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111 6 The Problematic Emergence of Sicarios in Colombia The only time the Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez wrote about the phenomenon of narco trafficking in Colombia was in his book Noticia de un secuestro, published in 1996 and translated as News of a Kidnapping . García Márquez chose to make a statement about the emergence and implications of the traffic of illicit drugs through a chronicle of the kidnappings of several members of the local intellectual, cultural, and political elite that had been carried out under Pablo Escobar’s orders. The book aroused a series of criticisms, mainly because the author did not distance himself from the hegemonic view of the phenomenon and because he depicted members of the elite as the only victims of the narcos ’ violence. Thus despite being an example of well-crafted journalistic prose, Noticia de un secuestro is a report from a single and narrow perspective .1 Nevertheless, the one-sided perspective that García Márquez so painstakingly delivers in his book makes evident the authorities’ lack of direction and strategy to handle narco traffickers. The book is not only a great example of the general state of confusion, but it also captures the authorities’ inability to build a legitimate narrative around a common enemy. The state was paralyzed. Authorities’ uncertainty regarding narco traffickers is succinctly captured in a dialogue between President César Gaviria and his adviser for security affairs, Rafael Pardo Rueda, in which the two men are conferring about a legal solution for the prosecution of narcos, Gaviria asked Pardo Rueda: “Tell me something, Rafael, aren’t you worried that one of these guys will suddenly turn himself in and we won’t have any charge to arrest him with?” (García Márquez, News of a Kidnapping, 71).2 No words could better attest to the puzzlement government officials felt. It was not only the inability to enforce the law that made them nervous and confused; it was the absolute lack of any law with 112 the ProBlematIC emerGenCe oF SICARIOS In ColomBIa which to prosecute narco traffickers.3 That same feeling of uncertainty has haunted Colombians, especially those living in the big cities, where most of the violent attacks of the narcos took place. It is against this particular backdrop that I want to consider the controversial emergence of sicarios (hit men) as alleged new agents of Colombia’s violence in the 1980s and 1990s. In the early 1980s, the United States forced Colombian authorities to enact extradition laws against the narcos. At the same time, Pablo Escobar entered politics, running for local office in his native Antioquia. The elite viewed this move as a moral and political threat. The then young and energetic secretary of justice, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, began an aggressive campaign against the narcos and promised Colombia that he would rid the country of those criminals. In response, Pablo Escobar had him killed.4 When two youths riding a motorcycle approached the Mercedes Benz carrying Lara Bonilla and shot him point blank on April 30, 1984, a new era of violence began in Colombia. Lara Bonilla’s death marked the beginning of a war that narco traffickers (led by Pablo Escobar) waged against the Colombian state and society. It also unleashed one of the most violent periods in Colombian history.5 The report about Lara Bonilla’s assassination included a photo of the two young men from Medellín who killed him: Iván Darío Guizado Alvarez, who shot the minister and died when he fell from the motorcycle; and the driver, Byron de Jesús Velásquez Arenas, who survived. The young innocent faces of the sicarios contrasted starkly with the horrible account of their actions . One of the names (Byron de Jesús) underscores the element of mysticism that from that moment on was attributed to sicarios: angels of perversion.6 For the next several years, Antioquian writers articulated the violence experienced, mainly through these new social agents who murdered Lara Bonilla: youths from the comunas of Medellín who had been seduced by narco-trafficking money and became sicarios.7 Paid assassins have played a role throughout Colombia’s long history of violence and war (they were called pájaros, chusma, and contra chusma, depending on the side they fought during the period known as La Violencia), and have existed as characters with the mysticism and idiosyncrasies attributed to guerrilla and paramilitary members. However, in the 1980s a...

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