Jose Joaquin Sanchez Frutos, El Jaro, was the “tight-pants pimp” in Joaquin Sabina’s Que demasiao. At the age of 16, he was struck down by a neighbor’s gunshot that he saw as a gang of kids robbed a friend. Today marks the 40th anniversary of the death of this criminal, immortalized in songs and movies.
Two years earlier, in 1977, the film director Jose Antonio de la Loma premiered Perros Calles, a film starring Angel Fernandez Franco, alias El Torete, which depicted the juvenile delinquent world of the time.
The setting was Barcelona, ​​but it could well be Madrid where El Jaro unfolded an entire criminal trajectory of a youth gang that continued to function after his death. One more of those that proliferated in the 70s and 80s, emerging from marginal neighborhoods, from the shanty towns on the outskirts of the capital.
Madrid and Barcelona. Two big cities, sceneries of the escapes of these new quinquis, persecuted by the Police, skidding with stolen cars “at the point of a knife and a push”, as Sabina’s song says; so young that they had not yet opened the polls of the newly born democracy.
The chronicles of the time tell that the history of El Jaro includes more than 500 car thefts, a hundred robberies, countless “pulls”…
A true leader of the band that came to have more than 30 members, although they acted in small groups, and that created a school, to the point that some of his fellow adventurers constituted their own, such as Guillermo Macia Pavon El Guille.
“Tattooed and suburban gang member, son of defeat and alcohol” -continues Sabina-. El Jaro was born in November 1962 in Villatobas (Toledo), within a broken family, with an alcoholic mother and a father who abandoned his five children once they emigrated to Madrid.
In the page that the ABC newspaper dedicated to his death, it can be read that when he was barely twelve years old, he entered the Carabanchel reformatory, to which he returned thirty times after as many escapes.
And at the age of thirteen he already had his own gang, which he managed from the Pena Grande neighborhood, in the north of the capital. Together with The Clown, The Gasoline, The Guille or The Fitipaldi they frightened entire neighborhoods, with cars at full speed, weapons and joints in hand.
The ABC chronicle collects the testimony of the priest Camilo Aristu, director of the Carabanchel correctional facility.
This was El Jaro: “He was an amoral psychopath. He was one of those people who do not calibrate the consequences of carrying out the achievement of their desires to the end. He did not like sports, work or study. He always wanted to be the best in everything and for that he spared no risk”.
And Father Aristu lamented that in Spain there were no special centers where these young people could be helped.
The biggest police blow to his gang was dealt in February 1978 with the arrest of 31 young people. Jaro and his boys had already specialized in garage robberies, never giving up “pulls” and, of course, shoplifting. They even dared with some bank.
Crimes against property “of which they do not let you choose”.
Return to the correctional facility and new flight. Until the end of July 1978, when the band had a confrontation with the Civil Guard in an attempted assault on a villa in Somosaguas. It cost him two bullets and the removal of a testicle.
After this event, El Jaro was interned in what was called the Zamora concordatory prison and later in a sheltered center for minors in Rabade (Lugo). He ran away, of course.
He wanted to form a new gang, with which he met his death on a street in Chamartin on February 24, 1979.
“They shot you six cheeky shots and then they bled you out and they put you in the pyramidon. !. This is what they take me out on television, “Sabina ends.
They say that El Jaro carried a wallet in his pocket with newspaper clippings that spoke of him. He wanted to be famous and he was.
The film Navajeros, by Eloy de la Iglesia, released a year and a half later, attests to the story of a boy who is nothing more than the story of a time in Spain, socially and economically convulsed and with a democracy still in its infancy.
