February 2002 | Archive | View images | © Sam Faulkner reportage The city which eats its young
By Martin Hodgson It is Saturday night in Barrio Castillas, one of the many poor neighbourhoods which sprawl up the mountain slopes of north-west Medellin. It's nearly half past eleven, but the night is mild, and the street is still busy. Earlier this evening, there was a party for the block's children, and most of them are still playing outside. They dart past on roller skates and BMX bikes, while their teenage brothers and sisters gather around battered stereos pumping salsa and rock music into the warm night air. Somewhere on the next block there is a birthday party, and the rough brick houses echo with the crack and whoosh of cheap fireworks. At the far end of the street, a yellow taxi noses its way across the low bridge straddling a rubbish-choked gully. No-one looks twice as the cab eases over a speed bump and rolls quietly up the street towards the front step where 20-year old Diego Molina is sitting with his girlfriend Marcela Noguera. When the taxi brakes sharply, she is the first to realise that something is wrong. The rear door swings open, and Marcela starts to her feet and flees inside. But Diego has no time to react as a young man with a black scarf masking his face climbs from the car, raising a .38 calibre revolver. He shoots Diego twice in the head, and then three more times as he crumples to the ground. The gunman ducks into the taxi which pulls away, tyres screeching. Whoever is in the passenger seat fires wildly through the open window as the cab roars up the block. Miraculously, nobody else is hit before it lurches round the corner and disappears into the night. Suddenly the brassy salsa music sounds very loud. A stunned crowd gathers around the victim. His mother rushes to his side, but by the time she reaches him he is already dead. Eight years after the death of Pablo Escobar, the notorious drugs baron, Medellin remains one of the most violent cities in the world. The Pistolocos 4,296 people were killed during the year 2000 in the city, which has a population of around two million. In the same period, there were some 700 homicides in the whole of England and Wales. At the height of the cocaine king's reign of terror, car-bombs rocked the city almost daily, and over 300 policemen were killed in one year. The foot soldiers of his war against the state were the teenage gunmen known as 'pistolocos' or crazy guns. Escobar died in a hail of police bullets in 1993, but the violence had already gained its own momentum, and the crazyguns turned freelance. Now there are around 300 armed gangs, or "combos," in the city, locked into an seemingly endless turf war. Street by street, block by block, they battle to carve out territory in an unrelenting chain of murder and retaliation. On the weekend Diego Molina died, 26 other people were killed in Medellin. Two policemen and a gang member were shot in gun battle inside secondary school, four people died in clashes between troops and left-wing rebels on the outskirts of the city, and detectives arrested more than 60 teenaged murder suspects in one morning. Not one case made it to the 7 o'clock news. "The city is at war, but the killing is invisible, because the victims are all poor," said Martha Gonzalez, a social worker with the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps it is not surprising that the people of Medellin have grown dulled to the violence. According to Ms Gonzalez, in many barrios it is quite normal for young women to grow up with no male relatives: their fathers are absent ; their brothers, cousins and class-mates all in the grave. "Everything is upside down. The cemeteries are full of mothers visiting their dead sons, when it should be the other way around," said Ms Gonzalez. Before Escobar made the city famous as the cocaine capital of the world, Medellin was best known for its pleasant climate, and industrious population. It was the most Catholic, most conservative, most hard-working city in Colombia. Twenty years later, its people are still asking how the City of Eternal Spring became the city which eats its young. Neither peace pacts, police crack-downs or mandatory sentencing have been able to stem the tide of blood. On some nights, it seems that all the authorities can hope to do is count the bodies. Investigators from the state prosecutor's office arrive at the murder scene less than an hour after Diego Molina's death. Two friends have carried the body to a nearby clinic where technicians measure, photograph and tag it before loading the corpse into an unmarked van which will take it to the city morgue. The grubby white vehicle - which the mortuary employees refer to as "the ice-cream van" - is now parked just a few yards from Diego's house, while the investigators study the murder scene. Technicians pace the street, searching for bullet-holes and spent cartridges while a female investigator questions the dead boy's relatives. They describe him as a good son, a football fan and a snappy dresser. Nobody can imagine why anyone would want to assassinate him. The investigator nods her head and takes notes. She is polite and even sensitive, but there is an air of routine to her questions. "A young man, no job, plenty of money, shot in the head," she says later. "It's a typical gang hit." The Virgin of the Assassins Andres takes a long drag on his joint and flicks the butt through the doorway into the alley outside. Still holding his breath, he ratchets the shotgun's worn pump and aims the gun at an imaginary victim. "Boom!" he exhales. "That's how we deal with any strange faces in the barrio. We get rid of their face." It is Sunday afternoon in Barrio Santo Domingo, another hardscrabble neighbourhood in the north-east of the city, almost directly across the valley from Castillas. At 19, Andres is a leading member of the 29, currently