Hunted: Predation and Pentecostalism in Guatemala

Hunted: Predation and Pentecostalism in Guatemala

by Kevin Lewis O'Neill
Hunted: Predation and Pentecostalism in Guatemala

Hunted: Predation and Pentecostalism in Guatemala

by Kevin Lewis O'Neill

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Overview

“It’s not a process,” one pastor insisted, “rehabilitation is a miracle.” In the face of addiction and few state resources, Pentecostal pastors in Guatemala City are fighting what they understand to be a major crisis. Yet the treatment centers they operate produce this miracle of rehabilitation through extraordinary means: captivity. These men of faith snatch drug users off the streets, often at the request of family members, and then lock them up inside their centers for months, sometimes years.

Hunted is based on more than ten years of fieldwork among these centers and the drug users that populate them. Over time, as Kevin Lewis O’Neill engaged both those in treatment and those who surveilled them, he grew increasingly concerned that he, too, had become a hunter, albeit one snatching up information. This thoughtful, intense book will reframe the arc of redemption we so often associate with drug rehabilitation, painting instead a seemingly endless cycle of hunt, capture, and release.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226624655
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 09/15/2019
Series: Class 200: New Studies in Religion
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Kevin Lewis O’Neill is professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Hunt

I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them down on every mountain and hill and from the crevices of the rocks.

— JEREMIAH 16:16

ONE

The central market is expansive. It stretches six city blocks, with sheets of corrugated metal covering almost every square inch. Each sheet was puzzled into position by someone wanting to extend the market by just a few more feet. A labyrinth of stalls piled high with everything from bags of toothpaste to boxes of broccoli, the market echoes with different reggaeton tracks as hawkers compete for customers. So unplanned is the place that it once burned to the ground because there was no clear way for the fire engines to enter the area. Volunteers ran in and out of the flames with buckets of water.

How did they know where to go? Because it is the shadows that really set the scene. An almost complete lack of natural light meets an uneven assortment of low wattage bulbs, each hanging from a cord. With aisles that sometimes pinch so tightly that you have to turn sideways just to pass, the market can conjure a sense of vertigo. I, for one, did not know which way was up, let alone out, which is why I tried my best to keep up with Santiago as we paced the market. It wasn't easy.

"They've hunted me before," Santiago said. He looked weathered, with a beard that seemed unintentional.

A man carrying a bucket of tomatoes suddenly pushed past us as a pastor preached into a bullhorn. The machine made him sound distant, from another world. "He paid the ultimate price," the pastor said, "to save us from our sins. Christ rescued mankind and all he asks from us is that we obey him, that we bathe ourselves in baptismal waters to know the true glory of God."

Santiago wasn't listening. He was visibly uneasy, with what seemed like paranoia setting in. Some of this had to do with the crack cocaine. Vaporized with a lighter and then absorbed through the lungs, the drug hits the bloodstream almost immediately, flooding the brain with dopamine. This jolt causes crack cocaine's characteristic high. It constricts blood vessels, dilates pupils, and increases the user's body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure. But this euphoria only lasts about five minutes, even less if the crack is of poor quality (and the crack sold at the market is almost always of poor quality). This sudden spike and equally abrasive drop can foster a sense of anxiety, of near despair — but so too can the hunt.

In a series of sharp lefts and hard rights, Santiago dodged vendors in an attempt to bury himself even further in the market. "The deeper I go," he reasoned, "the harder it is for him to find me."

Him? I wondered.

At first I thought that Santiago had a plan, that he knew where he was going. Maybe he was looking for a friend who might hide him somewhere. A needle in a haystack, I thought. No one would ever find him here, but it eventually became clear to me that Santiago's only strategy was to keep moving, to compulsively wend his way through the market.

He did this for hours, and I followed the movement of Santiago's feet in the hopes that they might give me some advanced warning as to which way he would turn, but he often pivoted so quickly and with such purpose that I struggled to keep pace. Either incapable or unwilling to stand still, we ended up discussing his history with hunting in short bursts.

"I wasn't working," he said, "I wasn't doing anything. I was just smoking, and so she had me hunted." Santiago tripped past someone selling pirated DVDs.

She? I asked.

"My mom," he said.

Santiago had not worked in weeks. In his early twenties, with sturdy hands and a quiet demeanor, Santiago's natural strength availed him to the city's construction sites, where multinational corporations built condominium complexes, office towers, and shopping centers. More than one hundred high rises had gone up over the course of a decade, presenting Guatemala City with a new skyline while at the same time providing Santiago with a steady stream of income. He shoveled dirt and cleared debris for cash-in-hand, throwing grey chunks of concrete into dumpsters for upwards of twelve hours a day.

"He's an excellent worker," his mother later told me as we spoke in her living room. Maria owned a two-bedroom house in a rather poor part of Guatemala City. It was a cinderblock structure with an aluminum roof, but it also had fresh tiles on the floor. Her two eldest children had paid for the flooring. They lived in the United States and wired money to Maria in small denominations. One hundred dollars here, two hundred dollars there. It added up in ways that elevated Maria and her family toward some sense of middle-class respectability, but then there was Santiago, her youngest.

