Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala
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Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520960091 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 01/16/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Secure the Soul
Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala
By Kevin Lewis O'Neill
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96009-1
CHAPTER 1
Insecurities
The phone call was rushed, near frantic. From inside Boqueron, one of Guatemala's maximum security prisons, a known gang leader pleaded with Pastor Morales via cell phone to do something: contact the press, notify a human rights office, intervene. A member of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), Gustavo explained to Pastor Morales that he was being transferred to Pavoncito, a notoriously insecure prison that houses members of the Paisas. The Paisas are an association of prisoners that controls much of the Guatemalan prison system. Many are former soldiers, with extensive combat experience in some of Central America's longest and bloodiest civil wars. From behind bars, they smuggle drugs, participate in human trafficking, and run prison systems, all while state officials offer failed responses. "The Paisas are becoming a criminal organization," conceded one police officer, "maybe even taking orders from outside the country." More immediately relevant to Gustavo's phone call, however, is that the Paisas and MS-13 are enemies. They compete for turf, for contracts, for respect. Pastor Morales, a minister and part-time prison chaplain, immediately understood the stakes of Gustavo's transfer. As many would comment later, such a move from one prison population to another "es igual a la pena de muerte." It is the same as a death sentence.
Although Pastor Morales called anyone who would listen, bringing both a municipal judge and Gustavo's mother to the prison gates, Gustavo entered Pavoncito shortly before 4:00 a.m. with four other members of MS-13. Prison officials placed these five men into a "secure" cell for their own protection, but their presence within the general prison population sparked a riot that culminated around 6:30 A.M. At this early hour, a mob of prisoners broke into Gustavo's cell, ripping the door off its hinges. They then dragged him and his fellow gang members into the prison yard and decapitated them, one by one. With night turning to day, with sunlight revealing what only darkness could permit, Gustavo's head sat on a pike while the prisoners set his body on fire. "Kill the dog, kill the rabies," members of the Paisas chanted. One even hoisted a decapitated head above his own. "Cholo enters, cholo dies," they screamed.
Only days after images of Gustavo's severed head circled the World Wide Web, the director of Guatemala's central morgue reflected aloud to me during an interview, "It's not like scissors cutting through paper, you know. Decapitation is tedious work (trabajo tedioso), a kind of sweaty (laborioso) work." For effect, the director ran his fingers across his own cervical vertebrae, demonstrating the physicality of it all. He sighed. Overwhelmed and overworked, haunted by a mercilessly dark job in a ruthlessly violent country, he adjusted his glasses, adding, "It's actually quite difficult to match the right head to the right body." With each body having been burned almost beyond recognition, with their heads kicked across the prison yard like soccer balls, it took all of the morgue's expertise to piece these bodies back together. "You need to study the articulations of each cut. You need to make sure that the cuts from the head match the cuts from the neck." The director seemed to stare past me.
In contrast to such a clinical appraisal, Pastor Morales focused not on Gustavo's broken body but on his soul. He mourned Gustavo as an unfinished work, because he knew "what an incredible thing was happening in Gustavo's heart." With the cadence of a eulogy, Pastor Morales explained: "On the outside he was incredibly intimidating, with scars from stab wounds and bullets. On the inside, I came to love Gustavo, who became my friend. In private, away from the piercing eyes of his other homies, it was easy to note his softening heart. During a bible study, Gustavo turned to me to whisper, 'It's great to feel such a deep presence of the Lord here with the homies today.'" Amid such rabid insecurity, with heads ripped from bodies and bodies burnt to ash, Pastor Morales's grief remained trained on Gustavo's heart, his softening inner world, his ability, in the words of Gustavo, to feel the Lord's presence deeply.
The distance between these two responses, between the morgue director's morbid despair and the pastor's ministerial disquiet, deserves attention. For it accentuates the Christian production and the consequences of postwar insecurity. In this bloodied context, with a prison system swollen to past 250 percent capacity, postwar insecurity carries a double valence—not only for prisoners and their chaplains but also for liberal, democratic, and ostensibly secular security officials. The first meaning relates directly to gang violence. MS-13 and others render the postwar prison insecure. "These prisons," warned Pastor Morales, "are out of control. The guards aren't in charge. The prisoners are." The second meaning, related to the first, is more of an affect than an effect. Insecurity, in this sense, is the feeling of rejection and isolation, of anxiety and hostility. "Gustavo texted me when he was being transferred," Pastoral Morales remembered, vibrating with emotion, "he texted me that they were going to kill him. That he was a dead man."
