Twelve-year-old Andrés Camilo Romaña had spent most of his young life collecting rubbish in the poverty-stricken neighbourhoods of Quibdó in Colombia’s Pacific coastal region of Chocó.
He did not like school because he was frequently bullied. Instead, he preferred to endure the unrelenting humidity of the city, roaming its streets and sifting through bins for anything of value.
“He was a good boy. He worked hard,” his mother, Jacinta Romaña, told The Telegraph. “He was never tempted by the easy money of gangs and violence.”
Andrés and his mother lived off recycling whatever he could collect with nothing more than rice and eggs to eat most days. His mother says Andrés was a quiet boy with dreams of one day living in Canada. He wanted to see the snow and feel the cold against his skin, but in April, 2021, he was hacked to death by a group of teenagers.
Andrés and two of his friends, aged nine and 17, had crossed an invisible border marking gang turf. They were accused of carrying out intelligence for a rival group.
The three youngsters were subjected to a brutal attack by machete. The price for straying into enemy territory is murder.
“Andrés died from major injuries to his stomach,” Ms Romaña said. “They tore him open. He must have suffered so much.”
Quibdó, like many of Latin America’s marginalised towns and cities, is plagued by organised crime and gangs, and it has become one of the most violent places on Earth. With a murder rate of 127 per 100,000 people, it comes second only to Tijuana in Mexico, according to global homicide rankings.
Statistics also show that more than half of Quibdo’s murder victims are under 30 years-old and that many of them are children.
It is not an isolated case. According to a recent study published by the Panamerican Health Organization, homicide is the leading cause of death among males between the ages of 10 and 24-years-old in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is also the second leading cause of death among females of the same age.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) concludes the majority of these murders are likely linked to gang violence. Murder has become Latin America’s enduring epidemic and experts say they know why.
“Violence persists across Latin America and the Caribbean because of high income and social inequality,” said Dr Robert Muggah, one of the world’s leading experts on homicide.
“High male youth unemployment and a host of other structural factors related to concentrated disadvantage in urban settings, uneven access to quality education and diminished opportunities for younger people are also contributing factors.”
In Quibdó, the three boys were held captive and tortured for several hours. They were mutilated before being shot to end their misery. Their bodies were dumped in the street for everyone to see.
Miraculously, nine-year-old Cristian David Mena was still alive despite his severe injuries. The gang had chopped off one of his hands and he had several gunshot wounds to his upper body. He had been left for dead, but was able to tell the police what had happened before eventually dying on the operating table three days later.
Globally, murder rates dropped dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic, but as the world emerged from lockdown, the number of people being deliberately killed began to climb again, especially in the Americas, which remains the world’s hotspot for homicide.
Brazil is the most murderous country on the planet in terms of absolute numbers (40,800 in 2022), but Jamaica is the country with the highest rate per capita (52.9 per 100,000 people) and the homicide contagion is spreading. Even Caribbean islands like the Turks and Caicos, usually considered a tropical paradise, are reporting increased levels of violence.
Costa Rica, considered by far one of the most stable countries in the region, has also registered record murder levels in the last twelve months.
‘The people I kill deserve to die’
Generation after generation in Latin America is exposed to levels of violence that for most of us would be unimaginable. For many, violence has become a way of life.
Jonny is a sicario or hitman in the small town of Caucasia in northern Colombia. He is fifteen years old the first time we meet in 2013. Back then he had been killing people for two years. He was a member of the Gulf Clan and had built up a reputation as one of their best.
In Colombia’s kaleidoscope of criminal conflict, the Gulf Clan constitutes one of the country’s biggest organised crime groups. They traffic drugs, people and gold, among other things, but in Caucasia they are the de facto state.
The Gulf Clan and its army of sicarios institute a dominant culture of silence to protect and uphold their lucrative illicit economies. It is a town under siege where the best way to stay alive is to be quiet, and to see or hear nothing.
Fifteen-year-old Jonny’s youthful appearance, deceptively innocent, is contradicted by the weight and horror of his words.
“I don’t think of what I do as murder,” he says. “The people I kill deserve to die.”
Sicarios police the slightest of challenges to the Gulf Clan’s authority. This includes killing those involved in unauthorised drugs sales, as well as those who refuse to pay extortion and informants.
Sicarios can also be employed to carry out so-called social cleansing missions. Thieves, drug addicts and members of the LGBT community can be targeted as the Gulf Clan imposes a warped moral code in order to assert its authority.
Jonny believes he is upholding this twisted system of criminal governance.
“We keep order,” he says.
Just as with Covid, murder is most contagious among already vulnerable populations. Poverty and social exclusion are exploited by armed groups that compete for control of trafficking networks and prey on vulnerable teenagers to boost their ranks.
“It’s the chase for easy money,” says Jonny. “Most young kids that join up are hungry and just want to put food on the table for their families.”
Violence can offer an escape for the desperate. Gang membership is often perceived as an immediate solution to despair and desolation.
“It’s a way out from the world of nothingness we grow up in,” Jonny says. “And it’s easier to pull a trigger than slave away all day for a pittance.”
