'Reinas', the girls within violent youth gangs

In the band they call them “queens”.

Although they are not the ones that hit the machetes in street brawls (

), play a crucial role in these expanding violent youth organizations.

They are the ones in charge of information work ("infiltrating other gangs to discover their plans and identify their "queens", says one);

They are the ones who traditionally carry and hide white weapons (“because the male policemen can't search us,” explains another).

In addition, they are in charge of recruiting other girls (“inviting friends, or friends of friends, to parties to introduce them”, they say).

However, and although "among them there are also hierarchies based on their proximity to the leader", specialized Civil Guard researchers point out, "they do not participate in the meetings in which decisions are made, they are treated as pure sexual objects". they add.

And the agents warn: “In the band,

In the background, the involvement of girls in violent youth gangs is growing at the same time that these groups proliferate and expand.

This is certified, without there yet being any specific data in this regard, by the specialized groups of the Police and Civil Guard, where they assure that "many times everything begins with the complaint of a mother who has lost her underage daughter, or who has gone to look for her at home and they have beaten her, or in the worst case they have raped her ”.

This is how Ana (fictitious name) appeared at the police station in her neighborhood in the center of Madrid nine months ago.

Desperate.

She couldn't take it anymore.

In one year my sweet 14-year-old girl, whom I brought from Guatemala with great effort at the age of nine, had turned into a monster: I thought she was going to the house of those two friends to do her homework (so she told me), then she began to be surly and hermetic (I thought she had a boyfriend), she locked her room, she wouldn't let me touch her things, especially her backpack (where I later found out she had her machetes and weapons), she became aggressive, He hit me, stole me, threatened me, dropped out (he had told the teachers that I was sick to justify their absences), came home late and drugged... Until one day he confessed it to me:

"I am with the Trinitarians and you know that I am climbing and I will not stop until I reach the top," he recalls his words.

“I didn't know what to do, I asked for help at school, I went to the police (but they said they couldn't do anything if they didn't catch her)

because I was 14 years old), I went to the CAI (Children's Care Center), nothing... I just wanted the ordeal to end, that they lock her up, that they take her away, that they do whatever”, says Ana, who He clung to his faith and went to the Christian Help Center in Madrid, where he assures that he found understanding and guidance.

“The day I finally went to the police station to report it, my daughter arrived with torn stockings and panties, bruised, with blows, bites, messy hair, the wrong dress on, without a bra, she couldn't get past the door of the house, he fell on the hallway floor and stayed there.

She had been gang raped.

My little girl, for whom I went out of my way, was 15 years old.

Ana recounts that, after filing the complaint, two agents from the UFAM (Family and Women's Care Units) of the National Police went to her house for her,

“They are going to eliminate you”

Weeks later, and despite her daughter's threats (“as soon as they see you take me to the airport, they will eliminate you,” she told her), Ana put her on a plane bound for Guatemala: “She has seen what it is to live there. with nothing, like me, who started working at the age of seven, even going hungry, until a month ago when I brought her back to give her a second chance," says Ana. Now, at 16, her daughter ("chastened and repentant") works as a clerk in a store from morning to afternoon and Ana watches her cell phone, checks her bag, goes through all the pockets of her clothes and cleans her room ("already without a latch") every day, while she fights against a fierce mistrust.

One of those friends of hers, with whom her daughter was supposed to do her homework, is in prison.

Sandra (fictitious name) is 23 years old and is one of the few who has managed to leave the gang, after years of belonging to the Ñetas group, in a town in the south of Madrid.

“My parents moved and I changed schools, there I met who she became my best friend and introduced me to her gang,” she recalls.

She has the face of a girl, she wears

on her teeth, and her voice is soft and tender.

No one could say that she was an infiltrator for years: "I was with my friend in the Ñetas, but I had a relative in the Latin Kings, I dedicated myself to passing on information," she recalls.

“What marked me the most was learning that a friend of mine from the Latin Kings was killed in Ecuador, after his mother had taken him out of the country when she learned that he was threatened by gangs: “I am not safe anywhere.” , thought.

a teenage game

"You enter hand in hand with a friend, in a teenage game, but then it is very difficult to leave, especially when you have handled information: if you know things, you become dangerous outside," she says, and remembers that for four years she had to warn when he left work in a bar so that they would follow his steps to his house: "I saw how they were leaning out of the windows, at dawn, to check my route."

Fed up with feeling that "as a woman in a gang you are worthless, you have no voice or vote", that "they only use you to get information, carry weapons or for sex", that "you are an object that can be discarded", "even that everything doesn't matter to you”, one day “I crossed the street knowing that a car was coming…” He dodged it.

Sandra plucked up her courage and spoke to the boss: "I told him I didn't want to continue, and he took pity on me, I never went to the monthly meetings in which the money was distributed, recruitment was quantified, the areas conquered and It set the strategy”, he explains.

By then, life at home was already hell, he had only gone to class when there was no party at his friends' house: “As soon as his parents left for work in the morning, we would drink, smoke and take drugs. to the houses".

She was drunk because she also had to go to parties that were opposed to her for information: "I had to get them to trust me."

Now she runs into her gang in the neighborhood, they look at each other but don't greet each other.

The law of silence prevails.

Sandra is at the university.

The testimonies of the female gang members are repeated.

Marta (fictitious name) attended a

, “a nightclub for minors” near the Nuevos Ministerios metro stop, where boys and girls of Dominican origin met, like her.

She was 12 years old - she tells it at 26 - and had taken the train in a town on the outskirts of Madrid with a friend after lunch, "to get to the place they had told us about in the early afternoon," she recalls. .

“The atmosphere seemed great to me, with different boys, who danced with choreographies and signs that I had never seen before;

They secretly smuggled alcohol in, I asked who they were and they immediately told me they were members of the Trinitarios gang and that they controlled who entered and who did not enter the premises, I fell in love with the leader of the group and my goal was to be at his level ”.

She recruited girls (“we were fresh meat to them,” she says),

he saw how they were drugged and raped without knowing it, he kept weapons, protected and helped pay for lawyers for detained members ("my boyfriend at the time is in jail," he says), infiltrated other gangs... "For a while I felt that he had an important mission to accomplish;

I, who before was nobody and suffered

,” he recalls.

She lived by and for the gang for years, drugged, drunk, until she ended up destroying herself and her family.

"Bottoms out".

According to the investigations of the Civil Guard, within the hierarchy of the "queens", those who are close to the leaders command more, these are the ones who "serve" other girls, "the ones who give them the orders, the ones who they organize the entrance tests in the gang, almost always consisting of having sexual relations with a member of the group or with several at the same time, and they are the ones who hit them if they misbehave”, they point out and show how they incorporate the worst macho roles within the band.

"They are objects, trophies, "leather" to use and throw away," they say.

According to the researchers, "in the top positions the girls tend to be Latina, but more and more locals are entering."

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