Luis Bedoya He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from El Colegio de Michoacán, Mexico (2017). Interested in the study of violence, crime narratives and state formation processes from local and regional scales.

Realidades socioculturales

Scopic regimes of a new war: photographs of gang members in the red note of the Guatemalan postwar period.

  • Luis Bedoya

Since the mid-1990s, Guatemalan newspapers have published photographs of tattooed men identified as mareros. The mobilization of these photographs plays a key role in the socialization of ideas about who these individuals are and what they do, leading to the formation of a public view of crime as a post-war phenomenon. The formation of the aforementioned public gaze, in turn, became a nodal component of a new counterinsurgency in the form of the fight against crime, of which the nota roja operated as one of its rhetorical devices. The discussion I offer focuses on the performance of the two representative newspapers of the genre: Al Día and Nuestro Diario, and is limited to the decade 1996-2005.