Fourteen years of age can be just a few years of life or an eternity. Sometimes both realities coexist in the same teenager, especially if he is a kid from the shanty towns in any big city of the third world.

  One of our shanty-towns, the other side

of the coin of Buenos Aires city.

On April 15 April of 2009, a teenager living in Zabaleta shanty town attempted a car robbery in the suburbs of Great Buenos Aires.The car owner heard the car alarm, raced towards his car, and when caught red handed,  the boy took out a gun and shot him five times before trying to run away.

The boy accused of murder has a police record for stealing cars. He is light and fast to run away from the police, he is probably addicted to drugs, and he is surely part of a band of criminals led by adults who give him enough money -and probably drugs-  after his thefts to survive. Grown up criminals and a fourteen year old outlaw, now murderer.

The car owner died on his way to hospital, while the killer was sent to a maximum security institution for underage criminals  in Buenos Aires province waiting for a definitive sentence.

So you can get the right picture, any nightmarish image you can summon of Hell, that will very well apply to the security institutions in my country. Those criminal children -or whatever childhood there is left in them after living all sort of abuses and deprivations-,  will commonly leave the institution walls beyond recovery, permanently damaged criminals for the rest of their lives. 

Our 14-year-old murderer was sent to a high security one and survived there long enough to detect the chance of escaping. He must have been pure survival instinct all that time until he managed to beat the security systems of the institution and run for his life.

His whereabouts were unknown ... for twelve hours: a report was received at the local police station from someone in Zavaleta shanty town, the teenager home before being caught... The young killer certainly knew he could be discovered if he showed his face there, but he went all the same. Of course, he was caught immediately and sent back to the institution. The boy explained he wanted to see his mother...

A murderer. A fourteen-year old criminal. A boy needing his mom. Just a child, a killer already.

This is the other dimension of violence, and I guess it applies everywhere, not only here in Buenos Aires. There are so many victims in this story; the man who died, his family; the child who killed the man, and the countless excluded children who become underage criminals.

  °°°°°°

Below is the newspaper clipping that triggered my post (it´s in Spanish, sorry):

POR EL ASESINATO DE CAPRISTO
Un acusado se fugó y fue recapturado

Uno de los adolescentes que fueron detenidos por el asesinato de Daniel Capristo, ocurrido el 15 de abril en Valentín Alsina, se escapó del instituto de menores donde estaba alojado, pero fue recapturado 12 horas después. Según fuentes policiales, se trata de un chico de 14 años que se escapó del instituto Gambier, situado en la localidad de Abasto, cerca de La Plata, pero ayer al mediodía fue recapturado en la casa de su madre, en la villa Zavaleta. Fuentes judiciales explicaron que el mes pasado el adolescente había sido trasladado desde un instituto de máxima seguridad de Lomas de Zamora al centro Gambier, con un régimen más flexible. El menor se escapó en las primeras horas de la madrugada de ayer.( www.lanacion.com.ar)

 Villa 31, City of Buenos Aires.

Package tours don´t include excursions here.