By Anhony Wayne Fontes

This article explores the making of carceral citizenship in Guatemala through an ethnographic analysis of la talacha – informal prison taxation schemes. Taxation is a key technology of citizenship. Tax enforcement mechanisms, the distribution of tax burdens, citizens’ willingness to pay, and their expectations of what they should get in return all make taxation an essential lens through which to understand state formation and citizens’ perceptions of and relations with one another. In Guatemala, where organized crime competes with and subsumes state institutions in ways that profoundly impact everyone, the state is only one of many entities claiming the right to tax, at turns competing and colluding with its underworld. These blurred dynamics are hyper-distilled in the country’s prison system, where state-prisoner networks tax the imprisoned population in the name of collective survival and elite profits. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork behind bars, I show how la talacha sets the terms of carceral citizenship by organizing prisoner-state co-governance, reifying the prison’s socioeconomic hierarchies, and shaping inmates' relationships with the world beyond the prison. 

EUROPEAN REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN STUDIES No. 116 (2023): July-December, pp. 105-123