The reckless will: Prison chaplaincy and the problem of Mara Salvatrucha

Public Culture

Volumn 22, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 67-88

  O'Neill, Kevin Lewis ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77949777780     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: 15278018     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2009-016     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. There is some disagreement over whether members of the 18th Street Gang participated in the killing of these prisoners. The media understand this prison riot as the result of gang warfare. See, e.g., Acuña 2008.
2. Carroll 2008; González and Del Cid 2008; and Los Angeles Times 2008. Yet many who are familiar with the prison system contend that members of the 18th Street Gang played only a minor part in the beheadings.
3. To become a member of MS-13, recruits are beaten for thirteen seconds by a group of active MS-13 members. Alternatively, women can be either beaten or "sexed" into MS-13.
4. Death and conversion are the only two ways out of MS-13. In some cliques, however, pregnancy can create a space to negotiate a qualified disaffiliation from MS-13.
5. Guatemala revamped its penal code in 1994, although all fourteen bills of penal reform have been debated without approval. This said, the country has one of the lowest prison populations in all of the Americas (28 per 100,000) but the highest homicide rate in all of Latin America. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 2005 report states that Guatemala had the highest murder rate in all of Latin America, with 70 per 100,000 (Benítez 2009). By contrast, the Canadian Red Cross (2006) estimates 109 per 100,000. Complicating these numbers is the fact that "the average criminal trial lasts for over four years and less than five percent of crimes result in a conviction" (Ungar 2003: 932).
6. This growing literature is built on a narrow base, concretizing certain standard references so much that even passing comments now seem like established facts. For example, one report quotes Wikipedia when discussing MS-13's history (ARIAS 2006: 14).
7. Neoliberal economic and political reforms implemented in Guatemala beginning in the 1980s included the standard adjustments mandated in many countries via World Bank and International Monetary Fund loan programs: market liberalization, privatization of industry and state services, reductions in public expenditure, and opening to foreign trade. Right-wing dictators and, later, democratically elected leaders aligned with U.S. interests expanded these reforms in the 1990s, a process that continues today with the signing on July 1, 2006, of the Central America Free Trade Agreement. The neoliberal rhetoric of personal accountability, the very one espoused by gang ministers, then, fits nicely with a retreat of state services in postwar Guatemala. For more on neoliberalism in Guatemala, see O'Neill and Thomas in press.
8. This "method of discipline," a primary text notes, consisted of "downcast eyes, lockstep marching, absolute silence, supervised work, [and] an unsparing use of the whip" (Bumas 2001: 131).
9. This essay is explicitly about how gang ministry frames MS-13 as a problem and not about whether such ministry "works." Although there are moments in this essay in which I imply that the gang members are in fact disciplined, to provide the necessary evidence to demonstrate how and to what effect these ministers discipline these prisoners is not the focus of this essay.
10. Yet even the prisons are slowly becoming privatized (Ungar 2003: 919)
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