Becoming a gangster brings money and motorbikes, it promises survival and status.
“I’ve become someone working as a sicario. Someone important.”
Jonny wears expensive looking trainers and sports a thick gold chain at our first encounter, the products of this easy money.
“We had nothing in my family. We grew up hungry. I remember I didn’t even have a pair of shoes until I was eight,” Jonny explains. “When I saw my sister’s boyfriend had cash, I wanted a piece of it. I knew he was a gangster.”
Jonny’s criminal trajectory follows a familiar pattern. He was introduced to the local commander of the Gulf Clan and quickly progressed from delivering packages and carrying out small errands to collecting extortion and eventually murder.
“The more they trust you, the more you get to do, and the more money you earn.”
Jonny is bitter and angry. He is indignant at the world for dealing him what he describes as an unfair chance in life.
“I’ve never understood why some people can have everything and others have nothing.”
As a result, he does not seem to struggle with the act of killing.
“It’s a job. If I didn’t do it, someone else would,” he says. “I do it to earn money. We all have to earn a living.”
Murder for Jonny takes on a form of revenge. It is retribution against a world that has given him few opportunities.
“Nobody cares about me. Nobody helped me when I had no food and no shoes, so why should I care about the world? About society? It has excluded me.”
Sicarios often project a strange mix of naivete and bravado, but Jonny displays a detachment that has obviously fuelled his macabre ambitions and diverted his moral compass.
“I want to make people scared of me. I want power. I want respect. Don’t I deserve that?”
‘The first kill is difficult, but then it gets easier’
Life in gang-controlled Caucasia is cheap. Sicarios tend to be paid a wage of between a hundred and three hundred dollars each month.
“The first time you kill is difficult,” Jonny says. “But then it gets easier each time. It’s an adrenaline rush. It becomes an addiction. The key is not to think about the person, but the money.”
Sicarios do not operate alone. Hits are usually carried out on motorbike. The first stage is to survey the target, a job carried out by look-outs, usually a network of teenagers armed with mobile phones. On the day of the murder, the lookouts will often coordinate the action, informing the “piloto” or the getaway driver not only where the target is, but also where to meet the person who hides and keeps the gun.
The sicario is usually only armed for the time it takes to commit the murder. The piloto will take the sicario near enough to the scene to identify the target. The sicario will fire their weapon before making an escape, eventually handing back the gun to be concealed again. It is a system that is a characteristic of homicide across Latin America.
In 2015, Jonny is arrested for the murder of a young gay men. He spends a short time in prison before being released. The key witness in his case turns out to be fake and the charges are dismissed. It is not uncommon for the police in Colombia to plant evidence or pay-off false witnesses in the attempt to seek conviction.
After his release, Jonny develops a particular condescending smirk, threatening even.
“I’m too clever for them to catch me,” he says. “I know I did it, they know I did it, they just can’t do their job properly.”
Jonny quite literally gets away with murder. Escaping justice spawns a terrifying arrogance. “I’m invincible now,” he says.
According to UNICEF, there are more children and teenagers in prison in Latin America and the Caribbean than anywhere else in the world. The region’s youth incarceration rate is second only to the USA and almost three times more than the global average at 77 per 100,000 youngsters.
In the northern Colombian city of Montería, the youth detention centre houses 18 teenagers. There is space for many more, but the prison has recently reopened after a spate of suicides forced its closure a few years ago.
Like Jonny, the majority of inmates are sicarios and members of the Gulf Clan.
A 17-year-old gangster sits on the floor, picking at his hands. Convicted of murder, Jorge has been sentenced to the maximum permitted eight years for a minor.
Two-years into his sentence, he continues to have nightmares. Pulling the trigger is not as easy as it might first seem, he explains. Easy money has consequences.
“I haven’t been able to get over what I did. I cry. I don’t sleep,” he says.
The young offenders are encouraged to embark upon a complicated process of self-reflection. In one exercise, they paint face masks to explore their identity, using colours to depict their past, present and future.
“It’s being inside that has made me think properly about my actions and the suffering I’ve caused,” says Jorge.
His 15-year-old cellmate, Moíses, agrees.
“Outside you feel big, you feel important. You don’t stop to think about anything until you get caught and locked up,” he says. “The money’s easy, but is it worth it in the long run? I don’t think so anymore.”
It is difficult to know if Jorge and his fellow inmates are telling the truth when they say they have changed. Fully aware that showing remorse and signs of rehabilitation will get them out earlier, it is no surprise they may be tempted to lie or exaggerate, but Jorge displays signs of emotional maturity that many of his peers do not.
“I have to be able to forgive myself before I can ask for the forgiveness of others,” he says. “I caused a lot of harm.”
Jonny sits in a dingy hotel room writing a list of names in a coffee-stained notebook. He says it is a list of his achievements, but each name he pens is a life he has taken.
Over the course of his criminal career, Jonny has murdered more than 30 people, but he shows no shame or guilt, even five years after his first murder.
“I’m not going to pay time for a single one,” he says.
It is 2017 and Jonny has struck a deal with federal prosecutors. He has become a snitch, one of the very people he used to kill.