one of the most feared combos in the city. Just a few days earlier, army troops raided a house on the next block where members of the gang were holding two kidnap victims. Maybe this explains why today Andres is feeling paranoid - it has taken me more than an hour to convince them that I am not spying for the police. Even now, as he shows off the gang's formidable arsenal - which includes AK-47 assault rifles and a selection of handguns - he and his companions alternate between dope-fuddled indifference and paranoid agitation. Their eyes are glazed with marijuana and nitrazepam tranquillisers and despite the power of life and death which they wield, they all seem very bored. Stepping into the sunlight, Andres yawns and pulls off his T-shirt, revealing the hunting knife in his waistband. His arms are scarred with jailhouse tattoos of a haloed Christ and the Divine Child, and at his neck hang a rosary and a medallion of the Virgin Mary. Like most gangsters, he is a firm believer in the protective powers of Maria Auxiliadora - known locally as the Virgin of the Assassins. "She's always looked after me," he says, pointing at the five neat scars across his legs and torso which mark the bullet wounds he received in an ambush by a rival gang. "I wasn't supposed to die that day- but when the time comes, I'll go out shooting," he says. There are plenty of ways to go. A shaven-headed youth called Jorge packs a wad of marijuana into a pipe shaped like a revolver as he reels off the list of enemy gangs. "Las Brisas, Granizales, La Avanzada...We've been at war forever," he says wearily. The only time his blood-shot eyes come alive is when a younger boy named Gustavo is sent to retrieve another hidden gun. It is a home-made pistol with a gaping muzzle, which Jorge says can fire one charge of shotgun pellets and broken glass. "This can make a serious hole in you!" he cackles cheerfully. It is clear that he is speaking from experience. Like most gangs, the 29 justify themselves by providing "security" in the barrio. In reality, they make their money from muggings, small-time drug deals and extorting protection money from shop-keepers and bus drivers whose route passes through the barrio. They also hire out their services for punishment beatings, robberies - and even contract killings. A young gunman can earn up to 300 pounds for a murder - over three times the minimum monthly wage. "It's a mercenary army. The gangs rent themselves to the highest bidder," said Luciano Sanin, a Medellin human rights lawyer. Medellin's most notorious gang, The Terrace, was hired by right-wing paramilitaries to carry out a string of high-profile political kidnappings and assassinations. But the alliance soon collapsed, and the paramilitaries in turn murdered several Terrace commanders. Andres leads the way up a concrete stairway which winds up the hillside to the street. The kerbstones are painted immaculate white, and the houses, though rough, are all kept with pride. Few cars pass through this distant corner of the city, and the atmosphere is that of a bustling village. At a bend in the road, a whitewashed shrine houses a plaster statuette of Maria Auxiliadora. Andres pauses for a moment. He bows his head to the Madonna of the Assassins, crosses himself and kisses his trigger finger. "We always come to the altar before we do a job," he says. On the wall behind the statue, a dedicatory plaque reads "Thanks for the help. The Boys." Some help from the mountains At the end of the street, Andres and Jorge climb a narrow flight of stairs to the flat roof of an abandoned house. From here you can see all of Medellin. Below Santo Domingo, spreading down to the valley floor and up the far mountain slopes, is an immense patchwork of box-like brick and concrete houses. Half the city's population lives in these neighbourhoods, known as communes, most of which were founded less than a generation ago by refugees fleeing rural areas wracked by civil war violence. Beyond the communes, out of reach but clearly visible through the haze pollution, are the gleaming skyscrapers of the city centre, and the marble shopping centres of the wealthy southern suburbs. They glitter in the sunlight like the promise of a life the gangsters will never have. "This is a city which left its young without the promise of a future," said Mr Sanin, the human rights lawyer. Unemployment in the city hovers stubbornly at around 20%, and some 80,000 youths are neither employed nor at school. "What are these kids doing? Many of them end up in gangs," he said. From the rooftop Jorge points to a dirt road running along a low ridge beneath us. It marks the absolute limit of their power: beyond the track lies Las Brisas, a neighbourhood dominated by a gang supported by the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's largest rebel army. "If you cross that line, you die," says Jorge. For nearly four decades, Colombia's savage civil war has been played out in isolated rural regions, but recently, guerrillas and paramilitaries have started to focus on the country's main cities. Most of the urban militias set up by the FARC and other guerrilla groups have drifted out of direct rebel control, but over the last three years, the paramilitaries have steadily increased their influence over non-political street gangs. "It's a natural consequence of the process of war and peace: the factions need logistical support in the urban areas," said Luis Pardo, a sociologist who works with gang members. For Andres the issue is simpler: "The militias were killing us. They said we couldn't smoke dope. So the people in the mountains sent us some help," he said. That help was a shipment of assault rifles and a month of military training in secret paramilitary camps. Now the two groups exchange pot-shots almost daily across the dusty no-man's land. Gustavo re-appears, this time lugging an AK-47 wrapped in a poncho