Just two years ago, the Civil Guard posts in the towns of Guadalajara and Toledo began to receive unusual calls: "A desperate mother because her son, a minor, had not returned home and had not answered his mobile phone in several days";
"heads of institutes who alerted that the kids, minors, did not enter class and stayed in nearby parks";
“a complaint for a machete injury to the head of a child at the bus stop”;
"a mother who reports that three young men have assaulted her daughter in her own home, after throwing stones at the house"... The investigations into those events, scattered throughout towns in both provinces bordering Madrid, had a common denominator: gangs juveniles.
"Union, silver and war".
An agent of the Guadalajara Civil Guard Information Service heard those words for the first time at the beginning of last year.
“One of the first boys we arrested for a street brawl between gangs explained to me his maxims and acting priorities: 'Union, to keep the gang together;
silver, to raise money;
and war, to look for the lone members of other gangs”.
It was the Tridente operation, the first, in January 2021, "the one that opened the Blood melon", one of the gangs, recalls the guard.
Until then, "bands were non-existent for us," he says.
Now, his team is focused on this type of investigation: "We are facing a phenomenon that is booming and expanding, very serious because it mainly affects minors."
And he predicted
The high price of rents and housing and gentrification —the expulsion of the less wealthy— from the neighborhoods on the outskirts of Madrid, the low-skilled jobs offered by industrial corridors, and good communications with the capital are behind the penetration of youth gangs into the territory.
To these aspects must be added, experts and sociologists reiterate, "the attraction" that some adolescents feel for this type of urban tribes, which carries with it an idea of "power", of "dominion of the territory", of "belonging to a group ” and a whole “culture of violence”, also musical, broadcast on social networks, especially TikTok
.
"We kill the treacherous, we erase them, we remove them from the map, if you knew what we traffic with, some sell women and others traffic grams", is heard in a video in which about twenty young people are seen walking around displaying machetes by Azuqueca de Henares (Guadalajara).
A gang walking down the street with machetes and they upload it to Instagram
📹 Azuqueca de Henares pic.twitter.com/oe8imabvFL
– SocialDrive (@SocialDrive_es) February 11, 2022
In the province of Guadalajara, they have carried out five police actions against gangs, with 35 young people arrested (and seven investigated) in two years and, currently, two other investigations are open.
The same occurs in Toledo (29 detainees and 13 investigated), where the Civil Guard dismantled the
choir
de Seseña, whose leader was in jail, and arrested —in the Bacano operation— the alleged perpetrators of the death of a young man murdered in Madrid —this year there are five deaths— in gang wars.
The last one was William Bonilla, 15, who was shot twice (in the neck and back) last Sunday night in a square in the Villaverde district, in the capital.
Police and Civil Guard are now looking for the perpetrator or perpetrators ("very young") of what they define as "an execution for revenge" between Dominican Don't Play (DDP), alleged aggressors, and Trinidadians, with whom the victim is linked .
"They were going for him," say the same sources.
The fishing ground is in the institutes
The fishing grounds in which they "fish" or capture the kids to integrate them into the gangs are the institutes, coincide sociological studies such as the III Observatory of Latin Gangs, carried out by GAD-3 for the Christian Aid Center, and the reality with which the security forces run into.
"There is always someone within the institute who acts as a hook and generally takes the weakest, loneliest kids to the park, or those who have less coverage or family attention, although not always because they belong to unstructured environments," they point out.
"And the first thing they do is convince them that their real family is them, the family becomes the band," they add.
That is the reason why so many mothers and fathers called the Civil Guard posts in Guadalajara and Toledo to recover their children,
Last year there was a raid on the Carmen Burgos de Seguí Institute, in Alovera (Guadalajara), where three minors were arrested to the astonishment of their classmates and teachers.
“We did not know that they could be related to the gangs, in the center they were not bad guys;
They were simply neglecting their academic obligations”, comments the director, David Espolio, who assures that “this year these students are more focused on their classes”.
According to his inquiries, "the gang in question came from Alcalá and Azuqueca de Henares and had had a confrontation with people from Alovera," which, according to the researchers, shows "the mobility of the groups and their desire to control territories." .
"80% of those who are arrested for participating in brawls or violent actions leave the gang, recover, after passing through the detention centers for minors," say the Civil Guard researchers.
"In many cases, they are boys between the ages of 13 and 16, who have stopped attending classes and are already beginning the tests of courage and initiation rites, which almost always consist of attacks on members of a rival gang," they point out. .
