaders of Casa Blanca were in the basement, in what had previously been solitary confinement cells but by the mid-­2000s were colorfully painted rooms with televisions for watching movies. They were sharing a bottle of rum and invited Miriam and me to join them. Miriam abstained, but I had a few drinks, happy to cut the tension one always felt in the prison interior. An hour went by, and most everyone was intoxicated. Ovideo rhapsodized about the next 9/11 event in the United States, a biological attack that would send the gringos flooding over the Mexican border where they would be treated badly just as they’d treated Central American migrants over the past century. He had been jokingly punching my shoulder but then suddenly hit me so hard that my vision blurred. When I could focus again, all seven of the coordinators were looking at me and Miriam with grave expressions. “Close your eyes,” Ovideo said. We did as he asked, and when we opened them again each of the seven barracks leaders had a pistol pointed at us. They accused me of wearing a secret recording device in my jacket the day before, which was untrue. I told them they were mistaken. After a moment they asked if I was nervous. I was terrified but for some reason also in a placid state, perhaps sure that I was powerless to change what was happening. I said no, and they told me to hold out my hands which, thankfully, were not trembling. Some of the coordinators seemed satisfied. Ovideo smiled. “But you are trained not to shake,” he said. I laughed and said I wished. “Close your eyes again,” the massive coordinator known as El Caballo (The Horse) told us. When we opened them the guns were gone. They sipped rum from plastic cups and smiled at us. “Don’t take it personally,” Ovideo said. “We had to test you the same way we test each other.” “You think I was wearing a wire?” I asked. “If you were guilty you would have shown it,” Caballo said. “We have to know if we can trust you,” Ovideo said. “You’ve seen a lot. Those guns we have? That’s nothing. We have guns hidden all over this barracks, the same way we have allies in every department of the country. When it’s time to fight, we’re always ready.” On our way out Ovideo and I walked

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drunkenly through the garden of sunflowers. “You know what a friend is, don’t you?” Ovideo asked. “A friend is an amulet. You take care of it because you never know when you’ll need it.” We shook hands and then he embraced me. “An amulet,” he said again. It was late at night when Ovideo called to tell us Oscar the roquero would be released. He had been in Casa Blanca for more than a year, Ovideo said, and had been Ovideo’s personal assistant for most of that time. He too had seen a lot. There was a strange convention that some prisoners were released at ten at night, which was, per Ovideo, “when the paperwork was completed.” A long pause made it clear this was regarded with suspicion. There was a chance someone would take Oscar’s life as he walked to the highway in the darkness. Oscar was on edge because he had been up for release three times already, and each time the paperwork stalled. That was common for prisoners who had no legal counsel, and they simply returned to their barracks to wait for the next review of their cases, which sometimes took more than a year. Miriam and I had never been at the penitentiary so late but we went anyway and found the grounds lit with moonlight. Captain Ramos, the newly assigned director who had replaced Lieutenant Reyes, was waiting in the yard. He was a member of the elite police force known as COBRAS, wore camouflage fatigues exclusively, and surrounded himself with several subordinates also in uniform. The additional COBRAS members were not part of the prison administration, and their presence there was out of the ordinary. Ramos had a caustic and vulgar sense of humor and showed little regard for Miriam’s role as interlocutor with the prisoner co-­governance councils. But this evening he was accommodating, as Miriam had personally recommended him to the US embassy for a security workshop in San Salvador that was led by the FBI, from which Ramos had just returned. Oscar was brought to the front yard when his paperwork was completed. He signed a few forms and as we walked to the gate, he seemed to panic, looking over his shoulders and turning in circles as the director laughed at him. “You think they would kill you here?” he asked. “Where we would have to clean it up?” At the front gate Ramos signed the final form and told Oscar he was free to go. Oscar tried to shake his hand, and Ramos recoiled. As we drove into the darkness Oscar looked around 360 degrees but relaxed when we reached the highway. He had been most afraid of Ovideo, he said, dreaming at night that Ovideo would kill him and dismember him like they had done to the other coordinators, years ago. “You know what happened when those guys took over Casa Blanca?” he asked. Miriam was shocked and tried to stop him from telling us. “They dismembered them and put their remains into the toilets,” he said. I had seen the

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toilets, which were just large holes in the concrete floor. “That’s why they say the whole building is embrujado [haunted]. At night people hear things coming from the drains and inside the walls. It makes some of them go crazy.” The rest of the ride was relatively quiet. When we arrived in Tegucigalpa, we took Oscar to Dolores’s house, where she had some new clothes for him and a plate of pork chops with beans and rice. We ate dinner together while Miriam tried to convince him to stay there for a few days and work with us. She offered him a job as an assistant. He asked what he would be doing, and she said he would be helping with her investigative work for a small stipend. Oscar was noncommittal. He took a shower and tried on his new clothes, and modeled them before us as we applauded. But still he looked uncomfortable. In the morning, as I was waking up on the couch of the living room where I had slept the previous few weeks, I heard the door open and shut. Oscar was gone. Later we heard he had been by Comité por los Desaparecidos and asked if they could help him. “He was going back to the graveyard where he used to live with his little group,” Gerardo told us. “He said he went there already and the groundskeepers remembered him. So he helped cut weeds and swept the promenade, and they invited him to come back.” “He’ll live there again,” Miriam said, sighing. Gerardo laughed. “Yeah, but he had a plan,” Gerardo said. “What was that?” she asked. “Is it true that at Casa Blanca one of the powerful guys there liked sunflowers? And they had a big garden with nearly one hundred plants?” “Yeah, it’s true,” I said. “Oscar had a whole bag of seeds with him when he came by here. He said the cemetery groundskeepers want him to plant them,” Gerardo said. “He’s going to be the cemetery’s gardener?” Miriam asked. “Seems so,” Gerardo said with a laugh. “That’s what he told us. And he knew you would come here looking for him, so he left you this.” Gerardo handed us an envelope. Inside was the money Miriam had given him the night before. “What’s this?” Miriam said. Gerardo shrugged. “He said come by in a few months, and he’ll cut some flowers for Doña Dolores.” When Dolores decided that my treatment for sorcery had ended, she came home from the market and told me to sit on the couch in the front room. “I have two gifts for you, and this will be all.” “Ok,” I said.

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“From now on you wear this,” she said, handing me a plain silver ring. I tried it and it fit. “It will shield you as long as you never take it off.” “Shield me from what?” I asked. She fluttered her hand in air like birds circling in the sky, her sign for sorcery. “And the second gift is this,” she said and handed me a pair of aviator sunglasses. “Step outside in the sunlight.” We walked to the street where kids gathered around, wondering what Dolores was up to. “Try them on,” she said. I did and the world turned a caramel color, like a sepia film, as the kids squealed with delight and then clapped. Dolores handed me a small mirror and I looked at myself. I looked like a state agent in plain clothes. She had remade me as a copy of the incarnation of sovereignty itself. “Gringo! Gringo! Gringo! Gringo!” the kids chanted. Dolores burst into laughter. “When you got here a few months ago, the brujería had you. Now you have the brujería,” she said. “What?” I asked. “I don’t know anything about that.” “You’re doing it right now, just standing there.” “Stop talking!” the kids shouted, laughing. I made myself as blank as possible. They stared at me, awestruck, then squealed and ran in separate directions. “See?” Dolores said. “See what? I don’t get it.” “And that makes you even scarier,” she said with a smile.

18

Futures

Miriam and I spent four hours in the US embassy hoping to get some assistance after discovering my visa records had been erased. We were given an appointment for the following week, and in the meantime I was to avoid police as much as possible, unless it was the General Directorate of Criminal Investigation, which Miriam visited regularly. On the second floor was the antigang unit, but we spent most of our time on the third floor, where the special investigations unit tracked mid-­size organized crime groups. “I go there because they always give me what I want,” she said with a laugh. “Why are they so open with you?” I asked. “Because those officers are an organized crime group,” she said. “They suspect that I know, but we don’t discuss it. So they are trying to figure out what I want from them. Because they would rather have me on their side, sometimes they will let me use their confidential databases. See how this works, now?” When I met Miriam, I was astonished that she could openly play both sides—the gangs and the police—but after nearly a year following her every move, I understood it was possible because actually they weren’t opposite sides. Both were part of the underground. This started to sink in the day we encountered a massacre at the billiards hall in the barrio El Pastel. We were on our way back to Dolores’s house and took the road at the bottom of the hill so we could stop at Jochito’s family’s house and drop off an envelope filled with money he asked us to deliver. They were crisp and unused five-­hundred-­ lempira bills, and how he had come upon them in the penitentiary we couldn’t ask. I drove slowly so the mara could see Miriam and would know it was us, and as we rumbled along, a figure rounded the corner running full speed. “Is that Enrique?” I asked. Enrique was one of the detectives from the special investigations unit. We knew him well. I beeped the horn, but he kept running at top speed with a black bag under his arm. When we got to the corner there was a general panic in the street as people ran in circles, crying and hold-

Guard batons, Granja Penal de Comayagua. Photo by the author.

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ing their faces. “Oh no,” Miriam said. “It’s a massacre.” We pulled over and went inside a small billiards hall, where four bodies were lying on the floor in pools of blood. Miriam grabbed a young woman who was running in and out of the front entrance and hugged her. As Miriam held her she asked what happened. “They came in with masks and started shooting,” she said. “Who was it?” she asked. “The MS,” she said. “They left us a note to pay them money or they would kill us. But we didn’t have the money on time.” “What did they look like?” “They had masks and bulletproof vests, like the police wear,” she said. Some neighbors shouted that they had found a mask in a trash can around the corner where we had seen Enrique running past the car. Miriam looked at me, and I knew what she was thinking—that the special investigations group was either posing as the MS-­13 and extorting businesses or doing hits for the gang and destroying the evidence. News media were beginning to gather outside and moments later interviewed the same young woman, as her hands trembled and she repeated herself compulsively. Enrique was Miriam’s main contact at special investigations, and she liked to visit him early in the morning when he was hung over. I had met him on my own when I visited the Criminal Investigations Directorate before knowing Miriam, and he had given me access to certain files and statistics in the antigang unit. “But recently he and others were reprimanded,” Miriam said, “for raiding the evidence room. They were taking cash, drugs, whatever they wanted, and got caught. But rather than send them to jail they put them all the way upstairs, where the room is just beneath the roof and so the room is always hot. They have no AC and leave the windows open, and by afternoon all of them are drinking.” Some afternoons Miriam would go by the special investigations office and, listening in on their conversations, ask to use one of the databases. “When they go after a gang or a criminal group they don’t bring them to jail like other squads. They bring them upstairs, present evidence, and say ‘Let’s negotiate.’ And so they get a cut of the money or the product, to keep things quiet.” “How do they keep it quiet?” I asked. “They might erase computer files, destroy evidence, change the dates on paperwork—there are a lot of ways to do it.” “And you’re not scared of being around them?” Miriam laughed. “We know all the same people,” she said. “When I need something, I can go to them. And when they need something, I help out.

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They’re not harmless, but right now they are happy to find out the things that I can tell them.” The day we saw Enrique fleeing the scene of the shooting with what could have been a bulletproof vest under his arm, Miriam was worried we had seen too much. The officers at special investigations would be concerned, and that was bad. We arrived at Dolores’s house, and she was waiting in the street. Before we could say anything, she scolded Miriam. “What are you doing stopping at the scene of a shooting?” She had spied Miriam’s car by the billiards hall, all the way from midway up the hill. Miriam told her about Enrique and said we needed to be careful with the special investigations people now. “I could have told you that,” Dolores said. “Why?” Miriam asked. “Because their trucks are already cruising by here.” Dolores said two of the gray, unmarked trucks used by the agents had driven slowly by her house just minutes before we arrived. “Now what do you suppose they want?” Dolores asked. “We shouldn’t be here,” Miriam replied. “Where are we going to go?” “To your house,” Dolores said. Miriam stared at her. “It’s safe to go back now?” “It’s safer than it is here.” “I don’t know . . . ” “Look,” Dolores said, “Acertijo is out of prison, and he’ll have the MS organized so no police can pull their tricks there. You’ll be fine now.” “And him?” she gestured to me. “He stays with you. You have your bedroom, and he will hang a hammock in the loft.” Dolores shouted for one of her grandchildren, who scampered around the corner and put a new hammock in the back of the car. “Now get out of here before they come back. You can get your stuff later.” Miriam owned a two-­story brick house in a cramped alley of the working-­ class Barrio Santito on the southeastern side of the city. Santito was the birthplace of the MS-­13 in Tegucigalpa, which Acertijo founded after he was deported from Los Angeles. She had not been to her own house in nine months, and as she came up the alley neighbors stopped what they were doing and things grew quiet. Three keys were necessary to get into the house—one for the iron gate, one for the door inside a small vestibule filled with plants, and one for a door on the other side of it that opened the opposite direction. We found ourselves standing inside a windowless salon. “Don’t touch anything yet,” she said, looking around. There were two couches, a television and a phone, and a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, on

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the far wall. In the adjacent kitchen was a two-­way mirror for observing the alley. Opposite us was a steel door with three bolts that opened to a rear courtyard. Miriam moved slowly, looking closely at the surfaces of everything. “If anyone’s been here, their fingerprints will show in the dust,” she said. Seemingly satisfied, she went up a set of wooden stairs. “Watch your foot,” she said. “That stair is made to collapse in case someone comes in at night.” Upstairs was a room full of boxes where I would hang a hammock and at the other end was Miriam’s bedroom, which had a single window looking onto the rear courtyard. Miriam examined the boxes, filled with artifacts from her research. We went in the bedroom, where there was a desktop computer, which she booted up and began checking the organization of files. “Everything on here is just garbage, just like what’s in those boxes in the loft.” “It’s also a trap?” I asked. “Not really. But I can tell if anyone tries to steal my materials.” At the back of the bedroom was a filing cabinet, also filled with seemingly useless documents. She opened the courtyard window and breathed the air. “This is where I jumped, the last time intruders came in the house,” she said. The drop was about twenty feet. “I was a ballet dancer, so I know how to land on my feet. I rolled into the bushes over there and then jumped the wall on the other side. You can see the bullet holes in the wall,” she said, pointing. “They had a chance to get me but they missed.” “What were they after?” I asked. “I had a whole database of stolen police files. Well, not stolen, but given to me by certain officers,” she said. “They knew their unit was infiltrated [by organized crime groups], and they had to protect their information.” “So they trusted you?” “Not me so much as my network of people. But for a while they would come here to use the databases, and that is why, on the other side of the house, you’ll see the foundation for another building. We were going to set up a research facility there. The FBI knew about it, and we were negotiating for funding from the United States. They were going to build a clandestine road to enter my courtyard from the other side, so on one end there would be a police checkpoint, and on the other the maras would control who enters and leaves. It was the perfect hideout for an anticrime investigative unit.” “Guarded by the maras,” I said. “Who else?” Miriam laughed. “So what happened to this idea?” “Then someone broke into the house, and the next week I got kidnapped by the police.” She told me about leaving a hair salon and seeing a police offi-

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cer writing a ticket for a parking violation, but then he grabbed her and forced her into a cruiser where three other men awaited. “They had me for four hours, and after a while I realized they were probably just trying to scare me. That I would live. But I am not one to take chances, so at one point I got my hand free from the restraints, and I threw myself out of the vehicle on Armed Forces Boulevard, where I landed on the shoulder of the road and rolled into the grass. It’s a highway, so they had no choice but to keep driving. Some good Samaritans stopped to help me. I had bruises and cuts, but I didn’t hit my head, so I was ok.” “That was nine months ago?” “Yes.” “When I first contacted you?” “That’s why I was wary,” she said. “Before you met me I was more daring.” What a thing to say, I thought—she was the most courageous person I had ever met. “Did they catch the officers who kidnapped you?” “I didn’t report it. I knew who they were and decided to leave it alone. They were a group from evidence analysis.” “Have I met them?” “No, but it was a group that had it in for me.” We sat in her windowless salon, facing the Mona Lisa. She recounted, I had heard from people in the penitentiary that there was a criminal group in evidence analysis. They did kidnappings for ransom and had secret prisons out in the countryside. I knew one of them already, so I would go by their office and overstay my welcome. Antonio was his name. I would smile and flirt with him, make up stories and see how much he would believe. But when I was really feeling bold, I would send him to get evidence for a case and then send him back. Again and again. While he was out of the office I would get on his computer, use a flash drive, and take files that I could copy and then give to the maras. It was justifiable because these police were far more dangerous. They were the actual delincuentes. Other times I would upload a Trojan virus or what they call a worm, so hackers would find a vulnerable system and possibly expose what was going on there. Tomás and I thought someone in the department would notice, but they always seemed distracted on their phones or video games. Then I was kidnapped.

For the next two months I lived at Miriam’s house. We still spent long hours at the penitentiary, but when we were not there I would sit in the shade of mango trees in her courtyard and try to catch up on field notes as Miriam made

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calls and worked her cases inside the house. She regularly received creepy calls in the night from unidentified persons and Dolores worried something was circling around us. When Semana Santa (Easter Week) arrived, and no visits were allowed at the penitentiary, most commercial businesses were closed for several days, and Miriam and I stayed at her house and didn’t go outside except to get the daily newspaper. One morning I opened the paper and saw a photo of the penitentiary entrance and someone surrounded by police who held umbrellas over his head. “Former cartel boss and cocaine kingpin Alexander Santiago Fortuna Sánchez was released early based on good behavior,” it read. “Alex is free,” I told Miriam. She reached for the paper. “Well, no wonder he didn’t ask us to pick him up,” she said, looking at the photo. “See how they are covering him beneath umbrellas? That’s so sharpshooters on the hillsides can’t get him so easily.” “On the hillsides?” “It’s happened before. They’re trained in the US. They can kill you from a mile away.” She paused and read the opening of the article. “Poor Alex,” she said. “But he’s free now,” I said. “His troubles are just beginning. It’s going to get worse unless he can get out of the country.” “Where would he go?” “When he was a trafficker he traveled to Miami a lot,” she said. “He’s got a US passport.” “So they will give him a visa?” “He’ll have a visa before you do,” she said. We both laughed. The next morning Miriam’s phone rang. Alex’s voice was muffled, and then we heard him crying. He was at a medical clinic nearby. Because of Semana Santa, the streets were empty. We parked in the back of the clinic and Alex’s bodyguard, Colocho, unlocked the door for us. Alex was shirtless and lay on a metal table, his chest shaven and wired to a heart monitor. He smiled when he saw us, but there were tears running down his face. “You are the only person I could call,” he said to Miriam. “What’s happening?” she asked. “I had a chest pains and everything seized up,” he said. “He had a heart attack,” his bodyguard said. “Luckily the doctor was in.” The doctor’s hands were shaking, and he seemed to be there under duress. When the doctor stepped outside, Alex said he thought the address to his safe house had been leaked. “Maybe one of the neighbors recognized me, I don’t know. The same car has driven by too many times,” he said. “They’re neighbors,” Colocho said, with some impatience. Alex exhaled.

