El Narco (26 page)

Gustavo was the second of three sons of a construction worker. His father made enough for them to eat most days, but not enough to get out of the ghetto. When Gustavo was a toddler, gunfire rattled daily in his
comuna.
When he was eight years old, Colombian police shot dead Pablo Escobar in Medellín.
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Even as an infant, Gustavo knew all about the cocaine capo. “Up in the
comunas
Pablo was like a king. He was bigger than the Colombian president,” Gustavo says.

The assassin speaks with the melodic accent of the Medellín slums and uses many terms from its mafia argot. He has words for pistols (irons), rifles (guitars), cocaine (parrot), and murder victims (little girls). But despite the slang, he pronounces his words carefully and holds back from swearing.

Following the death of King Escobar, top Medellín traffickers met to discuss business—in an underground garage in Envigado. From this infamous summit, the so-called Office of Envigado was born, an organization to oversee crime in Medellín. To avoid endless bloodshed, the office would make sure all debts between traffickers were paid—and collect 33 percent for the service.

At the head of the Office was Diego Murillo, alias Don Berna, who had been the chief of a gang of
sicarios
. Don Berna ruled that for anyone to commit murder, the Office had to authorize it. This was one of the key reasons for the decline in the Medellín murder rate. Each barrio had its “commander,” who responded to the capo. On the street, the organization was also known as the mafia. American agents called it the Medellín Cartel.

As Gustavo became a teenager, his father tried hard to steer him and his brothers away from the mafia. But it was difficult to convince them an honest life paid off.

“You see your father sweating hard all day and just making a few pesos. And sometimes he was out of work for months. And then guys in the barrio working for the Office are driving brand-new cars and motorcycles and have five girlfriends.”

Gustavo began to hang around on the street with older boys connected to the mafia, provoking his father’s ire. Eventually, his father caught him smoking marijuana when he was thirteen and kicked him out of the family home. “It was a bit severe,” Gustavo remembers. “Here we are in the cocaine capital of the world and my dad throws me out for smoking a spliff.”

Gustavo slept on friends’ floors and sometimes on the dirt streets of the slum, kept warm by the tropical heat. He also moved deeper into the arms of the mafia. As well as smuggling drugs, the Medellín gangsters ran protection rackets and sold stolen vehicles. Gustavo first made his name as an able car thief, the same trade that Pablo Escobar himself apprenticed in crime.

“I would go into the center of town and steal cars or motorcycles. I could find a way into anything. I used to love stealing. It became like an addiction.”

Despite robbing day and night, Gustavo stayed in school until he was seventeen. By then, he was earning more than most adults in his
comuna
, and he dropped out to work full-time for the mob. Gaining the trust of the bosses, he would get jobs moving bricks of cocaine or packages of money, sometimes dollars and sometimes euros. The white powder came from plantations and labs to the north and west of Medellín. But the bosses in the city controlled it, and tons of it passed through the slums on its way to Pacific or Caribbean ports.

“I tried snorting cocaine but I never liked it that much. Some of my friends would love it. I always preferred smoking grass.”

Gustavo drew closer to the top dogs in the Medellín mafia, and on one delivery he met kingpin Don Berna face-to-face. “He was very friendly. Obviously, he was a very powerful man. But he wasn’t arrogant. He just acted like a regular guy,” Gustavo remembers with a touch of awe in his voice. Soon after the meeting, Gustavo got the nod to start training as a
sicario
. He had just turned eighteen.

Gustavo stares intensely as he explains the assassination techniques: “We normally hit with one team on a motorcycle and another in a car. The bike has one driver and one shooter. The car blocks the victim in and the bike gets right beside the target. Then the shooter unloads fast and passes the gun into the car, where it is put in a secret compartment.”

Gustavo first learned the art by driving a bike for his mentor, an older
sicario
. “He taught me how it was done, how you have to keep steady, keep focused, and above all not miss the target. How you shoot in the head and heart to make sure you kill.

