Articles about "mareros"

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.