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He had expected his former contacts in the cartel to try and kill him. They were powerful enough to make an attempt at any time. But then as soon as he was out of the penitentiary, Ovideo cut off communication. “He’s not taking my calls,” Alex said. “None.” Maybe Ovideo was scared Alex would become an informant for the DEA to get a visa out of the country. “I just don’t want them to kill me in front of my son,” he said. His son was five years old and at the safe house as well, along with Alex’s father. Alex sought a way to use bribery to get his wife, Sandra, out of the Centro Feminino de Adaptación Social (Women’s Center for Social Adaptation, prison for women), where she had been sentenced following the raid on their mansion years earlier. Alex, his father, and his son, plus Colocho, were staying in a middle-­class residential neighborhood near the public university. When Alex was able to stand and the doctor wished him well, we followed him back to the safe house. For the next few weeks we spent long hours there with plenty of time to talk. During the first few days he asked if we would mind going to see Ovideo and find out what he’s thinking. “Before I left, we had a long talk,” he said, “and I thought we understood each other. But then why isn’t he taking my calls?” Each day as we spoke, Alex’s father made coffee, and we sat on couches in an open salon with gauzy curtains veiling the view of the street, while Alex recounted episodes of his life. I asked if he wanted me to interview him and arrange his recollections into a life history that he could pass on to his son. We tried, but I could see it was difficult for him to focus on one thing for very long. With the sound of each passing car he ducked or stood behind brick pillars, expecting gunfire. During one such episode we had been recording his memory of the day he was arrested and more than twenty police surrounded his mansion in the eastern suburbs, when a car passed by and Alex choked on his words, then coughed and pounded his chest. He exhaled and pointed to his bodyguard standing quietly in the back of the room. “You should just interview Colocho,” he said. “It’s fine, we can stop anytime.” I said. “No seriously,” he said, now laughing. “He was part of Battalion 3-­16. That guy, right there.” Colocho smiled and looked away. “What? I don’t believe that.” Alex chuckled. “Who do you think I’d hire for a bodyguard? Some marero with a chimba [homemade gun]? Nah, around here it’s nothing but the best,” he said in jest. Miriam was looking at Colocho and had tensed up but kept calm. I felt I could see her putting all the pieces together. She had already suspected it. “How do you and your colleagues feel about Daniel Ortega now?” she

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asked, breaking an awkward silence with an uncomfortable question. Ortega is the former Sandinista leader from the 1979 revolution who then served as junta coordinator until becoming president of Nicaragua from 1985 to 1990. He was running for president again in 2007, this time as a populist born-­again Christian. “He’ll ally with Hugo Chávez, and another Cold War will start again in Central America if he’s elected. I don’t believe all of his Christian nonsense,” she said. Miriam was provoking Colocho, seeing what would happen. “The Sandinistas and everything they represented, it’s all dead. Their war is over,” Colocho said. “The way I see it,” Alex said, changing the subject, “Colocho here is a son of a bitch, but he’ll keep me alive. Won’t you, Colocho?” “Correct,” he replied. “See, these ex-­military know their place,” he joked. He motioned for me to begin recording again, with my small voice recorder in the middle of the table. “As I was saying before, when the police arrested me. That day my partners sold me out, and I knew it was my turn. So I surrendered. I mean, my wife was in the house, and I didn’t want any shooting. So I get in the police cruiser, and we were riding into central Tegucigalpa to the booking station. Well, suddenly they put a rubber bag over my head and squeeze it so tight that I couldn’t breathe. And as soon as that happens, they start punching me in the stomach, hitting my ribs with their batons, and hitting me over the head with the butts of their revolvers. I choked and passed out. Then I woke up in a house where they interrogated me for two days. Each time I didn’t talk they’d get the rubber hood and do it again. There was no way to resist them.” “Ugh,” I said, not knowing how to react. “It’s an effective technique,” he said, laughing. “But I’m just telling you because it was Colocho and those 3-­16 bastards who used to love to use that technique on the prisoners. Right Colocho?” Colocho smiled. “Maybe we did, but we didn’t invent it,” he said. He turned to me. “We learned it from the United States military, the same ones who come here talking about democracy and human rights. They taught us while we sat at desks and took notes like students, but all the material was techniques of torture, sabotage, propaganda, anything you can think of to break your enemy. It was your government that was going around the world teaching people this was how to get rid of Marxists and insurgents. Find them, break them, and use that information to find more and break them too. Suddenly people realize they don’t want to die, or they can’t win, and they vanish.” That afternoon Miriam told Alex we would go to the penitentiary and find out what happened with Ovideo. But as we drove she grew nervous. “Alex was

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important out here,” she said, “but now Ovideo is on his own, and he could be ignoring him for many reasons. We need to give him a chance to tell us what he’s thinking.” It had been ten days since we visited the penitentiary, the longest interval between visits since we started them almost a year before. When we passed through the front gates Miriam gasped. The jaula had a fence around it, and the door had been sealed off. An air-­conditioning unit was buzzing on the side. Two guards had been assigned to the jaula, and they let us through the gate. Miriam knocked. When the door opened cool air and the smell of marijuana hit us in the face, and there sat Ovideo and a heavy-­set guy probably twenty-­five years old, playing video games on a flat-­screen television. A bottle of rum was on the table. Ovideo stood and greeted us with big hugs. “Montes,” he said, turning to the other guy, “these are my friends I told you about.” It took a second but then I recognized Montes from the news. He had been arrested a week prior as an unlicensed pilot and in possession of a plane full of cocaine that had flown in from Colombia. “Ovideo, we’ve been trying to call you,” Miriam said, “but your number has changed.” “No, since Montes arrived we have been using these,” he said, and handed me a satellite phone. “They can’t be tapped as easily. That’s what los grandes [the big boys] use.” He laughed. Miriam looked around. The place had been renovated with sheetrock, painted, and completely transformed. “What happened to the pesetas who lived here?” Miriam asked. “They were transferred,” Ovideo said. “What?” Miriam said. “To the Granja Penal de Comayagua [penal farm]? Didn’t you arrange for that?” Miriam tilted her head. “No, why would I arrange for that?” The prison in Comayagua was an hour northwest and known for overcrowding. “That’s what the pesetas were talking about for months!” Ovideo said, raising his hands defensively. “All of them said the pesetas across Honduras were going to Comayagua so they could live together as ex-­mareros and defend themselves. Lino, all the other guys who lived here, plus the others living behind the hospital—” Miriam put her face in her hands. “They went along with this?” “Yeah,” Ovideo said. “Why not tell me?” she asked. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “No, and the administration did this over Semana Santa,” Miriam said. “They knew we wouldn’t be here. How could I have been that stupid?”

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“But from what I heard, all of them petitioned the director to move to Comayagua, starting months ago,” Ovideo said. “I thought you were helping with that.” “No one told me anything. But clearly the director here gave in because the director at Comayagua has less authority, so now he’s got to deal with it.” The room was silent. “What is happening?” Miriam asked to no one in particular. “Have some rum,” Ovideo said, pouring a glass for her, which she ignored, and he then handed to me. “Ovideo what’s through that door?” she asked. There was a new exit off the back of the jaula. “That’s the private entrance to Casa Blanca,” Ovideo said. “You cut a door in the perimeter wall of Casa Blanca?” Miriam asked. “Yeah!” Ovideo laughed. “Montes is one of our new coordinators.” Montes casually butted in. “Ovideo told me you’re good people, so I’ll tell you what we’re doing.” Suddenly I realized Montes was drunk. “We’re building a basement under this structure,” he said proudly, “where we can store all the things we need here, and we have to be able to move them back and forth between the two buildings.” Montes spoke like he was running the penitentiary himself. “Or maybe I’m lying to you,” he said with a smile, pouring another glass of rum. “Why would I tell you all that, if I hardly know you?” “How long will you be here?” Miriam asked. “As long as they need me to be,” he said. Who “they” meant was unclear, but Miriam didn’t ask. On the way back to Tegucigalpa, Miriam was fuming. “Ovideo and Alex had a good thing going,” she said. “Why does he want to fuck it up now by getting involved with narcotraffickers?” “Maybe he’s scared not to have Alex around?” “No,” she said. “This Montes guy was arrested for a reason. Colombian cartels don’t make mistakes unless they are intentional. So ask yourself what Montes being in the penitentiary does for them? Now they have a direct pipeline into the prison. They can sell there, but they can also distribute from there, depending on the director’s complicity. What a brilliant hideout.” When we got to Alex’s house she explained everything as Alex shook his head. “They waited for me to leave because they think I’m an informant for the DEA,” he said. “But this is very dangerous. They are talking about moving drugs and arms into that bunker.” Drugs and arms had been moving in and out of the prison for years, but it was not a transit point for traffickers. This could mean, Alex said, that an entire cartel organization would shift its focus onto the prison, and the bal-

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ance of power that allowed for co-­governance, which inmate coordinators had worked for years to establish, would be undermined. “It’s not good,” Miriam said. “But here’s what I don’t understand,” Alex said. “If the maras are the only ones with money to buy cocaine but they already have their supplier, and no one else in the prison has money, why do they need all the arms and cocaine?” Miriam tossed her notebook onto the coffee table. “The new director,” she said. Alex laughed. “No, they’re all part of the same cartel,” he said. “I don’t even mind saying it now, since they already want me dead.” He looked at me. “You want to know about drug trafficking, yeah? Give me your notebook,” he said. He drew a diagram. “What you are seeing right here is one single business with different scales of operation, and you just met each one of them. Montes represents the producers in Colombia, Director Ramos represents the traffickers in the Honduran military, and Ovideo represents a group that runs shipments through the western border into Guatemala. That’s where the Sinaloa cartel picks it up. One, two, and three. That, right there, is what we call a ‘cartel.’” He wrote “cartel” in quotes and handed back the notebook, smiling. “Thank you,” I said. “For your education,” Miriam added. Then Miriam suggested going to the Granja Penal de Comayagua the next day to check on Lino. Alex agreed, suggesting the defectors might have more information about Montes. But that night we got a late call from Alex, and again he wanted us to come over. It was important, he said. So the next morning we returned. His father made coffee, and Alex played with his son on his lap. Finishing his coffee, Alex looked outside. “It’s just about to rain,” he said. “Before you go to Comayagua I want to show you something. When the rain starts, we’ll go.” “Where are we going?” Miriam asked. “My old house,” he said. Alex’s former mansion had been seized by the state after his arrest. I had heard about the house when, three years earlier, rumors in the news described a new narco-­kingpin who lived in a fortified compound in the hills beyond Tegucigalpa. Though he was panicked about being killed, Alex thought the heavy rainstorm would provide some cover. When the rain fell, we drove fast. We got onto the beltway, took the eastern route for five kilometers, and then turned onto a dirt road into the forest. At the top of a steep and unpaved incline there was a large property fortified with a ten-­foot wall. The rain was pouring. Alex struggled with the house key, but then the door opened. He laughed and we ducked inside. We were in what ap-

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peared to be an empty salon. Rain roared on the metal roof, and I could hear Alex suddenly breathing heavily and then gasping for air. He slumped against a wall in the shadows. Miriam was shouting his name and holding him up. We thought he was having another heart attack. He lay flat on the floor and slowly he recovered. “Someone is here,” he said. The mansion had no electricity, and everything inside had been seized by the state, so all we could see were shadows from the waving treetops outside. “No one is here, Alex,” Miriam said. “I thought they were waiting for me,” he said. Colocho moved quickly through each room. “It’s clear,” he said. Alex wiped his face. Moments later we were standing in the large salon, looking out through large windows onto a swimming pool surrounded by overgrown foliage. “I wanted to tell you something,” he said to Miriam. “I bought back the house from the state in an auction, with money I had put away in Miami. The police never found that account. So this house is mine again,” he said. “But I want you to have it.” Tears ran down his face. “No, Alex, I already have a house,” she said. “This would be your new office,” he said. Outside deer were grazing by the pool. “What about you?” she asked. “This is the last time I’ll come here,” he said. “What are you going to do, then?” she asked. “I’ve been petitioning for a visa from the US embassy to go to Miami. This morning the visa came through.” “And you’ll take your son?” “Yeah, so he can grow up where his father is not a known criminal,” Alex said. “What about Sandra?” Miriam asked. “She’ll need a passport and a visa,” he said. “It’ll be easier to take care of once I’m already there. Here all I can do is hide.” There was a pause. “Are you sure about the house? I don’t think I can accept it.” “Give it to the MS if you want. Whatever you do, it’s yours now.” “The maras don’t collect riches like you traffickers,” Miriam joked. But it was true. For the maras, wealth was the community itself. Even gang members like Acertijo, who was rumored to live in mansions of his associates in the hills overlooking Tegucigalpa, eventually vanished back into the barrios where their networks of spies and safe houses were their true protection. On

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our way outside the sun came out and Alex looked up, concerned. “Let’s go now,” he said. As we drove Alex was breathing heavily. “Go faster,” Miriam said. We reached the highway, and Miriam’s phone rang as Alex gasped for air. “Hello?” she said. “I have a phone now,” the voice said. “Who is this?” “Pantera,” he said. He was the supposed shooter of the massacre at Chamelecón. “We need to talk.” “Ok we’ll be there soon,” she said and hung up. “So much for going to Comayagua.” We dropped off Alex and Colocho and then went as fast as we could to the penitentiary. Miriam felt it would be dangerous to turn down Pantera. She didn’t know him well enough to react in another way. She asked to be let inside the cell where Pantera and Chele Sula stayed, and once we were inside, Pantera turned up the television to its highest volume, plugged holes in the walls, and then we sat in a small circle on the ground. They leaned forward and asked me to use my recorder, as if going on official record. “We want to tell you our side of the story, in case we never get to tell it. You guard this recording,” he said. Then Pantera and Chele Sula walked us through all their ideas about how they were framed—from the perspectives of the public defenders, prosecutors, witnesses, and judges. When they were done, Miriam looked at her notes. “Let’s go back to the beginning,” she said. “How do they know you are a gang member?” “Tattoos,” they both said. “Ok, which tattoos?” Miriam asked. Chele Sula spoke first. “This one,” he said, taking off his shirt and pointing to his shoulder. It was a large clown wielding a knife. “Yeah, it’s in the state manual,” Miriam said, “and they can get you for it. If you were an artist, I could make an argument for you.” I had seen the police manual that Miriam was speaking of, and after assuming it was a definitive archive of intelligence, I was surprised to find that much of it was culled from commercial tattoo magazines and newspaper articles. Miriam told them she would contact a lawyer to come and examine their cases thoroughly. Pantera was excitable and removed his shirt. “They got me for my clowns too,” he said, pointing to the tattoos around his neck. He had a ring of interlocking clowns, alternately laughing and crying like the yin and yang of gothic sovereignty’s lacerated anguish. “And you didn’t tell them you worked in a circus?” Miriam said, trying to

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break the tension. Pantera lit a cigarette and looked at us. His tattoos were mesmerizing—tombstones and portraits covered his chest and neck, as did skulls and spiderwebs, scorpions, and daggers. We spent another half hour in the cell before the guards knocked on the outer door, restricting the time we could spend with them. This was never the case with other inmates. The next day I got a call from Andres. He had never called me before, so immediately I knew something had happened. But instead, he asked why I was visiting with Pantera and Chele Sula. “Don’t you know how dangerous that is?” he asked. I was astonished he knew, but before I could react he asked if I could come to visit the following morning before we went any further with their case. “And bring your friend Miriam,” he said. “She needs to hear this too.” Miriam did not make social overtures the way most people did, and I worried she and Andres would not get on well, but my suspicions were misguided. Andres had coffee prepared, and we talked casually for a while before Miriam broke the ice. “Let’s just get to why we’re here and how you know we were talking to Pantera,” she said. Andres held up his hand to stop her. “Ok. I also like to be direct. But let me start by telling you a story,” he said. Andres started off describing a friend of his who had been a member of the military police in the 1980s. It so happened that they had a run-­in recently. “I was on the bus and I saw his face. It was familiar to me. I thought, who is this prick looking at me? This is it, I thought. I thought they had found me and this was the guy who would end my life. Well it turns out that he did recognize me, but he wasn’t there to end my life. I thought he was disguised to sneak up on me, but this prick is hiding out here just like I am. We had a laugh at that.” Miriam rolled her eyes impatiently and checked the time on her phone. “But then I kept seeing him around. And it wasn’t long before he was telling me things that I didn’t want to hear. And I figure, we’re both out here hiding, now he knows that I know, and when he tells these stories, that’s his way of threatening me. We each have a list of enemies a mile long. I’ve killed twenty-­ two people, and I don’t have a clear conscience. All of us live in purgatory expecting that our day will come.” “We really don’t have a lot of time,” Miriam said. “Look, I’ll get to the point. There was a time in the ’80s and ’90s when all of us had so much money it wouldn’t fit in our pockets. But we all ended up going into hiding. You know why? Because we know everything. We know how things work in this country. Well, this is the part that will interest you. A

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few months after I saw him on the bus, this guy calls me in the middle of the night and says to come over because he’s got this heifer and she’s giving birth.” “Oh boy,” Miriam said. “No, listen. So I get out of bed, in the dark, get dressed, and walk five kilometers to his house. I get there and the heifer is asleep outside, and there he was with a bottle of rum. There’s no heifer giving birth. And that’s when I knew I was fucked. He says to sit down and tells me he just heard a story from a friend of his, and he wanted to tell somebody. So he called me. Well, to cut a long story short, it was the story of Chamelecón.” “Ok,” Miriam said, sitting up in her chair. “I called you two here today because I wanted to give you a warning. I know you’re talking to Pantera, and I get that. If there’s any son of a bitch in that prison who has limited time, it’s him and the other guy there, Chele whatever.” “How do you know we spoke to them?” Miriam asked. “I have a friend who is a guard at the penitentiary and I told him to look after Jon, because I’ve known him since he could barely speak Spanish. So I ask him this favor and he gives me updates. But the other day when he called, he was concerned about you both.” “There’s no need for that,” Miriam said. “Well, here’s what I wanted to say to you, Miriam, because you’re the one they’ll go after. You better not believe a word Pantera has to say. Out of all of the people involved, he’s the slickest. That Chele Sula is another story—he’s not too smart. But Pantera is brilliant. They all say so.” “We have only seen them once, like we do with all prisoners,” Miriam said. “Look, I know you want to believe that Pantera was set up by the minister of security. I get that. But he is involved in this fiasco because of a simple police raid in San Pedro Sula. This was a month before the shooting, ok? It was a simple raid at a bus stop. The police arrive, put all of them against a wall to search them for tattoos, and most of the people were normal types. But then there was Pantera, and you’ve seen the son of a bitch. He’s covered [in tattoos].” “Right,” Miriam said. “So the officers told him to lie on the ground, and he does, and then they shoot him in the foot. Boom. And while he’s in pain they put an AK-­47 in his arms and photograph him, and say he attacked them with an automatic weapon. So, from that stage, they were framing him up. Those police wanted to blackmail Pantera and make him sell their drugs and so forth, whatever they needed. But Pantera was smart. He left the north coast to recuperate at

