Available From UC Press

The fear of violent crime dominates Guatemala City. In the midst of unprecedented levels of postwar violence, Guatemalans struggle to fathom the myriad forces that have made life in this city so deeply insecure. Born out of histories of state terror, migration, and US deportation, maras (transnational gangs) have become the face of this new era of violence. They are brutal organizations engaged in extortion, contract killings, and the drug trade, and yet they have also become essential to the emergence of a certain kind of social order.
 
Drawing on years of fieldwork inside prisons, police precincts, and gang-dominated neighborhoods, Anthony W. Fontes demonstrates how gang violence has become indissoluble from contemporary social imaginaries and how these gangs provide cover for a host of other criminal actors. Ethnographically rich and unflinchingly critical, Mortal Doubt illuminates the maras’ role in making and mooring collective terror in Guatemala City while tracing the ties that bind this violence to those residing in far safer environs.

Anthony W. Fontes is Assistant Professor in the School of International Service, American University.

“Not everyone is born into privilege and security. In fact, many are made to live in worlds in spite of it. This book will shake your illusions about right and wrong. Fontes’s illustration of the ill-existing boundaries of life amid violence must be read widely.”—Graham Denyer Willis, University of Cambridge

“This vividly written book takes the reader into the Guatemala prisons and intimate lives of gang members to explore the dailiness of post-war violence in Guatemala. Ethnographically rich and methodologically daring, this book challenges us to rethink the place of the prison as a key rite of passage in the lives of these young men.”—Kimberly Theidon, Henry J. Leir Professor of International Humanitarian Studies, Tufts University