Young Assassins of the Drug Trade

...Violence sinks its roots into were there moral, social or cultural prototypes which this reality...

...I believed that man was invincible...

...Most of the gangs identify themselves The incidence of single motherhood, and the number with the name of their leader: Nacho's Gang, Crazy of households headed by a single mother have grown...

...It brought them the fantasy of wealth surgency model was a mistake, and these frontal and the reality of death...

...authorization...

...When their children's activities imply a better material standard of living, the level of tolerance grows...

...For Medellin's poor, the drug trafficker became a symbol of lion against the establish- rebellion against the establishment...

...The young sicarios were born of the absence of any binding principles which might have given them some respect for one another and for life itself...

...But this is happening The security forces began by attacking the youth with the full understanding that any solution to a crisis gangs considered to be the reserve army of the narco- as profound as this one will be a long time in developtraffickers...

...There he joined a gang at the age of 14, beginning his participation, like most gang members, with simple activities like transporting arms...

...Most Colombians, of course, rejoiced at the death of Escobar...

...The mourners formed a compact and frenetic mass of humanity, determined to see and say goodbye to their idol...

...They have no clear notion that they are in any way acting against social norms or a symbolic order...

...The Institute estimates that there are between elinquency among boys between the ages of 50 and 100 thousand cases of physical, sexual or emo12 and 18 grew during the 1980s...

...A few lence against women and children...

...But he simply shrugs his shoulders and repeats the same phrase: "Only God knows when you should die...

...To be an adolescent in a poor that as long as the market for drugs keeps growing, neighborhood meant to be classified as a sicario...

...They identified him as the principal violent protagonist of a decade filled with drug trafficking, terrorism, murder, and political assassination...

...The subculture of violence incorporates the youth into an order of values different from the formal code of society at large...

...One of the most frightening episodes for Colombians was 24NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Alonzo Salazar is a Colombian journalist and social worker...

...where men of the cartel continue to recruit the chiefs The family-the basic institution of socialization in of the city's youth gangs...

...Of all the children surveyed, 56.5% had a positive opinion of Escobar...

...19.6% chose President CUsar Gaviria...

...During adolescence, young people are inspired by great ideas of one kind or another...

...respect for human rights...

...The traditional half of 1986, in the diverse centers of social assistance institutions responsible for mediating between the in Medellin, 7,500 cases of aggression against minors individual and the social order had lost their efficacy...

...Young boys with similar social profiles have assassinated newspaper editors, leftist politicians and state functionaries...

...increase in the number of registered cases of child abuse...

...So what road is open to us...

...They were the result of the absence of moral and cultural prototypes, and of the multiple influences of new social actors who made brute force and the VOL XXVII, No 6 MAYIJUNE 1994 25 VOL XXVII, NO 6 MAY/UNE 1994 25REPORT ON CHILDREN love of luxury the pillars of social relations...

...Under his leadership, the activities of the youth could win over the new urban generations...

...When the exercise a young boy joins a gang, he finds in the of violence has gang leader the identity model he never been one of the found in his family...

...Chucho was one of the 5,000 residents of Medellin-mostly young and poor-who attended the funeral...

...The larger gangs have a system of codes and relations upon which their cohesion is built...

...I never believed the government was capable of killing Pablo...

...The crowd broke the windows of the funeral home into pieces, and spontaneously carried Escobar's coffin on their shoulders...

...This was the tional abuse per year in the country...

...That's a man," is said about someone who does something bold-who is not frightened by anyone or anything...

...In many families, not only family love, but 26NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 26 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON CHILDREN the necessary family discipline which comes with positive models of authority is For the missing...

...In the gangs, they have found what society at large can't offer: friends and allies with whom they share essential aspects of their lives...

...They were treated as second-class citizens, to be dealt with only by the police...

...Short of a total restructuring of the justice and Juvenile violence became a way in which sectors of police systems, and a substantial redistribution of traditionally excluded youth-inhabitants of vast terriwealth, there are some "social action" programs which tories-sought the recognition of the state and the hold out some limited hope...

...The young boys of the shantytowns grow up wanting to live with intensity, to exercise their own will, to say: "This is who we are...

...The problem, of course, lies not only in these young delinquents, but also in the society that continues to produce them...

...The gangs gangs were brought under the influence of the Medel- became the alternative means of socialization...

