saw us coming into the area and they started to shoot at us,’ he said. ‘Then we fired back. Unfortunately both criminals died at the scene. It’s not our intention to kill anyone. But if they shoot at us we must answer the same way.’
The few hours on night patrol we spent with Avila counted as a quiet shift – only a tense chase into the heart of the slums pursuing a local gang involved in dealing, assaults and armed robbery; and a couple of stand-offs with boys carrying knives.
One of the lads was bleeding badly. No more than 16 years old, bare-chested despite the cold night, he had wrapped his shirt around his arm in a pitiful attempt to staunch the flow of blood. The shirt was sodden, and even as we talked to him he swayed, struggling to stay on his feet. He belonged in a hospital and Avila told him so. The boy shook his head.
‘What happened to you?’ asked the cop.
The reply was simple. ‘They stabbed me,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been to hospital because I haven’t got any money or documents.’
Avila threw his hands up in disgust, then reached into his pocket. ‘But to buy this you have money, don’t you?’ He waved the stash of drugs he had just confiscated: basuco, cocaine residue. ‘The basuco is better than medicine? He doesn’t go to the doctor, he prefers to buy this.’
Avila was dead certain the kid was staying out of hospital until he had exacted his own revenge against the attackers, but there was little he could do other than take away the drugs and knife and hope the boy saw sense.
‘Even when we try to help, we face the risk of confrontations,’ he shrugged. ‘We are the eternal enemy of the criminals.’
At its most fundamental, crime in Colombia falls into two categories: street-level violence and organised terror. On the one hand there are those who Sergeant Gilberto Avila deals with every day, the poor and desperate of the barrios, fighting just to make it through another 24 hours…and on the other, something else entirely. Guerrilla groups and drug cartels operating on a level of sophistication the equal of any big business – but with a callous viciousness steeped in the Thousand Days War and La Violencia.
They would seem to be poles apart – but they share some fundamentals. Money, drugs, guns, power. And neatly wrapping up the lot is Colombia’s latest growth industry: kidnapping.
In the last five years, there has been an average of over 1,600 kidnappings a year in this country. That’s more than four a day and makes up around two-thirds of all the world’s abductions. Thirty-five per cent of kidnaps are carried out by guerrilla and paramilitary groups for political motives – but most of the rest are purely economic.
Snatching someone and demanding money for their return has become as common a crime as mugging here, and people can be kidnapped for as little as £100 ransom.
Such an extreme problem needs a special solution.
We hooked up with Sub-lieutenant Juliet Quintero, otherwise known as Nikita. She has classic sharp South American features and clear skin that wouldn’t look out of place in the pages of a fashion magazine…but make no mistake. She’s deadly.
Nikita is part of the Colombian National Police anti-kidnapping unit – also known as GAULA. They are a special weapons and tactics unit, trained to carry out rescues in any environment – last year alone they secured the safe return of 136 hostages. That’s one successful rescue every three days.
But Nikita doesn’t exactly negotiate with the kidnappers. She shoots them.
Nikita is an elite sniper. She’s usually the first on the scene and she can end a kidnap with a single bullet. But she is also the eyes of the operation, there to cover the backs of police on the ground. If GAULA make mistakes, people die. It requires a steady nerve.
Nikita, who was nicknamed after the female assassin from the movie of the same name, has been taking out criminals for four years. ‘My colleagues call me Nikita because I’m a good shot,’ she told us. ‘So far I haven’t missed.’
She uses an AR10 sniper rifle: deadly precise, it can put a hole in a coin from a full kilometre away. This means that in a rescue situation she can take up a position out of sight and range of the kidnappers and eliminate them before the ground troops storm in.
Nikita was a disconcerting person; we didn’t know what to make of her. She was eerily calm when talking about her work, which was, after all, the cool, calculated shooting of men and women. There’d be no warnings before she took her shot, no ‘hands up and drop your weapons’…Nikita’s victims would barely even know they’d been hit – and they’d never know where the bullet had come from.
Being a sniper must always take a kind of extreme composure, an ability to detach yourself from the reality of what you’re doing, but in the high-tension, high-stakes situations in which Nikita works, where trigger-happy, desperate kidnappers are prepared to kill anyone – including their hostages – in order to escape, there’s the added pressure that she can’t afford to make any mistakes.
We couldn’t help asking her how she dealt with it. ‘You start to feel the adrenaline,’ she admitted. ‘You have to have more control over yourself, otherwise the nerves can get into you and you can make mistakes. It’s self-control.’
And she’s not about to let doubts get in the way of doing her job properly. ‘Even if they are criminals they are always humans,’ she says. ‘Of course. You don’t feel any satisfaction…but you have to take the decision to shoot or you’ll let the other person shoot first.
‘If I have him and I have permission, I shoot.’
It was cold – but it was also just the way things are here. And it’s one thing playing a hitman in the movies, acting out a role as a pitiless, ruthless killer…it’s another thing entirely to do it for real. As your day job. If I was to get a film part playing a stone-cold assassin, I now know exactly who I’d want to talk to about what it really feels like.
Having said that, maybe her lack of pity is understandable: in Colombia, it’s not just wealthy individuals who are under threat. The guerrilla conflict means the police themselves are major kidnap targets.
Barely 12 months before we met Nikita, police officer John Pinchao escaped after spending nearly nine years in captivity. He had been held by terrorist guerrillas in terrible conditions in a remote jungle encampment, his feet chained and his hands tied.
Pinchao’s unit had been captured after a 12-hour siege of the town of Mitú, when up to 1000 guerrillas stormed the town, killing 16 policemen and capturing another 61. After a bloody shootout, the police ran out of ammo and were forced to surrender.
Taken deep into the Amazon, Pinchao had been given up for dead long ago – by the time of his escape, he was 33 and had spent a quarter of his life as a hostage. Most of the other prisoners had been freed in a deal with the government but nothing had been heard of Pinchao since 2003. He only managed to get away after his guards forgot to chain his feet one night during a torrential rainstorm: he fled into the jungle, surviving for 18 days on roots and animals he captured with his bare hands, before stumbling into an anti-narcotics patrol. By then he was weak, exhausted, dehydrated and starving; doctors reckoned it a miracle he was alive at all.
Nikita sees stories like Pinchao’s as a warning. ‘I think kidnapping is the worst thing can happen to a person,’ she said emphatically. ‘I won’t allow myself to be kidnapped.
‘When police are kidnapped it’s usually in times of conflict, when they don’t have any ammunition or have no cover. When I leave for an operation, I put extra ammo in my pocket. Always. Always. And if the situation arose and I had no ammo, and help could not come…’ She raised her hand, her eyes locked on ours, made a pistol of her fingers and held it to the side of her head.
‘If that happened I would rather take my own life than be kidnapped.’
Nikita was hardcore, no two ways about it; and Sergeant Avila was dealing with a daily nightmare of violence and revenge on the streets…but we still didn’t feel we were getting