emblazoned with the shield of Atletico Nacional - Medellin's top football club. The rifle has no banana clip, but Andres brings it to his shoulder and takes aim at the ridge. He squints, and pulls the trigger. "Boom!" he mouths, but this time it is a whisper. The next day I meet Richard, the commander of the Las Brisas militia. A serious young man dressed in a fake Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt, he receives me in the patio of a whitewashed house just below the ridge. Richard offers me a seat next to a rickety chicken coop, and we drink Coca-Cola as he explains that he declared war on the 29 because they were terrorising the barrio. "It's like cleaning your house - you throw the rubbish out," he says. "We give them a warning, but if they don't mend their ways, there comes a point when these people must be killed." Later, he walks me to the cross-roads which mark the edge of his territory. On a wall this side of the divide, someone has stencilled a portrait of Che Guevara. On the next block, the graffiti reads "Militia scum - leave or die !" Richard apologises that he cannot go any further, and takes his leave with a warning. "What you see now is nothing compared to the war which is still to come." His opinion is shared by most of the investigators at the state prosecutor's office: the people whose job it is to tag and tally an average of 15 murder victims every day. "As long as the social conditions are unchanged, there is no hope. The future is very black," said one. The unit's headquarters is a grimy compound in a mid-town industrial zone, sandwiched between a plastics factory and Brazilian charismatic church. Night and day, the air inside the shabby offices is permeated with the choking fumes of burning plastic and the enthusiastic chanting of prayer. There's no impunity in Medellin Earlier today, agents arrested some 60 gang suspects in a series of dawn raids throughout in the communes below Santo Domingo. Forty prisoners are now crammed into two airless cells at the rear of the compound, and the remainder are corralled behind a traffic barrier in the corner of the carpark. Guards with the machine guns keep watch over the teenage suspects who loll in the sun, fiddling idly with rosary necklaces or shouting messages to their mothers and girlfriends in the street outside. They are all wanted for murder. According to Andres, children make good killers, because according to Colombian law they cannot be sentenced to more than 6 months in juvenile detention. "The youngest ones are the real crazies," he said. Parked on the other side of the forecourt is a silverblue Toyota jeep, riddled with bullet-holes - the aftermath of a Mafia hit. The reinforced windows are starred and shattered, and underneath the driver's door there is trickle of dried blood. Inside his gloomy office, the chief investigator slams a bulging lever-arch file onto his cluttered desk. It spills open, to reveal pages and pages of densely printed reports, listing thousands of suspects and known gang members. There are photographs too: mugshots, surveillance photos and confiscated album snaps showing gang members posing self-importantly with their weapons. Many of the subjects have a black cross neatly etched on their foreheads : case closed. Agents estimate that they make one arrest for every three murders. "Our biggest problem is that nobody will talk. They know who did it, but if they speak they're dead," said one. Back in Castillas, nobody expects the authorities to catch the man who shot Diego Molina. "There were dozens of witnesses, but nobody will speak. They're all too scared," says Alex Avendaño, a school friend of the dead youth. In private, neighbours confide that Diego had recently struck up a friendship with members of the 70th Street gang. That alone made him a target for Los del Hueco ("the Hole gang") a local combo with a savage reputation. None of which is any consolation for the dead boy's mother, Gloria Bustamente. Four days after the murder, she sits in her neat front room, working a string of rosary beads as she tries to come to terms with her loss. "I'm sure God didn't want (Diego) to die, but we have to accept his will. I don't think they'll catch the killer - I don't think they'll even investigate. For them it's just one more crime," she said. Her words remind me of a comment made by one of the investigators, when I asked if he ever felt frustrated by the unit's low arrest rate. "We might not catch them all, but there is no impunity in Medellin," he replied. "The murderers don't grow old - they all get what they deserve. They know their destiny: sooner or later they're going to die." Montesacro Cemetery spreads across a neatly landscaped hillside just south of Medellin. Yellow lilies line the carefully-trimmed lawns and the air is fresh and clean. Across the slopes, files of plain white grave stones stretch away in every direction, each one commemorating an early, violent death with the regimented calm of a war cemetery. Pablo Escobar is buried here too, in a modest grave behind the chapel where a priest is now reciting the funeral mass for Diego Molina. After the ceremony, a file of mourners follows the hearse to a freshly-dug grave high on the slope. As the uniformed pall-bearers carry the casket to the grave-side, a wave of hysteria breaks over the crowd, and the coffin disappears under a mob of young mourners. Someone has brought a ghetto-blaster, but the tinny sound of salsa is drowned out by the wordless moaning of grief. A stocky youth with a crew-cut draws a revolver and fires a single shot in the air as Diego's friends lower him into the earth. One by one, they throw a spadeful of dirt over the coffin. By the time the last mourner walks away, the next funeral has already arrived.	Martin Hodgson can be reached via email at martinh@colomsat.net.co
February 2002 | Archive | View images | © Sam Faulkner