Suchergebnisse

"Secure the Soul shuttles between the life of Mateo, a born-again ex-gang member in Guatemala and the gang prevention programs that work so hard to keep him alive. Along the way, this poignantly written ethnography uncovers the Christian underpinnings of Central American security. In the streets of Guatemala City--amid angry lynch mobs, overcrowded prisons, and paramilitary death squads--millions of dollars empower church missions, faith-based programs, and seemingly secular security projects to prevent gang violence through the practice of Christian piety. With Guatemala increasingly defined by both God and gangs, Secure the Soul details an emerging strategy of geopolitical significance: regional security by way of good Christian living"--Provided by publisher

Autohoteles in Guatemala City are mid-market, pay-by-the-hour hotels designed for sexual encounters. Folding quietly into the landscape of Central America's largest metropolitan region, these establishments provide middle-class Guatemalans with the opportunity to evade (even if only for an afternoon) the very regimes of surveillance that they have come to expect from fortified enclaves. Autohoteles have walls but no windows, guards but no guest books, and security booths but no surveillance cameras. They are one of the few places where the middle-class in Guatemala City pay not to be watched. Set against the increasing panopticism of everyday life in Central America, this essay engages the autohoteles of Guatemala City to understand an architectural form that minimizes rather than maximizes visibility, for the sake of discretion rather than discipline. It argues that these buildings evidence an intimate and necessary imbrication between the 'inside' and 'outside' of fortified enclaves.

AbstractThe current consensus among social scientists and political pundits is that the war on drugs failed, with a raft of failed programmes, failed interventions, failed policies, and even failed states. But these critics have tended to overlook a more existential form of failure that plays a key role in the ongoing effects of the war on drugs. This failure, which anthropologists of Christianity are well positioned to understand, is the perceived failure of Pentecostal Christians to make right with the Lord. Based on extensive fieldwork in Guatemala, a country profoundly transformed by the illicit movement of cocaine from the Andes to the United States, this article assesses how and to what effect a sense of moral failure among the country's Christian communities sustains a now expansive network of Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres. Reading one such centre's archive of intake forms as a jeremiad – a Christian lament that bemoans the failures of society to keep its covenant with God – this article concludes that a sense of moral failure sustains the fading edges of today's war on drugs.

Guatemala City is racked by the practice of extortion: the act of obtaining goods and/or money through the threat of force. Transportation workers are a particularly vulnerable population, with a homicide rate four times the national average. While social scientists, policy experts, and asylum advocates rightly observe that extortionists control territory, lost in this literature is an appreciation for how these violent actors also govern victims' experience of time and velocity. This article, in response, develops ethnographically the concept of terminal velocity to assess how the violent extraction of payments from transportation workers routinely presses these drivers up against the practical limits of Guatemala City. This includes the downward pull of extortion, which compels them to drive at ever-increasing speeds, and the upward drag of road congestion, poor infrastructure, and human fatigue that inevitably caps their acceleration.

AbstractThroughout the second half of the twentieth century, Latin America became something of a dumping ground for U.S. priests suspected of sexual abuse, with north-to-south clerical transfers sending predatory priests to countries where pedophilia did not exist in any kind of ontological sense. This article, in response, engages the case of Father David Roney of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. After a career of accusations and payouts, with Roney entering and exiting Church-mandated therapy programs, Bishop Raymond Lucker retired this notoriously predatory priest to rural Guatemala in 1994. By placing Roney beyond the reach of psychiatrists, psychologists, and spiritual directors, the Roman Catholic Church leveraged a psychological and juridical difference between two geographical settings in order to render the pedophilia of this priest effectively non-existent, thereby insulating itself from further reputational damage and additional litigation. Given that the Roman Catholic Church has long been an empirical point of reference for studies of subject formation—from pastoralism and mysticism to ritual and the confession—this article adds that the Church also provides ample evidence of an opposite process: of unmaking people.

AbstractPentecostal drug rehabilitation centres in Guatemala City are informal responses to drug use, with these all-male institutions attempting to save drug users from what some Christians call 'the devil'. Of ethnographic interest is that the mothers, sisters and wives not only pay for the capture and captivity of their loved ones but also volunteer their labour to support these centres. This article, in response, assesses not only the Christian impulse to domesticate sinners but also the extent to which a cult of domesticity organises Guatemala's war on drugs.

Across Guatemala City, Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers warehouse users (often against their will) in the name of salvation. This essay, in response, details how pastors deploy digital media to assess a user's relative fitness for a Christian life. Of particular interest is how pastors insist that photographs and videos allow the faithful to read users for signs of the soul. Contributing to the criminalization and mass incarceration of drug users, these images organize the outer edges of today's war on drugs.

Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, is a transnational criminal network that originated among Central American immigrants in Los Angeles during the gang wars of the 1980s. Since then U.S. deportation policies have transported MS-13 back to (and helped it expand in) Central America, with the strongest networks forming in the postwar countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Today a range of security officials train their efforts on a curious loophole in gang membership—Christian conversion as a way out—and by doing so open up new streams of funding and prompt a specialized cadre of ministers to apply their therapeutic skills to gangs. Relying on the promise of self-esteem, these ministers have placed the problem of MS-13 in the soul rather than on the streets, training an increasing number of eyes on atrophied wills that only the saving grace of Jesus Christ can strengthen. Gang ministry, as the effort is known, makes MS-13 the perfect problem through which to see the politics of American security anew, linking relatively mundane ministerial efforts to contemporary threads of religion and globalization, the politics of frontiers, borders and boundaries, and deportation and democratization as embodied practice.