Pastoral Morales and his colleagues in Christ routinely connect these two meanings of insecurity by reading the first as a result of the second, by understanding a failed sense of self as directly responsible for a nearly failed prison system. Correcting this consciousness and, in turn, this correctional system has become the work of Christ. "I texted back Gustavo some scripture," Pastor Morales added. "It was a few lines that came to my heart, that I wanted to share with him at such a terrible moment." For in the shadows of prison riots and public decapitations, of wailing women waiting at prison gates, the practice of prison chaplaincy announces with a bold kind of clarity that society must be defended—one sense of security at a time. This means suturing the soul to the social. And in doing so, the pious production of postwar insecurity shuttles between Gustavo's severed head and his softening heart, between the materiality of prisons and the morality of Pentecostalism, emphasizing pastoral interventions but ending, as did Gustavo, in pieces. Insecurity defines the postwar prison, and Christian men like Morales make it so. How, this chapter asks, and to what effect? The answer begins and ends with one particular manifestation of Christian piety: self-esteem.
SELF-ESTEEM
The wall was cool to the touch. Pressing my palm against its uneven surface, absorbing a bit of the mid-morning chill, I stopped to consider, to really meditate on, Gustavo's last hours. I was in Pavoncito with Pastor Allende, a Pentecostal prison chaplain who works separately from Pastor Morales. In the middle of rounds, we found ourselves in a part of the prison called Alaska, named for its isolation. This is where Gustavo and his fellow members of MS-13 had waited for death, most likely pacing the length of their six-foot-by-six-foot cell as a mob approached. None of them would have seen anything. The cells have no exterior windows. But they would have heard the Paisas approaching, with their screams and their taunts. At the far end of a long corridor, on the only floor of this one-story structure, dozens of Paisas rushed their door. At the same time, dozens more pounded a sledgehammer to the cell's exterior wall. What must Gustavo have felt, I thought to myself, with each thud of the hammer, with each tug on his cell door? Prisoners later put the number of Paisas involved as high as sixty. To this day, a sloppy repair with a rushed paint job marks the headway that this mob made. A human-sized hole aligns exactly with the cell. No one can confirm whether the mob dragged these five men through the wall, out the hole, or whether they pulled each of them through their cell door. The only real evidence of the event was the two Paisas that Gustavo and his comrades killed during the struggle. Their bodies left Pavoncito with Gustavo's later that same day, as did photos. Stumps of charred flesh, a basket of severed heads, each facing a different direction, and a stripped corpse with a broom handle plugging the anus.
With my hand still pressed against the wall, at the very spot where the Paisas had swung their hammer, I asked Pastor Allende why the wall was still broken. He mumbled back something about everyone inside of this prison being broken, being in need of repair. "And you know what?" he added. "The prison of the heart is worse than the prison of Pavoncito. And so I go inside this prison, inside all prisons, to open the gates but also to open minds and to transform people." This impromptu sermon, one of hundreds I would absorb over the years, reminded me that Gustavo's beheading was not merely gratuitous assault. It was conducted in a context of certain soteriologies of self.
By "soteriologies of self" I mean simply the ethnographic fact that the loudest, most observable, most pious Christian therapy employed by chaplains within the prison context is self-esteem. The Christian promotion of self-esteem saturates the prison system where Gustavo died; the practice of esteeming the self guides much of what prison chaplains do and say. The idea and promise of self-esteem provide both the pastors and the prisoners with a set of moral coordinates for who they are and, more importantly, what kind of people they want to become. In contrast to other available approaches to reform, it is self-esteem that stars in these Christian settings wherein the incarcerated might choose Jesus Christ over MS-13, leading one of Guatemala's more experienced prison chaplains to announce, in seemingly uncomplicated ways, "The greatest need here is to continue working with gangs, but we also need to support human development (fortalecer la formación humana) in order to recover self-esteem. We need more psychologists than educators here in Guatemala." By way of Christian authorities but within monuments to modern imaginations, prison chaplains work to esteem the self in the name of security.
"To raise your self-esteem," yet another prison chaplain had explained during an earlier set of rounds, "is to create a shield against bloodthirsty enemies." I remembered this musing as I leaned against the ruins of Pavoncito, at the very site of Gustavo's murder. Its promise rang hollow, at least to me. A shield? I thought. The sledgehammer must have sounded like war drums to Gustavo, a veritable death march. Yet, Christian support groups, moral manuals, testimonials, and bibliotherapy (the practice of narrating one's broken self to oneself) work to equip incarcerated gang members with the tools necessary to patrol their inner worlds, to esteem their selves, to recognize the moments when they feel the Lord's presence deeply.