...The gang works as an isolated environment that protects members from attacks on their self-esteem...

...Among many members of the community, the feeling persists that Escobar tried to do good, but the government's war against him forced him to do things he really didn't want to do...

...Among the poor, this crisis has so great that no delinquent can operate without their been accompanied and exacerbated by other factors...

...In just the first result of a number of processes...

...Pablo Escobar, for instance, at the same time that he was stigmatized by the state and the mainstream media, was mythologized by large groups of Colombians, especially among the poor...

...The boys are attracted mostly by the magnet of excitement, enjoyment and adventure...

...they have their own positive self-image...

...The juvenile gangs were the result not only of a socioeconomic crisis, but of a crisis of the legitimacy of social institutions...

...In 1985, homicide had become the city's leading cause of death, accounting for 1,684 victims, and by 1990, there were 5,500 homicides in this city of 1,700,000...

...Drug dealers, and in some areas sicarios, were idealized in just this way...

...For a decade, his life and activities acquired mythic dimensions in the city...

...With the understanding that in the exercise of violence there is an eagerness for self-expression and self-recognition, the methodologies of resocialization attempt to offer new forms of social representation which are meaningful to these boys...

...Residents were condemned to the world of "informality"-a world in which the rights and obligations of citizenship were lacking...

...uniting to fight for pron 1990, after the assassination of Liberal presiden- grams of community social development...

...Many become delinquent without considering themselves "different...

...of the youths in the drug traffickers' "army" die in one The family crisis is reflected in the growing vioof the many wars for which they are recruited...

...The actions of these young people questioned the meaning of life and death...

...And the exercise of violence has been one of the ways of getting society to acknowledge their existence...

...it criminalized and repressed them...

...Violence allowed the "foryouth...

...Chucho, a boy of 19, talks with great animation about the burial of the chief of the Medellin drug empire, Pablo Escobar-El Patr6n, as he is known to Chucho-killed by state security forces on December 3, 1993...

...This gives the gangs a good deal of vitality...

...Eventually, the national and Medellin, like Chucho, drug trafficking has marked local governments began to realize that the counterin- them for life...

...When they organized themselves to protest their condition, the political system closed all legitimate channels...

...In Colombia, have managed to achieve such power that they them- according to statistics from the Colombian Institute of selves have become small-time capos and have Family Welfare, every year since 1980 has shown an amassed considerable fortunes...

...Most were uninvolved with drug traffickers, but all tried to imitate their style...

...And for the first time in many years, they felt the triumph of the state as their own, hopeful that they had finally begun to overcome the long and extensive violence they had all suffered...

...Through the struggle for local political development, a fair number of young boys who were fearsome delinquents have been transformed into outstanding community leaders...

...the actions of paramilitary groups, guerrillas and These statistics reflect the impact of violence on social-cleansing groups...

...Uribe's Gang, Duvan's, etc...

...A few minutes after take-off, a young passenger unveiled a mini-uzi, turned it on the candidate, and killed him...

...They look for paradigms and heroes...

...Pablo Escobar was named by 21% of those surveyed...

...Translated from the Spanish by NACLA...

...These groups became involved in territorial wars that bled the poor neighborhoods, and through the 1980s, drastically raised the city's homicide rate...

...Medellin tial candidate Luis Carlos Galin, the government today is undergoing a number of interesting attempts launched a frontal attack on the Medellin cartel, to reconstitute itself as a society...

...Pablo Escobar himself emerged as the chief of the Medellin cartel by sheer brute force...

...It made the drama of the very mechanisms by which gang members-utilizing gang poorest public...

...Some of these methodologies are overtly political...

...One of the aspects of the Colombian drug dealer that allowed him to be idealized was his image as a "benefactor" of society...

...Poverty is better than the risk of death," she tells Chucho as she ticks off the names of his friends who have met violent deaths...

...I had to see it to believe it," he says...

...These migrant families remained under the corrupt control of the traditional liberal and conservative parties, and their traditional forms of social cohesion disintegrated...

...ment...

...President Belisario Betancur immediately enacted a treaty of extradition with the United States-where traffickers were more likely to be prosecuted-and an armed battle began in which the young sicarios occupied the front lines for the drug cartels...

...This is a complex phenomenon which is difficult to interpret...

