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Dec 31,2006 - Jan7,2006 |
The rise of the Cartels
Part 16 - Colombian criminal organizations are expanding their wings into North America
By Antonio Nicaso
Originally Published: 2001-06-24
Medellin — In Medellin, Colombia, dying once is not enough. Here, the dead are killed over and over again. Luis Alfredo Zea, for instance, some years ago was killed three times. The first time when he was attacked in a street of his barrio, the uptown neighbourhoods with dirt roads. They fired 28 shots at him; as many as the years of his life. Somewhere else this could have been a coincidence. In Medellin, only the naive would believe that.
The second time came as a surprise, not to him (who was dead) but to his father who saw a group of hit-men enter his house during the wake. And Luis Alfredo Zea’s body was again used for target practice.
As if this was not enough, the following day it was the turn of the burial motorcade. A car blocked the road and two killers on a motorcycle machine-gunned poor Zea’s coffin. And after three deaths, two coffins and almost a hundred shots to his body, Luis Alfredo was finally buried in a rush. No prayers, nor ceremonies of any kind. Maybe the fastest burial in Medellin’s history.
Police could only conjecture about the reasons for all this fury against Luis Alfredo. It appears that he was a killer belonging to a group of drug dealers and had tried to become independent and form a gang of his own. This excess of initiative procured him the first 28 shots. The other two "deaths" were a warning issued to his friends and colleagues, as if to say: who betrays us will not rest in peace.
A story like many others in Colombia, a land that the State finds difficult to seize back from drug dealers’ control. A country famous for its sad records, like those of kidnappings and murders, which have become a part of everyday life during the past years.
The first criminal organizations were created in the early Seventies and consolidated in the following decade through cocaine production and export. They got their names according to their areas of operation: La Costena, along the Atlantic coast, also specialized in marijuana production and sales, those of the Antioquia State and of the Valle del Cauca, as well as the Central and Eastern organizations.
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