Donal MacIntyre gets his teeth into how cannibalism has found its way into street wars.
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Child prostitution, assassinations and kidnapping – gang warfare is never for the faint-hearted.
But the rap sheet of guerilla turf battles has just got even darker.
Gang bosses are now actively encouraging cannibalism as a new addition to their arsenal of fear.
While some groups use the tribalistic practice to invoke the most excruciating revenge possible, often eating their foes alive, other gangs employ cannibalism as a twisted induction ritual.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, such stories emanate from two of the most dangerous countries on earth – Mexico and the Central African Republic.
In North America, infamous drug cartel the Knights Templar took particular relish in ratcheting up their vile gang inaugurations, testing the resolve of young recruits by ordering them to eat children’s hearts.
According to informant reports, notorious late chieftain Nazario Moreno González – who founded La Familia cartel prior to setting up the Knights Templar, and who was shot dead by government security officials in Mexico in March last year – made the grim order to test loyalty.
The ‘meals’ were readily available from his organisation’s organ-trafficking wing – sourced from kidnapped local children, whose organs were harvested by the cartel for the lucrative overseas market.
Authorities rescued one group of kids who had been taken from the same school, driven in a refrigerated van towards a Pacific port, wrapped tightly in blankets.
Speaking on local radio, a spokesperson revealed the Knights Templar’s harrowing rites of passage.
He said, “At an initiation ceremony they used the organs, in this case the heart, and forced people going through the initiation process to eat it. There are statements from some people who were present when Moreno González came and told others, either as initiation or as part of a ritual, ‘Today we are going to eat a person’s heart’.”
In Africa, the Central African Republic’s ceaseless civil war has escalated into similar tactics, but this time it’s reserved for enemies.
Rampaging Christian militias struck back against their Muslim rivals, the Seleka, after the resignation of the nation’s controversial Muslim president, Michel Djotodia – the first Islamic leader to wield power over the CAR’s Christian majority.
His decision to step down prompted a brutal backlash from mobs of Christian gang Anti-Balaka, which translates literally as ‘anti-machete’.
They might disagree with the use of the world’s most famous knife, but they’re not against a spot of cannibalism.
As the troubled country was gripped by riots and violent uprising, with mobs destroying mosques and attacking Muslim neighbourhoods in capital city Bangui, victims of the attacks were eaten alive on the streets.
One aid worker recalled, “They were taking machetes to people and burning the bodies and eating them.”
The extreme violence is said to have been retribution for similar uprisings from Djotodia’s Seleka army, helping him to seize power in 2013.
Since then, sectarian warfare has resulted in more than 20 per cent of the population being displaced, and the CAR has had three different leaders – with reports of more than 1,000 deaths per month.
In 2014 – a year on from the ill-fated coup – UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay visited Bangui, and was damning in her appraisal.
She said, “The inter-communal hatred remains at a terrifying level, as evidenced by the extraordinarily vicious nature of the killings. CAR has become a country where people are not just killed, they are tortured, mutilated, burned and dismembered – sometimes by spontaneous mobs as well as by organised groups of armed fighters. Children have been decapitated, and we know of at least four cases where the killers have eaten the flesh of their victims. The Anti-Balaka, who originally came into existence as a reaction to the depredations of the Seleka, are now metamorphosing into criminal gangs who, in addition to continuing to hunt down Muslims, are also starting to prey on Christians and other non-Muslims. How many more acts of cannibalism must there be before we really sit up and pay attention?”
Cannibalism is nothing new to the country.
Late dictator Jean-Bédel Bokassa is alleged to have kept human limbs in fridges, which he would serve to visiting dignitaries from France.
A series of grisly tales are associated with Bokassa’s 13-year reign but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the charges against him were later dropped.
Cannibalism isn’t the only new trick on the menu of gang intimidation tactics.
The Internet is also a massive weapon.
One question: how many serial killers do you follow on social media?
None? Well, the modern tyrant is tech-savvy.
Sites such as YouTube, Twitter and Instagram increasingly used for recruitment drives, with posts also serving as a reminder of gang brutality.
You need look no further than the entirety of ISIS’s reign of terror in the Middle East, and the host of British Muslim teenagers rushing to Syria to sign up to join the group, to see the power of cyber recruitment and brainwashing.
In Brazil’s troubled favelas – airbrushed out of last summer’s World Cup – gangs have moved from spraying graffiti on slum walls to posting ominous warnings on virtual walls.
Members reveal their vast drug stashes
and show off their arsenals of weaponry. Just as on the street corner, gangs clash
online – with rival groups calling each other out in YouTube videos, doing their best to intimidate their enemies with footage of past victories.
Last February a video was uploaded of a gunfight between Rio’s two main gang players, Comando Vermelho (CV) and Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP).
To locals, it was a warning and a reinforcement of power – to the rest of the world, a claim for global infamy.
The propaganda doesn’t even have to be posted by the gangs themselves, as innocent bystanders also become eager to update the rest of the world.
But there are risks for individual gang members. Shortly after going viral in 2012 – after a series of online posts depicting
a fast-living lifestyle involving women, money and violence – drug lord Nando Bacalhau was arrested.
Last year another gang leader, Wallace de Brito Trindade, was also captured by police.
His online exploits lead to another 12 people being arrested, after officers went through his Facebook photo galleries.
Local newspapers also use such digital data when reporting on gang violence – but this only serves to fuel the organisations’ notoriety, driving more traffic to their online profiles.
New York’s notorious turf wars have extended to the Internet, with users posting celebrations of a rival gang member’s death, while taunting the victim’s associates.
Warring organisations The Very Crispy Gangsters and The Rockstarz – names presumably chosen based on ease of domain name availability – have organised Facebook groups on which to exchange their beefs.
The Brooklyn groups have even used the site as a kind of live score alert for ‘fans’, with Rockstarz members posting messages like “Up 3-0” after the execution of a VCG counterpart.
It makes their threats more believable, with photos uploaded outside the homes of rivals serving as a very public and thinly-veiled warning: “We know where you live.”
Elsewhere, killers have posted tributes to their actions, often mocking their victims.
One user uploaded a picture of himself wearing the belt and watch of a man he had shot, captioning the image, “I can’t give it back, you can’t walk no more”.
But, as in Brazil, not all smartphone posts were particularly smart.
Such blatant messages led to the indictment of 49 members of the two groups in 2012.
The police commissioner for Brooklyn Raymond W Kelly said, “Because of these individuals’ insatiable desire to brag about what they did, investigators were able to draw a virtual map of their activities and bring them to justice.”
Despite the breakthrough, eight of the indicted remain at large, and online.
British gangs are signing up for Face-crook too.
Though not always so successfully.
In October 2013, a Kent group of armed robbers were caught after celebrating their successes a little too heavily in the virtual realm.
The brazen quartet used BlackBerry Messenger to communicate with each other, in a group they’d mysteriously titled ‘Armed Robbers’.
A series of incriminating selfies were discovered and they were jailed.
The only positive in these horrific trends is that cannibalism doesn’t seem to be devouring British gang culture.