...They lin Cartel via the so-called "offices"-convenient became the way many young people inserted themfacades, like car dealerships or real-estate offices- selves in a symbolic and "normative" world...

...The data are very imprecise, but by the middle of the decade, police had noted the existence of 200 gangs and some 5,000 young gang members...

...On April 26, 1990, Pizarro boarded a commercial flight in Bogoti to fly to the northern coast of the country...

...In Medellin's municipal polyclinic, of New actors began to play a dynamic role as generators 3,073 children treated for injuries that year, 74 were of life styles...

...In those cities, major drug dealers have formed armies of adolescents in the shantytowns to safeguard their territories, and use these youths as cannon fodder in their confrontations with each other and with state authorities...

...The killing of high officials highlights the role of the young paid assassins...

...By and large, the state had completely forgotten these areas by the 1970s...

...we exist...

...Finally, the army had to intervene to restore order and end the funeral...

...They considered him a good man with great powers, on whom the country's traditional rulers were unfairly trying to pin all the evils of the country...

...Subsequently, as the state attempted to bring these gangs under control, these same young boys began assassinating policemen and judges...

...For the boys of against the government...

...Monthly Review Press, 1990...

...In the Colombian gang, this requires the knowledge and use of arms...

...Toward the middle of the 1970s, when delinquency began to appear in these communities, the response of other sectors of society and state security organisms was in the form of the "social cleansing"-extermination-squads...

...collective consciousness...

...Although he has squandered much of the money that has come his way, he hasn't forgotten the promise he made when he decided to join the world of crime: to build a house for his mother...

...Vendettas became more common, as did treated for gunshot wounds...

...He is the author of Born to Die in Medellin (Latin America Bureau...

...NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 24REPORT ON CHILDREN Two young sicarios-hired assassins-in a doorway in Medellin...

...He lives in the Northeastern District of the city of Medellin, a densely populated area that extends up an abrupt and towering mountainside...

...And when he affirms this, he thinks of his own fatalistic life...

...The developed countries ask the producers illegally detained, augmented the resentment against to continue the war, though we all know that the war the security organisms and the state...

...the killing of Carlos Pizarro Lon-G6mez, presidential candidate of the M-19 party, a former guerrilla whose party had just joined the electoral process...

...of what their children are doing, but they protect them, and they are with them until the end...

...Youth violence made the state, which structures-might transform the negative quality of for years had treated the poor barrios as a police matgang leadership...

...Chucho, on the other hand, thinks that things will remain the same...

...The youth gangs became an expression of the drug-dealing subculture, in which ideals and heroes could be found...

...VOL XXVII, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1994 27 VOL XXVII, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1994 27REPORT ON CHILDREN boys...

...Why did they engage in operations in which they were so likely to die...

...Within a subculture, the recourse to crime and violence is not necessarily considered illicit, and those who behave violently do not always confront accusations of guilt because of their aggressions...

...The gangs emerged in areas characterized by massive rural migration...

...Here, relations of authority are combined with loyalty and solidarity in a way that sustains the cohesion of the group...

...Why did these boys assume such suicidal attitudes...

...This is most young boys of obvious when the father has abdicated the shantytowns, his family role...

...The close-knit crews from which the larger gangs are formed tend to represent "horizontal" space-space within which equals can build a life together...

...Pizarro's bodyguards returned the fire and killed the assassin...

...Most are just like Chuchofrom poor neighborhoods, abandoned by their fathers, school dropouts, and unemployed...

...The sons of these migrants from the Colombian countryside grew up on the edge of legality...

...groups that previously had fought each other to the death Children of La Milagrosa, a barrio constructed by Pablo Escobar on the outskirts of Medellin, have signed peace pacts, pose in front of a chapel built to honor the drug trafficker...

...Before juvenile violence became so widespread, many dramatic changes had occurred in Colombia, so first of all, we must speak of historical factors...

...All the gang leaders are accomplished gunfighters, and know how to operate smoothly and efficiently...

...On the one hand, they have tried to offer pro- gotten city" to be represented on the map of the grams of employment and individual social mobility...

...Everyone knows as enemies of society...

...One day in a gang operation, he was obligated to shoot, and since then, he has become a paid killer-a sicario-at the service of drug traffickers...

...Society began to unravel, children, and the effects of an authoritarian and intolNeither in school, nor in the family, nor in church erant model of the family...

