Postcards from the Edge: Colombia

Power vacuum fuels vicious drug war

Since the time when undisputed cocaine king Pablo Escobar held sway here, the "northeastern commune" district has forged a fearsome reputation as a recruiting ground for drug cartel hit men and violent gang wars. Medellin is once again in the grip of a vicious drug war. In January to September this year, city authorities say the murder rate has more than doubled with almost 2,000 killings. Officials at the Medellin public prosecutor's offices say the vast majority of victims were shot, likely victims of rival drug gangs and cocaine capos. That makes Medellin as dangerous as Ciudad Juarez, the frontier town dubbed Mexico's most dangerous city as a result of the ongoing cartel war there. Authorities in Juarez say killings are up from last year and are hitting record highs.

Colombian authorities estimate there are around 130 street gangs -- known as "combos" -- in Medellin, totaling some 6,000 members. Their only real loyalty is to the money that drug capos dole out to hire a gang's services. Capos will supply them with drugs to retail on street corners and occasionally issue them weapons to take on rival gangs loyal to another crime boss. Until earlier this year, Medellin's drug underworld was ruled by the so-called "Office of Envigado," named after a district of the Medellin metropolitan area. The "office" was a syndicate of the top cocaine bosses who agreed on the basic rules of doing business in the area. They shared smuggling routes and acted as the ultimate enforcers if cartel members reneged on deals or debts.

Colombian hitmen reveal horror of the kill

My destination: a single-story home in the city's notorious "Commune 13" district where I had set up a meeting with two hit men, who have for years hired their lethal services out to the cocaine cartels. Inside the house, a man called "Red" sat on a couch toying a fully loaded 9mm Ruger pistol. "This will stop somebody nicely," he said, as I glanced at it. His face and arms were covered in burn marks. He said it was a testament of the day a barrel of acid spilled onto him as he was working in a clandestine cocaine processing lab in northern Colombia.

Red explained that after the accident, the lab foreman tossed him out, half-dead, into a jungle clearing. What little strength he had left, he said he used to bat away vultures. And, against the odds, he made his way to safety and slowly recovered. When Red left the clinic months later, he said he went straight back to the drug lab and gunned down the foreman and three of his henchmen. That wasn't his first killing though, he told me. When he was just 11 years old, Red recounted, he took a razor to the throat of a neighborhood drug pusher who had been molesting his little sister.