A Place in the World: Maras in Prisons

This paper discusses how the penitentiary system In Guatemala has become in the 2000s an intricate labyrinth wherein elites fight out their battles, uses gang members called mareros as foils-- just as they do in the world outside of prisons--, and sustain the centrality of discourses over National Citizen Security without protecting youth or other Guatemalans.  Indeed, the current regime needs juvenile crime in order to construct hegemony by means of aligning itself with, and giving leadership to, the popular quest for everyday safety.  It has particularly focused on mobilizing middle and upper class youth to advocate against what is represented to be lower class youth violence.            

Within this context, this paper argues that the penal system has facilitated the production of-- to quote Michel Foucault-- “delinquency, a specific type.“  Authorities cluster mareros in certain sections, provoke fights between Maras and involve them in larger social dramas.   The prison system reinforces that particular marero identity of young men and boys who both potentially and actually have other identities.  It repeatedly calls that marero identity into intense action.  In the course of this the prisons have become the most sustaining space in the Guatemala for being a marero.  Within them, mareros recuperate their fantasies about themselves.  Finally, by looking at the demands and trajectories of jail riots that have involved mareros between 2003-and 2010, this paper suggests that, however disruptive, these uprisings do not necessarily challenge the “vector of power.” Instead they often seek to keep the penitentiary system safe for the Maras.