THE PRISON
To appreciate the practice of self-esteem, one must first assess the prison, if only to dislodge self-esteem from its bourgeois North American roots, from middle-class concerns over weight loss and social anxiety, from a largely gendered interest in a certain personal fulfillment and achievement. Guatemalan prisons, for one, are not total institutions or super-max structures but rather warehouses of violence. Prison cells designed to house four individuals at a time hold up to eighteen, for sentences that stretch more than 30, 40, and even 50 years. What may first appear as holding cells, dark spaces in which prisoners linger a day or two before prison personnel find more appropriate accommodations, are in fact where active gang members live until their release or, just as likely, their death. In the overcrowded cells, their walls slick with phlegm, constant noise meets a stunning lack of natural light to form a haunting echo chamber. And while the prison tower, which the philosopher Jeremy Bentham dubbed the panopticon, continues to resonate as a metaphor for power's entangled relationship with knowledge, it is painfully obvious that no one is really watching—and the prisoners know that they have been left alone. Prisoners do not decapitate fellow prisoners because of just a brief lack of oversight. Guards never enter the cell blocks that house active gang members, and the incarcerated take advantage of perforated boundaries to traffic a steady flow of drugs, cell phones, and sex workers. In many ways, this is how and why prison chaplains, men and women of faith who range from apocalyptic neo-Pentecostals to mainline Charismatic Christians, have become such a valued political resource. With no one else watching, these pastors pray that active gang members, through the saving grace of Jesus Christ, can become capable of watching themselves.
This effort is audacious, even if it is familiar to the history of American prisons. These institutions have always had a certain religious, even monastic, quality to them. The very language of prison reform is littered with religious imagery: the cell, the penitentiary, the reformatory. In the North American context, learned men of faith guided the construction of the modern prison in the early nineteenth century, developing undeniably Christian efforts at moral improvement. The Quakers, who authored Philadelphia's Walnut Street Prison, argued that exclusive contact with moral administrators could straighten crooked souls. Here, the iconic drawing of the kneeling prisoner, the very one that illustrates Michel Foucault's discussion of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon in Discipline and Punish, captures solitary confinement's Christian dimensions. At the same time, Calvinism inspired New York's Auburn Prison, which structured moral reform around congregate labor during the day and solitary confinement at night. This "method of discipline" consisted of "downcast eyes, lockstep marching, absolute silence, supervised work, [and] an unsparing use of the whip." Asylums had to be built nearby for those prisoners driven mad by the prison's "eerie silence." Yet sometimes the asylum also proved too little, too late. Prisoners often escaped—life, not judgment: "That prisoners in perpetual solitary confinement often hanged themselves or battered themselves to death," notes one critic, "was attributed to insanity induced by masturbation." Prisons often pushed prisoners beyond their limits.
Auburn Prison and Walnut Street Prison are important not simply as monuments to a Christian logic or as examples of the observation made elsewhere that architecture is a moral science, but because these penitentiaries served as the preeminent models for prison reform in Latin America. The Walnut Street Prison and the Auburn Prison laid the foundation for the prisons that Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont visited in antebellum America, the kind of prison that, in the words of Tocqueville, "does not break men's will, but softens, bends, and guides it. It seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much from being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, stifles, and stultifies." This French delegation, the archive tells us, were not the only foreign visitors. Tocqueville and Beaumont stood shoulder to shoulder with Latin American delegations eager to add prison reform to their liberalization to-do list. For over a century, an array of Latin American countries, from Brazil to Cuba, re-created North American prisons brick by brick—with blueprints purchased from afar, architects brought by boat, and the promise of progress standing guard in the watchtowers that they constructed.
This effort at reform proved uneven. Underfunded and overcrowded, with a history of slavery and debt peonage informing the effort, these correctional facilities melted into something far more brutal. Modern prisons became colonial whipping posts. And while authoritarian regimes throughout Latin America eventually co-opted these structures in the twentieth century for torture rather than moral reform—for punishment instead of discipline—the jails themselves still hint, architecturally speaking, at a Jacksonian notion that curing criminals means "inculcating in them healthy habits." This is one reason why constructing Bentham's panopticon within the criminal's soul can seem so very intuitive for contemporary prison chaplains in Guatemala, and why the psychotheological promise of self-esteem can appear so logical—even when the prison itself has become a never-ending crime scene.
RIOTS
"The Paisas were able to basically take over Pavoncito," Pastor Morales remembered. We sat side by side in his car, cruising the capital city en route to Pavoncito. Visceral memories cascaded, wrought by disbelief. "It turned to utter chaos. It was on the radio, the news station—we turned the radio on—you could hear screaming, yelling, and chaos and riots and sirens. They were playing it live over the radio." Raw emotions pushed the narrative as traffic seemed to both stand still and whirl past us. "It was really early in the morning," he remembered. "On the day of the killings, after their transfer, a couple of hours went by and then things got bad. When the guards changed their shift, the Paisas attacked the section where the MS-13 guys were." Pastor Morales trailed off. Sipping some coffee while collecting his thoughts, he let the city and its half-made streets distract us. He needed a moment. For the riot and its effects were unthinkable and yet totally predictable. These prisons have been battlegrounds for years.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Secure the Soul by Kevin Lewis O'Neill. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsPrologue
Introduction
Forgiveness
1. Insecurities
Hamsters
2. Reality
Pangs
3. A Calling
Service
4. Left Behind
Captivity
5. Forsaken
Adrift
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Notes on Research
Notes
Reference List
Index