Memories of the Future: The Mara-Contingency and Affiliation with Excess

Abstract

The commitment to analyze, interrogate and articulate the meaning of youth violence in a geopolitical arena, that is reorganizing global relations through appeals to fear and diverse rhetoric of security, acquires a crucial importance. This is particularly the case as certain categories of young people are demonized a priori and as the violent acts attributed to them are presented in an extremely simplified version. The immediate effect is the fuelled anger of the so-called public opinion and the emergence of the propitious environment for the implementation of authoritarian solutions that are detrimental to democracy and human rights. The mara represents the perfect portrait of an extreme threat and unfortunately, its members actively participate in the dissemination of their own myth, in which fiction and reality intermingle to certify that post-apocalyptic prophesies do take place on those meaning-inscribed bodies that advance ominously upon both real and symbolic territories as living testaments to the fragility of the social order that we have created. © 2012 Sage Publications and YOUNG Editorial Group.