“I had no choice,” he says. “It was the easiest way to get them off my back.”
Jonny’s arrogance pushed him to defy orders from his commanders. They began to see him as a wild card and wanted him dead. Knowing there was no escape from the bounty they had put on his head, he decided to surrender to the authorities.
He would tell them everything he knew in return for immunity from prosecution, including the name of each one of his victims. His offer was accepted. The entire cell of the Gulf Clan in Caucasia was captured and convicted.
Jonny would spend almost five years in witness protection during which time he was able to graduate from secondary school and find employment working as an engineer for a telecommunications company, but the life of an informant is a lonely one.
“I don’t go out much. There’s too much of a risk,” says Jonny.
Many Latin American politicians are looking to El Salvador for answers to the region’s murder epidemic.
President Nayib Bukele’s “mano dura” or iron fist security crackdown, which saw tens of thousands of gangsters rounded up and detained with little concern for due process earlier this year, has reduced the country’s murder rate to zero, but the strategy has been heavily criticised by human rights organisations and by security experts that conclude such policies only ever work in the short-term.
“These policies are ineffective, because law enforcement alone can neither reduce gang crime and violence nor prevent gangs from emerging and disaffected youths from joining them,” says Sonja Wolf, a Mexico-based academic and author of The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador.
“Tackling street gangs requires a holistic strategy that addresses the social roots of gangs and that enables gang members to resume a conventional life.”
Homicide, like Covid-19, is ultimately a treatable disease. While immunity to murder cannot be achieved through vaccination, it can be cured through effective leadership and policy, experts say.
“Treating homicide as a security issue often results in focusing on symptoms rather than causes,” said Dr Muggah. “Such approaches are not only costly and ineffective, they are frequently counter-productive.”
‘Life has given me nothing’
The southern Colombian city of Palmira consistently ranks as one of the world’s most violent, but a new programme has cut the city’s murder rate by 29 percent to 42.9 homicides per 100,000 residents, its lowest for 17 years. It remains higher than the national rate of 26.8, but local authorities say it is a significant improvement.
“It shows how the city’s commitment to social innovation has been more effective than traditional security measures,” the city’s mayor, Óscar Escobar, told the Telegraph. “We didn’t use any additional resources, no extra cash, we just managed to better co-ordinate between the different departments of the city’s authorities.”
The award-winning programme, which uses an epidemiological approach to identify homicide clusters, provides family support, as well as apprenticeships and entrepreneurship opportunities for young people.
Two of its main objectives are to keep teenagers in the education system and provide extracurricular activities in sport and music.
With a budget of just over a million pounds, the mayor and his team say they have managed to reclaim public spaces from the city’s gangs and transform the lives of some 30,000 young people between the ages of 15 and 29 years old.
Marcela Cabal is one of them. The 27-year-old mother of two is training to be a motorbike mechanic.
“It gives me an income,” she said. “It means I can support my two young boys through school rather than putting pressure on them to go out and earn.”
16-year-old Andrés Murillo says the access provided to psychological support has helped him most.
“I was angry at the world for not being able to do anything with my life. This programme helped me realise I was not alone. It helped me see there is a future for me,” he says. “Easy money is easy, but the life of a gangster is short. And what good is money if the only future you have is the cemetery?”
The public health approach of Palmira’s mayor is in direct contrast to that of Mr Bukele in El Salvador. Experts say social-based interventions are often less attractive for politicians because the results are usually not immediate and can require more financial investment.
“Public health approaches are helping shed light on the dynamics of lethal violence, including its contagious properties. A better appreciation of how lethal violence clusters can dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of responses,” said Dr Muggah.
In Quibdó, the city is also trying to confront gang violence. It is subscribed to Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s controversial Total Peace programme, in which the state negotiates with organised criminal structures in order to encourage their demobilisation.
As part of the initiative, young gang members are being offered minimum salaries and university tuition fees if they can leave their criminal lives behind. It is an unpopular policy with many young people.
“I’ve worked hard and studied all my life,” said 21-year-old John Jairo Cuesta. “What message does this send to people who have stayed on the right side of the law? I can’t afford to go to university and I can’t find a job. Why should someone who turned to violence have more opportunities than me?”
The Total Peace programme has brought temporary respite to Quibdó with a drop in murders in recent months, but it remains an incredibly fragile process.
“We need proper investment to make peace sustainable, otherwise the violence just perpetuates,” the mayor’s cabinet secretary, Hector Trujillo, told The Telegraph.
Ten years on since meeting Jonny for the first time, he does not appear to have changed much. Speaking just last month, there is still disturbingly little sign of remorse.
“I did what I did to try and build a future,” he tells me. “Do I wish life could be different? Of course I do. But dreaming gets you nowhere.”
Many of those Jonny helped to put away are now being released. It has made him more nervous. He constantly looks over his shoulder. Perhaps most alarming though is Jonny’s wavering commitment to his civilian life. Now 25, he has recently been made unemployed and the need for easy money has returned.
“Life has given me nothing,” he says. “I’m tired of the struggle. It’s easier to go back to what I know best, killing. At least there’s money in that.”
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