"He scares me when he smokes," Maria said. She then whispered, as if the neighbors might hear, "Oh, Lord, no one can hold him down."

Over the years, a number of substances had made Santiago rather hard to pin down: marijuana, solvents, paint thinner, the occasional pharmaceutical, and, to a growing extent, crack cocaine. He also drank, but that no longer held his attention. Instead, crack bounced Santiago between increasingly shorter bouts of work and progressively longer stretches of drug use, which made Maria concerned not just for her son's safety but also for his soul. "The way of the Lord," she said, "is the only way to truly liberate someone from sin."

So will you have him hunted? I asked.

Maria's Bible answered for her. She turned to Romans 5:3–5 and began to read aloud in a slow, steady voice: "We also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope." She traced the words with her finger while striding from one end of her living room to the other. Soft-spoken and gray-haired, Maria always seemed inspired when she had a Bible in her hands. "And hope does not put us to shame," she read, "because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us." Maria then fell silent, eventually answering my question. "Yes," she said, she would have Santiago hunted.

Back in the market, under the sheet metal, Santiago speculated that "she's going to call the pastor." He paused just long enough to talk, to square himself to me, adding, "Maybe she's already called him ... I bet she's already called him." Santiago then ticked off the reasons why he thought the hunt was already underway: "This is what happened last time," he said. "I stopped going to work. I couldn't handle the crack. I stopped going home to sleep. I was gone for days."

So why are we at the market? I asked. The crowds seemed absolutely antithetical to an escape. Wouldn't Santiago want to distance himself from people rather than run right at them?

Santiago explained to me what scholars have long known — that the crowd can be a resource. The crowd can turn a blind eye to abduction, but it can also turn the tables. Or, as Santiago said, "If you scream and make a scene, then sometimes people help you out. Sometimes people will step in long enough for you to slip away." Upon a second look, the market did present a confounding web of alleyways that Santiago could use to his advantage. "All I need is a head start," he said, "and I can disappear."

But wouldn't it be easier to just go back to work? I asked.

By work I meant the construction sites, with their steady pay, rather than the errands that Santiago had been running for vendors inside the market. He would haul bags of onions and boxes of dried fish from the trucks to the stalls for spare change, eventually earning enough to smoke for an hour or two, and when his high faded, he would hoist yet another box onto his back. Not having been out from under the market for nearly a week, avoiding the light of day for far too long, Santiago found himself trapped by his own desires, seemingly bound hand and foot.

"I can't get myself back to work," Santiago admitted, "not on my own, and if I did, I'd just smoke the money." He was being honest. Steady work had always been a problem for him — largely because a two-hour crack session can cost upwards of $50 USD, and these crack sessions rarely ever lasted two hours. They tended to extend across a day, even two, and so Santiago ended up spending all of his money to keep the sessions rolling. Then he would steal. This meant taking cash straight from his family's pockets but also stealing hard-earned appliances from under their noses. He even sold the family's microwave for pennies on the dollar and pilfered light bulbs straight from their sockets. "He sold my table saw," his brother huffed, "and that [machine] was how I made money."

Santiago's family was not alone. Prior to 2006, when there were only dozens rather than hundreds of Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers in Guatemala City, hunting parties would track down and capture those who drank too much. This was a different kind of hunt, with a different set of techniques. Alcohol slows down the user, even puts him to sleep, which can make hunting look a lot like fishing. "If he drinks," a hunter once explained to me, "we let him drink. And then we'd give him more to drink. Until he couldn't talk. Until he couldn't walk. Then we'd take him." With just a bit of bait, the hunter would reel in user after user. The work was easy. It was also inspired. "If you're in the streets," Alejandro said, "you'll end up dead."

But then nets turned into hooks as crack cocaine flooded the city. Unlike alcohol, crack cocaine does not slow down the user but instead speeds him up. It speeds everything up, which is why Santiago looked over his shoulder. He scanned the horizon, reading every vendor for signs of a chase. Though he occasionally mistook a pedestrian for a predator, Santiago knew who was looking for him.

Alejandro had hunted Santiago before. Ten years older than Santiago, with a stronger, wider frame, Alejandro was an imposing figure. "I don't feel anything anymore," Alejandro told me. We sat inside Pedro's center, among the general population, while Alejandro kept watch over the captives. "You know that feeling," Alejandro asked me, "when you're about to get into a fight, like when your hands start shaking? I don't feel that anymore." With a round face and strong arms, a nose that broke stage left, Alejandro walked smoothly when he wanted to be seen, but he could also hide in plain sight when he needed to disappear. Accustomed to wearing secondhand T-shirts with the sleeves cut off, Alejandro had a tattoo on his left shoulder. It looked like the earliest version of Mickey Mouse, the one with the spindly legs and a button nose. The tattoo was the kind of commitment that some people might regret, but Alejandro never seemed to care. "That's the least of my worries," he once told me.

Inside the center, well before Santiago's panicked tour of the central market, Alejandro described the market as one of his hunting grounds. "We pick up guys there all the time," he said. "It's not easy. The lighting is terrible, and there are thousands of people. And stuff's everywhere. I've twisted my ankle there while chasing down a guy."

