man didn’t appear to notice us as we walked silently up behind him; he made no movement, not so much as a tensing of the shoulders…but we knew he knew we were here all right. He’d been trained to know – and what he couldn’t be taught he’d picked up the hard way, in the field, in the firing line. Nobody was ever going to sneak up on him. This young cop was one of Colombia’s elite.
We waited as he crossed himself, placed his hands behind his back in the ‘at ease’ position, gazed at the memorial for a moment longer, and then finally turned to greet us.
‘This monument was created for all of the police officers who died on duty,’ he explained. ‘The last one was Wilson Reinosa, my best friend. The guerrillas planted a lot of mines in a place we had targeted. He died from a bomb there. He was married. He had a son. He was young, like 27, but a very good policeman.’
We all, involuntarily, glanced back at the memorial. When we looked at the cop again, he was smiling. ‘My name is John Orejuela,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘I work for the Comando de Operaciones Especiales, part of the Colombia National Police. Pleased to meet you.’
The Colombian National Police Special Ops unit – or COPES for short – are a tight, elite strike force of commandos trained up for the most dangerous missions in this country. They were formed in the mid-1980s as a highly mobile, highly equipped squad for quick reaction to high-risk or crisis situations.
Only 100 of the best police officers in Colombia are good enough for COPES. Trained by the SAS and the US Marines, they operate almost exclusively in life-or-death situations. Taking on the criminal untouchables – guerrillas, terrorists, drug cartels – COPES commandos are the front-line specialists in a deadly battle to keep order.
John had been a COPES commando for nine years, and the veteran of over 100 missions. His relaxed demeanour, friendly attitude and easy-going, open features hide a seriously dedicated professionalism. He showed us his dog-tags, permanently strung around his neck, as important a piece of equipment for the commandos as any gun or bullet-proof vest.
‘We don’t know when we are going to die,’ he explained, simply. ‘So in all the operations that we do we use these – to identify us if something bad happens. Maybe a grenade, maybe a bomb.’ He shrugged and grinned again. ‘It’s a bit dangerous…but here in Colombia, somebody has to do it. And I like the action.’
It had taken a while, but we’d found our man.
Colombia is a country born out of violence. Invasion by the Spanish conquistadores in 1499 was followed by over 300 years of oppression, rebellion and tribal warfare before the country won independence from Spain in 1819 – and another seven decades before the republic of Colombia was finally declared in 1886.
And things have hardly been smooth sailing since then. For as long as there has been a Colombia, disputes between the country’s two main political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, have had a habit of getting seriously out of hand.
In 1899 the country was torn apart by the Thousand Days War as tensions between the parties erupted into full-scale conflict – over 100,000 people died in three years – and 1948 marked the beginning of what they call La Violencia. For 10 years the Liberals, Communists and Conservatives fought in brutal, bloody clashes, mostly between hastily formed peasant militias. War crimes doesn’t even begin to cover the levels of lawlessness during this time: with guns and ammo scarce, the militias used whatever weapons they could, torture and rape were commonplace, and many of the warring factions developed their own unique ‘calling cards’ of corpse mutilation to frighten enemies and warn traitors.
The Corte Franela or ‘T-shirt cut’ involves leaving dead bodies headless and with severed arms; the Corte Corbata (‘Necktie cut’) leaves the throat slit open and the tongue pulled out and placed over the chest; and for the Corte Florero (‘Flower Vase cut’), the severed arms and legs are inserted in the torso of the victim, so the dead body looks like a crude, gruesome floral arrangement.
These horrific signatures originated during La Violencia but are still used today – by terrorist guerrillas and drug gangs for whom intimidation is as potent a weapon as death itself.
An estimated 300,000 Colombians died in the 10 years between 1948 and 1958, but even after the formation of a joint Liberal/Conservative government and the official end of La Violencia, the troubles are far from over. Left- and right-wing guerrillas continue to clash – with each other and with government forces desperate to keep some kind of control.
The official war might be over, but the killings go on.
Someone is murdered every 30 minutes in Colombia. Political assassinations are common, terrorism is rampant…but chuck in a massive kidnapping problem, crippling street-level poverty and the fact that Colombia is the world’s number one producer and exporter of cocaine and you’ve got a crime cocktail that has left the country ravaged and reeling.
Four different units are taking on the world’s deadliest criminals here. The drug squad, anti-kidnapping snipers, the Metropolitan police…and the commandos. And, of all them, it was the commandos we most wanted to see. They’re the ones on call and ready to roll at a moment’s notice. They’re the ones able to get in and get the job done – any job – and then get out again. They’re the ones with missions so secret, so dangerous, that most of them don’t officially exist until after they’re completed.
But we couldn’t ignore the sheer scale of the challenge facing the other divisions of the Colombia National Police. Those trying to keep this country from descending into anarchy again are all putting their lives on the line in the name of a better Colombia. We couldn’t gloss over the fact. And that meant getting up close and personal with officers from all four units.
Besides, we were going to have to wait for John Orejuela and COPES to get an assignment they were prepared to take us on. It would happen, they assured us.
Before we met Orejuela, however, we had business in Bogotá.
With a population of 45 million, Colombia is one of the biggest nations in Latin America. Right in the centre of the country lies the capital, Bogotá, home to over seven million people. Here, in the poor parts of town, casual violence is a way of life, and trivial disputes are often settled with a bullet: in this tightly packed maze of narrow alleyways someone is murdered almost every day.
The cops patrolling these streets aren’t about to go out unprepared. With over three million illegal firearms now in circulation, and 200 policemen killed every year, the Bogotá Metropolitan Police aren’t taking any chances. They’re packing, on average, two guns for every officer.
We met Sergeant Gilberto Avila, a veteran of the Met who has been deep in the barrios of Bogotá for 16 years – areas such as the poorest and most dangerous neighbourhood in the city, Ciudad Bolivar.
Avila has the look of a friendly uncle. Where the younger officers are lean, toned and wiry, and most of the other veterans are carrying seriously intimidating bulk, he’s more…solid. The kind of guy you wouldn’t automatically put down as tough – until you got on the wrong side of him and learnt the hard way. His jet-black hair is receding and the smile in his eyes is touched with something like sadness too. He’s seen a lot of dead bodies on his beat; he’s met a lot of victims.
‘In this past week we’ve had five homicides…all from firearms,’ he told us. ‘The last homicide we had was two days ago. A person was killed with eight gunshots. What happened is what we call “settling of accounts”.’
It’s a euphemism and, like so much in this country, takes its cue from the language of big business. What it actually means, in this barrio, is another tit-for-tat killing. Revenge is a way of life here.
‘He killed someone and then he was killed himself,’ explained Avila. ‘The family of that person looked for him to assassinate him. But we are on the trail.’
Not that those close to the victim might appreciate Avila’s efforts. Sometimes, while trying to bring a murderer to justice, he can get in the way of that settling of accounts – and become a target himself. And all