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COLOMBIA
HEART OF DARKNESS: SPECIAL OPS WITH JOHN OREJUELA

Colombia was always going to be a challenge. For decades, this bustling South American nation has been at war with itself: since the 1960s, government forces, left-wing insurgents and right-wing paramilitaries have all been engaged in the continent’s longest-running armed conflict.

The consequences add up to nothing less than carnage. Terrorism like you wouldn’t believe, guerrilla warfare, kidnapping as big business – and sometimes small – and vast, powerful drug cartels worth billions of pounds. Dense, impenetrable jungles and sprawling slums. Incredible wealth and indescribable poverty. Kids with machine-guns, rampant knife crime, casual murder, political assassinations, dead cops…and everywhere the magical lure and deadly stink of cocaine.

Trying to control this country is a nightmare. And it means the Colombia National Police are a force like no other. To nick a line from one of my favourite films, charging a man with murder in this place is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.

Like I say, Colombia was always going to be a challenge. Not because of the violence, the danger, the risk involved in just getting in and getting out again…but because, with so much going on, we didn’t know where to start.

THE YOUNG POLICEMAN stood to attention, facing a simple stone statue. In front of him, on a bed of rock, a pillar rose about 12 feet high; inscribed upon it were a few words in Spanish. Flowers had been planted around the base. Beyond lay a garden, a church, a complex of low, modern-looking buildings. Other police officers – some in uniforms, some not – passed by in silence.

Behind the lone figure, the main road to Bogotá. A Colombian flag, whipped up by the mountain wind, obscured the view briefly; but when the breeze died down again, the view to the capital was clear. High rises, skyscrapers, vast jumbled barrios and slums. Beyond that – mountains. Jungle.

The 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 too often for the cops on the streets of Bogotá, it can be a case of kill or be killed. Not long before we met, Avila had recently experienced this for himself.

‘They 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 to the heart of Colombia’s problems. What made the cops here different? What made them stand out among the world’s toughest?

We couldn’t ignore it any longer. We had to confront the worst this country had to offer. And that meant two things: the cocaine cartels and the FARC.

The FARC – which stands for The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – have terrorised the nation for over 40 years. This guerrilla force began as the military wing of the Colombian communist party, and their aim is still to overthrow the government and install a communist state. They remain the largest insurgent group in South America – and estimates of their numbers range from 10,000 to 18,000 members.

Their bloody campaign has been financed through kidnapping, extortion and drug trafficking. Tens of thousands have died in the conflict and the terrorists are responsible for more police deaths than any other form of criminal activity. It was FARC guerrillas who captured and imprisoned John Pinchao in the shootout at Mitú.

Taking them on are John Orejuela and the commandos of the Special Ops Unit. We got in touch again, asking whether we could shadow the force on their next assignment. We could, they said. But first they wanted us to meet another man. Listening to him would help us understand just what COPES are up against.

Deep in the jungles of south-eastern Colombia, 180 miles from Bogotá, lies the Colombian National Police anti-narcotics base, San José del Guaviare. Here Colonel Gustavo Chavarro leads an elite division of the drugs squad. Working closely with the Special Ops commandos, Chavarro’s men are responsible for taking out the drugs at source.

Although he’s got 20 years’ service and 80 men under his command, Chavarro isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. ‘It’s a high-risk job and we in the Colombian police are aware of that,’ he told us. ‘But it’s what we like, what we love.’

Colombia produces 70 per cent of the world’s cocaine. Each year 700 hundred tons of the drug is manufactured here with a UK street value of £28 billion. If cocaine were a legitimate business, Colombia would be one of the richest countries in the world – as it is, all that wealth goes into the hands of criminals, resulting in the formation of influential, highly organised and ruthless drug cartels.

Most notorious was the Medellín cartel – headed by the worst drug lord of them all: Pablo Escobar.

Escobar ran the Medellín cartel for over a decade…murdering and bribing his way to a £2 billion fortune: in 1989, at the height of his power, Forbes Magazine in America declared him to be the seventh richest man in the world.

