Price Wars: How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World by Rupert Russell

Author:Rupert Russell [Russell, Rupert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

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It’s pouring rain and I’m huddled under somebody’s porch. I crouch on the ground with four kids. They’re between eight and sixteen years old. None of them have shoes. They swap rude jokes, laugh and take turns rolling a cigarette. Every once in a while one stands up, takes off his T-shirt, runs over to the gutter and washes it in the gushing rainwater.

One of them, a thirteen-year-old named José Angel, starts chatting with me. He’s short for his age, but his confidence and cheeky grin lend him a certain charisma in the gang. He tells me about the last time he saw his mother. She dropped him and his brother off at some kind of group home. She told him she’d return later with some food. Only she never did. He says he was beaten at the group home, that the adults barely fed the children, and that one of the other kids stabbed his brother in the stomach. They both escaped. He joined a gang of two dozen young boys like him who hang out during the day by the Chacao subway station and spend their nights sleeping on cardboard boxes under the highway. Their patch is right next to the Guaire River that runs through the city. “When the river floods,” he says, “some drown because they sleep on their stomachs.” This isn’t what they fear, though. Just three days ago, a rival gang of street kids came into their territory brandishing knives and other improvised weapons. He saw them coming and ran away, but one of his friends was caught. When Angel returned the following day, he found him next to the highway. “They had taken apart his head, he was burnt, eyeless, his nose cut, his arms were scattered everywhere in the grass.”

What is worth murder, decapitation, immolation? “They want our garbage,” Angel says. “If we allow them to take our garbage we don’t eat.” Every evening they sift through the trash that is thrown out by restaurants, looking for edible scraps. Without access to the dumpsters outside these restaurants they starve. Gangs guard and fight over these dumpsters like other gangs would fight over territory to sell drugs.

The rain subsides. The kids run out from the porch into a small public square between two roads. Led by the eldest, Ignacio, they begin their “training.” Using flip-flops as stand-ins for knives, they pair off and mock-fight each other. They dance around, dodging and weaving, trying to strike a blow on the other. The eldest of them acts as a kind of coach, giving them words of encouragement as well as fear. “Respect the iron!” he commands. The training is fun. Angel is enjoying himself. He manages to land a blow on his opponent. “You’re such a little backstabber, Angel,” Ignacio says.

We meet up again that evening. They’ve invited me to go “recycling” with them. They take me to a shopping mall. I walk down the ramp to the underground car park, past the cars and through a corridor behind a fast-food restaurant to the mall’s back lot outside.

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