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his mother’s house in Olancho [eastern department]. So he’s way out in the country, living with his mother in a small town. But who has a brother-­in-­law in this small town? The Minister of Security Oscar Álvarez.” “I see where this is going,” Miriam said. “I bet you do,” Andres said. “So he hears about Pantera, but he doesn’t know much about who he is. He just knows there is a gang member lying in bed with a broken foot and a fucking lot of tattoos. So Álvarez goes there, personally, to the guy’s mother’s house, and he makes him an offer. Pantera will have the Barrio 18 shoot up a bus. He’ll give the orders. And what will happen? Some poor people die, but the minister of security will be given all the power in the administration, beyond even the president. The money for fighting gangs comes from the US, and they know how to open those channels. This was about power. And of course, if Pantera talks, they kill his entire family out there.” “You’re saying Pantera ordered the shooting?” Miriam asked. “Well, when he says he didn’t, technically he’s not lying. He was at his mother’s house because he had a broken foot. But he persuaded them somehow. But get this: what do you think I heard about those who did the shooting?” No one spoke. Andres laughed. “Supposedly all of them got passports, visas, all that shit, and then sent to the United States. All this was arranged by minister of security’s network. But when it comes to Pantera, he is in prison because somebody had to be caught. Somebody had to make the minister look like he caught the mastermind. So he’s getting paid big money to stay quiet.” “Then why is he talking to us?” Miriam asked. “Because now he’s scared! Now he realizes that in prison it’s easier to kill him than to pay all that money. So, that’s why he’s talking to you, and why you need to take better care,” Andres said. “I knew there was something wrong with their story,” Miriam said. “But look, today he got a warning. I don’t know how, but he’s been warned. All he has to do is wait a few years and someone will pay to have him escape. He’ll get a new identity, he’ll be flown to the US, and he’ll vanish from Honduras. In the end this guy will be in the States, with a new identity and all his tattoos removed, but he has to wait, and he needs to calm down. So every time you go in his cell, you two are making this more complicated. Pantera chose you because everyone knows you are good at what you do. Hell, we all know that. But you don’t have to resolve every case. And if you don’t mind me giving you some advice, please, stay far away from this one.” A half hour later as we were leaving Andres’s house, Miriam thanked him and they exchanged phone numbers. When we got onto the main road back to Tegucigalpa she told me to pull over on the roadside.

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“What’s going on?” I asked. “While we were talking to Andres I got a text message from Lágrima [Teardrop],” she said. Lágrima was one of the defectors living under plastic tents behind the hospital at the penitentiary, named for the blue teardrop tattooed under his left eye. “All it said was ‘auxilio’ [help] and then ‘Comayagua.’” Miriam tried his phone, and there was no answer. She tried Lino’s phone, and still no answer. “I don’t want to drive to Comayagua, but let’s go,” she said. “It’s only an hour so we’ll be there by 1 p.m. We check on them and leave at 2 no later. Agreed?” “Sure. A few months earlier Lágrima was telling everyone who would listen at the National Penitentiary that the Comayagua prison would become a safe haven for defectors from across Honduras, where they would be able to defend themselves. “A group who risked everything to leave gangs and then started their own gang,” Miriam said, laughing. She considered it more of Lágrima’s blustery hype. He talked big and his storytelling was spellbinding, but Miriam doubted him from the start. “When you get to be my age, you can just see through people,” she said. But as a gang defector, there was no overstating his fear of retribution. In the makeshift tents behind the prison hospital, death could come from any angle, and Lágrima’s eyes scanned the yard a full 360 degrees every time we had spoken. “Defectors like me are the most damned people in all of Central America,” he said, with some amount of pride and yet with fear in his eyes. We arrived at the Granja Penal de Comayagua at 1 p.m. The prison was a one-­story building on the side of a highway, almost unnoticeable in the shadow of the biggest US military geostrategic installation in the country, Soto Cano air base, built in 1984.1 I was relieved the sky was overcast, as the prison was notoriously hot, built around a concrete courtyard that magnified the heat and glare of the sun. We checked in at the guards’ desk, and they unlocked the door to the interior. It was square with dormitories along the perimeter, designed to house 250 inmates, though at the time more than four hundred people were living there. Inmates vied for our attention as soon as we entered, and Miriam stopped to talk to each of them. They needed shoes, medicine, lawyers, phones to call home. It was bad to blow them off, she had told me many times. You never knew how it might come back to you. It took us more than an hour before we saw Lino and Lágrima in the far corner of the yard. They were with several other defectors, and their expressions told us something was wrong. Miriam hugged Lino, trying to lighten the mood. “It was a trap,” he whispered in her ear. Miriam stepped back and looked at

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him, and then three men appeared behind Lino, each of them tall and heavyset. They said nothing, and we tried to speak as if it were not happening. After a few minutes one of them took Lágrima by the arm and led him away, another doing the same with Lino, and several other enforcers appeared in their place, backing Miriam and me into a recess of the courtyard without a word. Other prisoners stood back, and I could see that each enforcer had a large knife in the waistband of his shorts. Miriam stepped toward them and said she was just checking on the boys. They accused her of being a lawyer for defectors and called us stupid for coming inside a prison courtyard. “Do you think this is a place for you?” one asked. “We brought the gang defectors here because we are going to kill each of them, one by one. Do you think you can stop us?” Miriam was pale and stumbled on her words. I could feel the fear drifting across my body like an iceberg, my thoughts struggling to control survival instincts that told me to either surrender or run, and my mind became a small blank space emptied of content. I looked at Miriam, and she was staring blankly into the distance. The men stood in front of us, motionless, as the roar of conversation in the courtyard receded, as if at the end of a tunnel. Images of my childhood flashed up, and suddenly I was in the shallows of a green lake in North Carolina, laughing and splashing water with my cousins, then holding onto my father’s freckled back as he swam underwater, his thinning hair waving with every stroke over a green darkness receding to the lake bottom. Then I returned to my body, somehow focused on a familiar face in the crowd, an older man who had been an inmate in maximum security at the penitentiary in Tamara. Miriam and I brought him a pair of shoes one day, which he was still wearing in Comayagua. He was coming toward us, squeezing through the crowd, and then ushered a man with a guitar between us and the enforcers. The guitarist was a prisoner, too, and with a pained expression, he said he would like to play a song in honor of our visit. He began and for several minutes he strummed and sang, his eyes closed and his face to the sky. Something in the singing and music seemed to pause the events that were transpiring, and seemed to cast everyone in that corner of the prison into a frozen tableau of fear, sadness, and flailing powerlessness. The words and music seemed far away, washed out by the blood rushing through my ears. And though I have tried and cannot recall the words or the chords to the song, I can fully visualize the performance, and remember its combination of gesture, emotion, and the slightly out-­of-­tune chords as one of the most gut-­ wrenching expressions of song I have witnessed in my life. When the song was over Miriam and I thanked him and shook his hand, then realizing that something had changed in the atmosphere around us, altered by his performance.

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The enforcers were still looking at us but had backed away and were no longer blocking our path. Miriam grasped my arm and we wandered into the crowd, in the direction of the outside door. A few minutes later we were facing the guards at the exterior checkpoint. “Did you find who you were looking for?” one of them asked, blithely. “We couldn’t speak to them because some of your coordinators threatened us with knives,” she said. “They are going to do harm to the defectors. Why don’t you have the defectors isolated?” Miriam’s voice trembled, and she was almost shouting. “Because here in this prison, there is nowhere to move them,” the guard said. “So how do you plan to protect them? They will die in there,” Miriam said. “They chose to come here,” he replied. “We didn’t ask for them. And now you want us to be responsible for what happens?” “You are the administration here,” Miriam said. “That might be, but there are too many prisoners for us to control what happens. In reality, all we can do is pray they don’t tear down the walls.” “So you just make it easier for them to victimize each other?” Miriam asked, again raising her voice. “What would you have us do?” another guard responded. Miriam pulled out her cell phone. “I’m calling the minister of security directly,” she said. “Call him and tell him exactly what you’ve seen,” the guard said, looking at the others. “We hope he’ll respond to you. We’ve filed reports, but they won’t respond to us.” Miriam waited as the call went to voicemail, and she left a long message, then hung up. She and the guards looked at each other in silence. One of the guards on the periphery of our exchange spoke up. “We need help as much as those defectors,” he said. “We’re all prisoners here, ma’am.” I could see Miriam’s eyes were full of tears. She waved her hand. “I need some air,” she said, picking up her notebook and heading for the door to the outside.

Afterword

June 2011, New York City “Why do you think you decided to study these gangs?” he asked. I was on the couch in my psychoanalyst’s office, where for the previous two years I had been talking a lot about the experiences of fieldwork that make up this book. That day he was asking me a direct question, which did not happen often. I paused and nothing came to me. At a loss for words I said, “It just happened that way.” This was an inadequate answer, but it stated the obvious as much as it masked something important. On the one hand it is clear that ethnographic fieldwork is defined by an open-­endedness that means in the beginning things can go in a number of different directions. I never had much interest in gangs as a sociological or literary topic and had no plans to study them, but in the early summers of my fieldwork, talk about gangs was constant and seemed to suture together the many other socioeconomic and political issues important to Central America at the millennium. Gangs seemed like an inevitable topic in conversation as much as gangs themselves seemed inevitable in an existential sense. By the late 1990s they encompassed more than one local issue and were fast becoming the means by which other matters were thought and articulated. In a few years gangs would become the prism through which nearly all public debates about historical, moral, political, and economic aspects of the nation were revaluated. Even for those who did their best to scorn or ignore gangs during the early 2000s, over time in Los Piñares those same people developed a deep knowledge of gangs as they simply saturated lived experience. The topic of gangs worked its way into my imagination as an ethnographer because their immediacy in the life of the city felt destined, like a new species incarnating the contradictions of an ecosystem that it arrives to transgress. On the other hand, the answer to my analyst’s question was evasive. Almost immediately I realized that I resisted admitting that gangs fascinated

Confined to the house, she adopted a kitten. Photo by the author.

328 Afterword

me because they seemed so powerful. But after some thought I wondered if it wasn’t that collectively the gangs inhabited some world-­altering potential that most people can only fantasize about. Clearly, they transformed that potential into a necropolitical machine that continues to cause immense harm, but there is no doubt that gangs in the early 2000s encountered a social world that scapegoated them for all manner of contemporary problems and that they managed to harness this process and invert it. What had fascinated me most about them was this power of positive negation, of generative destruction, that intensified a social accusation so thoroughly that it reversed itself and left a space in which radical negativity could thrive. Pandillas had opened the space slightly, inventing gangs as a product of the imagination and organizing small communities around the excitement of teenage bonding and adventure. They amplified those practices of bonding and adventure into a new vitalism in which a member’s life became an exercise in performative transgression. But the maras were something else, and the power they exerted over the community was based on abjection and fear. Why think about them to the extent that a dissertation research project would require? Wasn’t it a slap in the face to the local community to grant the maras so much intellectual labor? But as I look back on the moral panic surrounding the unknown magnitude of the maras’ community during the early 2000s, as it swept northern Central America even in the face of the state’s most intense repression, it seemed also disingenuous to look away. I had easily observed the limited social world of pandillas as that research felt open, visible in real time, and concrete. But during the early 2000s the maras were something nearly mythological, the aura of their iconoclastic reinvention of the social world magnified by a profound negativity that was so powerful, even from the start, as to establish a break in the continuity of historical time. Even as I came to know many of their members, the maras remained unknowable. Of course they were secret societies competing against one another, and with the state competing against them all. But they were not unknowable simply because they were criminalized. The important point here, and what allows for me to portray the maras of the 2000s in Honduras as a social project founded on an immanent critique of law, is that they were criminalized because they were unknowable. They were themselves the community established on the socioeconomic and political contradictions of late capitalist and late liberal governmentality, whose impossibilities were the generative force animating gang sociality and aestheticization. As so-­called enemies of the public good, the maras of the early 2000s dramatized the limits of multicultural and liberal tolerance as an allegorical struggle between good and evil. In their hands, alterity’s demands of the wider nation-­state were radical-

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ized as an impossible threshold toward which the state would only respond with force, demonstrating the perilously narrow passage through which all late liberal futures must pass. Today the struggles of indigenous Hondu­ rans, Afro-­Hondurans, environmental defenders, LGBTQI communities, and other social movements come up against this same impasse, in which self-­ determination and liberal tolerance often run in opposition to one another. The villainous splendor of gang aesthetics of the early 2000s asked of the state what all social movements eventually ask: What will be the cost of social and political belonging? February 2012, New York City It was around noon when I got a text message from Víctor. “The Comayagua prison is on fire,” it said. I looked online, and Honduran news channels were outside the facility as black smoke billowed into the sky. The exterior of the prison was in a state of chaos—guards, civilians, and inmates intermingled in a panicked crowd, powerless to stop the blaze. Gunshots rang out as guards shot inmates climbing over the exterior walls to escape the flames. By the time firefighters arrived the blaze was unstoppable and consumed much of the prison before it burned itself out. It was difficult to imagine such an out-­of-­control fire happening there, as the interior was mostly concrete with little to burn. When photographers entered what remained of the prison, I could hardly look at the photos—many with carbonized bodies piled atop one another, frozen in agonized positions. Newspapers published them alongside survivor accounts accusing guards of spreading gasoline over the courtyard before lighting it on fire. By the following afternoon a crowd of family members had traveled from all across the country and swelled outside the prison gates, demanding an investigation. When the crowd began banging on the doors to the prison, demanding the bodies of their loved ones, they were immersed in clouds of tear gas that outraged a nation all too familiar with the botched investigations of the country’s prison fires. While formal investigation reports would state that the cause of the fire was an open flame or perhaps the cigarette of an inmate lying on a flammable foam mattress, for many Hondurans the conflicting accounts of survivors left the cause of the fire an open-­ended question. Though the prison had been overpopulated with gang members under Mano Dura, the news stories about the blaze in 2012 highlighted the deaths of those considered innocent detainees of the state—the many civilians who were swept up in police operations following the military coup against President Zelaya in 2009. After Zelaya proposed an opinion poll to gauge whether citizens wanted to rewrite elements of the Honduran constitution, he was re-

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moved from the presidential mansion at gunpoint and flown through the US Soto Cano airbase and then to exile in Costa Rica. Protests erupted, and mass demonstrations, police repression, and curfews shut down the country for months on end. “It seems like yesterday that they were burning gang members in San Pedro Sula,” Víctor said when I called the night of the fire, “and now they’re burning protesters. It’s no surprise because the authorities always say protests are infiltrated by gang members. That’s how they tried to criminalize the resistance [to the coup]. But the strange thing is, I know I saw gang members in the marches—and so what? They have a right to be angry and protest too.” This was the first time I heard Víctor speak positively about gangs in several years. After the coup, crime in Los Piñares had gotten immediately worse as local police were often absentee, dispatched to repress protests in other parts of the city. Then after Nationalist candidate Porfirio Lobo assumed the presidency in 2010, the highly contested election resulted in political polarization so extreme that institutional gridlock paralyzed government bureaucracies, including those within the already overburdened criminal justice system. As a result, impunity following the coup was often higher than 90 percent. In Los Piñares, Víctor said, the local head of police had joked openly that since the government had not produced his paycheck in months, he had no choice other than to accept bribes. “Now the police and gangs out here are like carne y uña [flesh and fingernail], one and the same,” he said. “The teachers and bus drivers are all on strike, but there’s plenty of cocaine if you want it.” Looking back at the story of the fire I wondered if Lino, Lágrima, and the others we knew were there at the time. I could still see the face of the guitar player who sang for us the day Miriam and I visited. I couldn’t remember the words to his song but could remember it had been a lament of the guilty, or as Lágrima called himself and other gang defectors, “the damned.” Unlike political prisoners, Lágrima and the others never claimed to be unjustly incarcerated. Prison was their castle. They empowered themselves not by seeking the help of human rights lawyers but by building a criminal underworld as an alternate universe. It was a territory without a map, a vast and mercurial social world where the threat of force was not cloaked behind liberal niceties. The tens of thousands of young people belonging to gangs, burrowing through the underworld, and hovering in the state exterior like fugitives from a sinking ship, built their new world like a bunker. It was what guarded against the menace of a state openly transgressing its laws, as during the fire in Comayagua. When I read the official accounts of prison guards being exonerated of responsibility for the fire, I thought of that song and the poetic exuberance

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flowing through the criminal world where gang members I knew spoke of justice and liberal democracy like quaint dreams of another era. It made me think of the National Penitentiary, where the maras had converted their barracks into cathedrals of the negative sacred, earnestly and reverently painted like satanic Sistine Chapels. Inside those dormitories, I could see that their communities gathered on the other side of a line in the sand, where the aesthetics of criminality were the inverse of the state’s exhausted legal discursivity. As I gazed at the bleak images of weeping families and charred bodies, I longed for the voices of Lágrima, Lino, Erlan, and others, whose charming infamy filled the void of justice’s anticipation. When the Comayagua prison fire occurred, it had only been five years since the peak of gang tattooing, when teenagers tattooed in devils publicly deconstructed facile dichotomies of good and evil, contesting a political imagination that opened some futures and foreclosed others in piles of ash. But by 2012 it was as if their critique had evaporated into nothing, eclipsed by the coup and gangs’ entry into the cartel economy. Did it have anything left to tell? How might one imagine futures otherwise while standing in a pile of ash? July 2014, Tegucigalpa I have avoided writing this book for years—worried for the safety of friends, embarrassed by the cheap swagger of other ethnographers of this topic, and gutted as the violence of gangs across the 2010s reduced their communities to networks of shallow, undiscerning, and traumatized aggressors. But it was not until the child migrant crisis of 2014 that I began to consider the importance of this backstory in which gangs arose out of contradictions inherent to sovereignty and law, US foreign policy, and the fissures of late liberal nation-­states. As I watched the news unfold on Víctor’s television during a return visit in 2014, not only were most of the arrivals to the US southern border from Honduras, but most said they were fleeing gangs. It was true that gang recruitment of children as young as five and six to serve as local informers had become unbearably oppressive across the country. But as US publics debated the root causes of this child migration, the unidimensional representation of gangs as monolithic and panoptic death cults simply served to reinforce processes of criminalization that had made gangs possible in the first place. Gangs were and are highly fluid social communities and have been many things in Central America over the years. It is easy today to forget that until the coup of 2009, gangs commanded the center of national public debate without contributing a word to it. Only the military abduction of the highest executive official in the country could eclipse them. But as it would turn out, the coup and subsequent gang history were inseparable. First, the coup forged a con-