“When I did my first hit, I got a little too close and shot too many bullets into the body. Then the blood and guts exploded out all over me. I had to throw away my clothes and wash hard to get it off. That night I had bad dreams. I kept remembering shooting the person and the blood spurting out.”

Gustavo did more hits and the bad dreams stopped. Every few weeks he would be given a new target. Mostly he killed in Medellín, but he was also sent to take out victims in other cities across Colombia such as Bogotá and Cali. Soon he had killed ten, then fifteen, then twenty people. Then he lost count.

I ask him if he thinks about the victims. He shakes his head.

“I keep focused and do my work. Before I go out, I pray to Jesus and clear my mind. I never take drugs or drink before a job as I need my five senses. When I come back, I will relax and smoke a spliff and listen to music.”

Gustavo says he doesn’t know or ask who the victims are. A target is selected and another team will follow the person’s movements to find the best time to strike. Then the
sicarios
will be called in.

“I get a call saying, ‘There goes the little girl. Take care of her.’ They will give me a photo of the target. And then we will go and hunt.”

Gustavo says it is all about the money for him. He gets a base salary of about $600 a month plus a payment of between $2,000 to $4,000 for each hit he carries out. While such money is a far cry from that of the billionaire traffickers with their diamond-studded mansions and fleets of private planes, it makes him wealthy by the standards of the Medellín slums. Furthermore, with a 22 percent unemployment rate for Colombians under twenty-six years old, it is undoubtedly the best-paid job he could get.
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“Some people murder because they get pleasure out of it, because they actually enjoy killing and get addicted to the blood. But I do it out of need.”

His blood money has taken him and his family out of the ghetto. As well as renting this apartment, Gustavo has bought his family a house in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. Teenage arguments he had with his parents are long forgotten, and he now sees them several times a week. His older brother is also in the mafia, but they are paying to put their younger brother through private school in the hope he will find a decent legitimate job.

Besides supporting his family, Gustavo likes to spend his earnings on designer-label clothes and high-tech Japanese motorbikes. He is also a big fan of English Premier League football and pays for cable TV to watch all the matches he can, as well as playing soccer video games on PlayStation 3.

“I support Wigan because they have Colombian striker Hugo Rodallega. I appreciate that Manchester United play good football as well. But I don’t like Arsenal.”

The references to British soccer teams seem a surreal connection from this Colombian hit man to the far-off reality of my homeland. Later, I publish the Gustavo interview in a British newspaper, and a Wigan fan group sticks the story on their Web page. They find it amusing that a Colombian assassin follows their team.

Gustavo tells me he likes romantic salsa music but avoids Medellín nightclubs in case he bumps into rival assassins. He is also a fan of electronic dance music and once went with a cousin in Bogotá to see London DJ Carl Cox.

“Everyone in the club was just drinking water and dancing like crazy. So I asked my cousin what was going on, and she said they were all taking the drug ecstasy. But I didn’t want to take it as I was worried it might be too strong. I heard LSD is crazy as well. I have respect for people who take that, but I don’t know if I want to risk it myself.”

The reference to a British DJ strikes me as another surreal connection with the world that I come from. For Gustavo, being an assassin has given him the means into the consumer lifestyles enjoyed in the rich West: to watch soccer on cable, play video games, wear designer clothes, go to nightclubs; the same pastimes that any student, building worker, or office boy in my own country can enjoy. It also gives him a sense of achievement—to be a somebody in a barrio full of nobodies. It even gives him a status that makes these two dumb European journalists sit in front of him and lap up every word he says.

But whatever benefits it has, there is no easy way out of the mafia for Gustavo. Being a cartel hit man does not come with a retirement plan.

“The bosses don’t let you leave because you know too much. When people try and get out, they can kill them. The only way is to just disappear without saying anything.”

He claims he is not scared of prison and already did one short stint for being caught with a stolen car. His boss (commander) looked after him, sending him food, and he had conjugal visits from girlfriends every week. He also took his high school exams behind bars and passed with decent grades. I ask if there is any other job he would like to do with his qualifications. “I would like to be a police detective investigating murders,” he says with a straight face. “But I can’t because of my criminal record.”

