Mortal Doubt

Abstract

Twenty years since the end of Central America’s longest and bloodiest civil war, Guatemala City is dominated by both the fact and fear of out-of-control crime. In powerful, haunting prose, Mortal Doubt takes readers inside the making of this new order of violence through the evolution of its most infamous emissary: the maras, or transnational gangs. While maras are widely blamed for the rise of peacetime crime, Anthony W. Fontes argues that they have, in fact, become key figures through which both Guatemalan and global society prop up a sense of order in the face of overwhelming uncertainties about the cause and meaning of so much violence. Through histories of war and peace out of which the maras emerge, into the porous prisons and illicit businesses in which they operate, and out through the brutal spectacles that draw gangs into the global imagination, Mortal Doubt traces how maras’ flesh-and-blood violence has become indissoluble from their symbolic power in social imaginaries, giving cover to a host of actors feeding and feeding off peacetime insecurity. To convey the consequences of the struggle to make sense of senseless suffering, Fontes weaves fantasy and reality together in ways that cannot always be pulled apart, and the doubled image of the gangster who walks the city streets and the gangster infesting strung-out imaginations blend and merge. This figure, in turn, provides a lens through which to witness the making and mooring of collective terror in Guatemala City and beyond. Mortal Doubt is composed of two distinct and complementary chapter forms. Even-numbered chapters are “traditional” scholarly essays, while odd-numbered chapters are ethnographic short stories that provide connective tissue and a narrative arc for the book.