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nection between gangs and cartels in Honduras that rebuilt gangs as part of the organized crime apparatus. Second, the coup enlivened new social movements that flourished in the political void hollowed out by gang life, as the negation of a negation. What, then, of gang history belongs to the historical unfolding of the last decade or more? In this book I have returned to the era of their greatest political potential to ask what gangs were doing at that time and why it is worth recalling. It is my claim that gothic sovereignty consists of two entwined phenomena: the return of states of emergency and their executors, and the aesthetic refraction of the state’s spectral lawlessness in criminalized communities. Mano Dura had nurtured a consistent state of emergency across the 2000s against which gangs forged their aesthetic practices, but the 2009 coup extended the emergency into the 2010s and touched off a wave of political activism that could be put into conversation with fugitive gang societies of the 2000s, if their communities were intelligible behind the criminalizing portrayals that have obscured them. The coup against Zelaya pushed back on progressive reforms intended to rebuild the welfare state in tandem with the political aspirations of the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Bolivaran Alliance of the Americas) and the leftist resurgence of the “pink tide.” When his administration raised the minimum wage, increased pensions, and enabled wider access to public education, those moves earned him the ire of right-­wing elites. Their ire materialized when, in his second year, Zelaya pushed for reform of the national constitution written in 1981 under the military junta of Policarpo Paz García, a document that centralized power in the executive branch. Political opponents accused Zelaya of attempting to eliminate political term limits, and protesters for and against constitutional reform filled the streets for months. In June 2009, military officials arrived at the presidential mansion, shot out the locks, disarmed the presidential guard, handcuffed Zelaya, and flew him to exile in Costa Rica. Again massive protests filled the streets, and the government responded with repressive measures of live ammunition, illegal detentions, curfews, and a renewed state of emergency. While the US State Department did not condemn the coup, in 2010 it celebrated the contested election that installed Porfirio Lobo to the presidency, making the coup seem a trial run for similar constitutional impeachments by right-­wing elites in Paraguay in 2012, Brazil in 2016, and Venezuela in 2019. As the consequences of the coup and election fraud continued to unfold, Oscar Álvarez returned as minister of security and, as a recurrent figure of gothic sovereignty in the country, shepherded new emergency legislation through the National Congress in 2010. The Ley Antiterrorista (Antiterrorist Law) built on the Ley Antimaras

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of 2003 and denied basic rights to those arrested for public protest, effectively criminalizing dissent. The law would be enforced by new hybrid military and civil police forces, trained by US Green Berets of the 7th Airborne Division and funded by the US State Department.1 Such hybrid forces were essential to repressing the public furor in 2012 when the next contested presidential election installed the Nationalist candidate Juan Orlando Hernández as president. The deep and sustained turmoil of the coup and its two subsequent contested presidential elections had serious impacts on daily life in Tegucigalpa, leaving many state bureaucracies paralyzed with work disruptions and stoppages, especially police and court systems that were already overburdened with record arrest numbers following protests. The dysfunctionality of the Honduran criminal justice system allowed for criminal impunity that emboldened paramilitary, cartel, and gang activity across the country. In Los Piñares gangs stepped into the void of law enforcement to inaugurate new extortion measures backed by cartel financing. I hadn’t expected to find out much about it, but in 2012 when I stopped by to say hello to Jorge’s parents, his younger brother, Abel, was there with his six-­month-­old daughter. After being deported from Atlanta in 2012, Abel joined the MS-­13 in a barrio on the other side of Tegucigalpa where he now lives with his wife and child. As we talked, his parents nodded in agreement as Abel described the new alliance between the maras and national cartels. In the city you see police and gangs working together all the time now. They don’t receive their paychecks from the government, and what are they supposed to do? They do business with gangs. But at the same time the DEA and other groups have reduced the amount of cocaine coming into the country. And so the cartels have gotten into extortion, and that’s when they contact us. We collect the money, and if anyone gets caught they’re released the next day because these guys have all the money in the world.

Despite flailing law enforcement at the domestic level, official statistics cited a 72 percent decrease in drug traffic through the country by 2015 as largely due to new international antidrug collaboration.2 Cartels compensated for financial losses by moving into extortion, which shaped the gang world from a vibrant space of political negation into a tool for violence against the poorest communities in the country. Though gangs had been collecting “rent” for years, their new demands were exorbitantly higher, forcing families to plead for money from relatives living abroad. Such demands were backed by

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new levels of violence—burning families in their homes, executing entire families together—and as gangs recruited children to serve as spies in their new operations, families without money for a guide to the US border nonetheless sent their children north as a matter of survival. When I visited in 2014, the new atmosphere in Los Piñares was palpable. The only kids in the street were going back and forth to school in pressed blue and white uniforms. No one was kicking a ball, playing chase, or milling in groups laughing. The kids and most everyone else were all locked inside their homes. I had lunch with Víctor and Elena, and as we were catching up on things, footage of the child migrant crisis played on the television. Children were locked together in rooms bathed in fluorescent light, with nothing but a space blanket each. Víctor kept one eye on the television as he explained what had happened with the local gangs in the previous few years. Since the coup, gangs here have changed. How can I describe for you what happened? It’s like a spaceship landed on top of us, or like an entire organism came to life. We’ve had gangs in this barrio for almost twenty years, but now it seems like it was just getting set up. Now the machine is assembled. The gangs collect money for the cartels, and the cartels provide them immunity. Boom—it’s done. We thought gangs were bad before, but now what they do here they do in the name of someone else. The money they take from us goes up the chain. Living here, it’s like we are secuestrados [hostages].

Since the late 1990s, law enforcement had conveniently portrayed the maras as a transnational formation, a claim I always doubted, though, ironically, that claim became reality when they aligned with cartel organizations whose commodity chain was international. This fundamentally changed what gangs in Honduras were. As Víctor described it, Los Piñares wasn’t the gangs’ home anymore; it was their beat for the cartels. During lunch Elena switched the television to CNN, which was airing infrared surveillance footage of the Sonoran Desert, where tiny figures were moving through the dark landscape by night. Commentators lamented the danger and asked how parents, in Honduras particularly, could possibly send their children on such a journey. Elena exhaled with frustration. “Really, do people in your country think we are irresponsible parents?” she asked. “I think they just don’t know what’s going on here,” I said. “We don’t want our kids to get lost in Arizona, in the desert. We know it’s

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dangerous. But here our kids sit in the house like it’s prison.” Their daughter, Ana, by then fifteen years old, was sitting nearby and put her phone down. “They say that when the migrants get to the US that the police think they’re criminals,” Ana said. “Like gang members,” I said, as that was what some politicians called them. “But that’s not right,” Ana replied. “They leave Honduras because they aren’t criminals. But in the US, they say they are criminals?” “Some say so,” I replied. “But they should know that in this country right now, we can’t trust anybody,” she said. “Police, gangs, it doesn’t matter. If they know who you are, they can make you get involved with them. You don’t have a choice. They make you kill or use drugs and turn you into people like them. Here it doesn’t matter what you want to do with your life. They will make you a criminal.” “So how do you stay safe?” I asked. “All you can do is be careful,” Ana said. “You have to trust in God. But sometimes things happen, and you just run. Everyone thinks about it. All the kids around here talk about it.” We sat in silence, and then Ana was back to her phone, head down and pecking at the keyboard, communicating with friends who were also locked inside their homes a few streets up the hill. Elena chuckled at Ana’s distractedness. “These kids are accustomed to all this now,” Elena said. “It’s what they know.” March 2019, Tegucigalpa Since Juan Orlando Hernández’s contested reelection in 2017, his administration has overseen such political upheaval in Honduras that it is impossible to summarize here. It may suffice to say that under Hernández, political desperation in the country reached a nearly historic threshold, only held in check by increasingly diversified and repressive police and military bodies. Under Hernández the impacts of political and financial corruption, privatization, resource extraction, and narcotrafficking touched the lives of nearly anyone in Honduras. While the investigation of the Indigenous ecofeminist and activist Berta Cáceres’s murder in 2015 reached a global audience, Hondurans who protected their communities from gang violence, infrastructural megaprojects, palm oil plantations, and the privatization of natural resources were more vulnerable than ever. Under the antiterrorist law, those protesters are now subject to incarceration in newly constructed supermax prisons that overhauled the co-­governed prisons of the 2000s with new institutions of segregated and often solitary

336 Afterword

confinement. Arriving there, protesters have been incarcerated alongside some of the country’s most dangerous gang members, and though this initially seemed a cynical ploy by authorities to deter political activism, as one environmental activist recounted to me, it had the unintended consequences of initiating substantive conversations between those embroiled in the gang world and those in the newly criminalized world of protest. It’s no wonder, then, as Amelia Frank-­Vitale and Juan Martínez have described from their fieldwork around San Pedro Sula, that during the previous few years gang members were known to join citizen barricades blocking highways in protest of government policies and have weathered the violence of state authorities alongside nongang individuals. In this sense, when the government criminalized protesters by calling them “gang members,” it was wrong, but only partly so. Protesters were not becoming gang members; gang members were becoming protesters.3 When my taxi arrived in Los Piñares the next day, we were stopped at a checkpoint of the Policía Militar del Orden Público (Military Police of Public Order) where cars were searched, money exchanged hands, and police stood by with automatic weapons at the ready. The force had been created by the Hernández administration to take back gang-­controlled zones and dismantle organized crime rackets. Its mission was similar to that of Mano Dura, but the officers’ highly stylized uniforms seemed to inaugurate a new era in law enforcement. Their forces dressed in slick black suits covered in black armor, their faces shielded by black masks, goggles, and black helmets, making it impossible to discern one officer from another. The aesthetics introduced a faceless and dehumanized surface of law enforcement behind which state power was an indiscriminate force capable of criminalizing any subject before it. Víctor was waiting for me by the roadside, shaking his head. He gestured to the small security camera outside the nearby internet café and laughed. They hung it there as a decoy, supposedly to film gang extortionists, but it was intended actually to film police taking bribes. “When it’s not gangs, the police extort us,” he said as we walked toward his house. When we descended the hill, Víctor told me to close my eyes. After he guided me to the bottom and told me to open them again, I was astonished. His shaky, plank-­wood house had been entirely rebuilt, this time with cinder block and stucco, a concrete stoop, and perfectly painted white bars on all the windows. He had even installed sheetrock and recessed lighting on the inside, where his youngest daughter watched a soccer game on a flat-­screen television. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I knew they were more financially stable, as earlier that year his middle son had made it across the border and was sending money back from a warehouse job in Indiana. But normally renovating your house meant gangs would see you had resources and soon arrive for extortion payments. After

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Víctor gave me a tour I asked if he wasn’t concerned that gangs would see his renovations and, knowing he had money on hand, target his family. “No, some of the MS even helped us carry the heavier materials down the hill,” he laughed. “They did?” “There’s no extortion here anymore,” he said. “Only the police extort us. The MS wants to sell drugs here, and if they are killing people every day, it draws too much attention.” “No extortion?” “As long as we are quiet about the drugs, they just protect the neighborhood like the old days.” “What about across the river?” “Oh, in Brisas? Barrio 18 is extorting people all the time. It’s terrible.” “And so the MS is protecting you all now?” “That’s why no one is scared to sit out in the street!” he said. It was true. His three daughters had been sitting by the street since I arrived. I joined them as they made flowers out of multicolored foam salvaged from the nearby garbage dump. They fashioned it into floral arrangements on stems of wire. “Later we’re going to clean off Guillermo’s grave,” Víctor said. “I thought you might want to see it.” Guillermo, Víctor and Elena’s eldest son, had been killed marching with anticoup protesters in 2010. An hour later we were in a neighbor’s truck and leaving Tegucigalpa, climbing the ridgeline where we turned onto a dirt road descending the other side until we arrived at a fence with a cemetery placard. We walked through the overgrown hillsides until we found Guillermo’s tombstone, where two white horses grazed in the tall grass. The gravestone was painted red, white, and black—the colors of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (National Popular Resistance Front), the political party formed by grassroots organizations to resist the 2009 coup. The group had fought to restore Zelaya’s presidency and become a broad coalition of interest groups as a singular political movement. Guillermo was part of its motorcycle brigade, a group of bikers who rode in front of every march. Ever since Guillermo was a child, Víctor had been strict and kept him always close by his side. But when Zelaya was ousted, Guillermo found his passion marching with the resistance. “He always wanted to belong to something,” Víctor said as we pulled the weeds alongside his grave. At one of their marches in 2010, Guillermo and his girlfriend were crossing an intersection on his motorcycle when a speeding transit bus struck them. Both were killed, and Víctor had been inconsolable. I was in New York at the time, and we spent hours on the phone as he sobbed uncontrollably. But when the rest of Guillermo’s motorcycle brigade volun-

338 Afterword

teered to carry his casket to the graveyard and took a detour through central Tegucigalpa, many other members of the resistance joined. Víctor said no fewer than three hundred people followed them to the graveyard. “They gave speeches in his honor and everything,” he said. “It was the worst day of my life, but I was able to feel proud of him at the same time. I never expected so many people cared about our family.” As Víctor recounted the day, Guillermo’s sisters knelt at the grave and pushed the wire-­stemmed flowers into the dirt as a vibrant plastic bouquet. After visiting with Víctor and Elena I spent several days in the newspaper archives in central Tegucigalpa culling old articles for this book. On the last day, I walked out of the archives in the late afternoon to return to my hotel and rounded a corner on a busy street where I ran directly into Miriam Blanco. We laughed at the chance encounter and stopped briefly into a coffee shop to catch up. After telling me about her recent projects she paused. “Actually I have something to give you, but it’s at home,” she said. “What is it?” “It’s a necklace with a Che Guevara medallion on it. I think you will recognize it.” She looked at me. She meant Ovideo’s necklace, the one he wore at the penitentiary years before. “Did something happen to Ovideo?” I asked. “He was killed in a riot a month ago. The last time I visited, one of the coordinators gave me the necklace, to give to you.” I felt my chest constricting. “I think you should keep it,” I said. “You knew him much longer than I did.” “Yes,” she said, “but you read his poetry. You two had a bond. I never got close to him.” I deferred again, and Miriam said she would find out how to mail it to his family. As we talked a while longer, I asked if she had been to Comayagua after the fire in 2012. “I went with some of the families who protested at the gates,” she said. “What a disaster,” I said. “I couldn’t look at the photographs of the fire. They were too awful.” She agreed but then paused as if waiting for me to say something. “You don’t know do you?” she asked. “Know what?” I asked. “How the fire was started.” “I guess not. The reports said it was a cigarette or an open flame, right? But I don’t think anyone believes that.” “Yes, but if you read carefully, in some reports they said an inmate set his bed on fire. Intentionally.” “Yes, I do remember that.”

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“Well, that is how it happened.” I was waiting for her to tell me something I hadn’t ever considered, which was usually where conversations like this went. She paused again. “One of the inmates who survived told me who it was.” “Who was it?” “You know him.” “It was Lágrima?” “Younger.” Then it hit me. “No—” “It was Erlan Colindres.” “I can’t believe that,” I said. “When this guy told me about it, I don’t think he was aware that I knew Erlan.” “Is Erlan dead?” I asked. She nodded. “Yes, in the fire.” “But what happened?” “I’m not sure, but I knew he joined a new gang from Tegucigalpa called the Chirizos. Some of the inmates there were from Tegucigalpa and had families who were harassed by the Chirizos. So, you know the rest.” “Tell me, please,” I said, feeling emotions rising until I had to look away. “A group of men cornered him, and they say he lit his mattress on fire. It was a top bunk so it caught the roof on fire, and then the whole place went up. That’s why the newspapers said that someone supposedly yelled, ‘We will all die here!’4 That was quoted in newspapers all over the world. It was Erlan who said that.” “Yeah, I remember now, but when I was reading I just passed over it.” There was a long silence. “Well, you always wanted to know about Erlan Colindres,” she said. “So that’s the final chapter.” “Why didn’t you email me and tell me?” I asked. “You want me to email someone in the United States about El Chelito? No way,” she said. She was right. “Well, I wish I had spent more time with him,” I said, feebly. We noticed it was dark outside and the crowds were thinning out. Miriam gathered her files, and I picked up my notebook and pen. “Well, you’ll never forget him,” she said as we walked toward the door. January 2021, Boone, North Carolina Among the ephemera of fieldwork that I keep close at hand are two digital image files on my hard drive. They have been, in many ways, the inspiration for this book. Along with a black-­and-­white photo of Víctor as a young man

340 Afterword

that is taped to my computer monitor and one of Jorge’s earrings sitting nearby on my desk, for many years I have made sure the two image files weren’t lost in the infinite recesses of my hard drive. The photos are both of Jochito, one of the MS-­13 leaders from the penitentiary. I was always somewhat spellbound by him, as he was an underground legend in Tegucigalpa and had a naturally contorted face so menacing that people joked he didn’t need tattoos to look fearsome. His personality was equally coarse, but when my passport was stolen in 2006, Jochito had listened to the account with interest. “That makes you vulnerable to the police,” he said. I nodded. He then invited me to come to the MS-­13 barracks as much as I needed to. He said he would speak to the guards at the front gate, and I would no longer need identification for entry. I had my doubts, but the next time I arrived, I was waved through as Miriam lagged behind, rifling through her handbag for her ID. Jochito approached when he saw me in the barracks that afternoon. I told him what happened at the gate and that to my surprise, the MS-­13 barracks was the only place left where I felt safe. “That’s because here, the police can’t touch you,” he said, smiling, as if I had finally understood. “Feel at home behind these walls.” No one was permitted to take photos in the gang barracks in the mid-­ 2000s, so the photos I have of Jochito are not mine. They came from someone who worked in the antigang unit of criminal investigations who one afternoon gave me a flash drive of computer files from the office, thinking they would help my research. Among them was a folder of mugshots, mostly of people I had never seen before. When I noticed Jochito among them, I was taken aback and immediately felt I had crossed some line in whatever mutual trust we had established during our brief acquaintance. They were mugshots from the night of his capture in 2004, after being on the city’s most-­wanted list for more than a year. He stayed ahead of the police, he had explained to me, by bribing members of their own squad with sums of money he made selling cocaine in the barrios of the market where he had grown up. But someone had betrayed him, it seemed, and there he was, rendered powerless in the state’s inner sanctum. In the first photo Jochito faces the camera. The image is taken from the waist up, and he is without a shirt. The hot light of the flash washes out the texture of his skin. His right eye is swollen, perhaps from being beaten before arriving at the precinct, and he looks at the camera as if caught off guard by the photographer. This image is the less interesting of the two. In the second image Jochito is in profile facing left, as soft white light pours over him. On his arm is a tattoo of a dagger with the name Michelle above it, and on his abdomen is another tattoo of a woman tearing through the skin. Behind him a concrete wall is illuminated by the flash where streaks of black lines and

