The Angry Ones

The teenagers, in jeans, flashy shirts and black leather motorcycle jackets, surrounded the trembling old man and jeered as he stripped off his clothes at their command. When his underwear was gone and he stood naked, the kids grinned, turned and strutted away. Suddenly one of the gang, 14 years old and illiterate, spun round and stalked back. "Here's something for you to wear," he snarled, brutally stabbing the old man twice, and leaving him critically injured. Packs of out-of-control teenagers, out for kicks or cash, are terrorizing Santiago, Chile. The Chileans call them colericos--angry ones.

Their costume--jeans, plaid shirt, jacket--is their trademark. Those who can afford it ride sputtering convoys of motor scooters, complete with snug-sweatered girl friends perched behind. Besides the slashers and the holdup artists, there are the bobby-soxers and song faddists, who burst into Los Cerrillos airport last month to greet Canadian Rock-'n'-Roller Paul Anka, causing $25,000 worth of damage before airport crews cooled them off with a riot hose. But Anka, who affects boyish dignity and grey flannel suits, looks like a Boston banker compared to the Chileans' own pride, a character in far sharper threads who bills himself as Peter Rock. An exponent of the guitar-whanging, hip-swiveling school, Rock packs them into the smoky dens, where colericos meet to beat, and is said to lead a powerful pack of toughs himself.

On the colericos' right wing, a group of introspective jeans-wearers have "found" themselves--and are busily analyzing the drives and motives of angry ones still lost. Like others of their kind around the world, they blame the aimless drifting on a lack of a creed or an ideal to believe and work for.

To the left is another group of colericos who have found themselves. This ardent band meets almost nightly in an old two-story building in downtown Santiago only a block away from Congress and three blocks from the presidential palace. They dance to rock-'n'-roll music like the rest, but they have a purpose and a trademark --a sports shirt of blazing red. Their parties are held to raise funds for the Communist Youth Movement, and they confine their rumbles to times of social uproar, when they take to the streets to lead bus-burning, window-smashing attacks on the government.

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