Squad Gang Quotes

Todd came toward me with the squad trailing behind him like a street gang of angry thugs with breasts.

People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just vanished. The rumors of what had happened to them were fantastic and bizarre though, as it turned out, they were only an understatement of the real thing. Before going to see General Videla […], I went to […] check in with Los Madres: the black-draped mothers who paraded, every week, with pictures of their missing loved ones in the Plaza Mayo. (‘Todo mi familia!’ as one elderly lady kept telling me imploringly, as she flourished their photographs. ‘Todo mi familia!’) From these and from other relatives and friends I got a line of questioning to put to the general. I would be told by him, they forewarned me, that people ‘disappeared’ all the time, either because of traffic accidents and family quarrels or, in the dire civil-war circumstances of Argentina, because of the wish to drop out of a gang and the need to avoid one’s former associates. But this was a cover story. Most of those who disappeared were openly taken away in the unmarked Ford Falcon cars of the Buenos Aires military police. I should inquire of the general what precisely had happened to Claudia Inez Grumberg, a paraplegic who was unable to move on her own but who had last been seen in the hands of his ever-vigilant armed forces [….] I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer, as if to illustrate some seminar on the banality of evil. Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush. I am gripping his hand in a much too unctuous manner and smiling as if genuinely delighted at the introduction. Aching to expunge this humiliation, I waited while he went almost pedantically through the predicted script, waving away the rumored but doubtless regrettable dematerializations that were said to be afflicting his fellow Argentines. And then I asked him about Senorita Grumberg. He replied that if what I had said was true, then I should remember that ‘terrorism is not just killing with a bomb, but activating ideas. Maybe that’s why she’s detained.’ I expressed astonishment at this reply and, evidently thinking that I hadn’t understood him the first time, Videla enlarged on the theme. ‘We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: it is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger.’ Behind him, I could see one or two of his brighter staff officers looking at me with stark hostility as they realized that the general—El Presidente—had made a mistake by speaking so candidly. […] In response to a follow-up question, Videla crassly denied—‘rotondamente’: ‘roundly’ denied—holding Jacobo Timerman ‘as either a journalist or a Jew.’ While we were having this surreal exchange, here is what Timerman was being told by his taunting tormentors: Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space. […] We later discovered what happened to the majority of those who had been held and tortured in the secret prisons of the regime. According to a Navy captain named Adolfo Scilingo, who published a book of confessions, these broken victims were often destroyed as ‘evidence’ by being flown out way over the wastes of the South Atlantic and flung from airplanes into the freezing water below. Imagine the fun element when there’s the surprise bonus of a Jewish female prisoner in a wheelchair to be disposed of… we slide open the door and get ready to roll her and then it’s one, two, three… go!

Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief, that wars are not necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The allied coalition lost few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait during the Gulf War of 1991, yet doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Bill Clinton stopped a Balkan holocaust through air strikes, without sacrificing American soldiers. His supporters argued, with some merit, that the collateral damage from the NATO bombing of Belgrade resulted in far fewer innocents killed, in such a “terrible arithmetic,” than if the Serbian death squads had been allowed to continue their unchecked cleansing of Islamic communities.

French said: “It’s like this with us, baby. We’re coppers and everybody hates our guts. And as if we didn’t have enough trouble, we have to have you. As if we didn’t get pushed around enough by the guys in the corner offices, the City Hall gang, the day chief, the night chief, the Chamber of Commerce, His Honor the Mayor in his paneled office four times as big as the three lousy rooms the whole homicide staff has to work out of. As if we didn’t have to handle one hundred and fourteen homicides last year out of three rooms that don’t have enough chairs for the whole duty squad to sit down in at once. We spend our lives turning over dirty underwear and sniffing rotten teeth. We go up dark stairways to get a gun punk with a skinful of hop and sometimes we don’t get all the way up, and our wives wait dinner that night and all the other nights. We don’t come home any more. And nights we do come home, we come home so goddam tired we can’t eat or sleep or even read the lies the papers print about us. So we lie awake in the dark in a cheap house on a cheap street and listen to the drunks down the block having fun. And just about the time we drop off the phone rings and we get up and start all over again. Nothing we do is right, not ever. Not once. If we get a confession, we beat it out of the guy, they say, and some shyster calls us Gestapo in court and sneers at us when we muddle our grammar. If we make a mistake they put us back in uniform on Skid Row and we spend the nice cool summer evenings picking drunks out of the gutter and being yelled at by whores and taking knives away from greaseballs in zoot suits. But all that ain’t enough to make us entirely happy. We got to have you.” He stopped and drew in his breath. His face glistened a little as if with sweat. He leaned forward from his hips. “We got to have you,” he repeated. “We got to have sharpers with private licenses hiding information and dodging around corners and stirring up dust for us to breathe in. We got to have you suppressing evidence and framing set-ups that wouldn’t fool a sick baby. You wouldn’t mind me calling you a goddam cheap double-crossing keyhole peeper, would you, baby?” “You want me to mind?” I asked him. He straightened up. “I’d love it,” he said. “In spades redoubled.

