The machete or bolomachete is the fetish weapon of youth gangs, a huge knife commonly used in the jungle to clear vegetation or cut sugar cane. Transferred to the city, its size makes it an ideal tool to keep the distance in attack or defense, but it also makes it lethal. On the first Saturday of February, a black night in Madrid that left two dead and five injured in clashes between members of the Trinitarios and the Dominican Don’t Play (DDP), the cameras of the Independence nightclub on Atocha street they recorded Jaime Guerrero Mesoussi, Pepe, 15 years old, carrying one of those huge knives in his hand as he ran away. “He had just ripped it from the side, after being attacked by a rival group,” police sources point out. He bled to death without the emergency services being able to do anything for him. It had only been five months since he had stopped training and had started “getting into trouble,” as his father worriedly put it to his soccer coach for the past two years.
The continuous and serious clashes between youth gangs led last week to the Secretary of State for Security, Rafael Pérez, meeting with the Madrid Government Delegate, Mercedes González, and the highest police officers in Madrid in order to respond to a historical demand of the agents who fight against this type of crime: “That carrying a machete is a crime, if there is no normalized justification.” The head of the Ministry of the Interior promised – according to those attending the meeting – to “study” the way to articulate the control of those weapons that have been showing deadly, and that the young people carry tucked inside their pants and attached to their legs , or hide under cars or hedges in the parks and sports fields they frequent. The main difficulty of elaborating this norm is that the regulation of weapons has a state character.
Meanwhile, the slogan is to intensify the controls and identifications in the areas they frequent and to seize weapons. Over the weekend, 514 National Police officers have been deployed in 11 districts of the capital —working with the Madrid Municipal Police— and in the town of Parla, in addition to 834 Civil Guard officers in nine municipalities in the region and areas bordering,
The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, however defended this Monday that Madrid is “safe”, and stressed that the police device to reinforce violent youth gangs launched this weekend has left a balance of 37 detainees and 3,000 identified. For her part, the spokeswoman for the Madrid City Council, Inmaculada Sanz (PP), assured that the weekend has been “very calm” and detailed that “more than ten bladed weapons” had been seized.
However, in the window at the entrance of the Islazul Ranger store, the catalog of machetes they have is displayed. They range from 6.50 euros the cheapest, to 1,000 the most expensive. There are all kinds of them: serrated, smooth, gray, black, with a strap on the handle… “Their sales represent 1% of our income, here we live mainly from selling clothes,” says José, the manager. In Madrid there are other establishments of this franchise, especially in shopping centers, but also in the center, for example in La Latina, a few meters from the Plaza Mayor. To buy a machete, all you have to do is prove your age of majority with a DNI.
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At the back of the establishment, the pistols and shotguns of airsoft. They seem real, but they are compressed air weapons, what they expel are what are known as pellets. They are used for leisure activities and paintball for decades, but it was not until 2012 when a ministerial order regulated its possession. The then head of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, included them in the weapons regulations and established that a card granted by the municipalities to own them. These permits are valid for five years, cost around 20 euros per piece and you can have a maximum of six. Police sources assure that this measure “practically withdrew them from circulation.”
Local clerks have had all kinds of experiences with buyers of machetes. From one that suddenly took twenty of them and several axes, to another two that just after acquiring them went into the dressing room to hide them in the leg of their pants. “We cannot refuse to sell them to anyone because we would be accused of discrimination,” they say. “Guys have also come who comment that they normally wouldn’t have bought it, but that they feel they have to protect themselves in the neighborhood,” José points out. These days, perhaps due to recent events, that window is particularly striking. Two boys stop to look at it, point and comment: “Look, I think this is the one the boy died with, the Amazon.”
The machete is the gang’s weapon of choice for two reasons. In the first place because of their lethality and the defense they allow. “With a knife or a razor,” José points out, pointing to the sample of this type of weapon that he has on the counter, “you have to get closer, with which you expose yourself.” The machete, however, allows you to hit the enemy at a greater distance and the cuts it causes are very deep. In addition to the deceased, the Samur and Summa health workers have found amputated limbs dozens of times or deep breaches in sensitive areas of the body with a simple machete blow. “Not only do they carry them, they also hide them in strategic places such as trash cans, sewers, hidden in parks or in a nearby house. Any place where they have it at hand if you have to face rivals, ”explain police sources.
story of a fetish
But they are also chosen for the fetishism that exists around them. At the beginning of these gangs, in New York prisons in the 90s, the leaders designated the machete as a symbol of these groups in memory of the supposed agrarian roots they represented. The Trinitarians are believed to have been founded by Leónides Sierra in 1992 in Rickers Island prison, one of the most isolated and impregnable in the world. He was interned there to protect him from confrontation with inmates in other prisons. Sierra founded this gang for precisely that, to defend themselves against other enemies and create a supposed community to support themselves against rivals and to gain territory. His full story has been collected by documents from the New York prosecutor’s office. A story that the youngest members of these gangs are probably not aware of today, for whom machetes represent a symbol of power and ostentation on the networks.
In July, the UK began implementing a new strategy to prevent knife crime. Thanks to a state order, the police can ask the judges to apply certain very restrictive measures to people who have knives seized, those who habitually carry them or those who have a previous record of crimes with knives. These measures, which apply from the age of 12, include that after a certain time that person is obliged to stay at home, that is, personalized curfews; restrictions on the use of social networks so that they do not publish violent content and the limitation of movements in a certain geographical area. And of course, the ban on carrying a knife. The approval of such measures in Spain would have a difficult journey. High courts in several communities have struck down similar restrictions during the pandemic, even when the motivation was health.
The creation of legal tools such as those already applied by the United Kingdom were born from a demand by agents, very similar to that demanded by the security forces and bodies in Spain. Home Secretary Priti Patel pushed through this legislation after gang-based knife attacks had become a real security issue in the country, and especially in London. According to a report from the British parliamentBetween March 2020 and 2021, 41,000 crimes with knives were recorded, 27% more than 10 years ago. Of the almost 19,000 that came to trial, 19% involved minors.
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