By Jorge Rolón Luna*
“No way, not for 500.000 (guaranis), I wouldn’t do it for less than 15 or 20.000 dollars, not even if I were drunk.” That was the confession a hitman gave me for an article published a while back. The recent cases of hitmen make us recall these expressions, to reflect on the complexity of the phenomenon and the dangerous process of naturalization with which we are treating this tragedy as a society.
The growing number of hired killers has to do with the narco-world, which society can no longer ignore. Half awake, but still drowsy, our society is like someone who has a construction site in front of his house and the drills, the saws, the hammering, suddenly do not let him sleep. But when the noise stops, he covers himself again with his quilt or blanket and falls into a deep slumber.
Drug violence in general, and contract killing in particular, is far from being sufficiently understood, grasped and explained in our country. Simply because we do not study it in the academic world, nor does the State devote special attention to it. The cases of hired killings are labeled as “intentional homicide” and remain there, just as a by-product of drug trafficking.
The most violent expression of drug trafficking is contract killing. However, it is an issue that is not registered, nor studied, much less understood in Paraguay. It has many explanations, some simple, others not always easy or understood and, therefore, absent. Of ancient origin (sicarii means “dagger man”, because of the instrument used to kill), it comes from the times of the Roman domination in Judea, when the Jews assassinated their enemies. After a long time, it became connected to the elimination of political enemies. The sicario and the sicariato constitute, nowadays, a phenomenon that has nothing to do with those Jews furious against their oppressors. As Fernando Carrión says, the sicariato has become the incarnation of “an inter-criminal system with its own characteristics in which a criminal organization appears that, first, kills for hire in exchange for economic compensation and, then, becomes an autonomous instance of control of territories, institutions and societies”.
The little that could be clear about the sicariato comes especially from studies of the clues left by its violence in the media of other countries, since in our country it has not been researched. Among the key points to keep in mind when analyzing this crime in our country, it is worth recalling a series of fundamental statements that show its intertwined aspects.
First, organized crime has “violence and threats as basic tools for the development and achievement of its goals”. It is their way of resolving conflicts, especially in an illegalized market such as drug trafficking. Second, drug trafficking has a direct relationship, in turn, with contract killings. If a country has serious drug trafficking problems, it will have hired assassins as part of the population. Third, the higher the level of narco-criminal activity, the higher the levels of violence; in other words, if drug trafficking grows, there will be narco-violence and hired killing (as a modality).
Now, let us qualify this last statement. An eventual decrease in homicides and contract killings does not necessarily mean that criminal forces are defeated or in retreat. There may be periods of truce between criminal gangs, between them and the State, to the point that homicide levels drop at certain times. But this is not necessarily due to the effectiveness of security policies, but rather to top-level agreements. In Medellín (Colombia), for example, a truce was established by the mythical “Don Berna”, leader of the notorious “Oficina de Envigado”, the notorious debt collection and assassination company. Homicides were reduced to a minimum, in a period that came to be known as “donbernabilidad”. Similarly, there was a decrease in homicides in São Paulo (Brazil) between 2018 and 2019, as a result of a truce between the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital) and the CV (Comando Vermelho). This shows that the hitmen respond to an organizational discipline, even if they relate to criminal organizations as soldiers, hired individually or even as parts of a “company” that is dedicated to it. The aforementioned “Oficina de Envigado” began as a collection agency for Pablo Escobar, while the Zetas Cartel began as a hitman service for the now-dwindling Gulf Cartel in Mexico.
Continuing with the sequence of statements about what is known regarding hired assassination, today it is clear that organized crime in general (and drug trafficking in particular) requires for its operation and development of agreements, pacts and various levels of political and state complicity. Thus, hired assassination begin as “narco” but then go beyond its limits to become a method of conflict resolution of various social natures (such as family problems, rivalries between neighbors and various disputes).
It is possible to risk then that in our country, the current violence and contract killings are due to an intensification of drug trafficking activity, to disputes between drug trafficking organizations for territory control, routes and businesses, or to the absence of a truce between rivals. This intensification has already transcended from the criminal world to the world of politics and the state, infiltrating and capturing local and departmental governments in the border zone, prosecutors’ offices and courts.
Drug violence in general, and contract killing in particular, is far from being sufficiently understood, grasped and explained in our country. Simply because we do not study it in the academic world, nor does the State devote special attention to it. The cases of hired killings are labeled as “intentional homicide” and remain there, just as a by-product of drug trafficking. Its brutality, cruelty and true nature are perceived as a distant echo sometimes, with the roar of the brutal murder of the day, at other times. But only those who live it know what it is all about. As Juan Alberto Cedillo says, referring to the hitmen in Mexico: “Thanks to the fact that they would not be tried for the murders they committed in Mexico, when the capos had the opportunity to tell their stories (in the U.S.), they went so far that the prosecutors had to tell them to stop…”
A self-confessed hitman once revealed to the author of this article certain details of “his work”: “when it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go, I’m not going to stop”. Such a phrase explains some of the logic of the matter: the existence of hired assassination implies real extrajudicial death sentences, impossible to review, not even by the hired assassin himself. But, that is just scratching the surface; everything indicates that, if someday the drug lords, soldiers and hired killers speak up, we will also have to make them stop. It is not far from the truth that our narco-violence problem is increasingly similar to the much talked about and atrocious cases of Colombia and Mexico.
*Lawyer, university professor and independent researcher, author of the book of short stories “Los sicarios”.
Image: Design by Moisés Ruiz