Government officials, judges and politicians were all paid off – and if they couldn’t be bribed, they were ruthlessly murdered. Escobar made it a point of honour to execute anyone he considered a traitor or a threat: whether they were rival cartels, policemen, state officials, civilians, even members of his own gang – hundreds died at his word.

In the poor barrios and slums, he was known to reward street kids for killing police officers, and he once described his policy in dealing with cops as ‘plata o plomo’ – silver or lead. Bribes or bullets.

In 1985 he backed the storming of the Colombian Palace of Justice by left-wing guerillas: 11 of the Supreme Court Justices ended up murdered. In 1989 he was implicated in the assassination of Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán, a liberal who had vowed to clean up the system. That same year he also ordered the bombing of an Avianca passenger plane – the aim was to assassinate just one man, another presidential candidate, but in the event another 120 people were also killed.

Five American citizens were among the dead on Avianca flight 203. For the US administration it was the last straw: Escobar had to be eliminated. In 1992 United States Delta Force operators trained and advised a special Colombian police task force, charged with locating and taking down the drug lord and wiping out his cartel once and for all.

Commandos from COPES were given US Special Forces training. They were taught that the old rules no longer applied: this was a war – and that meant that they were to do whatever it took to win.

Over 18 months the task force conducted hundreds of raids, going up against the full weight of Escobar’s private army. Their tactic was simple and devastating – destroy everything that protected him, eliminate his most trusted allies. Nearly 100 of Escobar’s lieutenants were killed as the commandos got ever closer to their target.

In December 1993, they finally got their man. After the drug lord was tracked down to a middle-class suburb in Medellín, the task force swooped, and in the resulting shootout Escobar was hit three times – the last, fatally, in his ear.

But if it was the end of the most powerful cartel of the 1980s, it was just the start of the modern troubles. Into the vacuum stepped other cartels…and the FARC terrorists. Between them they’ve carved up the cocaine trade – and taken Escobar’s legacy to whole new heights of ruthlessness.

COPES can no longer manage on their own – and that’s where the narcs come in.

Operating with the same military attitude – and the same level of firepower – as the commandos, Chavarro and his men are fighting the drugs trade at its most fundamental level: destroying drug crops and factories, flying deep into territory under the armed control of the cartels and anti-government guerrillas.

They’ve paid a heavy price: 17 officers killed and 29 wounded on recent eradication missions alone.

Chavarro told us about the last one: a raid on a suspected cocaine lab.

‘It was called operation Eclipse,’ he explained, ‘the location, destruction and legal inspection of two laboratories that produce cocaine.’

Four Black Hawk helicopters and 46 police officers made the treacherous journey into the jungle – all prepared and expecting to face armed resistance from the drug producers. The Colombian jungle is dotted with over 100,000 hectares of coca crops, often guarded with landmines and booby traps, and they also have to be ready for ambushes. It’s not something they’re prepared to do without the best weapons. Chavarro’s men all carry automatic machine-guns, and the Black Hawks are armed with GAU-17 miniguns, each of which can spray the jungle with 50 rounds a second.

‘God has given us the guns to defend our ideals,’ he told us. ‘We need good weapons. I take my men to extremely dangerous places. The only thing I want to transmit is confidence to my men – that everything will be fine. Even though I know I can’t personally guarantee it.

‘Our families know that we run high risks, and that we can die. I tell my family that the day I die in service they should be proud. But every morning when I get up I pray to God to let me grow old…I pray that he gives me the opportunity to become a grandfather and see my son grow up.’

On the last raid the drugs squad were revisiting an area notorious for resistance to the cops – several police aircraft had been shot down here before. Ground-level commandos had identified a new cocaine lab, however, and that meant acting fast and being prepared for the worst.

Chavarro’s helicopters were in the air for 40 minutes before they reached their target, a clearing in the jungle and a makeshift laboratory. After several passes of the area, every gun sweeping the dense canopy of trees that could be hiding terrorists with rocket launchers and anti-aircraft weapons, the signal was given and the choppers landed.