Mario Sanic bolted the front door shut and ran with his mother to hide in the bathroom, from where they could hear gang members banging on the door and trying to kick it down.
Both prayed to God to save their lives. In the midst of their prayers and fear, Mario thought to call the police and fire department. ‘I told them that someone was hurt. What I wanted was for someone to come to the door to help us,’ he said. His idea saved them. 10 or 15 minutes later, the firefighters arrived to assist the person who was supposedly hurt, and the attackers disappeared.
In July 2017, he found a note slipped under the door of their house that demanded US$130 per month in extortion payments and included the following warning: ‘Know that there are consequences; we know where your little shop is.’
Two years earlier, the Sanic family was living in the El Mezquital neighbourhood, located in the southern part of Guatemala City, in an area described by authorities as a ‘red zone’. The neighbourhood is controlled by the Barrio 18 and MS-13 gangs, and even food delivery services won’t go there for fear of being mugged.
El Mezquital is next to one of the largest and most important bus terminals in the city and is part of a number of neighbourhoods principally inhabited by members of these two criminal groups. The Sanic family opened a corner shop where they earned approximately US$195 per month. Mario’s father and brothers worked elsewhere, and he looked after the family business. In July 2017, he found a note slipped under the door of their house that demanded US$130 per month in extortion payments and included the following warning: ‘Know that there are consequences; we know where your little shop is.’
For Mario and his family, the decision to leave their home was a difficult one. Finally, in September 2017, they decided to move out without paying the extortionists. They fled as soon as possible to another part of the city.
Measuring the outcomes of cases in which people abandon their homes is complicated because the police stopped recording such cases in 2015 due to a lack of personnel to input the data. The latest figure was 402 abandoned homes, according to the national civil police. ‘It’s hard to have a database of abandoned homes now, since we’re always too overloaded with extortion cases to be able to create teams to collect data,’ explained David Boteo, chief of the police’s anti-gang unit (División del Programa Nacional Contra el Desarrollo Criminal de las Pandillas, Dipanda).
The public prosecutor’s office has not updated this information either. This institutional chaos – combined with the fear that prevents people from filing reports – leads to the undercounting of cases. The only record that does exist is that of homes that have been recovered: in the last two years, 26 homes were recovered. ‘They were recovered because a report was filed, but the problem continues, and we have reports of other neighbourhoods facing the same problem,’ said Boteo.
New tenants
Three months later, Mario and his mother returned to their home to confirm complaints they’d received from their neighbours, who said there was music and loud noise at night in the supposedly empty house. They arrived to discover leftover food, empty beer cans, broken bottles, condoms and some mattresses. They also found two boxes in a closet with some 9-millimetre bullets and AK-47 bullets.
‘It was obvious that someone was living there, and we thought about alerting the police. We were leaving when we saw two guys on the corner heading towards us. One of them went to pull up his pant leg and pulled out a shotgun,’ Mario recalled. That was when he grabbed his mother’s arm, they ran back into the house and they locked the door with two bolts.
‘I thought we weren’t going to get out of there. “You’re gonna pay for this, you bastards. Come out. We just want the bullets,” one of them shouted.’
When the family alerted the police, the bullets were seized, though a formal report was not filed. The Sanic family instead decided to just clean up the house and leave. Since then, not one of them has returned. They changed the locks on the front door and moved to a nearby neighbourhood.
The house is now rented, and the rent is deposited into their bank accounts. The tenants are friends of the family, and in the year they’ve been living there, they haven’t had any problems. They hear gunshots at night, but they say that’s common in El Mezquital.
Forced displacement
Gang threats force people not just out of their neighbourhoods but out of the city. This was the case of Leonel, a 55-year-old plumber and construction worker who was the target of gang intimidation and had to abandon not only his house in the La Limonada neighbourhood but also his factory job as a food packer. He and his family migrated to El Progreso, a neighbourhood located about 80 kilometres from the city, in northern Guatemala.
La Limonada is an area located in the centre of Guatemala City. The ‘for sale’ signs that can often be spotted around the neighbourhood specify that the owners will accept vehicles as down payment on the properties. Extortion and drug distribution in this area are controlled by MS-13 and Barrio 18.
Thanks to the report that Leonel filed on the intimidation he had been subject to, the public prosecutor was able to recover his home, which had been occupied by gang members. However, for his safety, he decided not to return there and instead remained in El Progreso.
Reports issued by the police’s anti-gang unit show that the majority of the 13 families that recovered their homes in 2019 did not return to them. The police have discovered that the properties invaded by gangs are used as ‘safe houses’ to sell drugs or provide safe harbour for their members. ‘Those who return to their homes do so because they’ve learned that the gang members who were threatening them are now in prison or dead. The public prosecutor’s office has sometimes found that those homes are in fact occupied, but not by gang members. Instead, the criminal groups had already rented out the houses,’ Boteo explained.
People are not just abandoning their homes due to threats in the department of Guatemala; there have also been reports of the same issue in areas of Chimaltenango and Quetzaltenango. According to Boteo, residents of Quetzaltenango agreed to pay US$715 per month to the gangs in order to remain in their homes. ‘The families that left their homes have been threatened over the phone or in person by members of clicas (local branches of a gang) demanding huge monthly sums. The phone calls making these threats originate in prisons,’ he said.
Investigations have revealed that the abandoned homes include all kinds of structures. Before making their extortion demands, gang members analyze people’s financial situation, observe the type of house they have, if they have a car, the car make and model, and if they rely on some sort of business for income. If they fulfil the requirements the gangs look for, they become potential victims.
In December 2014, semi-buried human remains and an altar to Santa Muerte (a popularly worshipped Mexican figure that personifies death) were found in two abandoned homes in El Mezquital, including the house where Mario Sanic used to live. Weeks later, the deceased was identified as a Barrio 18 gang member and it was thought that he was killed as part of a ritual. ‘It wasn’t easy to leave [El Mezquital] because it’s where we grew up. These are moments you’ll never forget,’ Mario said while being photographed against the light to obscure his face. No one in the family plans to return to the neighbourhood – not even for a visit.
Credits:
Author: José Manuel Patzán Photography: @JosueDecavele