Battle of the Urban Tribes

Skinheads walk thru Teusaquillo. Notice that the guy in the foreground is dark-skinned. 

Skinheads group up near the Santa Ana church. 

One of these guys wore a 'Good night white pride' t-shirt. 

While pedaling thru the ordinarily quiet and stately Teusaquillo neighborhood during today's May Day bike tour we encountered these groups of youths with cropped hair and dark jackets stampeding thru the streets. What were they doing?

They were gangs of skinheads, a weird and disturbing phenomenon in Colombia, facing off against each other. 

The skinheads take off in pursuit after the enemy band. 

The youths charged thru the streets, meeled about in the neighborhood's small park and then took off north again, yelling and swinging sticks at each other. They reminded me of packs of dogs, insects or some other supposedly 'lower' sort of animal which fights unthinkingly in packs.

The cops show up, but just a few of them. 

Bystanders and police whom I approached shrugged off the commomotion. These were only 'urban tribes,' they said. In fact, they were gangs of ideologically opposed skinheads: communists vs. anti-communists, some of them probably on their way home from the Primero de Mayo demonstration. 

The skinheads run thru the small nearby park.
In the confusion, I wasn't sure how many
groups, or 'Urban Tribes,' were here. 

This park has a small police station,
but the cops understandably felt outnumbered. 

I suspect, however, that these kids have little real ideology, but are instead acting out primordial instincts to join a group, adopt a label and lash out against those who are different. Rather than 'communist' vs. 'anti-communist', they might just as well have been fans of rival football teams, whom I have also seen fighting in public. 

Even so, I was comforted to see one of the skinheads wearing a t-shirt with the anti-racist song title 'Good Night White Pride,' altho that song, ironically, contains the lines 

One group chased their rivals out of the park and to the north. 

'You pick on the weak...You`re only strong in groups...Can`t do shit on your own'; sentiments which, I suspect, could apply equally well to either side in this fight. 

Caught one! Cops catch a member of one of the gangs. 

Fortunately, like two packs of dogs, these guys concentrated on each other and ignored the rest of us.

After waiting for reinforcements, the police arrived and herded the skinheads away. I don't know how it all ended. 

You're caught, dude. But he's the only one. 

Fortunately, too, these violent extremists are only a tiny group in Colombia, where most people are probably of mixed ethnic heritage. 

Neighbors watch from their windows. 

After the gangs had run off, these kids showed up and sang this anti-violence rap song. Nice. These same kids performed for us a few days ago in the Central Cemetery.




By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours