Hunted

The theme of Kevin Lewis O'Neill's fascinating book, Hunted-i.e., drug addicts kidnapped and held in involuntary confinement in treatment centers run by Guatemalan Pentecostals-may strike readers as so outré or outrageous as to provoke a reaction.Surely Pentecostals don't do this?Don't they stress free choice?Aren't there better ways of dealing with addiction?Isn't this a marginal phenomenon, done in secret, in defiance of the authorities?The answers are eye-opening: Pentecostals are indeed doing this, they regard this approach to drug addiction as preferable to the available alternatives, and there are around 6000 beds (xv) for addicts in such centers in Guatemala City, while the political authorities (apart from certain human rights advocates) largely endorse this approach to treatment.The Catholic Church operates a detoxification center in Guatemala City with a grand total of six beds (xv).Meanwhile, there are more men in the treatment centers than there are in Guatemala's maximum-security prison system.Since there now exists a "shadow carceral system infused with Pentecostal imperatives," and a "near consensus" on the need to "hunt" addicts (xvi), the courts sometimes sentence addicts to time in the centers ( 19), and so one might regard them as an improvised adjunct to the legal and prison system rather than an alternative to it.One center director, "Pedro," commented that "I do not kidnap men.I rescue them" (xvi).O'Neill denotes the complex system of human interactions associated with the centers with the oxymoronic label "predatory pastoralism" (xiii, 69).O'Neill is the author of an earlier monograph on Guatemalan Pentecostalism-City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (University of California, 2010)-and he brings to this topic two decades of on-site observation.Whereas the earlier work was more of a standard anthropological study, Hunted consists in brilliant participant-observer reportage.As readers progress through this book, their experience may mirror that of the anthropologist, for whom the initial, open-and-shut case against the addiction treatment centers gradually became less clear-cut.At a pivotal point in the narrative, O'Neill had to decide whether or not he wanted to initiate a formal complaint that would lead to police raid on a center and found himself uncertain as to whether it would be better to leave things as they were (68-69).Those observed in this book, as well as the one observing them, are all marked by ambiguity and ambivalence (72-76, 108, 123).Near the beginning of Hunted, O'Neil offers a startling depiction of the common procedure for apprehending and placing men into the treatment centers

Addiction · Criminology · Human rights · Political science · Politics · Prison · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · History · Law · Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies · Psychology · Religion, Society, and Development