El Narco by Ioan Grillo

Author:Ioan Grillo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

I drive through Medellín to meet a sicario. It is a pleasant city. A cool breeze keeps the mountain valley fresh. Airy plazas are illuminated with sculptures of comically plump people based on the paintings of Medellín artist Fernando Botero. The most beautiful women in the world stroll down wide sidewalks.

Back in 1991, Medellín was the most murderous city per capita on the planet with some 6,500 homicides, among a population of 2 million. Now that crown has passed to Ciudad Juárez. But while Medellín has reduced the numbers of killings, it is still very violent, with 2,899 homicides in 2009.4

The man I am going to meet pulled the trigger on several of those hits. German photojournalist Oliver Schmieg arranges the interview. The Munich native has spent eleven years in Colombia and taken incredible photos of clandestine cocaine labs and guerrillas in combat with the army. I am blown away by how dogged and determined Oliver is. He works through his network of narcs, police informers, and street thugs. But the best contact is a former soldier who became chief of security for a prominent Medellín paramilitary leader. The contact pulls strings and Oliver is soon talking to the sicario on the telephone. The sicario first has to clear the interview with his direct boss, so he asks us to call back. Oliver phones again the next morning and the man says we can come over. We drive nervously to the address.

We arrive at an apartment block in Envigado, a middle-class neighborhood that has long been the heart of operations for the Medellín mafia. A doorman calls to the apartment and we are ushered upstairs. Our man opens the door and invites us to sit down at a large wooden table. The big apartment has little furniture, but a state-of-the-art plasma TV and a PlayStation 3 console.

Gustavo is twenty-four years old and strikingly thin, with light brown skin and crew-cut hair. He is dressed in a trendy green, short-sleeved shirt, Hawaiian shorts, and bright green canvas boots. A bulky childhood friend—and fellow sicario—shares the apartment and is pacing around with his shirt off, revealing tattoos on his back. Gustavo sits down with us and pins his elbows to the wooden table, fiddling around with a cigarette tin. At first he is a little nervous. But as we talk, he becomes more friendly and open. We talk for hours. The more we chat, the more I like him. He is clever and charismatic while being modest. I keep forgetting that he is a contract killer. Later I ask myself if it is wrong to like someone who robbed human lives. Can I really separate a human side of someone from the deeds they have done?

The flashy apartment we are in contrasts with the slum where Gustavo grew up. He was born in the comunas that snake up steep mountain slopes overlooking Medellín. The neighborhoods of unpainted breeze-block homes with tin roofs were squatted by thousands who swarmed to the city from Colombia’s peaks, valleys, and jungles.

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