"It's a pride thing, and by posting it to the Internet it's like proof. "It's a way of establishing dominance and because it's hard to withstand being hit in the groin, it becomes a good measure of toughness." "Games like this are to see how tough you are," he says. Raison compares sack tapping to the common game of "chicken," where boys take turns hitting each other to see who can take the most hits without calling off the game. "Sack tapping resonates on a lot of different levels, some of which kids are probably not fully aware of," he says. It does, after all, involve the "all-around central organ of dominance for man." Charles Raison, an associate professor of psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, says the game might have a lot to do with asserting dominance. "That's why when a guy gets hit in the balls, he feels it in his stomach as well," Katz says.ĭr. In the womb, the testicles form inside the body, so when they descend they take nerves from the abdomen with them. Aaron Katz, a urologist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. The groin is one of the most sensitive parts of the body because it has such a rich supply of blood and nerves, says Dr. When inmates were released from prison, they would join the megabanda roaming the country and engaging in criminal activities.This fad is no joke, Wheeler says, "It's just ridiculous that boys are doing this." Playing 'Chicken' of the Groin This has expanded to alcohol, drugs, and prostitutes.Ī system of extortion governed whether an inmate had a comfortable cell and access to supplies for visits and parties. Last September, Insight Crime reported that the power of megabanda prison gang leaders, known as “pranes”, has risen with these bosses overseeing a food and clothing network in the squalid jails. The men were negotiating the transport of 800kg of cocaine to New York.įollowing his 2013 election, President Maduro’s government created a special homicide police unit and the deployment of the armed forces to fight crime.īut it remains an uphill battle, with criminal organisations from Colombia, Brazil and Europe as well as homegrown groups all operating in Venezuela.
In 2015, the two nephews of Venezuelas’s President Nicolas Maduro’s wife were arrested in Haiti in a sting by the US Drug Enforcement Agency.
“Its long Caribbean coastline, sparsely populated jungles and plains and proximity to other Caribbean drug transit points like Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Honduras and the Dominican Republic have also contributed to Venezuela becoming a major narcotics smuggling route,” Insight Crime reported.Ī relative cries outside prison in Barquisimeto, Venezuela where inmates die of drug overdoses in the crowded jail. Insight Crime described the shared border as “a hub of criminal activity” for drugs, human trafficking and money laundering. The New York Times has reported previously that drug traffickers can “make an airstrip on the flat prairie in a few hours by dragging a log behind a pick-up truck to smooth the ground”.
Mexican drug cartels, if viewed as a combined entity, control most of the cocaine entering the US via a number of trafficking routes.Ī report last November by, an analysis group of Latin American organised crime, described Venezuela as “a key transit country” for drug shipments to the US and Europe. Last year, reported that Mexico was experiencing one of its worst moments in the field of drug trafficking, with authorities unable to keep up. In a decade of drug violence, about 26,000 have gone missing. The cartels of Tijuana, Juarez and the Gulf have been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Mexicans.