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Weeks of terror have been experienced in Bogotá, Colombia, since bodies began to appear in different places in the city. Some with their throats cut, others tied hand and foot, wrapped in tarpaulins, garbage bags or even abandoned in water channels. Although at the beginning there was talk of four cases, the truth is that after 20 days of this month there are already ten.
The first reports appeared on Saturday, April 4, when they were found between San Cristóbal and Usme. two bodies in a wooded area. Both approximately 25 years old and with gunshot wounds to their skulls. Apparently, the double homicide would have been committed days ago, according to the Metropolitan Police.
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Eight days later, on April 12, in Plaza España, in the center of the city, an inhabitant of the street alerted about the presence of two black garbage bags containing two bodies: the first of them, mutilated and with cuts by knife, and the second had several bullet wounds. The deceased were found with signs of torture, tied hands and feet and packed in plastic bags.
Once the first four cases were notified, the coincidences began to set off the alarms of the authorities. Colonel Ernesto Goyes, inspection officer of the Bogotá Police, states: “We found two male bodies of approximately 35 years old packed in plastic. We are carrying out an inspection of cameras in the sector with the Judicial Police to establish the motive for the incident and if it has any relationship with other bodies found in the city.”
The truth is that the first versions delivered by a researcher and known by EL TIEMPO suggest that It would be about settling accounts for the control of the micro-trafficking business in different areas of the city. Despite the fact that a criminal pattern cannot yet be established among the homicides, the truth is that there are coincidences in the way the victims were killed.
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But the cases do not end there. In the week of April 14 to 20, six more bodies appeared consecutively, distributed among the towns of San Cristóbal, Teusaquillo, Usme, Engativá and Kennedy. The common factor was the black garbage bags and the bodies with their throats cut.
On the 14th of this month, on Calle 26 with Carrera 30, around 10:30 in the morning, a man’s body was left in a black bag. The commander of the Teusaquillo station, Colonel Sandra Lancheros, warned that “this body was brought from another town, the closest one is Los Mártires. The Sijín is investigating if that was the place where the murder was committed.” According to the colonel, the body, like the cases in Plaza España, was tied hand and foot, as if it had been tortured.
Given this riot of homicides in the capital, The Secretary of Security, Aníbal Fernández de Soto, stated that the portfolio’s action has a key focus on the prioritization and intervention of the criminal gangs that operate in the city by strengthening the rewards strategy, which “has already made it possible to solve important homicide cases.”
However, the situation intensified in the last four days of this month. On Sunday, April 17, a cremated body of a man was found in the rural area of Juan Rey, in San Cristóbal. That same day, between Usme and Ciudad Bolívar, in the Tunjuelo riverbed, a woman of approximately 30 years old was found with her throat cut and undressed.
A day later, on April 18, in the Palmeras de Kennedy neighborhood, the discovery of a dead man with three stab wounds and with the same signs as the other victims was reported: hands and feet tied with a scarf that was also tied around his neck and wrapped in black bags.
According to the report of the authorities, the security cameras revealed that a man aboard a pedicab would have abandoned the body at 11 pm the previous day, which led the investigators to establish that this homicide had not occurred in the town of Kennedy and the body would have been abandoned there.
According to the commander of Citizen Security, Alejandro Rodríguez, “this type of homicide could be due to criminal disputes associated with drug trafficking. In most cases, they seek to establish terror with these mechanisms and thus take over the territory.”
Juan Sebastían Jiménez, a security expert at the National University, says that what has happened is that these types of events always take place in the midst of hidden violence that persists among the most marginalized places in the city. “The figures are what make the cases visible. What we may be seeing is that in Bogotá the macrocriminal structures are being reorganized and that is why there is an increase in murders”.
The security researcher at the Manuela Beltrán University, Yenifer Suárez, points out that these types of criminal gangs that are reconfiguring themselves in the city operate under schemes of symbolic violence, “leaving marks of torture to impose fear on their enemies, who are generally from territorial origin”.
For Jiménez, in areas such as San Cristóbal, Usme and Ciudad Bolívar, where some of the bodies have appeared, there is a dispute over control of the corridors of illegal micro-trafficking economies, which could give clues to the motives for the homicides.
The last homicide with similar characteristics was reported yesterday, at 10:30 in the morning, in Engativá. The Police reported another body, that of a 22-year-old Venezuelan citizen who would have had his throat slit, stabbed four times below the ear and tortured with stab wounds to the skull and neck. The man disappeared since April 18, and, according to the authorities, he was a consumer of hallucinogenic substances. Faced with this case, the Police say that they are carrying out the investigations, but everything indicates that he would be part of that sequence of homicides that terrify the people of Bogota.
Source: Elcomercio
