Gothic Sovereignty: Street Gangs and Statecraft in Honduras

By Jon Horne Carter

Gang-related violence has forced thousands of Hondurans to flee their country, leaving behind everything as refugees and undocumented migrants abroad. To uncover how this happened, Jon Carter looks back to the mid-2000s, when neighborhood gangs were scrambling to survive state violence and mass incarceration, locating there a critique of neoliberal globalization and state corruption that foreshadows Honduras’s current crises.

Carter begins with the story of a thirteen-year-old gang member accused in the murder of an undercover DEA agent, asking how the nation’s seductive criminal underworld has transformed the lives of young people. He then widens the lens to describe a history of imperialism and corruption that shaped this underworld—from Cold War counterinsurgency to the “War on Drugs” to the near-impunity of white-collar crime—as he follows local gangs who embrace new trades in the illicit economy. Carter describes the gangs’ transformation from neighborhood groups to sprawling criminal societies, even in the National Penitentiary, where they have become political as much as criminal communities. Gothic Sovereignty reveals not only how the revolutionary potential of gangs was lost when they merged with powerful cartels but also how close analysis of criminal communities enables profound reflection on the economic, legal, and existential discontents of globalization in late liberal nation-states.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781477324189

Book preview

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 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.

Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela. Map designed by Erin Greb.

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 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 members 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

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 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 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

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 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 maquilas (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. 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 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 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 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 present 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 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 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