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handprints are smeared everywhere. I realized then that this was the fingerprinting room where detainees were physically identified and entered into the state database. Both photographs are unartful, standard for mugshots, but to me they are remarkable documents—literal portraits of Jochito’s detention by state authorities, two incarnations of sovereignty eye to eye, where the bombastic legitimacy of the one is effortlessly diminished by the autonomy of the other. As I look more closely at the second photo, in which the glowing light draws attention to the features of Jochito’s face, a faint smile is visible on the corner of his lips and in the twinkling squint of his left eye. His posture is upright, and he seems to laugh at something beyond the frame, where no doubt an unpleasant interrogation with antigang detectives is soon to follow. The photograph is an artifact of his arrest but also of Jochito’s singular defiance, his steadiness contrasted against the panicked scattering of other detainees’ handprints on the wall behind him. As a criminal subject confined by the infrastructure of state power, he is nonetheless radiant. In his presence the room itself, a locus classicus of state authority, feels both of the law and beyond it, a place where the violence of sovereign power becomes literal and where fear is the only response. The images are a study in gothic sovereignty as a legal and an embodied phenomenon, the harsh light of the state exposing Jochito’s wounds no less than the unnerved handprints of those vanished into the depersonalizing abyss of sovereign right. But at the center of the maelstrom Jochito’s soft smile emerges and with a single blow, undercuts the authority governing the room and gestures to an outside, to the underworld with all its potential for transformation, with all its lethal risk and gambler’s luck, with its dead ends and open plateaus. His smile is a supplement to law’s order, the residue left behind whitewashed crime scenes of necropolitical emergency in which state sovereignty emerges from behind its liberal mask as a death’s head. But Jochito’s smile is no such mask. It is the recently brutalized but irrepressible incarnation of an alternative historical horizon. It is the desert in which exhausted pieties of late liberalism are turned to dust. It is a glance backward at a political past foreclosed upon itself. And it is the faint tremor of an awakening, atop the subterranean worlds of our time where monsters and gothic sovereigns dream.

Acknowledgments

For more than twenty years Víctor and Elena Santos and their children have welcomed me into their home with open arms. It is unfortunate that I cannot use their true names here and must adhere to pseudonyms, but to Víctor, Elena, and their family I owe a debt that cannot be repaid. Thank you for your constant friendship. To Miriam Blanco, Dolores, and the Báalam collective, I am eternally grateful for your hospitality and generosity and for your helping me in times when no one else could. In the neighborhood of Los Piñares I thank Jorge, Daniel, Anibal, Gerson, and Beti, each of whom has always been ready to share their lives with me for many years. More broadly in Los Piñares, I will always treasure the time I have spent with Teodoro, Paz, Tomasa, Wilfredo, Daniel, Isaias, Selvin, Hilda, and especially Doña Beti, whose good humor and friendship has meant so much. Across Tegucigalpa I would also like to express my gratitude to the faculty and staff of Los Archivos Nacionales, the Centro de Documentación de Honduras, the Comité por los Desaparecidos,” the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología y Historia, the Unidad de Servicios de Apoyo a la Mujer, the faculty and librarians at the Universidad Autónoma de Honduras, and Vida de Paz, all of whom extended their wisdom, good advice, and facilities on many occasions. In 1997 Dr. Jefferson Boyer took me to Honduras for the first time. The following year he encouraged my return to Los Piñares and ever since has had an open door when I returned. I wish to thank him for his friendship, his generous intellectual collaboration, and for helping me through thick and thin. During our numerous trips together, Gail Phares indelibly shaped my sense of history, justice, and caritas in Central America and demonstrated that compassion is its own form of ferocity. I wish to thank her for her kindness and for setting the highest example for us all. I am also deeply appreciative to colleagues who have offered their insights and feedback on this project over the years: Mark Bonta, Yogesh Chandrani, Ryan Chaney, Aldo Civico, John Collins, Shannon Dawdy, Rick Elmore, Michael Fisch, Anthony Fontes, Lindsey Freeman, Daniella Gandolfo, Chris Garces, Adriana Garriga-­López, Asher Ghertner, William Girard, Daniel Goldstein, Jeff Gould, Jamey Graham, Shane Greene, Nadia Guessous, Thushara Hewage, Illeva Jusionyte, Richard Kernaghan, Alejandra Leal, Susan Lepselter, William Mazzarella, Jun Mizukawa, Ellen Moodie, Todd Ochoa, Alejandro Paz, James Phillips, Adrienne Pine, Gregory Reck, Gilberto Rosas, Zainab Saleh, Robert Samet, Victoria Sanford, Allen Shelton, Jesse Shipley,

344 Acknowledgments

Nitzan Shoshan, AbdouMaliq Simone, Timothy Smith, Anand Taneja, Kimberly Theidon, Deborah Tooker, John Wolseth, Rihan Yeh, Eugene Young, Gabriela Zamorano, and all of my colleagues in the Department of Anthropology at Appalachian State University. I wish to thank them all for their support and critical enthusiasm along the way. From graduate school to the present day I have had the pleasure of knowing Michael Taussig as both a dissertation supervisor and an irrepressible artistic force whose love for writing and imagining the world also shaped mine inside and out. The many weekends we spent hiking and swimming at his home in High Falls, New York, not only brought to life the ideas in this book but taught me that camaraderie is the glue that binds reading, writing, and thinking into a life. I am also grateful to Neni Panourgiá and Alphonso Lingis for offering their immense intellectual resources to help me rethink law and politics, ethics and resistance, and transgression and trust. Many thanks are also due to E. Valentine Daniel and Greg Grandin for pushing me to think about gangs both semiotically and politically within long historical trajectories in both the United States and Central America. This book would not have materialized without Casey Kittrell, senior editor at the University of Texas Press, who took interest in its early stages and offered encouragement, perceptive commentary, and infinite patience to see me through. I would also like to thank Dean Neva Specht for funding acquisition of the photo from Getty Images used in chapter 3, as well as Richard Kernaghan and Ellen Moodie, whose acute observations and generous spirit transformed a draft into a book. I am also indebted to Josh Scalzetti for his discerning eye as copy editor and to Patrick James for his insightful commentary as this text came together. Before and after each trip to Honduras I spent time with my parents, Har­ old and Peggy Carter, at their home in North Carolina, where they always kept my bookshelves and writing table ready for my return. Over the years their genuine interest in Honduras made long stretches of fieldwork emotionally possible, and I am awed by their unconditional support even as the uncertainties of such research became increasingly unsettling. They have always extended to me both love and self-­determination, which I hope to pass on as life unfolds. It still seems like yesterday that Christina Sornito knocked on the door of my windowless carrel at Lehman Library to suggest some fresh air. Despite the words “Amor Fati” tattooed on her upper arm, which I now imagine glowing under the dull fluorescent lighting, I had no idea we would end up spending our lives together. That experience has been more splendid and more magical than I ever imagined possible. Now with the recent arrival of Adrian

Acknowledgments 345

Laurel Sornito-­Carter, whose laugher and touch fill our days with cosmic reverie, each moment is filled with the twinkling of the miraculous. Thank you both for making possible the long hours of writing required for this book; I know I have felt far away. But in the solitude of late nights I often dreamed of our future together and found myself spellbound by its horizon. May love, art, and optimism enchant our lives in the years to come. Amor fati, indeed.

Notes

Introduction 1. US Department of State, 2018 Report on International Religious Freedom (Washington, DC: Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 2019), https://www.state.gov/reports /2018-­report-­on-­international-­religious-­freedom/. 2. Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 3. See Mark Anderson, “When Afro Becomes (Like) Indigenous: Garifuna and Afro-­ Indigenous Politics in Honduras,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 12, no. 2 (2007): 384–413; Darío Euraque, Conversaciones históricas con el mestizaje y su identidad nacional en Honduras (San Pedro Sula: Centro, 2004); Christopher Loperena, “Radicalize Multiculturalism? Garifuna Activism and the Double-­Bind of Participation in Postcoup Honduras,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 21, no. 3 (2016): 517–538. 4. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2000), 255. 5. Elana Zilberg, Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 35–36. 6. Óscar Martínez and Juan José Martínez, The Hollywood Kid: The Violent Life and Violent Death of an MS-­13 Hitman, trans. John Washington and Daniela Ugaz (London: Verso, 2019). 7. Zilberg, Space of Detention. 8. Ellen Moodie, El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 9. Juan José Martínez D’Aubuisson, A Year inside MS-­13: See, Hear, and Shut Up, trans. Natascha Uhlmann (New York: O/R, 2019). 10. Deborah T. Levenson, Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 11. Antony W. Fontes, Mortal Doubt: Transnational Gangs and Social Order in Guatemala City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018). 12. Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 13. Dennis Rodgers, “Living in the Shadow of Death: Gangs, Violence, and Social Order in Urban Nicaragua, 1996–2002,” Journal of Latin American Studies 38, no. 2 (2006): 267–292. 14. Adrienne Pine, Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 15. Amelia Frank-­Vitale, “Rolling the Windows Up: On (Not) Researching Violence and Strategic Distance,” Geopolitics 26, no. 1 (2019): 139–158; Amelia Frank-­Vitale and Juan José Martínez D’Aubuisson, “The Generation of the Coup: Honduran Youth at Risk and of Risk,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2020): 552–568.

348 Notes to Pages 8 –14

16. Richard Lapper and James Painter, Honduras: State for Sale (London: Latin America Bureau, 1985), 84. 17. “Ronald Reagan Has Authorized a $19 Million CIA Plan,” UPI, March 9, 1982, UPI Archives, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/03/09/President-­Reagan-­has-­authorized-­a -­19-­million-­CIA-­plan/6513384498000/. 18. Patrice McSherry, “Tracking the Origins of a State Terror Network: Operation Condor,” Latin American Perspectives 29, no. 1 (2002): 38–60. 19. Gerald Boyd, “Reagan Terms Nicaraguan Rebels ‘Moral Equivalent of Founding Fathers,” New York Times, March 2, 1985, https://www.nytimes.com/. 20. Gregory Treverton, “U.S. Strategy in Central America,” Survival 28, no. 2 (March/ April 1986): 138. See also Phillip L. Shepherd, “The Tragic Course and Consequences of U.S. Policy in Honduras,” World Policy Journal 2, no. 1 (Fall 1984): 116. 21. Comisionado Nacional por los Derechos Humanos, Los hechos hablan por sí mismo: Informe preliminar sobre los desaparecidos en Honduras, 1980–1993 (Tegucigalpa: Guaymuras, 1994). 22. Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories, 1998). 23. Julieta Castellanos and Leticia Salomón, Reforma policial y seguridad ciudadana (Tegucigalpa: Edigrafic, 2002), 2–5. 24. UN High Commissioner for Refugees, U.S. Department of State Country Report on Human Rights Practices 1993—Honduras (New York: United Nations, January 30, 1994), https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6aa4f14.html. 25. Juanita Darling, “Tales of 1980s Brutalities by Contras Arise in Honduras,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1999, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-­xpm-­1999-­oct-­27 -­mn-­26806-­story.html. 26. UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Honduras: Assessment of the Damage Caused by Hurricane Mitch (New York: United Nations, 1998). 27. UN Office on Drugs and Crime, “Transnational Organized Crime in Central America and the Caribbean” (New York: United Nations, 2012), 31–44. 28. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3–18. 29. Serapio Umanzor and Mario Berríos, Los pájaros de Belén (San Pedro Sula, Honduras: Pacura, 2008). 30. For extensive analysis of the legal evolution and mutating tactics of Mano Dura, see Lirio Gutiérrez Rivera, “Discipline and Punish? Youth Gangs’ Response to ‘Zero-­Tolerance’ Policies in Honduras,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 29, no. 4 (October 1, 2010): 492– 504; Lirio Gutiérrez Rivera, Territories of Violence: State, Marginal Youth, and Public Security in Honduras (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 31. Arian Campo-­Flores, Daren Briscoe, Daniel Klaidman, Michael Isikoff, Jennifer Ordonez, Joseph Contreras, and Alvaro Cruz. “The Most Dangerous Gang in America,” Newsweek, March 27, 2005, https://www.newsweek.com/most-­dangerous-­gang-­america -­114579. 32. María Ferrara, Suyapa Martínez, Ellen Verryt, Wilmer Vásquez, Lizeth Coello, Lucas Valderas, et al., Human Rights Violations in Honduras (Geneva: World Organization against Torture, 2006). 33. “Honduran President’s Brother Arrested in Miami on Drug Trafficking Charges,” National Public Radio, November 27, 2018, https://www.npr.org. 34. US Department of Justice, Southern District of New York, “Son of the Former

Notes to Pages 15 – 28 349

President of Honduras Sentenced to 24 Years in Prison for Conspiring to Import Cocaine into the United States,” September 5, 2017, https://www.justice.gov/usao-­sdny/pr/son -­former-­president-­honduras-­sentenced-­24-­years-­prison-­conspiring-­import-­cocaine. 35. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 2: The History of Eroticism, and vol. 3: Sovereignty, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1993); Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 36. Sacha Newell, “The Affectiveness of Symbols: Materiality, Magicality, and the Limits of the Antisemiotic Turn,” Current Anthropology 59, no. 1 (February 2018): 1–22. 37. Newell, “Affectiveness of Symbols,” 12.

Part I. Angels Epigraph: Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 241.

1. Flash 1. Elizabeth Povinelli, “Geontologies of the Otherwise,” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, January 13, 2014. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/geontologies-­of-­the-­otherwise. 2. Frederic Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927). 3. Sonja Wolf, Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 65–66; Elana Zilberg, Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 207–231. 4. Peter Maas, “The Way of the Commandos,” New York Times Magazine, May 1, 2005; Solís Rivera, Luis Guillermo, and Daniel Matul Romero, “La región centroamericana,” in Bajo la mirada del halcón: Estados Unidos–­América Latina Post 11/09/2001, ed. Claudio Fuentes (Santiago, Chile: Biblos, 2004), 135–160. 5. US Department of State, Country Report on Human Rights Practices 2005—Honduras (Washington, DC: Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, March 8, 2006). 6. Inter-­American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), Situation of Human Rights in Honduras (Washington, DC: IACHR, October 3, 2019), https://www.oas.org/en/iachr /reports/pdfs/Honduras2019-­en.pdf. 7. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 51–53. 8. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 93–106. 9. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 52. 10. Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Drug Trade (New York: Lawrence Hill, 2003), 487–492. 11. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Holt, 2007), 118–120. 12. Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories, 1998).

350 Notes to Pages 28 – 43

13. US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Drugs, Law Enforcement, and Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, December 1988), 41–42. 14. US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Drugs, Law Enforcement, and Foreign Policy, 73. 15. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2000), 255. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 60.

2. Baroque 1. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2000), 253–264. 2. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257. 3. Daniela Gandolfo, The City at Its Limits: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 67–88. 4. Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 95. 5. Walter Benjamin, “Theological-­Political Fragment,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006), 305–306. 6. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–6. 7. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 155–200. 8. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Norton, 1990), 22. 9. John Beverley, “Baroque Historicism: Then and Now,” Essays on the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America (New York: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), 136–137. 10. Beverley, “Baroque Historicism,” 66. 11. Beverley, “Baroque Historicism,” 140. 12. Walter Benjamin, “The Poverty of Experience,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996), 732. 13. Elyssa Pachico, “The Problem with Counting Gang Members in Honduras,” Insight Crime, February 17, 2016, https://www.insightcrime.org/news/analysis/the-­problem-­with -­counting-­gang-­members-­in-­honduras/. 14. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 44. 15. Isabel Muñoz, Maras: La cultura de la violencia (Salamanca, Spain: Casa Duero, 2007). 16. Michael Taussig, Beauty and the Beast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), ix.

3. Allegory 1. Linda Newson, The Cost of Conquest: Indian Decline in Honduras under Spanish Rule (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986).

Notes to Pages 4 4 – 59 351

2. Eric Wolf, “The Virgin of Guadaloupe: A Mexican National Symbol,” Journal of American Folklore 71, no. 279 (1958): 34–39. 3. Brian Davies, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae: A Guide and Commentary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 4. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (New York: Value Classic Reprints, 2017). 5. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014), 138. 6. Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927– 1934, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996), 542. 7. Benjamin, “Destructive Character,” 541. 8. Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 163. 9. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, The Truth about Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 40–71 10. Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 137–160. 11. As I read through the posts I printed and glued them into my fieldwork notebook, afraid they could be removed, though in 2021 segments can still be found archived online by a figure named Minstrel Boy on the website Democraticunderground.com under the column “Another Man Who Knew Too Much?,” https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss /duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4228844. 12. An example of those studies is José Miguel Cruz, “Las factores asociadas a las pandillas juveniles en Centroamérica,” Estudios Centroamericanos 685 (2005): 1156–1182. 13. US President’s Special Review Board, The Tower Commission Report: Report of the President’s Special Review Board, February 26, 1987, https://archive.org/details/TowerCom mission. 14. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Anchor, 2008) 27–29. 15. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (New York: Verso, 1998), 232. 16. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 45.

4. Image 1. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927– 1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 510. 2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 4. Frank Graziano, The Millennial New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8. 5. Marcos Carías, Crónicas y cronistas de la conquista de Honduras (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Linda Newson, The Cost of Conquest (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986). 6. Leticia de Oyuela, Historia mínima de Tegucigalpa: Vista a través de las fiestas del patrono San Miguel a partir de 1680 hasta finales del siglo XIX (Tegucigalpa: Guaymuras, 1996).

