The person who told me this story is an old friend. Her name is Julieta Lezama, a seasoned freelance reporter who sells her stories to press outlets in Spain, the United States, and Latin America. She’s young—on the brink of forty—and has two sons plus a divorce from another journalist whose beat is politics and finance, topics far removed from the things that make Julieta’s soul thrum. What interests her is harsh reality, public order, crime, and the blood that flows out of bodies and gives a tragic hue to the contours of this beautiful country, whether it’s splashed on asphalt or grass or plush pillows in affluent homes.
What Julieta is passionate about is the violent death that certain human beings, one fine day, decide to inflict on others for whatever reason: venting old animosities, love, resentment, self-interest, or, of course, money and the endless variations on that theme: commercial benefit, extortion, competition, envy, embezzlement and pilfering, inheritance, identity theft, fraud—how many justifications are there for crime? According to Julieta, they are as varied and inventive as humanity itself. No two people kill the same; there’s something uniquely personal in the act that defines us, just like there is in art. And in the moment, it gives us away.
Julieta has a small office in the same building where she lives with her two teenage boys, in the Chapinero Alto district of eastern Bogotá. The only luxury she enjoys (and only for the last eleven months, as her work with the Sunday magazine of the Mexican newspaper El Sol has stabilized) is a full-time secretary and all-around collaborator named Johana Triviño, who organizes her files and keeps her deadline calendar up to date. In addition—and this is her favorite part—Johana’s in charge of arranging meetings with people involved in the cases, and sometimes goes with her, especially when Julieta wants a witness around. Johana has a virtue that’s rarely found in female communication studies graduates: she knows how to use (and identify) all kinds of weapons, from handguns to less conventional arms, since she spent twelve years as a member of the FARC’s Western Bloc. At first it was a bit of a lark for Julieta: working with someone who came from a world so different from her own, from the shadowy Colombia that, incredibly, had existed apart from the rest of the country for more than fifty years and now, with the arrival of peace and then the ultraright’s rise to power, was in a very delicate position, on a tightrope.
Johana, protagonist number two in this story (though not necessarily in hierarchical order), is a Cali native, from a family that moved in the eighties from Cajibío, in Cauca Department, to the Aguablanca district. It’s the toughest area of Cali, that stunning city known as heaven’s branch office. There she grew up among migrants from Tumaco, Cauca, and Buenaventura. Among gangs of criminals, members of the FARC and ELN, paramilitaries, and drug dealers. Her father was a jeep driver, informal taxi driver, and finally the personal chauffeur to a wealthy family, the Arzalluzes, who lived in a fancy house in the Santa Mónica neighborhood.
The Arzalluzes, as it happened, had a little girl, Costanza, who’d been born on November 9, 1990, the exact same day and year as Johana. The family (the Arzalluzes) took this to heart, and on the shared birthday, they would give Johana suitcases of barely used clothing, shoes, books, and toys that their daughter no longer wanted. The ritual played out every year: bright and early that day, Johana’s father would take her to Connie’s (as Costanza was called) house to visit and accept the gifts. They would share a slice of cake with the servants, have a glass of soda, and that was it. After that Connie would start getting ready for her other birthday party with her cousins, friends from the club, and schoolmates, and Johana would be sent back to Aguablanca. That’s how things always went until the year they turned fifteen.
Naturally, the Arzalluz daughter was having a huge bash at Club Colombia that year, and she was so busy getting ready that she couldn’t take part in the traditional celebration with Johana. Starting early that morning, Johana’s father the chauffeur had to make a million trips between the club and Santa Mónica. The caterers’ van wasn’t big enough, and since the food had to stay chilled, he was stuck ferrying the trays of appetizers, spring rolls, finger sandwiches, octopus carpaccio, and, most especially, the six pyramids of king shrimp that were to preside over the central tables. Added to that was an endless stream of baskets of dishware, three sizes of wineglasses, water glasses, and cutlery. He had to transport the decorations that the mother wanted brought from home to the club ballroom to enhance the elegant atmosphere, which changed with the hour according to her whims and anxiety levels: a two-seater Chesterfield for the birthday girl’s grandparents to sit on; several bronze sculptures of Mercury and young Bacchus, his hair made of clusters of grapes; a Louis XV–style gilt-framed mirror; and an old painting from the English romantic period, a hunting scene that, the family claimed, could be from the Turner school. He helped supervise the lights and sound checks for the band, which started setting up its equipment at four in the afternoon, and to top it all off, he had to make three trips to the airport to pick up relatives flying in from Bogotá and Medellín. He got off of work at eleven that night, dead tired, and was finally able to go home for his daughter’s fifteenth birthday party.
In Aguablanca, Johana and her family were celebrating in the church’s community hall, with speakers and a good sound system. Her father loved old-school salsa and they were playing compilations of Héctor Lavoe, La Fania, Ismael Rivera, Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz, La Pesada de Cali, musicians who dominated the scene in this city that loved rhythm, the sound of trumpet, bass, and percussion.