I ask him about his future, about the idea of marriage or children. He has several girlfriends but says he doesn’t want to tie the knot yet.

“I might make a commitment when the time comes. The girls in Medellín love gangsters. They look for boyfriends in the mafia as they know they have money to spend.”

Does he feel remorse about the people he has murdered? I ask. How can he square what he does with his Catholicism? “I know it is bad,” he says. “But I do it out of need. I do it to support my family.”

He also knows that his work may well lead to his own murder. But he tries to keep any fear tucked deep inside.

“I need to keep strong and focused. I can’t spend all my time worrying if they are going to kill me or not. Everyone dies in the end.”

Colombian assassins gained fame the world over, especially in Mexico. As Mexicans worked with their partners to move the white lady north, they also studied the notorious Colombian killing machine. The respect for Colombian hit men can be heard in many Sinaloan ballads, such as one called “De Oficio Pistolero,” or “pistol-slinger by trade.” “They are the Colombian mafiosi, they do not forgive mistakes,” the song begins.
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Mexican assassins emulated many of the Colombian techniques and also began to call themselves
sicarios
. Like their partners, the capos recruited young men from the slums. They also used cars to block in their victims. However, while Colombians used motorcycles, Mexicans ambushed from Jeeps and SUVs. And while Colombians used pistols, Mexicans blasted with their beloved “goat horn” rifles.

As the Mexican Drug War escalated, the AK-47 ambushers began to spray with crazy amounts of bullets. Murder victims were often found with up to fifty caps inside them, while another three hundred spent bullets lay on the concrete. Such overkill helps ensure a hit. It also drastically raises the risk of hurting civilians. I began rolling up to an increasing number of murder scenes where bullets had struck bystanders: a businesswoman driving behind a target in her VW Beetle; the man making tacos on the side of the road; the mother walking along with her baby in a buggy. The Mexican press started calling them victims of “lost bullets.” The civilian death toll hit the hundreds.

But
sicarios
always got their targets. And they almost always drove away unmolested. I was astounded how Mexican assassins could carry out simultaneous hits in three parts of Culiacán or Ciudad Juárez amid hundreds of police and soldiers and then disappear into thin air. And I was amazed how effective the gangsters were at kidnapping victims from their homes, workplaces, or restaurants—and dumping their bodies in public places later. Why do people give themselves up to a criminal commando they must suspect is going torture and kill them? Why don’t they run for their lives?

Back in the prison in Ciudad Juárez, I ask these questions of Gonzalo, the cartel killer who orchestrated many of these kidnappings and assassinations. The thirty-eight-year-old operative sits on his bed in a wing of the prison run by evangelical Christians telling me about his brutal life in the mafia. His face shows little emotion as he recalls some of the techniques for sending people to their doom.

“We have all the points covered. We work like the police in the United States, you understand? In every job we have points. If someone tries to get away, there will be a point that will respond. To do a kidnapping, you have to think about it for a long time. You have to do it well, because if you mess up one time, that could be it for you.”

He also elaborates how gangsters employ a large network of spies. And how, in many cases, victims are turned in by their own relatives.

“A lot of women move in this environment as well as kids, sixteen to eighteen years old. They can be very important points, watching things. A lot of the times, family members themselves will be involved in the jobs—brothers, uncles, cousins. And then it is easier as they know everything about the person, how they move. Sometimes they arrange to meet the person in some place. And then we turn up.”

Finally, Gonzalo discusses the gangsters’ biggest aid: support from police. Local officers working with the mafia will actually block off areas so
sicarios
can carry out a hit, then go in afterward once the commando is safely driving away. Furthermore, gangsters will often use codes to give to police officers that stop them to identify they are “protected.” Such practices may seem terrifying revelations. But they have even been confirmed by many of the government’s own publicized interrogations of thugs.