352 Notes to Pages 59 – 82

7. Juan B. Valladares, La Virgen de Suyapa (Tegucigalpa: Editorial Universitaria, Universidad Autónoma de Honduras, 1995), 40–41. 8. Oyuela, Historia mínima de Tegucigalpa, 14. 9. James Dunkerly, Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America (New York: Verso, 1989), 548–552. 10. On state kitsch, see Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997), 94. 11. Walter Benjamin, “Exposé of 1935,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002), 898. 12. Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand (London: Routledge, 2006). 13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-­Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 14. “‘Celda especial’ para que no escape ‘El Siniestro II,’” La Prensa, August 2, 2005. 15. “Celda especial,” La Prensa. 16. “Recapturan a marero asesino de agente de DEA,” El Heraldo, August 8, 2005. 17. “Recapturan a victimario de agente de la DEA,” La Prensa, August 8, 2005. 18. “Construyen ‘leonera’ para ‘El Chelito’ en Renaciendo,” La Tribuna, August 26, 2005. 19. “‘El Chelito’ estrena celda en Renaciendo,” El Heraldo, August 25, 2005. 20. “‘El Chelito’ estrena celda,” El Heraldo. 21. “Otro menor peligroso escapa de ‘Renaciendo,’” La Tribuna, August 26, 2005. 22. “Otro menor peligroso,” La Tribuna. 23. “Otro menor peligroso,” La Tribuna. 24. “‘Los Puchos’ intentan rescatar a ‘El Chelito,’” El Heraldo, November 17, 2005. 25. “Se fuga ‘El Chelito,’” El Heraldo, November 19, 2005. 26. “Por 30 mil lempiras habrían dejado ir a ‘El Chelito,’” La Prensa, November 27, 2005. 27. “Recaptura a marero,” El Heraldo, November 27, 2005. 28. “Condenado El Chelito por muerte de Markey,” El Heraldo, January 21, 2006. 29. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, The Truth about Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 3–39. 30. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 303–304. 31. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 303–329; Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 142; Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1999), 43.

5. Danger 1. Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Don­ ald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 142.

Notes to Pages 85 –118 353

Part II. Devils Epigraph: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage), §4, 79.

6. Underworld 1. Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 3 (January 2011): 446. 2. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Language, Counter-­Memory, and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139– 164. 3. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 140. 4. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 160. 5. Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” in Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings, ed. Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-­De Mauro (Kelowna, Canada: Praxis, 2008), 23–27. 6. Roger Caillois, A Little Guide to the 15th Arrondissement for the Use of Phantoms, trans. Ruby Ryan (New York: Readux, 2015). 7. David Harris, Eugène Atget: Unknown Paris (New York: New Press, 2003). 8. Georges Bataille, “X Marks the Spot,” Documents 7 (1930): 437–438. 9. Leo Cabranes Grant, “The Fold of Difference: Performing Baroque and Neobaroque Mexican Identities,” Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 483. 10. See Robert Brenneman, Homies + Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Kevin O’Neill, Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 11. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 39–42. 12. Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Sudhir Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day (New York: Penguin, 2008); William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 13. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 30–43. 14. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, 3 vols. (New York: Zone, 1988–1999).

8. Crime 1. Jean-­Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 2. Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 3 (January 2011): 445. 3. Antonin Artaud, “An Emotional Athleticism,” in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 259.

354 Notes to Pages 118 –149

4. Artaud, “Emotional Athleticism,” 260. 5. Gilles Deleuze, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16–27. 6. Audra Simpson, “Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, Voice, and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures 9 (December 2007): 67–80. 7. See Charles Briggs, Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 8. Leticia Salomón, Julieta Castellanos, and Mirna Flores, La delincuencia juvenil en Honduras (Tegucigalpa: Centro de Documentación de Honduras and La Agencia Sueca Para el Desarrollo Internacional, 1999), 17–21. 9. Sartre, Saint Genet, 86–100.

9. Storm 1. Émile Durkheim, On Suicide, ed. Alexander Riley, trans. Robin Buss (New York: Penguin, 2006), 59. 2. Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-­Founder of World Anarchism, trans. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Vintage, 1971). 3. Bakunin, “Reaction in Germany,” in Bakunin on Anarchy, 57. 4. Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York: Norton, 1965), 86. 5. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, 86. 6. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 262, 263. 7. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 254. 8. David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography (New York: AK, 2009), 530. 9. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 2003), 178; “The Lisbon Earthquake,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927–1934, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996) 536–540; “The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 563–568. 10. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 263. 11. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Honduras: Assessment of the Damage Caused by Hurricane Mitch, 1998: Implications for Economic and Social Development and for the Environment (Mexico City, April 14, 1999), https://repositorio.cepal.org /handle/11362/25506. 12. Christina Sornito, “Tuyaw, a Reminder of the Dead, or Another Way to Talk about the Weather in the Age of the Super Typhoon,” Journal of Historical Sociology 32, no. 1 (2019): 38–48. 13. In Larry Towel, “Rebuilding Honduras,” New York Times, December 6, 1998. 14. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 178. 15. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero, 2009), 8.

10. Rubbish 1. Frederic Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927). 2. Influential works by other scholars in the Chicago sociology cohort include Nels

Notes to Pages 149 –159 355

Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man (New York: Martino Fine, 2014); Ruth Cavan, Suicide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928); Paul Cressey, The Taxi Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Robert Park and Ernest Burgesss, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Clifford Shaw, The Jack Roller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Lewis Wirth, The Ghetto (New York: Transaction, 1997); H. Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 3. Thrasher, The Gang, 116. 4. Thrasher, The Gang, 6. 5. Thrasher, The Gang, 487–532. 6. Frederic Thrasher, “Social Backgrounds and Education,” Journal of Educational Sociology 1, no. 2 (1927): 69–76; Frederic Thrasher, “The Comics and Delinquency: Cause or Scapegoat,” Journal of Educational Sociology 23, no. 4 (1949): 195–205. 7. J. Mark Ruhl, “Redefining Civil-­Military Relations in Honduras,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 38, no. 1 (1996): 33–66. 8. Julie Marie Bunck, Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation: Drug Trafficking and the Law in Central America (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2013), 286. 9. Dennis Rodgers, “The State as a Gang: Conceptualizing the Governmentality of Violence in Contemporary Nicaragua,” Critique of Anthropology 26, no. 3 (September 1, 2006): 321. 10. Rodgers, “The State as a Gang,” 323–325. 11. Rodgers, “The State as a Gang,” 326. 12. Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report 1996—Honduras, January 1, 1996, Mexico City. 13. US Department of State, U.S. Department of State Country Report on Human Rights Practices 2000—Honduras (Washington, DC, 2001), 3. 14. Comisionado Nacional de los Derechos Humanos, Los hechos hablan por si mismos: Informe preliminar sobre los desaparecidos en Honduras, 1980–1993, 2nd ed. (Tegucigalpa: Guaymuras, 2002). 15. Amnesty International, Honduras: Continued Struggle against Impunity (Mexico City, 1996). 16. Casa Alianza, “Demanda de los representantes de Marco Antonio Servellón García, Ropnyu Alexis Betancourt Hernández, Diómedes Obed García y Orlando Álvarez Ríos y de sus familiares contra Honduras ante la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos ‘Cuatro Puntos Cardinales,’” Tegucigalpa, 2005. 17. Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (May 2008): 191–219. 18. Stoler, “Imperial Debris,” 193. 19. Stoler, “Imperial Debris,” 193. 20. Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Holt, 2006), 88–99. 21. John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York: New Press, 2005), 99–125. 22. Ginger Thompson and Gary Cohn, “Torturer’s Confessions,” Baltimore Sun, June 13, 1995. 23. Deborah Tyroler, “Honduras: Battalion 316 Continues Acts of Political Violence,”

356 Notes to Pages 159 –177

Latin American Database, November 9, 1988, archived at https://digitalrepository.unm.edu /noticen/2535. 24. Julia Preston, “Honduras Accused of Death Squad Operations,” Washington Post, November 1, 1988. 25. “Honduras: Death Squads May Be Returning,” Latin America Press (Lima), August 18, 1994; “Death Squad Threatens to Execute Young Delinquents,” Central America NewsPak (Austin), January 9, 1995. 26. “Death Squad Allegedly Murders Human Rights Coordinator,” La Tribuna, February 12, 1998. 27. Ana Yancy Espinoza, La seguridad privada en Centro América (San José, Costa Rica: Fundación Arias por la Paz y el Progreso Humano, 2003), 137. 28. Freddy Cuevas, “Jefe policial denuncia ejecuciones de pandilleros en Honduras,” El Heraldo, August 31, 2005, archived at https://www.lmtonline.com/lmtenespanol/article /Jefe-­policial-­denuncia-­ejecuciones-­de-­pandilleros-­10226718.php. 29. Gastón Gordillo, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 6. 30. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, trans. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), 6. 31. Hannah Arendt, Love and St. Augustine, ed. Joanna Scott and Judith Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 18–44. 32. Plato, The Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (New York: Penguin, 2003). 33. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986). 34. Bataille, Erotism. 35. Ernesto Guevara, La guerra de guerrillas (San Salvador, El Salvador: Ocean Sur, 2014). 36. Patricia Cálix, “Historia y silencio bajo cielos de mármol,” El Heraldo, October 31, 2015, https://www.elheraldo.hn/.

11. Evil 1. Georges Bataille, “The Language of Flowers,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 10–14. 2. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty and Venus in Furs, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone, 1991), 88–89. 3. Pierre Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 73. 4. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vols. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1988–1999), 197. 5. Michel Leiris, “The Sacred in Everyday Life,” in The College of Sociology (1937–39), ed. Denis Holier, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 27. 6. Bataille, Accursed Share, 3:222. 7. Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 1–18. 8. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 47–48.

Notes to Pages 177 – 210 357

9. Oscar Martínez and Juan José Martínez, The Hollywood Kid (New York: Verso), 12. 10. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 90. 11. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 303. 12. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 90. 13. Tom Hayden, “Homies Were Burning Alive,” AlterNet, June 2, 2004. 14. “Prison Riot in Honduras Kills 86 Inmates,” New York Times, April 6, 2003. 15. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 38. 16. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 38. 17. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 264. 18. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Peter Demetz (New York: Shocken, 1986), 187. 19. Alan Riding, “Discontent of Peasants in Honduras Leads to Violence and Death,” New York Times, July 22, 1975. 20. Terrence Turner, “The Social Skin,” Not Work Alone: A Cross-­Cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival, ed. Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin (London: Temple Smith, 1980), 112–140.

12. Corruption 1. Gregory Treverton, “US Strategy in Central America,” Survival 28, no. 2 (March–­ April 1986): 128–139. 2. Peter Dale Scott, Jonathan Marshall, and Helen Fisher, The Iran-­Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (San Francisco: South End, 1987). 3. Greg Grandin, Empires Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Holt, 2007), 64–69. 4. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999). 5. Ioan Grillo, El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 63. 6. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 55. On Matta, see p. 54. 7. Grandin, Empires Workshop, 114–115. 8. Seymour Hersch, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 63–71. 9. Steve Hendricks, A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (New York: Norton, 2012). 10. Charles Tilley, “War-­Making and State-­Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169–191. 11. David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service (New York: Atheneum, 1977). 12. Howard Hunt, Give Us This Day: The Inside Story of the CIA and the Bay of Pigs Invasion (New York: Arlington House, 1973).

358 Notes to Pages 210 – 225

13. John Nutter, The CIA’s Black Ops: Covert Action, Foreign Policy, and Democracy (New York: Prometheus, 2009), 14. 14. Donald Schultz, “How Honduras Escaped Military Violence,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 3, no. 2 (1992): 107. 15. Timothy Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Anchor Books), 26. 16. Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 72. 17. Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1982), 297. 18. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 513. 19. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 513. 20. Peter Kornbluh, The Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York: New Press, 1998), 270–272. 21. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 25. 22. In William Leogrande, “How to Dispose of the Contras,” opinion, New York Times, August 9, 1989, https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/09/opinion/how-­to-­dispose-­of-­the -­contras.html. 23. Noam Chomsky and Edmund Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 83–128. 24. Stephen Kinzer, “Our Man in Honduras,” New York Review of Books, September 20, 2001. 25. Eduardo Galeano, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1971), 335.

13. Lumpen 1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (New York: Penguin Classics, 1967). 2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International, 1947), 43. 3. Robert Bussard, “The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels: The Rise of the Idea of the Lumpenproletariat,” History of European Ideas 8, no. 6 (1987): 675–692. 4. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 231. 5. Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism, ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Vintage, 1971), 294. 6. Ginger Thompson, “Gunmen Kill 28 on Bus in Honduras; Street Gangs Blamed,” New York Times, December 25, 2004. 7. Rolando Canizales Viril, “El fenómeno de los movimientos guerrilleros en Honduras: El caso del Movimiento Popular de Liberación Cinchonero (1980–1990),” Diálogos Revista Electrónica (San José: Universidad de Costa Rica, 2008), 2041–2050. 8. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International, 2004), 83. 9. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 10. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 (London: Electric Book, 2001), 38. 11. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 83. 12. Marx, Class Struggles in France, 56.

Notes to Pages 225 – 239 359

13. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 75. 14. John Lee, “Camarena Figure Gets 3 Life Terms: Drugs: Honduran Juan Matta Ballesteros Has Received Two Other Lengthy Sentences for His Role in the DEA Agent’s Murder,” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1991, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-­xpm-­1991- ­05- ­09 -­me-­1914-­story.html. 15. “Del autobús a la avioneta,” El País, December 4, 1990, https://elpais.com/diario /1990/12/04/espana/660265220_850215.html. 16. Ioan Grillo, El Narco: The Bloody Rise of Mexican Drug Cartels (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 60. 17. Julie Marie Bunck and Michael Ross Fowler, Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation: Drug Trafficking and Law in Central America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press), 271. 18. Larry Rohter, “Seized Honduran: Drug Baron or a Robin Hood?,” New York Times, April 16, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/16/world/danli-­journal-­seized-­honduran -­drug-­baron-­or-­a-­robin-­hood.html. 19. Paul Gootenberg, “The ‘Pre-­Colombian’ Era of Drug Trafficking in the Americas: Cocaine, 1945–1965,” The Americas 64, no. 2 (October 2007), 133–176. 20. Gootenberg, “The ‘Pre-­Colombian’ Era,” 152. 21. Luis Astorga, “Cocaine in Mexico: A Prelude to ‘Los Narcos’” Cocaine: Global Histories, ed. Paul Gootenberg (London: Routledge, 1999), 188. 22. Grillo, El Narco, 60. 23. Steven Dudley, “Honduran Elites and Organized Crime: Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros,” InsightCrime, April 9, 2016, https://insightcrime.org/investigations/honduras-­elites -­organized-­crime-­juan-­matta-­ballesteros/. 24. Grillo, El Narco, 63. 25. Stephen Engelberg, “Suspect in Murder of Drug Agent Is Seized in US Trap in Honduras,” New York Times, April 6, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/06/world/suspect -­in-­murder-­of-­drug-­agent-­is-­seized-­in-­us-­trap-­in-­honduras.html. 26. James LeMoyne, “Military Officials in Honduras are Linked to the Drug Trade,” New York Times, February 12, 1988. 27. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 57. 28. Engelberg, “Suspect in Murder of Drug Agent Is Seized.” 29. Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1937–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 137–160; Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 30. Bataille, “Psychological Structure of Fascism,” 142. 31. Daniella Gandolfo, “Lumpen Politics? A Day in ‘El Hueco,’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 60, no. 3 (2018): 511–538. 32. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, 143. 33. “Encargo del ‘Chapo’ traía misterioso avión que aterrizó en Toncontín,” La Prensa, May 26, 2015, https://www.laprensa.hn/.

Part III. Justice Epigraph: Jean Genet, Thief’s Journal, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove, 1964).

360 Notes to Pages 241– 258

14. Community 1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), 293. 2. Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove, 1966), 147–171. 3. Michael Hardt, “Prison Time,” Yale French Studies 91 (1997), 64–79. 4. Ricardo Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre, “The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Towards an Interpretive Social History of Prisons,” in The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830–1940, ed. Carlos Aguirre and Ricardo Salvatore (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 1–43. 5. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135–194. 6. On reforms of the period see Salvatore and Aguirre, “Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America.” 7. Michel Foucault, “About the Concept of the Dangerous Individual in Nineteenth-­ Century Psychiatry,” trans. Alain Baudot and Jane Couchman, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 1, no. 1 (1978): 1–18. 8. Inter-­American Commission on Human Rights, Report on the Inter-­American Commission on Human Rights on the Situation of Persons Deprived of Liberty in Honduras (Washington: Organization of American States, 2013), 7. 9. Tea Fredrickson, “Abject (M)Othering: A Narratological Study of the Prison as an Abject and Uncanny Institution,” Critical Criminology 27, no. 2 (2019): 261–274. 10. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 67. 11. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 12. Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 1–19. 13. Esposito, Communitas, 6–19. 14. Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Social Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 13–14. 15. Chris Garces and Sacha Darke, “Surviving the New Mass Carceral Zone,” Prison Service Journal 229 (2017): 2–9. 16. Jon Horne Carter, “Neoliberal Penology and Criminal Finance,” Prison Service Journal 229 (2017): 2–9. 17. Esposito, Communitas, 20–40; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: The Matter, Form, and Power of a Common-­Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (New York: Penguin Classics, 2017). 18. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 268. 19. Giorgio Agamben, “What Is a Camp?,” in Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 37–47. 20. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 104–112. 21. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. 22. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 105. 23. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 89.

Notes to Pages 258 – 272 361

24. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 25. Esposito, Communitas, 124.

15. Sovereignty 1. Mario Berríos, Un payaso en el delito: El temible criminal “Luz Baja” (San Pedro Sula, Honduras: Hernández, 2002). 2. Franz Kafka, “Before the Law,” in Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schocken, 1961), 135–136. 3. Kafka, “Before the Law,” 135. 4. Kafka, “Before the Law,” 136. 5. Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1991), 127–181. 6. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 28. 7. Derrida, “Before the Law,” 203–204. 8. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Continuum, 1962), 73–74. 9. Chris Garces, “The Cross Politics of Ecuador’s Penal State,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 3 (2010): 459–496. 10. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 71–115. 11. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vols. 2 and 3: The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty (New York: Zone, 1993). 12. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (New York: Zone, 2002); Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 13. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. 14. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 8–9. 15. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2000), 263. 16. Derrida, “Force of Law.” 17. James Martel, Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (New York: Routledge, 2013). 18. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1999), 253. 19. Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 20. Elana Zilberg, “Gangster in Guerilla Face: A Transnational Mirror of Production between the USA and El Salvador,” Anthropological Theory 7, no. 1 (2007): 37–57.

