Guatemala: Heartbreak and Hope

GUATEMALA CITY — Tono Godoy could pick up his pistol. He could go to the homes of his brother’s killers. He could pull the trigger, again and again, punishing their sin with bullets.

Or he could listen to his little girl.

“No, papa! Don’t do it,” the 8-year-old begged through tears. “Don’t get involved in that again!"

His girl urged him to leave to God the business of blood for blood. She wanted him to try to be like his brother Oscar, the one who’d stayed clear of the gangs, and had spent months convincing Godoy that violence was no way to live.

Goodness wasn’t enough to keep his brother from being shot through the belly in the street near his mother’s home.

Godoy wrestled with his rage and pain. He’d promised Oscar he would try to change. He could be a killer, or he could be a father. He couldn’t be both.

Life or death?

It was up to him.

The colonia El Limon clings to the side of a steep ravine on the outskirts of Guatemala’s capital city. It was born from a refugee encampment that sprouted after an earthquake. Many of the homes have dirt floors and tin roofs. Only about half are connected to electricity or running water.

It is a place where young people grow up embracing a way of life most Guatemalans fear and few understand. Young men join street gangs called maras. Maras sell crack cocaine, rob, extort and kill.

The Department of Homeland Security recently launched a highly publicized crackdown on maras in the U.S. Some of the groups pose a grave threat because they are multinational criminal syndicates that traffic in people, drugs and weapons, federal officials say.

In El Limon, the maras seem to pose the greatest threat to each other.

El Limon’s children play soccer on a dusty field that is named for homicide. Las Cruces — the crosses — is a reference to the markers that sprout whenever murder victims are dumped on the pitch.

The mara that killed Godoy’s brother prowls at the top of the hill, just a few minutes’ walk up the narrow, twisting streets.

Every day, by force of will, Godoy turns his back on the killers. He heads down the hill. His path leads to a narrow cinderblock schoolhouse. There’s a small library in the basement. It is there Godoy nurtures the future — his own, and those around him.

The school is run by Grupo Ceiba, a nonprofit organization that sprouted first in El Limon and has since spread to other tough neighborhoods.

Godoy helps run the after-school program. Sometimes that means teaching computer skills. Sometimes that means explaining how to find books in the library. It often means making peace between the schoolboys, demonstrating with calm patience the power that comes from respect, starting with respect for yourself.

The boys and girls address Godoy as “teacher.” The new title is a source of pride and bewilderment for Godoy.

“How many people could believe that Tono would be here?” asked Julio Cesar Coyoy, a Grupo Ceiba teacher and its executive director. “The person who must believe it most is Tono.”

Grupo Ceiba started in 1989 with support from the Roman Catholic Church. It now stands on its own, funded in part with an international grant. When the children of El Limon weren’t getting educated, the people raised money and built them a school. For their parents, Grupo Ceiba launched a job-training program that teaches computer repair,Web page design, iron-working and candy making.

Many in Guatemala’s poor neighborhoods aim no higher than finding low-paying factory work, said Marco Antonio Castillo, Grupo Ceiba’s director general. Some can’t resist the lure of the easy money available through gangs and drug trafficking.

The best way to bring peace to the streets is by attacking Guatemala’s economic and social ills, Castillo said.

“I am not only working because of the violence of today,” he said. “I am working so the violence doesn’t repeat itself in 10 years.”

Until July, there were three Godoy boys in El Limon.

Tono Godoy, 22, spent nearly half his life running with gangs and wanted to change. Oscar Godoy, 19, had avoided the gang life and worked at Grupo Ceiba, doing the same job his older brother does now. The youngest brother, Ronny Godoy, 16, is a leader in the local White Fence gang.

Tono Godoy lives in a one-room corrugated steel shack. His wife keeps the earth floor carefully swept. The tattered dolls owned by their two daughters, ages 6 and 8, sit on a rough shelf. There’s a single bed, a print of Jesus on one wall and a black-and white TV powered by an extension cord.

Godoy’s mother lives in a nearby threeroom home that shelters three families, including Ronny, his wife and their toddler daughter. There are bullet holes in the front door. How they got there, no one recalls.

The night he died, Oscar had gone up the hill hoping to spend time with his girlfriend. There were two gunshots. He suddenly was pounding on the door.

“Mama! Mama,” he cried and fell inside, bleeding from bullets in his hand and stomach. The doctors couldn’t save him.

It shouldn’t be Oscar, Tono Godoy thought. Oscar had taken him to Grupo Ceiba. He’d shown him people who knew the way to a life outside of the maras.

They’d helped Tono land a construction job. He built houses and went home after work. He realized the mara had kept him from his children. Paola, his 8-year-old, loved having her daddy around.

He understood. His father had made a living washing trucks and buses. The man drank himself to death a decade before. There are some happy memories of working with his father, but Godoy said he can’t recall ever owning a toy.

Trouble came calling after Godoy’s father died. At first it was just punks who did little more than get into fistfights with rivals. Then a man named Francesco showed up in El Limon. He’d been deported from the United States. His skin was covered with gang tattoos. He loaned Tono cash to pay for family expenses, but the help came with a cost.

“He told me to do bad things. We would go together but he had me do them,” Godoy said.

Guns — and the money to buy them — followed. Both came to El Limon as a result of the cocaine trade taking root in Guatemala.

Almost overnight, straying into the wrong place could get you murdered.

When Oscar was killed, his brothers immediately began talking revenge. Ronny got his guns and told Tono Godoy to do the same.

Paola began wailing in fright when she saw her daddy looking for his gun. She begged him not to go back to the mara.

Godoy doesn’t have the words to explain what happened next. Rage. Grief. Love. The world began to spin. He heard himself speak: “What happened, happened. I’m not going to dirty my hands again.”

Then he fainted.

He awoke in the hospital. He knew he’d made the right choice. Somebody had to break the cycle of blood for blood.

Oscar’s body is now in a crypt in a rundown corner of the national cemetery near the heart of Guatemala City. It usually isn’t safe for his family to visit the tomb. Gang members responsible for the murder keep a lookout on the traffic leaving El Limon.

In January, the surviving Godoy brothers found a safe way to the cemetery, their first visit since the funeral. The air that day was filled with smoke from workers burning dried flowers collected from the graves. Oscar’s tomb was marked with a white Styrofoam cross, a broken arm swinging loose in the breeze.

“Sometimes I think it should be me here, not him,” Tono Godoy said.

The devil is always near, he said, trying to pull him back to his old ways. Still, each day he gets up and heads down the hill to Grupo Ceiba, quietly proving he can walk a new path.

He prays that someday his younger brother will follow.