Contemporary urban tribes

The phenomenon of resurgent tribes today is the most visible result of the decentralization process affecting contemporary man.

The emergence of groups that were formed around a defined territory and its raison for aesthetic reasons, possession of objects or references to imaginary ideological radicals (Nazism, leftist, etc.) Search for identity as a diffuse, not a new phenomenon.

Ever since the 20s, in the United States, in full post-war and the arrival of European immigrants, they start talking about gangs that form in the urban periphery of large cities.

Later in the sixties, mainly in Europe and the United States resurface the youth within the context of the counterculture and social protest movements.

Then in the eighties there is a wide range of groups that straddle the ideological spectrum of the far right and far left racist: neo-Nazis, skinheads, punk, etc..

In Venezuela, for sixty years under the influence of the counterculture, the media and the movement of protest, youth gangs emerge as an essentially urban phenomenon.

These are groups that are violent youth to fight with other groups, without guns and without explicit criminal purposes.

They were the "thugs" who starred in street fighting to prove supremacy in a particular territory but failed to violent death.

In Latin America, from the eighties and mainly in Central America, arise in nature violent criminal gangs, known as maras. After the war, many young people returning from the United States, make up this type of gangs that control territory for drug trafficking offenses and the consummation of high level of violence.

In Venezuela, the phenomenon of criminal gangs or gangs, as an important sociological phenomenon appears to mid-90s. But the sociocultural and sociopolitical context, is no longer that of the counterculture and protest movements of the '60s who openly defied the capitalist system, the ideology of bourgeois rule with their values based on wage labor, production, family and material success as the pivot of the model of self-realization and social achievement.

Now we're talking about a permanent deployment context of the global capitalist system or integrated, global capitalism, where the market is the corporate parent civilization of the production of meaning, so the values associated with this structure are hegemonic and new bands are now involved of this value system.

Ownership of objects-material values-sign and compulsive consumption as the only way to build meaningful identity and social recognition, pleasure and power associated with these values.

From a sociopolitical viewpoint, are disenchanted with the system of representative democracy and social mediation, as levers to access the sharing of material goods, social and cultural announced by him.

This meant the closure of the social possibilities of realization according to the model.

Moreover, we have in Venezuela since the last third of the century, the installation of a wild process of anomie that grinds not only the mediation policy and traditional values, but also institutions-matrices as in any modern society is the family.

In response to the insurgency of interpersonal violence as a major public health problem in Venezuela, which binds in terms of "epidemiological chains" to the process of social decomposition that we call wild spray as social, we decided to investigate the phenomenon of criminal gangs.

Using the methodology of life history and depth interviews, we interviewed a group of individuals serving sentences for murder and who had belonged (or belongs) to bands operating in the Guyana region.

In this research we found some elements that allow us access in a preliminary way, to a phenomenology of criminal gangs that are located in urban neighborhoods of low socioeconomic status of the main cities of this region.