362 Notes to Pages 279 – 297

16. Apocalypse 1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 3–31. 2. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lies and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 28–56. 3. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London: Fv, 2020). Also see William Mazzarella, “The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who’s Afraid of the Crowd?” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 4 (2010): 697–727. 4. Jon Horne Carter, “Gothic Sovereignty: Gangs and Criminal Community in a Honduran Prison,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 3 (2014): 475–502. 5. Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 3. 6. See, for example, Robert Brenneman, Homies + Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Kevin O’Neil, Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 356. 8. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 356. 9. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (New York: Penguin, 1986). 10. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 5. 11. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 9. 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Vintage, 1989), 35, 45. 13. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 11. 14. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 13. 15. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 40. 16. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 32. 17. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 32. 18. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 52. 19. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 51. 20. Brenneman, Homies + Hermanos, 153–187. 21. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 18. 22. Gilles Deleuze, “Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos,” in Essays Clinical and Critical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 36–37. 23. Deleuze, “Nietzsche and Saint Paul,” 48.

17. Trust 1. Alphonso Lingis, Trust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), x. 2. For a detailed history of private security contracting, see Larry Hancock and Stuart Wexler, Shadow Warfare: The History of America’s Undeclared Wars (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2014). 3. Robert Weiss, “From Cowboy Detectives to Soldiers of Fortune: Private Security Contracting and Its Contradictions on the New Frontiers of Capitalist Expansion,” Social Justice 34, nos. 3–4 (2007), 1–19. 4. Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993).

Notes to Pages 298 – 339 363

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-­Moral Sense,” in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Pearson and Duncan Large (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 114–123.

18. Futures 1. Abdul Nafey, “Security and Geopolitics in the Caribbean Basin,” Indian Quarterly (November 2004): 45.

Afterword 1. Sandra Cuffe, “US Trained Police Are Hunting Down and Arresting Protesters amid Post-­Election Crisis in Honduras,” The Intercept, February 20, 2018, https://theintercept .com/2018/02/20/honduras-­election-­protest-­tigres/; “Honduras: Congreso aprueba ley antiterrorista,” La Prensa, November 18, 2010, https://www.laprensa.hn/. 2. “Honduras: Ingreso de droga se ha reducido en un 72 porciento,” El Heraldo, September 24, 2015, https://www.elheraldo.hn/. 3. Amelia Frank-Vitale and Juan José Martínez D’Aubuisson, “The Generation of the Coup: Honduran Youth at Risk and of Risk,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2020): 552–568. 4. Marcos Aleman and Freddy Cuevas, “Prison Inferno Kills 358 Inmates in Honduras,” Pittsburgh Post-­Gazette, February 16, 2012. https://www.post-­gazette.com/.

Index

aesthetics: 43, 172, 271; antiliberal, 281, 284, 328, 329, 331; Baroque, 36, 96, 100; as critique, 4, 87, 177, 211; as embodiment, 57, 331; and gangs, 3, 115, 175, 236, 285; gothic, 87, 99, 279; and gothic sovereignty, 16, 40, 175, 179; of police and security forces, 336; and states of emergency, 40, 332; surrealist, 232. See also tattoos affect, 282; as the basis of gang sociality, 23, 279; and contradiction, 4; as reservoir of potential, 61, 93, 118, 138, 177, 280; and the sacred, 94; and semiotic incoherence, 15, 62–63, 89, 181, 236, 282; and spectrality, 65; and transgression, 87, 225, 233, 271, 284; and worlding, 117 Agamben, Giorgio: and ambivalent sacred, 269–270; on the camp, 257, 270; and sovereign power, 57, 177, 245, 257– 258 agape, 163–164 Aguacate airbase, 204, 211; and history, 213; and law, 245 allegory: Baroque and, 36–37, 53; crime and, 65; and crisis, 212; gangs and, 13, 93, 178, 181, 282; the negative sacred, 94; redemption, 53; and tattooing, 63. See also evil Álvarez, Oscar: and La Araña, 47–48; and Chamelecón bus shooting, 234, 322; demonization of gangs, 25, 40, 46–49; and La Diabla, 48 Álvarez Martínez, General Gustavo, 25, 159 angels, 20, 75, 105; in Christian theology, 44; Erlan Colindres, 40, 65, 67; and history, 45, 136; Saint Michael, 59 anomie, 138. See also Durkeim, Émile apocalypse: in Christian theology, 62–63, 144–145; gang appropriation of, 63, 148; and historical time, 40; in tattoo

images, 40, 63. See also Revelation, Book of Aquinas, Thomas, 44 Árbenz Guzmán, Jacobo, 8, 203, 209–210, 212 Artaud, Antonin, 118 Báalam collective, 246–249, 251; and antiliberalism, 298; archives, 264; and group structure, 292; and maras, 251; office vandalized, 252; and risk, 265 Bakunin, Mikhail, 138–139, 219–220 banana industry, 8; and narcotrafficking, 26–27, 207; and politics, 27; and US imperialism, 196, 227 bank robbery, 155, 198, 206–207, 223– 224, 261 baroque: aesthetics of, 16, 36, 39, 96; and allegory, 36, 272; and difference, 100; in Latin America, 37; reinterpretation of, 37–38; and Spanish colonialism, 43; temporality of, 37–38, 40, 58, 271. See also allegory; Benjamin, Walter; historical time Barrio 18, 226; barracks at National Penitentiary, 72, 271; and Chamelecón bus shooting, 322; history of, 11, 135–140; and leadership, 39, 48; and recruitment, 115; at Renaciendo, 74. See also gangs; maras; tattoos barrios, marginal, 13, 87–101; architecture of, 107; and extortion, 14; and gang recruitment, 14; and historical agency, 96, 99; and media, 109; and pandillas, 34–35; and police, 119; and psychological health, 107; and religion, 62; surveillance, 119. See also city; gangs; Tegucigalpa Barthes, Roland, 57 Bataille, Georges: on beauty, 172; on eroticism, 164; on fascism, 83, 174; on

366 Index

general economy, 83, 101, 174–175; on heterogeneity, 82; on lumpenproletariat, 50, 232–233; on negative sacred, 68; on sovereignty, 15, 174; on violence, 94–95, 269–270 Battalion 3–16, 157–160; US and, 9, 314; veterans of, 10, 158, 160, 252, 313 Baudelaire, Charles, 37 Benjamin, Walter: on allegory, 45, 147, 211–212; on awakening, 29–30, 37, 61; on Baroque, 36–39, 52, 282; on catastrophe, 142–143; on destructive character, 45, 57, 211–212; on the dialectical image, 4, 29–30, 53, 57; on experience, 37; on gamblers, 211–212, 214; and gothic Marxism, 181; on history, 35–36, 45–46, 53, 61, 139; on messianism, 271; on new barbarism, 38; on photography, 56; on profane illumination, 53; on redemption, 53; on shock, 37, 282; on state of emergency, 36, 139, 282; on surrealism, 37; on violence, 17, 271. See also historical time; sovereignty, state Beverly, John, 37 Blake, William, 44 Blanco, Miriam, 69–83; and journalism, 71; and sensory awareness, 81–82; and underworld, 71–72 Bonilla, Juan Carlos “El Tigre,” 160 Borjas, María, 160 Bratton, William, 12 Brenneman, Robert, 287 Breton, André, 232 brujería. See sorcery Bush, George H. W., 231 Bush, George W., 11 Cabranes-­Grant, Leo, 96 CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement), 108 Caillois, Roger, 68, 93, 269–270 Callejas Romero, Rafael, 10 Cannibal Corpse, 127 carcerality. See prisons Carías Andino, Tiburcio, 243 caritas, 32, 163–164

cartel: Medellín, 27–28; Sinaloa, 234, 317 Casa Blanca, 77, 248, 252–256, 266–268, 273, 299–304, 330. See also organized crime; Penitentiary, National Cementerio General. See Cemetery, General Cemetery, General, 48, 136, 166–169, 251, 299, 304, 337 Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). See CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) Chamelecón bus shooting, 217, 220, 234– 236, 289; multiple narratives of, 319– 322; trial, 319 Chávez Frías, Hugo, 314 children, 32, 34, 151–169; and creativity, 23, 149–151, 154; and criminalization, 50; deaths of, 32; and fugitivity, 153, 166, 168; and police, 152–154 Chomsky, Noam, 213 Christianity, 3; and angels, 44; and binary morality, 181; liberation theology, 32, 163–164; millennial, 137, 143; and new religions, 276–279, 285; Protestantism, 16, 61–63, 106, 143–144, 254; and redemption, 192; and self– sacrifice, 269; and youthful creativity, 151. See also colonialism; evangelism of gangs; Revelation, Book of CIA (Central Intelligence Agency): and Árbenz, 8; and Battalion 3–16, 153; and Contra war, 9, 27–28; and counter-­ insurgency, 159; and gangs, 78; history of covert operations by, 9, 27–28, 80–81, 159, 197, 204, 209–210, 212, 228; Robert Seldon Lady, 194–197, 201, 203–204, 208–210, 212, 228; and Lepaterique base, 102; and Juan Matta, 230; and Frankie Stearns, 79–80, 296 Cinchoneros, 218, 220–221, 231, 234– 236 city: and citizenship, 93; and corruption, 143; and crime, 22, 24–25, 68; and gangs, 46, 58, 94; and Latin American modernity, 147; ruins, 34, 49, 107, 149–153; and sacred, 93–94; and shock, 94; and violence, 130. See

Index 367

also barrios, marginal; Comayagüela; Tegucigalpa cocaine. See narcotrafficking industry Colindres, Erlan, 24–25, 31, 76–78; as angel, 63, 67; arrest of, 52–53, 54–57; as Christ figure, 56–57; and Comayagua prison fire, 331, 339; criminalization of, 24–25, 46; and exteriority, 82; and la leonera, 49, 65–66, 74; and Markey shooting, 21, 79–81; and negative sacred, 67–68; and race, 58; and Renaciendo, 40, 48–50, 63–66, 76–79; and sorcery, 294–295; trial of, 66–67; and upper-­class crime groups, 31; and Virgin of Suyapa, 41. See also Markey, Timothy; Puchos, Los; Stearns, Frankie colonialism, 37–38, 58–59. See also baroque Comaroff, Jean and John, 46, 67 Comayagua prison, 323–325, 329–331, 338. See also prison fires Comayagüela, 32, 47, 140, 147, 161–169, 223, 252 Communist Party of Honduras, 253 conspiracy theory, 232, 295. See also covert operations Contra war: and cartels, 155, 205; and cocaine, 9, 11, 27–28, 52, 198; and continuity with Mano Dura, 245; funding of, 27, 154, 197–198, 207–208; and historical returns, 213, 265; peace talks, 10, 28, 231; revisionist history of, 30; and Frankie Stearns, 296–297; and Tower Commission, 52. See also covert operations; narcotrafficking industry; Nicaragua covert operations: in Central America, 209–211; and Contra war, 27, 81; and DEA, 52; and disposal problem, 212; history of, 197–198; and Hotel Maya, 213; and memory, 29; and Office of Strategic Services, 52; and private contracting, 209; and psychological operations, 210–211. See also sovereignty, state Creciendo en Gracia: See Growing in Grace

criminality: and art, 117; and baroque style, 16; and bodies, 3, 39, 57, 321; and Contra war, 52; and gangs, 22, 40; and martyrdom, 56; and photography, 24, 54–57, 61; and political protest, 335–336; and righteousness, 40, 117, 156, 219, 236; and seduction, 291; as spectral, 67–68; and surrealism, 37, 67, 181. See also law; sovereignty, existential; sovereignty, state Cruz, José Miguel, 351n12 dark web, 80, 199 DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration): and Contra war, 28–29, 231; and corruption, 50–51, 202; covert operations by, 52, 79–80, 82, 256; in Honduras, 19, 21, 24, 26–27, 196, 202, 333; and informants, 313, 316; in Venezuela, 50– 51. See also Contra war; imperialism; narcotrafficking industry death penalty, 280 death squads, 32–34, 156–160, 181, 213, 235, 280, 312. See also Battalion 3–16 Deleuze, Gilles: and Baroque, 100; on Book of Revelation, 287–288; on desire, 97; on difference, 177; on the event, 145, 180–181; on folds, 100; on humor, 173; on minor languages, 118; on nomadism, 284 Derrida, Jacques, 36–37; on justice, 267– 268; on messianism, 271; on the sovereign, 258 devil: and affect, 282; and antichrist, 278; and history, 3, 13, 40, 148, 179; and pleasure, 144; and protection, 192; and transformation, 176–177, 188; and wage labor, 271–272 Diabla, La. See Isabel Martínez, María Sierra (La Diabla) Drug Enforcement Administration. See DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) Durkheim, Émile, 67–68, 138 economy. See CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement); NAFTA (North

368 Index

American Free Trade Agreement); neoliberalism El Salvador: and Contra war, 8, 30; and MS-­13, 5–7, 40, 272; and Soccer War, 59–60; and war on terror, 12, 24, 303 Escobar, Pablo, 232 Esposito, Roberto, 249, 258 evangelism of gangs, 283–284; emphasis on New Testament, 283; and interiority, 283; versus maras’ code of silence, 284; and selfhood, 284. See also Christianity; rehabilitation centers evil: and apocalypse, 143–144; ethics of, 13, 63, 117, 173, 239, 278; and Mano Dura, 25, 39, 48; and political theology, 58, 62, 331; and truth, 85, 175–176, 181, 189, 282. See also devil; laceration; tattoos FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation): and gangs, 310; reputation in Honduras, 265; training of Central American authorities, 303 fieldwork, ethnographic: and estrangement, 82–83, 92–93, 261–262; and immersion, 90–92, 251; and interviewing, 115–116; and montage, 91, 293, 351n11; as nonlinear, 69, 91, 326; notebook in, 54, 91, 83, 91–92, 248, 275; and photography, 57; and senses, 81, 91, 95, 118; and storytelling, 53. See also trust Fontes, Anthony, 7 Foucault, Michel: on the body of the condemned, 279; on the dangerous individual, 243; genealogical method of, 92; and on history, 92; on the modern prison, 241, 255, 257 Frank-­Vitale, Amelia, 7, 336 Freud, Sigmund, 37, 50, 233 Galeano, Eduardo, 29, 228 Gandolfo, Daniela, 233 gang defectors: carceral conditions, 257, 323–325; and community, 315; and redemption narratives, 98; violence against, 137

gangs: as analytical object, 4–5, 22–23, 99; Bloods and Crips, 5; and contagion, 100; and criminality, 52, 98; “culture” of, 99; and difference, 100, 118, 243; historical agency of, 100; and identity, 121; and illicit economy, 11–12, 99, 125, 137, 156; as pandillas, 6, 21, 87–89, 120, 125, 137; as political communities, 3, 98; and revolutionary struggle, 216, 272; self–­mythologizing of, 46–47, 96; and symbolic inversion, 98, 100, 328; theatricality of, 50, 83, 99; and wasteful expenditure, 83, 100– 101, 271–272, 318 gangs, research on, 19, 216; and counterintuition, 90, 116, 292; ethical complexity of, 114, 116, 185, 190–191, 328; in rehabilitation centers, 97–99. See also fieldwork, ethnographic; secrecy; trust gender: and incarceration, 313; and maras, 172; and violence, 26 Genet, Jean: childhood, 116; on evil, 117, 239; on the Mettray reformatory, 241; on ostracism, 116–117 Gordillo, Gastón, 162 gothic sovereignty: and abstract violence, 57; and anti-­liberalism, 93, 175, 269, 341; and consciousness, 61, 129; definition of, 15–16, 24–25, 332; and evangelism, 284; and heterogeneity, 50, 82–83, 156, 232–233; and history, 81, 138, 160, 197, 208, 296, 332; and late liberal prison, 244, 257–258, 284; and Frankie Stearns, 80–82; and tattooing, 40, 179, 282, 319, 331 governmentality, 52, 155, 244. See also late liberalism Graeber, David, 139 Granja Penal de Comayagua. See Comayagua prison Growing in Grace, 276–279 Guadalajara cartel, 28, 229 Guatemala; and Cold War, 5, 30; and gangs, 7; and Mano Dura, 12; and 1954 coup, 8, 203, 209–212 Guevara, Ernesto “Che”: and foco move-

Index 369

ment, 165; as symbol, 231–232, 253, 267, 338 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 163–164 Guzmán, Joaquin “El Chapo,” 14, 234 heavy metal music, 34, 63, 99, 107, 115, 177; and roqueros, 166–167; sonic elements of, 127 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: on cunning, 61; negation in the thought of, 117; and “spirit of the times,” 39; and totality, 92 Hernández, Juan Orlando: and authoritarianism, 336; and disputed elections, 333, 335; and narcotrafficking industry, 13 Hertz, Robert, 62 historical time: disruption of, 30, 40, 44– 46, 100, 138; end of, 1; and ethnography, 53; as fable, 258; and media, 56– 58; and miracle, 67; and quasi-­event, 250; See also gothic sovereignty; maras Hobbes, Thomas, 254, 258 Hobsbawm, Eric, 138–139 Hotel Maya (Tegucigalpa), 213–214 human rights advocacy, 29; and children, 149–169; and Erlan Colindres, 64–66; and justice, 298–299; and maras, 181, 186, 256–257, 280–281, 330; and prisons, 69, 73–75, 246, 248, 256; and safety, 73–74, 249, 252, 299 Hurricane Mitch, 11, 22, 104, 108, 121, 135–148; and Central Penitentiary, 243–244; and Christian eschatology, 143; and resettlement, 72, 121; and ruins, 152, 161; and trauma, 142 illicit economy, 35, 100, 177; cartels as part of, 14; gang appropriation of, 16, 23, 26, 52, 99; as historical artifact, 8, 10, 52, 266; and legibility, 50; and sacrifice, 176; sociology of, 50, 225; and survival, 11 images: and ethnographic writing, 279– 280, 339–341; of gang members, 24, 95, 271; and graffiti, 74; and monstrosity, 127, 129, 179; and montage,

279; and photographs, 54–57, 129. See also Benjamin, Walter; criminality; tattoos imperialism, 6, 8, 16, 24, 29–31, 52, 158, 323, 333; monuments to, 213; neo­ imperialism, 57 indigeneity, 41–44, 57–58, 60, 106, 241; and social movements, 329, 335. See also colonialism; late liberalism Institutional Review Board (IRB), 245 Iran-­Contra scandal, 9, 27, 208, 232 Iraq, 12, 24, 208; and Iran-­Contra II, 208 Isabel Martínez, María Sierra (La Diabla), 38–39, 48–49 journalism. See media judicial system, 66, 135, 234; and courtroom experts, 263; and maras, 261– 267, 289, 291. See also criminality; law juvenile delinquency. See criminality Kafka, Franz, 267–268 kidnapping: of Miriam Blanco, 71, 310– 311; and Cold War, 165; and covert operations, 195; and DEA, 231; of Ricardo Maduro’s son, 12; and organized crime, 124–125, 198 Klossowski, Pierre, 173 labor, wage: and globalization, 127, 218; and illicit economy, 35; refusal of, 35, 38, 96 Lacan, Jacques, 177 laceration, 16; and abstract violence, 180, 193, 270; and law, 258; and tattoos, 148, 319; and transgression, 174, 192; and wage labor, 100 Lady, Robert Seldon: and Contra war, 204; dark web discussions of, 199; and escape from Italy, 194; father of, 202– 203; personal history, 351n11 late liberalism, 3–4, 61; and carcerality, 257; and futures, 16, 193, 271, 329, 331; and governmentality, 4, 23, 52, 193, 250, 328; and multiculturalism, 328–329; and the otherwise, 23, 46, 93, 250, 279, 341; and Protestantism,