How do you find someone in the market? I asked.

"The family calls us," he said. "They let us know where he is, and what he's doing.'" Alejandro then echoed Santiago's strategy about the crowds. It seemed to be common knowledge. "But you need to watch out for the crowds," Alejandro said. "They'll back a guy up if you just try to hook him in the market. You need to wait a bit, watch the situation."

By this time, Alejandro had relaxed against a wall and was taking his time to answer my questions. He seemed to enjoy these moments of reflection, the chance to really consider his techniques.

"I'm waiting for the guy to separate from the group," Alejandro said, "to go buy some more drugs or just take a walk. You need to wait until he's alone, on his own."

And then?

"And then you walk up to him," Alejandro said, "and grab his thumb." Alejandro took my hand and turned my palm upwards. My arm locked as I suddenly found myself standing on the tips of my toes. "I then tell him that 'you either walk out of here with me quietly, or I'll break your arm and drag you to the car.'" He paused. "It's actually pretty wild," Alejandro said, "to know that you're being hunted. You don't know where to go. You don't know what to do. You just start to panic because it could be anyone. Different guys hunt for different centers and they're all from the streets. So you don't know who is going to grab you." Alejandro knew both sides of this exchange.

"When I'm hunting," he said, "I use it to my advantage. I hang back, watch the situation, and let the guy get comfortable. Because maybe he doesn't see me waiting for him. Maybe he doesn't know I'm the guy hunting him." Alejandro then flipped perspectives. "But when I'm being hunted," he said, "it scares me. Because I'm usually pretty fucked up [by the time I'm being hunted] and I don't know who is watching me. I mean, it's like you got God calling out your name."

TWO

Pedro often called out Alejandro's name. A man of faith, with long hair and a bulging stomach, Pedro was well past middle age. In the past, a quarter of a century earlier, Pedro had spent a year inside of a Pentecostal drug rehabilitation center for drinking and drugs and living on the streets. "How is it that I managed to escape from drug addiction?" Pedro once wondered aloud as we stood inside the center. "How is that I managed to escape from smoking marijuana, from injecting cocaine, from having gone mad, from ending up a prisoner, from getting to the point where I had to sleep in the streets?" Pedro paused. "I experienced God's mercy," he said. "Christ rescued me. He brought me to a place where I met ... where I met myself, where I met God." Pedro would later start his own enterprise out of a two-story house. We talked on the first floor of his center, inside his front office, while a wall opposite of us announced in bold blue font: "The man who falls and then gets back up is greater than the man who has never fallen."

"We give the family peace," Pedro said, "because they prefer to have their father or brother or son locked up here so that he doesn't get himself killed." Pedro rested his elbows on his knees, leaning forward until he was balancing on the edge of his chair. He looked uncomfortable, with his soccer jersey starting to bunch around his belly. "There are people here against their will," he said, "and they want to get out, but why do they want out?" Pedro answered the question for me: "Because they want to do drugs." At the time, fifty-five captives lived above Pedro's front office. Santiago would make it fifty-six.

The house was never meant for any of this. While Pedro lived with his family on the first floor, using the space largely as it was intended, with family meals eaten around a kitchen table, the second floor strained to keep up with the demands of captivity. Roughly 1,200 square feet, the second floor had a total of three bedrooms. Two of them had been converted into dormitories, with each holding a cluster of bunks stacked three beds high. Pedro called the third bedroom the morgue (la morgue). This is where new arrivals recuperated from withdrawals. Offering nothing more than a king-sized mattress splayed out on the floor and a few buckets, the morgue held three to five captives at any given time.

Then there was the family room, with its southern facing windows. It was not large, maybe 400 square feet, but it served a number of different purposes. It was where the captives ate their meals, listened to sermons, and slept on the floor. Every night, as many as thirty men zigzagged across the room, piecing themselves together so that they fit just right. The second floor's toilets, both of them, still functioned as such, but they strained from overuse.

The bars were also conspicuous. Pedro secured every possible avenue of escape. He capped the door at the top of the stairs with a metal gate, and he plugged the morgue with a heavy door. Both had padlocks. Pedro also lined those southern facing windows with bars and then topped them with corrugated metal.

A door connected the former family room to a balcony. I often imagined the kind of plans that the architect must have had for this space. The house was obviously built with upward mobility in mind. The architectural intention, it would seem, was to have the balcony just off the family room — so that the patriarch and maybe even his wife could have a drink while the children played with toys or even roughhoused until the man of the house told them to cut it out. I could even imagine a real estate agent touring a young couple through the house, quickly admitting that the space was obviously much too large for them "for now" but that they would one day grow into it. The agent might have even tried to sell the very same scene that came to my mind whenever I looked onto the balcony: the kids, the cocktails, the stern but loving plea to just be quiet. But none of that made sense anymore, given that Pedro had fortified the balcony's door with padlocks, lined the edges of the veranda with razor wire, and posted two guard dogs there.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Hunted"
by .
Copyright © 2019 The University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Note
Preface
The Hunt
Captivity
Escape
Return
Hunted, a Conclusion
 
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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