It’s Saturday morning in a Mexico City subway station, and the members of the Panamiur gang are headed to a party. Their leader, Cidel, is wearing huge sunglasses, a fauxhawk slathered in hair gel, cargo pants, and a T-shirt with a giant 2 and 6 airbrushed across it—a reference to November 26, 2010, the date the Panamiurs were founded.
The four dozen kids surrounding Cidel are similarly adorned in fake gold chains, oversize shades, brightly colored baseball caps, and tight jeans. They shout chants at a member of a rival gang on the other side of the platform. “Jori’s f***ing mom is taking a bath, eh, oh!,” they holler. “She’s very close to our territory, eh, oh! With a huge dick in one hand and a rag with PVC glue in the other, eh, oh! And the gang says, we are gonna rape her, we are gonna rape her. Hard, hard in the ass! f***ing bitch!”
They are laughing because it’s all a joke, but the rest of the passengers look anxious. Panamiur is one of a group of local gangs known as combos made up of reguetoneros (“reggaeton fans”) in their late teens and early 20s who haunt the subway stations of Mexico City. Like all of the combos, Cidel tells me Panamiur is first and foremost about music, partying, and supporting the crew no matter what. From the perspective of the passengers, however, it’s also about huffing pipe cleaner and industrial-strength glue from rags, throwing up gang signs, and yelling obscenities about raping someone’s mother, so any nervousness is understandable. Especially considering the stories about the combos that have been circulating in the regional media over the past year.
The combos first made headlines last July, when more than 600 disgruntled reguetoneros, diverted from a canceled reggaeton show, decided to go wandering around subway stations in trendy neighborhoods instead. Signs were torn off the walls, fights broke out, and more than 200 kids were arrested and taken to jail for a bit before being released. A few weeks later, on August 4, a full-scale battle broke out at another station, when 50 combos were ambushed by 150 members of a rival, reggaeton-hating gang. Surveillance videos of that brawl, which depict improvised bombs exploding on the platform, went viral, and Mexico City suddenly had a new youth trend to worry about that had the public wondering if they were living in some Spanish-language remake of The Warriors.
While most combos are undoubtedly guilty of general rowdiness and huffing chemicals in public, like American greasers in the 50s and heavy metal fans in the 70s, they’re not as threatening as their media profile might suggest. According to many combos there’s been a concerted effort on the part of the gangs themselves to organize and avoid serious conflicts, mostly thanks to the efforts of a soft-spoken 20-something known as Brenan. In 2011 he founded FU Antrax—a sort of United Nations for glue-sniffing, subway-riding teenagers.
