The cell phones of dozens of teenagers recorded the last steps of Jaime Guerrero alive. A death in the eyes of all. In those videos, the huge pool of blood that the almost 15-year-old boy, allegedly a member of the Trinitarians, left before collapsing at the gates of a nightclub in the center of Madrid was also recorded. Those same phones also pointed to the point where someone uselessly practiced cardiorespiratory massage on the young man in a desperate attempt to avoid another victim of gang violence. His death from a stab wound to the heart created a wave of concern because that murder occurred in Atocha, a place of passage, next to the Retiro, the most important train station in Spain, right next to a fast food restaurant always overflowing. Right under the noses of many who do not live with crime on a daily basis. The author of the fatal blow has not yet been arrested, but everything points to the fact that it is another young gang member. What went wrong so that one adolescent became murdered that day and another a murderer?
“The gangs do not always capture young people, they are the ones who look for them,” insisted the sociologist Mariah Oliver in the Justice and Interior Commission of the Community of Madrid a few days ago. Oliver had been invited to give keys to the deputies on how to tackle this problem. She knows him from the inside. She was a Latin Queen, sentenced to prison in one of the first sentences in Spain that punished simply belonging to these urban groups. His is a story of improvement, one of those that is so popular and has even inspired an advertising campaign. To summarize: he left the gang, studied for a degree and now works on violence prevention. He does it hand in hand with Professor Carles Feixa in the project transgang of the Pompeu Fabra University, which aims to establish effective strategies to fight against the negative aspects of this type of group, beyond the “iron fist” once they have already committed crimes.
When she set foot on the ground in 2018 to try to approach the problem of the gangs in Madrid, she found a scenario that was very different from the one she knew. She defends that, despite the idea with which she has worked until now, groups such as the Dominican Do n’t Play or the Trinitarians no longer function as a single hierarchical system. There is no single leader in each province or community to guide the actions of obedient members. “They have lost the pyramidal structure, now they are a series of atomized groups that identify themselves with a few acronyms, but not with other groups in the rest of the territory. This has caused, for example, that we no longer have someone to turn to if we want to work or mediate with them”, explained the expert.
Police have long confirmed this view. “Police persecution has caused many of the elderly to have been arrested and sentenced. This has made minors now take center stage and they are much less organized and want to demonstrate more, that is why their activity is more violent”, explain sources from the body. The trend is clear. There is no detention of gang members in which several minors are not included. Three boys who had not turned 18 are accused of immobilizing and stabbing a young man in the chest in Usera a few weeks ago. Two minors were convicted of ending the life of another young man on a street in Zaragoza in 2018. A minor was also in charge of stabbing a rival in a Ciudad Lineal park on the first weekend of February, the same one that Jaime died Warrior. Of the four attackers who killed rapper Isaac in broad daylight in a Madrid tunnel, three did not exceed 17. According to police data, the number of minors involved in gang clashes has doubled in two years.
“We are concerned because the age of entry to the gangs has dropped to 11 or 12 years,” said Mercedes González, the Government delegate in Madrid after the boy’s murder in Atocha. “It is not necessary to go for them, they are the ones who show interest and are attracted to these dynamics at an age in which the level of maturation makes them much more permeable to anything. They enter a process of socialization through violence in the crisis of adolescence”, Oliver stressed in that appearance.
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In most cases, this approach begins through social networks. Many adolescents see in these publications with green and black hearts, which identify the Trinidadians and the Dominican Don’t Play respectively, an attractive world. Some of them adopt these slogans without knowing very well what they are getting into and some end up receiving demands for money or proof of loyalty to the gang. They are those whom the real members of these groups call bulterosyoung people who presume in their networks to belong to a gang with which they only sympathize for fun or because of a need to belong to a group.
The territory is not only the street, the gangs also fight for the digital world. For this reason, many of the confrontations in real life begin with a Tik Tok or Instagram post or a video clip on YouTube. The supposed rivals put on a face on the networks and recognize each other when they cross paths on the street, in the neighborhood or at school. The Police have long alerted parents and teachers to pay attention to the accounts of adolescents and take action against seemingly innocuous symbols such as hearts or labels such as #d3 or #d7.
Oliver’s intervention came just a few days before the regional president, Isabel Díaz-Ayuso, announced a commission on youth gangs. The opposition has criticized it because an autonomous government does not have the responsibility for security, but it does have the power to promote social programs that prevent violence. “You have to act before a boy is murdered and another murderer. When criminal measures have to be taken, the damage has already been done,” stressed the researcher, who assured that “many of these young people are forming their own groups by imitating what they read in the media or on the networks.” This means that it is no longer necessary for a gang member to approach them in the park to capture them, but they themselves take the initiative and reproduce the symbols and practices.
Concern in the classrooms
Faced with this panorama, unarmed, are many teachers who are direct witnesses of the flirtation, and sometimes something more, of their students with these gangs. So much so that there is no specific public program to which they can go to attack the problem. Some of them individually call Mariah Oliver herself or the police forces, who offer talks in schools. But they also contact evangelical groups that offer a kind of god’s path as an alternative to violence.
“There are many social agents who want to work on this, but they don’t have the tools,” says Oliver. The generically named bands may seem somewhat abstract, but if we bring the magnifying glass closer, they are adolescents fascinated by a symbology and a feeling of belonging to something greater than what life offers them. As stated by the researcher Luca Giliberti in a scientific article fruit of their conversations and coexistence with members of gangs in Catalonia, “beyond welcoming and responding only to the symptoms of youth discomfort, these groups offer members a capacity for empowerment capable of claiming an oppressed identity, challenging the culture dominant”.
In the current composition of the bands, two factors come together. For children of immigrants who, despite being born in Spain, still do not feel part of society, these groups represent something like a second family. “These groups are capable of representing and welcoming individuals who experience different forms of social exclusion, from leaving the world of education to the scenario of those excluded from the world of work that is opening up more and more with the crisis,” says Giliberti. At the same time, the gangs are strengthened by hundreds of publications on the networks of middle-class adolescents who feel an enormous fascination for this world. This is, broadly speaking, what lies behind Ayuso’s statement that the members of the gangs are “as Spanish as Abascal (leader of Vox)”.
In this scenario, gang members are even attracted to the idea of belonging to something forbidden, which is why the omerta among its members: nobody knows anything about any band. “The simple membership is already a crime, that makes it very difficult to work with them, because they live it in hiding. They don’t trust anyone who gets close to them,” explains Oliver. In 2014, the Supreme Court declared the Dominican Don’t Play gang illegal, something that justice had previously done with the Latin King, the Ñetas or the Blood. The sentence for belonging to a criminal organization or group reaches five years. For this reason, in the oral hearings that judge the crimes within these rivalries, a strange “pact of silence” is generated between the accused and the victims.
The gangs in Spain are not involved, so far, in large-scale drug trafficking, although they are in small amounts as a method of financing. Their confrontations arise over something as intangible as territory. “They attack each other for control of a park or a street or simply because you are my rival,” says a police source. Very young members become part of a gang identifying the enemy, but without knowing why it is. This further reinforces the voices that point out that the root of the problem is much deeper and that this dead boy in the eyes of everyone in Atocha is just the tip of the iceberg. A phrase by Mariah Oliver sums up this approach: “As long as we only apply punitive measures and not prevention, young people will continue to kill and die for nothing.”
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