Real Quick" [Intro:] Valuable lesson, man I had to grow up That's why I never ask for help I'll do it for you niggaz and do it for myself [Chorus:] I go 0 to 100 nigga, real quick Real quick, whole squad on that real shit 0 to 100 nigga, real quick Real quick, real fuckin quick nigga 0 to 100 nigga, real quick Real quick, whole squad on that real shit 0 to 100 nigga, real quick Real quick, real fuckin quick nigga! [50 Cent:] I'll run my blade 'cross a nigga ass {"real quick"} I'm so for real I'm on some real real nigga shit You playin boy I'll get you hit {"real quick"} You better hope the parademics come {"real quick"} Got me fucked up you think it's different now a nigga rich Before I get to cuttin know you niggaz better cut the shit Boy, you gon' have ya head popped, pull a trigger for me And my lil' niggaz trigger op' like it's legal homie No game when I bang, boy I empty the clip You run like a bitch, you ain't 'bout that shit Hey hey hey hey, I'll catch you another day day day day It's the Unit back to the bullshit [Tony Yayo:] Yeah! Nothin in life is out of bounds AK hold about a hundred rounds 60 shots like K.D. at the Rucker's Okay! When I see you on respirators Southside nigga 'til the day I'm gone Indulge in the violence when the drama on Yeah, these rap niggaz lukewarm I'm two sleeves of dope, when the mic on [Chorus] [Kidd Kidd:] Real quick, Rida Gang fuck nigga, huh! Don't Tweet me, see me when you see me Down to make the news just to say that I'm on TV (Kidd Kidd) This clip rated R, niggaz PG Them shells burn like a bootleg CD (huh?) Fuck love, I want the money When you get too much of it they gon' say you actin funny "Kidd, how you feel now that the Unit's back?" Like a million bucks, muh'fucker do the math! [Young Buck:] Cold-blooded, boy my heart don't feel shit Get with me, ask 50, I'll take the hit {"real quick"} Balenciagas, you can still get ya ass kicked Take a rapper nigga bitch and make a real flick I know I'm different from what you usually be dealin with Don't need a mic, give me some white to make a million with Single borough, six shots on the Brooklyn Bridge I'll let the nigga Drake tell you what I just did (yeah) [Chorus] [Lloyd Banks:] Nigga gettin money new to you (uh) I give a fuck if shit get ugly, there'll be a beautiful funeral You fit the script I'm gon' assume it's true Can't manuever through the street without a strategy, ain't nobody to tutor you And man was lucky Unit's through, you know why he flows 15 years, switchin dealers like casinos And my goon'll clip you on the arm (uhh) I'm out the country every week and dumpin ash out on the Autobahn Auto-pilot's always on Rather better livin, I've been [?] green bills callin me all day long This is homicide, more tears in your mama eyes More reason to wake up, real niggaz arrive [Chorus]

it was largely by military means that Lloyd George sought to proceed: nasty means at that. The British too had their ‘squads’. Each side used the other’s terminology: ‘murder gangs’.

Real Quick [Intro:] Valuable lesson, man I had to grow up That's why I never ask for help I'll do it for you niggaz and do it for myself [Chorus:] I go 0 to 100 nigga, real quick Real quick, whole squad on that real shit 0 to 100 nigga, real quick Real quick, real fuckin quick nigga 0 to 100 nigga, real quick Real quick, whole squad on that real shit 0 to 100 nigga, real quick Real quick, real fuckin quick nigga! [50 Cent:] I'll run my blade 'cross a nigga ass {"real quick"} I'm so for real I'm on some real real nigga shit You playin boy I'll get you hit {"real quick"} You better hope the parademics come {"real quick"} Got me fucked up you think it's different now a nigga rich Before I get to cuttin know you niggaz better cut the shit Boy, you gon' have ya head popped, pull a trigger for me And my lil' niggaz trigger op' like it's legal homie No game when I bang, boy I empty the clip You run like a bitch, you ain't 'bout that shit Hey hey hey hey, I'll catch you another day day day day It's the Unit back to the bullshit [Tony Yayo:] Yeah! Nothin in life is out of bounds AK hold about a hundred rounds 60 shots like K.D. at the Rucker's Okay! When I see you on respirators Southside nigga 'til the day I'm gone Indulge in the violence when the drama on Yeah, these rap niggaz lukewarm I'm two sleeves of dope, when the mic on [Chorus] [Kidd Kidd:] Real quick, Rida Gang fuck nigga, huh! Don't Tweet me, see me when you see me Down to make the news just to say that I'm on TV (Kidd Kidd) This clip rated R, niggaz PG Them shells burn like a bootleg CD (huh?) Fuck love, I want the money When you get too much of it they gon' say you actin funny "Kidd, how you feel now that the Unit's back?" Like a million bucks, muh'fucker do the math! [Young Buck:] Cold-blooded, boy my heart don't feel shit Get with me, ask 50, I'll take the hit {"real quick"} Balenciagas, you can still get ya ass kicked Take a rapper nigga bitch and make a real flick I know I'm different from what you usually be dealin with Don't need a mic, give me some white to make a million with Single borough, six shots on the Brooklyn Bridge I'll let the nigga Drake tell you what I just did (yeah) [Chorus] [Lloyd Banks:] Nigga gettin money new to you (uh) I give a fuck if shit get ugly, there'll be a beautiful funeral You fit the script I'm gon' assume it's true Can't manuever through the street without a strategy, ain't nobody to tutor you And man was lucky Unit's through, you know why he flows 15 years, switchin dealers like casinos And my goon'll clip you on the arm (uhh) I'm out the country every week and dumpin ash out on the Autobahn Auto-pilot's always on Rather better livin, I've been [?] green bills callin me all day long This is homicide, more tears in your mama eyes More reason to wake up, real niggaz arrive [Chorus]