Carlos Duván, her older brother, helped hang banners and decorate the room with posters and balloons. Her friends wrote phrases about life, enthusiastic ideas, and “aspirations” for the future. Her father bought twelve boxes of Blanco del Valle aguardiente, Viejo de Caldas rum, and a few bottles of Something Special whisky for the family’s nearest and dearest.
And the food!
Balls of unripe plantain stuffed with pork rind, plantain fritters stuffed with cheese, slices of fried plantain with tomato onion salsa and guacamole, three massive pots of sancocho stew, white rice, and several kinds of meat. When the father arrived, people were dancing already, but out of respect for him they played the waltz again so he could take his daughter out on the dance floor, to the applause of friends and family.
The call came after midnight. It was Mrs. Arzalluz; she was so embarrassed to do this, but Connie needed to ask him a favor. What was it? In all the commotion, the girl had left her makeup bag in the car the chauffeur had used to pick up the grandparents from the airport and then driven home. When she’d gone to touch up her makeup for the first dances, she discovered—a tragedy!—that the bag was still in the car the chauffeur had headed home in. Connie had left it there and then forgotten to ask him to take it out with everything else. She wanted to know if it would be too much of an imposition to ask him to bring it to her; her party was going to go on all night and the bag had the makeup a cousin had bought for her in Miami that matched her dress perfectly.
The driver explained that he was at his daughter’s party and had already had a few drinks, so it wasn’t a good idea for him to drive, but then Connie came on and begged him to bring it to her. What was she going to do without her makeup? She’d need to touch it up during the party! The father had no choice but to agree. He put on his jacket and told Johana he had to go back to Club Colombia, just for a minute. Seeing everybody’s disappointment, he added: what can you do, it’s work.
Our guess, or really what the police told us, is that as he was pulling up to the club he didn’t spot a cyclist coming until he was right on top of the guy, and swerved so violently he skidded over the median and overturned the car into the river. He died of a skull fracture. The Arzalluzes came to the wake, but not the funeral. They gave us big hugs and I realized something: poor people are important only when we die, that’s it. Connie didn’t come to either the wake or the funeral, since she was hungover from her party. The cunt who killed my father for a fucking bag of makeup, my little rich friend, didn’t even come to offer her condolences.
From that day on, I was filled with hate.
I said to myself: We can’t leave Colombia in those bastards’ hands. This country is perverse, diseased, and it has to change, even if it’s by dubious methods. I refuse to just sit down and cry.
The neighborhood had these urban militias roaming around, and paramilitary groups too, and from time to time you’d hear gunfire. I liked the FARC guys; they had a certain mystique and were tough as nails. No soft talk—they knew what was needed. A cousin of mine, Toby, was with them. I talked to him and he gave me pamphlets about the guerrilla groups and their cause. Even a well-thumbed book. How the Steel Was Tempered, by Nikolai Ostrovsky. It had been so thoroughly and sweatily manhandled that I thought I might get mange from turning its pages. I didn’t understand a thing, but I liked it. It convinced me that a person needs to study and understand History, with a capital H. That’s what I did, on my own, all throughout my time in the guerrilla. Fight and study. Often the two activities were one and the same. By the time I turned sixteen, Carlos Duván and I had traveled to Toribío. We managed to make contact with the FARC and asked to join. They accepted us. We completed the politics and training courses, and then our military training. After a few months, hearing my comrades’ stories, my anger began to dissipate. What had happened to my brother and me was nothing compared to the horrors other people had experienced.
I remember thinking, this fucking country where I had the bad luck to be born is an execution yard, a torture chamber, a machine for disemboweling peasants, Indians, mestizos, and blacks. Which is to say, the poor. Whereas the rich are gods just because. They inherit fortunes and last names, and they don’t give a shit about the country—they look down on it. What’s behind those fancy last names? A thieving great-grandfather, a murdering great-great-grandfather. Men who stole land and resources. So I decided: I’m going to fill those fucking bastards with lead—it’s the only thing they fear or respect. The only thing they listen to. That way they’ll learn.
That’s how I started, first helping around the camp and later wielding a gun.
It was through Johana that Julieta met her primary associate, a prosecutor of indigenous descent who worked in the criminal affairs unit, with whom she would exchange information and theories about the cases under investigation, and who, over time, had become her friend.
His name was Edilson Javier Jutsiñamuy, known to his colleagues as Wildcat. His family was from the Nipode Witoto community in Araracuara, Caquetá, and his last name meant, almost prophetically, “insatiable fighter.” A man well into his fifties, unhurried and weedy, who had left behind family life and a childless marriage to devote himself entirely to justice. He had sought out Johana early on in the peace process to corroborate certain facts and have someone trustworthy who could provide him with information. They gradually got to know each other and over time developed a cordial friendship that was later expanded to include Julieta, since the prosecutor was interested in her journalistic investigations, and particularly in her ability to access milieus that were off limits to him and uncover useful information. He is the third protagonist.
And there will be more as we go along.