On the first of October, a 15 year old young manwhose name the authorities keep withheld, was hired from prison by a leader of the gang ‘DZ Mafia’ so that, in exchange for 2,000 euros, he would burn down the apartment of another prisoner, leader of ‘the Blacks’, a rival clan.
According to the criteria of
The young man arrived at the neighborhood where he had to fulfill his criminal mission, with a friend of the same age. But before locating the apartment, security guards ‘the Blacks’, several of them minors, discovered them and attacked them. The first received 50 stab wounds and was incinerated, and his partner managed to flee and is in the hands of the Police.
The tragedy did not stop there. Two days later, to take revenge, the head of ‘DZ Mafia’ hired another young man, 14 years old, for 50,000 euros, so that, armed with a .357 Magnum, he murdered one of the leaders of ‘the Blacks’. The hitman-child He did not complete the mission: to get closer to the place where he was to carry out the crime, he hired a vehicle from an online platform and, on the way, he got involved in an argument with the driver, a father of a family without ties. with criminal groups, and killed him with a shot to the head.
Many petty criminals
Under the influence of these rappers, they live conditioned and with the ghost of great gangsterism
He was arrested and held in a juvenile prison, while his employer, the 23-year-old leader of ‘DZ Mafia’, was transferred from prison. The events did not occur in a third world city, but in the port of Marseillessecond city of Franceshaken for years by bloody wars between gangs dedicated to drug trafficking, extortion of merchants and prostitution.
The settling of scores between mafia clans in the port city stopped being news a long time ago: since the mid-seventies, Marseille sIt became the capital of cocaine and heroin trafficking, to the point that today many French media call it a “narco city.” He President Emmanuel Macronforced on several occasions to visit the city due to violence, launched an action plan three years ago, once the Police assumed that criminal gangs had banned him from entering a large area in the north of the city. .
Macron’s action plan served to lower the “drug homicides”as the authorities call them, which went from around 100 in 2023 to 19 in the first nine months of the year, according to AFP. But the fact that the protagonists of the current chain of violence are so young has particularly shaken French public opinion.
“We are witnessing an unprecedented savagery and an ‘ultra-juvenilization’ (of crime)”declared prosecutor Nicolas Bessone to the Parisian newspaper Le Mondethis Sunday. “Two boys responded to calls (on social networks) to end the life of another, without any remorse, without any reflection,” he added.
The references to what the French saw in the TV series about the Colombian bosses have made the comparison with the hardest years of the violence in Medellinand what happens in Mexico.
Rudy Manna, spokesman for the Alliance police union, expressed his astonishment: “We are facing the ‘Mexicanization’ of society, with increasingly younger hired killers, for whom the notion of life or death does not exist (…), “There are no longer any limits and we are faced with absolute horror.”
It’s not just Marseille
As demonstrated in a detailed investigation a few months ago by journalist Angelique Negroni, from the Parisian newspaper The FigaroMarseille is far from the only city where minors appear linked to drug sales, contract killings and criminal gangs. “Banalized and unchecked, the violence of these increasingly younger criminals is imposed in all cities gangrenous by drug trafficking,” stated the chronicler.
Banalized and unchecked, the violence of these increasingly younger criminals is imposed in all cities gangrenous by drug trafficking.
Apart from Marseille, this violence with high participation of minors is imposed in dozens of neighborhoods in Nice, Lille, Saint-Denis (north of Paris), Lyon and other cities. On Friday, a few minutes southeast of the Eiffel Tower, the youth gangs of Balard and Beaugrenelle clashed with knives, samurai katanas, metal knuckles and iron goat legs, on an esplanade facing the Seine River.
After the first confrontation, there was a sequence of scuffles that ended in a nearby shopping center. One of the injured, a teenager like all those involved, was hospitalized with serious injuries to his nose and skull.
In Saint-Denisnorth of Paris, near the legendary cathedral where most of the French monarchs are buried, blood flowed at the beginning of the year in the midst of another war between gangs. A 14-year-old student was stabbed in a subway station, and another, who had just turned 18, was beaten to death with a baseball bat. More than twenty minors were arrested then: they were carrying knives or blunt weapons.
“First of all we need parents,” cried Mathieu Hanotin, mayor of Saint-Denis. “Commit, talk to your children and keep them at home as much as possible,” he explained later, in a speech that echoed statements by President Macron on youth violence, when the president said: “Our country needs a return of authority at all levels, starting with the family.”
“In schools, the carrying of knives and retractable blades has become normal,” explains Police Commissioner Naima Makri, who heads a cell specialized in juvenile delinquency. The magistrate Emilie Petrovsky, responsible for juvenile crime in the prosecutor’s office of Meaux, a small town west of Paris, talks about the increasing participation of teenagers in robberies, extortion, micro-trafficking and bill collection, in an environment where knives and razors come to light with ease, and – as the chronicler Negroni says – “a look perceived as aggressive can trigger a bloody battle after school.”
“What is disconcerting is that, in front of authority, some young people make fun – adds the judicial official –, they do not realize the seriousness of the acts they commit, and that is why one wonders how to recover them, because empathy is learned , but they have no basis, since they suffer from serious emotional deficiencies.”
Social networks reproduce and feed back the cycle of violence, since attacks and fights are frequently recorded on video, and circulate at breakneck speed on WhatsApp chains, Telegram and other platforms. “That stimulates the pulse (between gangs) because the humiliation (of those attacked) lasts” and that fuels the thirst for revenge, he explains to The Figaro Commissioner Makri.
Yann Sourisseau, head of the Central Office against organized crime, of the Judicial Police, is alarmed: “Minors with the profile of petty criminals on public roads for robberies, possession of narcotics and acts of street violence have become hired killers” . He explains to Le Figaro that they are even hired through social networks, and are offered between 15,000 and 20,000 euros per kill, in a kind of “uberization of crime.”
Once detained, many of these adolescents “appear disconnected from reality and without any feeling towards the victims,” adds Sourisseau. Those who remain on the street act within small groups, with high mobility to flee and hide, and those who hire them provide them with stolen cars to move around, an apartment to stay near where they must commit the murder, and a photograph of the victim. }
Drugs, guns and rap
The issue has transcended the level of judges and police, and today it worries sociologists. One of them is Thomas Sauvadet, author of the book Warrior capital: competition and solidarity among city youth and frequent guest on radio and television talk shows. For him, many of these minors are clouded by the glorification of ‘gangsterism’ made by certain well-listened rappers, whose videos praise illegal drugs, weapons, violence and criminal gangs.
Mentions the rap producer El Mehdi Zouhairi, alias Malsain (Malsano), head of a cocaine and other drug distribution network in Seine-Saint-Denis, fugitive since April, when he was sentenced to ten years in prison by the Bobigny court . According to what Sauvadet told Le Figaro, many petty criminals under the influence of these rappers “live conditioned and with the ghost of great ‘gangsterism’, which encourages them to go on to commit acts of greater violence.”
A French diplomat who served in Central and South America for several years told EL TIEMPO a few days ago that “in the 80s and 90s, when he saw this phenomenon of child hitmen in Mexico, El Salvador and ColombiaI was telling my compatriots in Paris about it, and they couldn’t believe it, and it turns out that now this happens more and more in France and we have no idea what to do.”
The result of an online survey on the Le Figaro website illustrates the concern of the French. The minority exception, a legal norm that mandates special, sometimes non-criminal, treatment of children and adolescents who commit crimes if it is proven that they are not aware of their actions, has been a sacred principle for decades. But in the newspaper’s poll, 87 percent said that exception should be reviewed. And in France, the country of human rights, that is a novelty.
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