"I got to hit people I didn't know at all," says a girl who managed to get out of the band.
"We almost killed one," says Kevin, another young Ecuadorian, after going to jail for committing several serious attacks.
“They give you joints, marijuana, alcohol... you try and mix the cocaine;
one is left as crazy and so you do whatever they send you, ”he adds.
“Now they are entering at 11 and 12 years old,” says Sebas, a 26-year-old Dominican, a former member of the Trinitarians who was charged with attempted murder.
multinational gangs
The recruiters are of Latin American origin in most cases, even though they were born in Spain;
however, most of those recruited are Spanish of origin, "kids from families from Guadalajara or Toledo all their lives, but also North Africans, Romanians, sub-Saharans...", say the specialists, who highlight the plurinational character that form those gangs.
The violent youth groups, self-promoted in the networks, have spread throughout the so-called Corredor del Henares, the residential, industrial and business axis that connects Madrid with Guadalajara, with the A-2 highway and with the train: Coslada, Torrejón de Ardoz , Alcorcón, Alcalá de Henares, Meco, Azuqueca de Henares and Alovera.
And also in areas of Toledo very close to the Villaverde neighborhood (Madrid), such as Ocaña, La Sagra (Bargas, Olías del Rey), Magán, Illescas, and especially Seseña, in the El Quiñón urbanization, one of those monuments to the real estate bubble built in the middle of the Toledo plain by the late Francisco Hernando Contreras, popularly known as
El Pocero
.
Operation "BACANO" @guardiacivil against the "choir" of Seseña of the Latin band DDP
11 detainees, 13 investigated and abundant bladed weapons and narcotic substances seized
Three of the detainees are the alleged perpetrators of the fatal stabbing of Usera pic.twitter.com/ uXpFbuntTC
— Gorka 5.81 (@gorka581) February 10, 2022
"The gangs expand by following the train tracks, because it is their preferred means of transportation," say the agents of the armed institute, who have been forced by this phenomenon to reinforce and specialize their units, centralized from the Information Headquarters (UCE- 3).
Before, the gangs were confined to some neighborhoods of the big capitals, where the competition falls on the National Police, which for a few months has also been forced to establish a special device in Madrid with massive identifications and reinforcements of dissuasive control in those areas. more conflicting.
In the last three months alone, police have arrested 42 gang members in the capital.
Toledo and Guadalajara are the two provinces that have suffered mainly and at the same time the outbreak of this particular violence, which extends from the most humble neighborhoods of the capital, where the immigrant population has traditionally settled.
The roots of the initially called “Latin gangs”, youth organizations with a marked territorial character, are found in Latin America (Latin Kings, Ñetas, Dominican Don´t Play —DDP—, Trinitarios, Bloods, Forty Two), where they arose to control or dominate the areas where certain population groups settled and whose wildest version is the gangs.
“The strength of this phenomenon in Spain is marked by the fact that, as soon as we head off a
choir
, a
chapter
or a
block
—the different ways in which the DDP, Trinitarians and Blood call their autonomous units—, they immediately reconfigure, there is always someone to take over and reestablish the hierarchy where they have already existed”, explain sources from the armed institute, who assure that they have dismantled five
choirs
(formed by an average of 20 members) in these two years.
A 'Master Plan' against gangs
The expansion of the phenomenon, in light of the operations carried out by the Civil Guard beyond the big cities, allows us to see how this proliferation occurs.
An issue that is already one of the main concerns of the police forces in matters of citizen security.
Agents from the Information groups in Toledo and Guadalajara are now busy instructing potential trainers, that is, other guards who will go to the institutes to explain to the kids the risks of joining one of these gangs, within the framework of the Master Plan. promoted by the Ministry of the Interior.
"The main way to put an end to this phenomenon of youth violence is to inform the boys, warn them, prepare them so that they do not make wrong decisions in which they can put their lives and those of others at risk," says one of those responsible for these programs. educational.
At the same time, Citizen Security agents are being instructed to distinguish between these types of groups.
"Not because of their clothing, because police pressure has led them to hide their symbols, necklaces, colors, handkerchiefs, etc.," they warn.
"But they continue to use their own language and expressions, which allow us to discern whether it is a normal fight outside a nightclub or whether it is a matter of gangs," they explain.
And they all agree on one idea: "The key is to intervene as soon as possible, at home, at school and on the street, to prevent the escalation of violence in the group, which is what makes it most difficult for the gang to leave."
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