...First it became normal to witassaults are now on the wane...

...Many young people identified implacable logic of the illicit drug market: as long as themselves with the drug dealers and were radicalized there are buyers, there will be sellers...

...The war on drugs confronts the strategy backfired...

...There is no submission to outside authority, or to norms they don't share...

...In 1983, a 16-year-old adolescent discharged a sub-machine gun, killing the minister of justice, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla...

...Death became a routine, first for the state and society at large, and then for groups of adolescents who grew up in the crossfire and amidst the indifference to corpses on the streets...

...The first cartel-connected youth gangs were created at the end of the 1970s...

...This latter process has meant work- ter, begin to reconsider its legitimacy and its manner ing with the social and personal self-image of the of relating to its citizens...

...It used the same logic as the Pablo Escobar died, but he was neither the begincounterinsurgency war: classifying entire communities ning nor the end of drug trafficking...

...These boys typically charge 500 thousand pesos (US$800) for a murder...

...The boys lack society's conception of "good" and "bad...

...acknowledge They may not approve their existence...

...Using diverse strategies, "other" society...

...It made socioeconomic and on the other, they have tried to develop diverse inequity more evident...

...In a poll conducted last year in the schools of the Northeastern District, students were asked whom they considered the most important person in the country...

...Young gang members with their defisome official as well as private institutions have com- ant actions profoundly questioned a social order susmitted themselves to the resocialization of delinquent tained by discrimination...

...If we look at cities like Caracas or Rio de Janeiro, we find a situation similar to that of Medellin...

...Young people who should, perhaps, have been taken to rehabilitation centers for their resocialization were gunned down in the streets and outskirts of the city...

...The new organizations will form to engage in this lucrative state offensive, in which thousands of people were business...

...In this masculine world, status-and leadership-is attained by bravery and purchasing power...

...The leader holds the gang Women have entered the labor market in significant together, and acts with absolute authority...

...These gang leaders, in turn, our culture-is undergoing a profound rearrangement control their own sectors of the city, and their power is in all social strata...

...After this event, the media spoke of these young killers as kamikazes-young boys who carried out actions so surprising and fearless that it became practically impossible for the government to guarantee the safety of anyone...

...He decides numbers...

...and 12.6% named the goalkeeper of the national soccer team, Ren6 Higuita...

...These young men don't find in their criminal actions any reason to consider themselves "guilty...

...Most disappeared from many households...

...Among the poor, he was idolized, and he became a symbol of rebel- Pablo Escobar's funeral cortege...

...The gang leader is a substitute for all the leaders and structures of leadership that society is unwilling or unable to offer...

...Look brother," he says, "Pablo died but we still have the same poverty, the same unemployment, the same corrupt authority...

...If it weren't for the immense sums that the traffickers get for their commerce of illicit drugs, it would be virtually impossible to recruit so many adolescents, purchase sophisticated arms, and in general have the capacity to corrode and disintegrate society...

...In 1980, 730 people died violently in Medellfn...

...Abandoned by her husband, Chucho's mother works as a domestic servant for a wealthy family, and though she is consumed with fear that her son will die a tragic early death like so many of his friends, she is thankful that he has provided her with a roof over her head...

...Alcoholism and drug addiction, paternal questions of life and death and, logically, he is gener- irresponsibility, and high rates of unemployment have ous with his loyal followers, and the implacable all contributed to a situation in which the father has scourge of those who betray or go against him...

...Around the beginning of the 1970s, drug trafficking started to become widespread in Medellin and the surrounding metropolitan area...

...According to reports of the Attorney General's office, members of the armed forces were involved in these extermination groups...

...In this sense, the is hard and useless...

...To a lesser degree, the middle-level capos and the sicarios from the barrios are also recognized as benefactors-as defenders of the well-being of the communities...

...This offensive took place without the least ing...

...Adolescents from poor neighborhoods were recruited as sicarios for the confrontations between rival drug groups...

...ways of getting Mothers frequently maintain an ambigusociety to ous attitute toward their delinquent sons...

...Armored cars and bodyguards became part of the country's everyday life...

...were treated...

...In this way, the state began to lose its most essential public functions: defending citizens, regulating conflicts, and administering justice...

...We are talking of a generation that found its strength in a territory in which all limits were dissolved...