370 Index

61; and quasi-­event, 250; and social projects, 250; and urban life, 93 law: and Contra war, 34; and crime, 39, 56, 117, 173, 331; and exteriority, 47, 82, 93, 258, 288, 328, 341; and impunity, 26; and justice, 291; legitimacy of, 34, 39, 52, 56–57; Ley Antimaras, 12, 332; Ley Antiterrorista, 12, 332; and political theology, 58; and spectrality, 56–57; and state of emergency, 40; and tattoos, 3, 8; and violence, 17, 37 Lawrence, D. H., 285–287 Le Bon, Gustave, 280 Leibniz, Gottfried, 53, 100 Lepaterique base, 59, 102, 106–107, 204, 211; and history, 213; and law, 245 Levenson, Deborah, 7 liberation theology, 163–165 Lingis, Alphonso, 292 Lobo Sosa, Porfirio, 14 Lombroso, Cesare, 46 lumpenproletariat; Mikhail Bakunin on, 219–220; Georges Bataille on, 50, 212, 232–233, 236; Karl Marx on, 219–220, 224–225, 232–233; and solidarity, 218 Luz Baja. See José Francisco Valle Maduro Joest, Ricardo, 12, 180, 234 Mano Dura, 6, 12, 332; atmosphere during, 62; and Contra war, 25; and criminality, 13; and gang recruitment, 270; and incarceration, 244–245, 250, 329; and political theology, 145; popular support for, 24; and prison fires, 180, 329; and spectacle, 48, 132, 291; and spirits of the dead, 176; tactics of, 134– 135, 235; and tattoos, 173; and war on terror, 11–13, 24, 39, 195–196. See also gangs; prison fires; maras maras: and cartels, 13, 333–334; and Chamelecón shooting, 220; and contagion, 170–171; and Contra war, 11; criminalization of, 12, 206; as cultural problem, 3, 105; and existential sovereignty, 83, 101, 115, 175–176, 269–272, 279–

287, 318; and exteriority, 130, 181, 321; and extortion, 308; and futures otherwise, 34, 46, 133, 279; and gender, 172; historical accounts of, 5–8, 30, 133, 177; and historical time, 30, 46, 135–138, 143, 148, 219, 236, 271, 280, 328; and illicit economy, 30–31, 52, 89, 100–101, 227, 271–272; and justice, 267; and kinship, 133–134; organizational structure of, 22–23, 89, 100, 132, 249; and pandillas, 6, 87; as political community, 89, 101, 185, 249, 328; and psychological warfare, 207, 235, 262, 276; and recruitment, 89, 115, 120– 121, 169; and resistance, 211, 218–219, 221; and solidarity, 115, 226, 236–237, 275, 318, 335; and Frankie Stearns, 299–301; and surveillance, 264, 274– 275, 310; and territory, 115, 119, 169; and violence, 164–165, 234–237, 256– 257. See also gangs; prison fires; tattoos Markey, Timothy, 19, 21, 26, 49–52; and assassination, 19, 79–80; and clandestinity, 54, 56–57; and Venezuelan office, 50–51 Martínez, Juan José, 6–7, 177, 336 Martínez, Oscar, 177 Marx, Karl, 50, 218–220, 224–225, 232–233; and Mikhail Bakunin, 138–139; and crime, 67; gothic Marxism, 181. See also Benjamin, Walter; lumpenproletariat Matta Ballesteros, Juan Ramón, 28–29, 198, 207, 227–233; as anti-­imperialist icon, 232; capture of, 227, 231; and CIA, 230; and the cocaine trade, 227, 265–266 Mbembe, Achille, 179 media, 1; and affect, 82; and crime reporting, 3, 24, 46–47, 54–57, 198; gang appropriation of, 19, 40, 236; and marginal barrios, 34, 95, 109, 157; and prison fires, 178–181; and spectacle, 6–7, 12, 19, 25, 67, 121 messianism, 282–283 migration, undocumented, 1, 30, 238, 331; and border crossing, 184, 187; and

Index 371

family, 113–115; in Los Piñares, 18– 184, 221–222, 334–335 military, 24, 32–34, 60, 132; and civil relations, 154; and death squadrons, 156–160; and intelligence, 200, 206, 320; and narcotrafficking industry, 28, 229–230; and 1963 coup, 154; and 1978 coup, 207; and organized crime, 28, 156–157, 206, 223. See also military coup of 2009 military coup of 2009, 14, 329–332; and law enforcement, 333, 335; and organized crime, 331–332, 333; political impacts of, 332–333; and political protest, 337 millennialism, 58, 144 Mitchell, W. J. T., 279–280 monstrosity: and apocalypse, 285; and desire, 127; and futures, 341; gang appropriation of, 24, 175–178; and law, 24, 99, 158, 291; and pathology, 3 Moodie, Ellen, 6–7 Morazán, Francisco, 152, 214. See also Ney, Michel MS-­13 (Mara Salvatrucha), 19, 49, 333; and Barrio 18, 11, 72, 104, 226; and carcerality, 75, 173, 259, 261–266, 271–272, 340; and Chamelecón shooting, 220; and heavy metal music, 177; historical accounts of, 5–6, 177, 309; illicit economy, 11; and justice, 268; and pandillas, 89; and prison fires, 178–179; and recruiting, 115, 130, 221; and revolutionary left, 272; and secrecy, 12; and spectrality, 119, 121; and spirituality, 278–279, 283; and state institutions, 308, 333; and surveillance, 237, 251; and war on terror, 12. See also gangs; maras; prison fires Muñoz, Isabel, 40. See also images; saints; tattoos NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 10, 52, 107 narcotrafficking industry: and Cuba, 228– 229; and gangs, 7, 23, 89; history of, 28–29, 198; and military, 28, 198, 208,

218, 229; in New York City, 228; in Panama, 230; in Peru, 228; as a ruin of counterrevolutionary history, 212; and the state, 14, 234, 235, 247–248; and Tegu­cigalpa cartel, 229, 253, 263 negation, 45–46, 138–139, 148, 328, 332. See also criminality; evil; Hurricane Mitch negative sacred. See sacred, the Negroponte, John, 208, 213 neoliberalism: and crime, 46, 52, 96, 280; and development, 13, 107, 142, 218; and labor, 7, 35 Ney, Michel, 214–215 Nicaragua, 216, 221; gangs in, 7, 155–156, 218–219; police in, 156, 219; and Sandinista Revolution, 7–10, 32, 314; and Frankie Stearns, 81; and Virgin of Suyapa, 59. See also Ortega, Daniel Nietzsche, Friedrich: and deception, 298; and evil, 85; genealogical method of, 92; and ressentiment, 97, 285; and revaluation of values, 63; and untimeliness, 30 Noriega, Manuel, 230 North, Oliver, 27, 208, 213 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). See NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) Nueva Suyapa, 5, 24–25, 58, 68, 256; and El Infiernito, 52, 56, 63. See also Colindres, Erlan; Puchos, Los; Virgin of Suyapa Ocaña Navarro, Aguas Santas, 63, 79, 297 Once Dragones, 102–129. See also gangs; Piñares, Los O’Neill, Kevin, 7 organized crime, 223–224, 233–234, 247. See also Contra war; covert operations; narcotrafficking industry Ortega, Daniel, 10, 313–314 pandillas. See gangs Pastora, Edén, 296 Paul, Apostle, 163–164 Pedagogical Center for Renewal, 40, 48–

372 Index

49, 69–83; and austerity, 63–64, 74, 259; as commons, 65; history of, 63; and la leonera, 49, 74–75; and landscape, 72; and mental health, 77; and negative sacred, 68; and organized crime, 81, 297; and safety, 77–79, 80; and sorcery, 295. See also children; Colindres, Erlan Penitenciería, Nacional. See Penitentiary, National Penitentiary, Central, 241, 243–244 Penitentiary, National, 12, 16, 48, 69, 173, 245–258; and austerity, 12, 250, 257; and co-­governance, 12, 244, 251–254, 317; and Colombian cartels, 315–317; contraband in, 273, 306, 316–317; gang defectors in, 256–257, 323; history of, 244–245; and journalism, 71, 249, 264; maras versus political prisoners, 256–257; maximum security at, 254–255, 289; as means of survival, 71, 77, 252, 266; and military intelligence, 256; and missionaries, 256, 283; porous infrastructure of, 273; prisoner release, 300–305, 312; surrounding landscape, 72; and surveillance, 273– 274, 294; transformation by criminal groups, 49, 244–245, 254, 267–273, 315–316, 331; violence in, 69, 273, 331. See also Barrio 18; evangelization of gangs; MS-­13; and prison fires Peru, 43, 163, 228 photography. See image Piñares, Los: description of, 63, 83, 89, 105; and economic liberalization, 106– 107; first impressions of, 34–35; and gang prevention programs, 34, 102, 107–108; and gangs, 63, 87–89, 104, 119–121, 128–130, 132, 175; and generation gap, 105, 115; historical accounts of, 106; and Hurricane Mitch, 140–142, 145–147; illicit economy in, 87, 89, 99, 181, 221–223; and informal justice, 186, 190; and Mano Dura, 62, 132–135, 194, 196; and media, 95, 198; religion in, 61–62, 143–144;

and safety, 90, 104, 118–120; and solidarity, 95, 132–133; and soundscape, 61–62; and structural inequality, 175, 198; and surveillance, 119, 128–129, 273–275. See also ethnographic fieldwork; gangs; maras Pine, Adrienne, 7 police: and affect, 274, 294; antigang, 12, 38; and Chamelecón shooting, 220, 291, 321; collaboration with gangs, 123–124, 129, 173, 299, 306, 330; and Contra war, 10, 34, 153–159, 245; corruption, 13, 89–90, 222–224, 253, 262, 306–310, 321–322, 335; and death squads, 71, 153, 156–159, 251; General Directorate of Criminal Investigation, 38, 306–308; and Hurricane Mitch, 146, 152–153; and illicit economy, 185, 235, 237; and journalism, 56–57; and labor conditions, 222–223; and Mano Dura, 134–135, 270; National Directorate of Investigation (DNI), 200; surveillance, 264–265, 309, 336; violence, 31, 161, 163, 165, 166, 248, 253, 262, 272–273, 329– 337. See also Colindres, Erlan; death squads; Mano Dura political theology, 36, 58, 62. See also allegory; law; sovereignty, state Povinelli, Elizabeth, 4, 23, 250 prison fires: 177–180, 186, 245, 259, 329– 331; and Erlan Colindres, 338–339; investigations, 280–281, 330–331; maras’ response to, 270–271, 281–282, 284–285; and prison reorganization, 280–283 Puchos, Los, 21, 25, 66; and El Infiernito, 522; and Virgin of Suyapa, 58; and Renaciendo, 49, 73–78 Reagan, Ronald: 8–9, 27, 197, 208, 229, 297. See also Contra war; Iran-­Contra scandal refusal, ethnographic, 118. See also fieldwork, ethnographic; gangs, research on; trust

Index 373

rehabilitation centers, 7, 34, 97–99, 252; and asceticism, 98; and linear history, 279, 287–288; maras’ refusal of, 281, 283–285; and pathologization, 99; and redemption, 98; and salvation of the practitioner, 98; and selfhood, 97, 279, 287; and Frankie Stearns, 300–301; and tattoo removal, 187. See also Christianity; evangelism of gangs Reina, Carlos Roberto, 140, 145, 154 Renaciendo, Centro Pedagógico. See Pedagogical Center for Renewal Revelation, Book of, 59; and Jesus Christ, 285; and paganism, 286; and rotary-­ thought-­images, 286–287; and vengeance, 144–145, 284–285 Rodgers, Dennis, 7, 155–156 Rose, Jacqueline, 282–283 ruins, 142–143; and Hurricane Mitch, 147, 152–154, 161–162, 243–244; and imperialism, 158, 213; and Rosario mining company, 202; and rubble, 162; and tattoos, 148, 177–178. See also allegory; Benjamin, Walter; historical time sabotage, 71–72, 261–266, 273–275, 294, 314; of police files, 308, 310 sacred, the: and community, 241; and negation, 57, 67, 94–95, 143, 172; negative sacred, 68, 94, 241, 331; and profane, 67–68, 174; and sacrifice, 176–177, 269–270; and secrecy, 137; and sovereignty, 176, 258–259, 269–270; transgression, 282; and utility, 174; and violence, 283–284. See also criminal; laceration; saints; state of exception sacred sociology, 94 sacrifice. See sacred, the saints, 44–45; and carcerality, 241; and criminals, 126, 179; and protection, 293 Sandinistas, 7–9, 32, 208, 231, 296, 314; and 1978 coup, 207–208; and police, 156. See also Contra war; covert operations; Nicaragua

Sarmiento, Benicio, 293, 295 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 116–117, 126 Schmitt, Carl, 15, 244 Schultz, Donald, 210 secrecy, 63, 114, 273–275, 298; and experience, 236; and gang research, 19, 30–31, 71–72, 89–91, 118–119, 156; and National Penitentiary, 301–305, 312 Simpson, Audra, 118 Situationism, 93 Soccer War, 59–60 sorcery, 39; and Centro Pedagógico Renaciendo, 295; and gangs, 293; and National Penitentiary, 291–295; treatment for, 292–294, 298, 304–305 Sornito, Christina, 142–143 sovereignty, existential, 8, 15, 58, 93, 173– 175, 193, 341; and sacrifice, 270; and vengeance, 284. See also gothic sovereignty; laceration; maras sovereignty, state, 4; and Contra war, 155, 197, 245; and crime, 46–47, 173, 341; and disaster, 139–140; and gangs, 341; as heterogeneous, 155–156, 196; and lawlessness, 160, 193, 245, 341; and media, 6, 57, 67; and miracles, 60; and pagan magic, 288; and state of exception, 7, 8, 15, 36–37, 39, 58, 155, 258, 272, 331; and underworld, 52; and United States, 231, 232, 305. See also covert operations; gothic sovereignty; statecraft spirits: and aura, 176; and city, 93; and carcerality, 77, 304; and history, 96, 105–106; and Hurricane Mitch, 142– 143; and place, 165, 282 Standard Fruit Company. See banana industry statecraft, 52, 87; and illegal practices, 198, 272. See also covert operations; sovereignty, state; underworld state of exception. See sovereignty, state Stearns, Frankie, 80–82; and Casa Blanca, 299–300; covert operations by, 296– 297; historical accounts, 79, 80–81;

374 Index

illicit activities of, 301; and Ocaña Navarro, 79; and rehabilitation center, 300; and US embassy, 81. See also covert operations; lumpenproletariat; underworld Stewart, Kathleen, 36, 91, 117–118 Stoler, Anne, 158 tattoos, 3–4; beauty of, 172; and body, 184, 279; and Christian evangelicals, 278–288; and countermythology, 40, 179–180; and ethnographic writing, 279–280; face, 39, 170–193; and historical time, 40, 147, 175, 236, 288; of occult images, 40, 144, 192, 269, 285, 319, 331; political anthropology of, 173–175; and selfhood, 280, 288. See also laceration; sacrifice Taussig, Michael, 40, 53, 271–272, 344 Tax, Sol, 168 Tegucigalpa: city­scape, 69, 80, 83; colonial administration of, 41, 43; crime in, 22; and El Chivero, 251; and land occupations, 106; marginal barrios, 95, 199; and silver mines, 43; urban development, 115; urban migration in, 106, 121 Thrasher, Frederic, 23, 149–151 transgression: and crime, 99, 109, 116, 328; and disciplinary institutions, 241; and existential sovereignty, 174, 328; force of, 94, 192; and gangs, 16, 48, 192–193, 328; and law, 98, 117. See also sovereignty, existential; maras Treverton, Gregory, 9 trust, 168, 184, 188, 251, 275, 298, 340; and friendship, 110–112; and imperialist history, 76, 78–79, 246–249, 254, 265, 268; as joyous risk, 292, 302– 303. See also fieldwork, ethnographic; imperialism Turner, Terrence, 193 underworld, 31, 235; and abjection, 294; and Charles Baudelaire, 37; and counter­history, 46, 58; and the dead,

46; and exteriority, 82, 93, 328, 341; and gangs, 83; and heterology, 82; historical dimensions, 82; and incommensurability, 4, 82–83; and legibility, 93, 236; lumpenproletariat in, 225; and safety, 226; as source of information, 299, 320–321; and state, 87; and upper-­class crime groups, 185. See also covert operations; lumpenproletariat; sovereignty, state United Fruit Company. See banana industry United States: and narrative of progress, 196–197; and underworld, 87. See also banana industry; Battalion 3–16; Contra war; Mano Dura United States Army School of the Americas, 34, 245. See also Battalion 3–16 United States embassy, 29, 78, 83, 303; architecture of, 213; and covert operations, 81; and gang prevention programs, 250–252, 264; and intimidation, 78, 247, 248; and Matta extradition, 232; and 1954 coup, 210; and politics, 196–197 Valle, José Francisco (Luz Baja), 265– 266 vengeance, 12, 112, 125–126, 143, 283– 288 Vida de Paz, 108, 149–169, 253, 268, 292 Virgin of Guadalupe, 44 Virgin of Suyapa: historical accounts of, 42–43, 57–61; and historical time, 43; and Los Puchos, 58; and Markey shooting, 21; and racial difference, 44, 58, 60; and state, 59–60; theft of, 67–68. See also Colindres, Erlan; colonialism; Puchos, Los war on drugs, 24, 26, 52, 196–197, 208, 229. See also DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration); imperialism; narcotrafficking industry war on terror, 11–12, 39, 272, 208–209;

Index 375

and Cold War, 24; and Guantanamo Bay, 63; and imperialism, 197 Webb, Gary, 9–10, 27 Weber, Max, 61, 155 Women’s Center for Social Adaptation, 313. See also gender

Zelaya, José Manuel, 14, 135, 234, 260, 329–330, 332, 337. See also military coup of 2009 Zetas, Los, 222 Zilberg, Elana, 6–7, 272

376 Index