What has happened to the people of El Salvador since the end of the war? Many who were poor before the war are even poorer today. The poor live on the edge of life in a daily struggle to survive. Those who did not die during the war wage a daily battle against poverty, hunger, and disease. The violence of the war and death squad assassinations has given way to a more subtle, but pervasive, criminal violence and gang activity.24

Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief, that wars are not necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The allied coalition lost few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait during the Gulf War of 1991, yet doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Bill Clinton stopped a Balkan holocaust through air strikes, without sacrificing American soldiers. His supporters argued, with some merit, that the collateral damage from the NATO bombing of Belgrade resulted in far fewer innocents killed, in such a “terrible arithmetic,” than if the Serbian death squads had been allowed to continue their unchecked cleansing of Islamic communities. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin killed far more off the battlefield than on it. The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic brought down more people than did the First World War. And more Americans—over 3.2 million—lost their lives driving cars over the past 90 years than died in combat in this nation’s 230-plus-year history.

Along the way they will be preyed upon by cartels, police, Mexican immigration authorities, maras and random rural gangs, robbed, enslaved, forced into narco assassin squads, and raped—an estimated eight out of ten migrant women who attempt to cross Mexico suffer sexual abuse along the way, sometimes at the hands of fellow migrants. Migrants are kidnapped en masse by Zetas, with the complicity of corrupted and terrorized local police and other authorities and of treacherous coyotes, so that their families back home or awaiting them in the US can be extorted; meanwhile the captives are tortured, raped and sometimes massacred. Thousands upon thousands of migrants have been murdered in Mexico, and many others die by falling from “La Bestia”; as many as seventy thousand, some experts estimate, lie buried along the “death corridor” of the migrants’ trail.

It is still unclear exactly what inspired such brutality. Many point to the influence of the Guatemalan Kaibiles working in the Zetas. In the Guatemalan civil war, troops cut off heads of captured rebels in front of villagers to terrify them from joining a leftist insurgency. Turning into mercenaries in Mexico, the Kaibiles might have reprised their trusted tactic to terrify enemies of the cartel. Others point to the influence of Al Qaeda decapitation videos from the Middle East, which were shown in full on some Mexican TV channels. Some anthropologists even point to the pre-Colombian use of beheadings and the way Mayans used them to show complete domination of their enemies. The Zetas were not thinking like gangsters, but like a paramilitary group controlling territory. Their new way of fighting rapidly spread through the Mexican Drug War. In September the same year, La Familia gang—working with the Zetas in Michoacán state—rolled five human heads onto a disco dance floor. By the end of 2006, there had been dozens of decapitations. Over the next years, there were hundreds. Gangsters throughout Mexico also copied the Zetas’ paramilitary way of organizing. Sinaloans created their own cells of combatants with heavy weaponry and combat fatigues. They had to fight fire with fire. “The Beard” Beltrán Leyva led particularly well-armed death squads. One was later busted in a residential house in Mexico City. They had twenty automatic rifles, ten pistols, twelve M4 grenade launchers, and flak jackets that even had their own logo— FEDA—an acronym for Fuerzas Especiales de Arturo, or Arturo’s Special Forces.

A giant gang of kids crammed around a locker trying to look casual is almost never a good sign. It’s basically the definition of a bad omen. One you can spot from the other end of the hallway, like a black cat, or a broken mirror, or a ladder you’re not supposed to walk under, or a crack you’re not supposed to step on.