2024-09-15 06:39:34
During the sixties and seventies, student fights, which young people believed were caused by sporting rivalry in the championships played by their school teams, ceased to be isolated cases and became a pattern in games, in which the police played a deterrent role.
Schools gradually disappeared from the violent scenes, and in 1978, the Externado San José withdrew from the school championships. However, in that same period of the late seventies, public institutes such as INFRAMEN, ITI (since 1999, INTI) and ENCO (today INCO) emerged as heirs to the violence between institutions.
In the nineties, the intensification of rivalries, which were becoming less and less sporting, forced many students to be careful in the streets of San Salvador, especially if they belonged to public schools, and to be careful of their opponents. Being an opponent meant being a student from an academic high school or a student from a technical high school. In this way, INFRAMEN and ITI became the references for student fights in San Salvador and began to win sympathies among students from other schools. In this way, “la raza” was organized, which was divided between the so-called “national” and “technical” students.
Today’s rivalries, which are fought by a minority of less than 10% of high school students, are no longer sporting. Today’s fights have major consequences. In them, taking the shirt, insignia, buckle, pin or any other identifying element of the opposing school is a heroic act and the rival’s clothes serve as trophies.
These fights have been reduced thanks to the security measures implemented during the administration of President Nayib Bukele, who not only increased security in educational centers, but also modified some educational strategies in order to consolidate peaceful and resilient educational spaces.
These differences between student groups have been drastically reduced, thanks to the frontal war against gangs, who used these spaces to recruit young people and delimit imaginary spaces within student institutions.
The latest of these violent incidents between criminal groups made up of students took place on the night of Thursday, September 12, in the vicinity of the Don Rua roundabout, in San Salvador Centro. In this altercation, 14 young people were involved in an exchange of words that ended in a shower of stones, leaving four students seriously injured and ten detained by the National Civil Police (PNC).