The Maras of Guatemala City: Notes on an Anguished World of Teenagers

Abstract

In Guatemala City, on October 6, 1986, the newspaper El Gr?fico reported that some youths in a bus had thrown a hand grenade at a crowd of teenagers in front of a discoth?que called Monta?a One of the wounded?a ten-year-old who had been on his way downtown to buy a pair of sneakers?offered a somewhat different account. A group in a school bus, he said, descended upon him and others with knives and guns, snatched gold chains, and fled. A few days later, Carlos Escoto of the National Police delivered the official version: the grenade had gone off by itself in the midst of a band of drugged youths loitering in front of La Monta?a P?rpura. After disclosing that the youths belonged to the Mara 33, a criminal band operating out of a poor neighborhood, Escoto explained that the group had its origin in U.S. television programs and misguided parenting: This evil affecting our youth is the fault of irresponsible parents who have permitted their children to live in complete freedom.l Thus began, in some confusion, both the public life of the urban youth gangs known as mar as and the public critique of them. Since then, the maras have received extensive, indeed extravagant, publicity from Guatemalan politicians and from the media. Many observers link the gangs to terrorism and la subversi?n and think that they loom as the single greatest threat to the country's civilian government. Others consider them apolitical pockets of despair. Still others, aligned with the city's powerful Evangelical movement, describe them as materialistic cults driven by Satan.2 Amid these alarmed condemnations, there has been no shortage of explanations for the deeper causes behind the emergence and growth of gangs: a breakdown in the family, a slavish devotion of Guatemalan youth to the worst aspects of U.S. culture, alienation and frustration bred by poverty, and so on.3 Despite their differences, though, all these explanations interpret the maras solely with reference to the adult worlds that surround the gang members, as if young people are mere puppets who do no designing of their own. Always the gangs are seen to reflect the intrinsic weakness of youth when confronted with hostile social, cultural, or religious forces. The following brief, preliminary report offers a rather different view of the maras. Imperfect though the available data is, it indicates that while the maras