From gang member to counterinsurgent to family man: A life amid Colombia’s complex conflict

Introduction

What initiates, shapes, and ends a violent career? In this essay, we examine the experience of Alejandro, a gang and paramilitary leader over 30 years of Colombia’s 60-year-old conflict. His experiences reflect how the dynamic between his own life challenges and wider historical processes in his country molded his violent career and provided a basis for its end. For many years, Alejandro thought of himself as a combatant and patriot even as he was also a cocaine trafficker and extortionist, only distancing himself from these ideas after critical reassessment in prison. Despite ending his violent activities, he retains illicit contacts to survive. The essay examines the trajectory of Alejandro’s life and how his experiences emerge from, reflect, and construct his social context.

We argue that gang life under Medellín’s highly violent conditions operates at the intersection of wider social issues and individual experience. Exclusion, poverty, and conflict create varied pathways into a violent life that some individuals choose as they seek a place amid difficult circumstances. These paths can engender violent careers along routes where social experiences and emerging ideological frameworks shape and are shaped by a person’s choices. Individuals seeking to exit gangs may benefit from alternative frameworks developed through education, religion, and social rehabilitation programs to envision new lives.

We undertook this research over several interviews with Alejandro in 2023 as well is in wider research on conflict in Colombia during our careers. Arias is an academic who has conducted research in Medellín and Antioquia over 15 years. Ramírez, a lifelong resident of Medellín, has developed a career over many years focused on addressing conflict processes in Medellín and Colombia more broadly. Ramirez has known Alejandro, a pseudonym, since Alejandro’s adolescence observing Alejandro’s rise in crime, eventually losing touch as he achieved high rank in criminal groups but resuming contact after his release from prison. Alejandro reviewed an earlier version of this essay to ensure his life was correctly represented and his experiences sufficiently anonymized.

Individual and society

Journalistic and policy discussions of crime nearly always construct lawbreaking as a dangerous other to social norms. The mere distinction between criminals and non-criminals creates an often-artificial opposition. The academic literature, however, highlights that crime and criminal gangs are the product of wider social processes (Contreras, 2012; Feltran, 2020) or even of state policies (Jensen, 2006). Similarly, the ‘war on drugs’ manifests this tension constructing drugs as an enemy while popular demand creates drug markets, legitimate business profit from it, and many state actors participate in the trade (Arias and Grisaffi, 2021). The language of conflict justifies state repression that falls heavily on disadvantaged social sectors.

For some time, scholars have deconstructed this opposition showing how crime emerges from and is implicated in non-criminal dynamics. Andreas (2013) illustrates how crime has played a role in the historical formation of the United States. Government agencies often manage criminal organizations and markets to ensure peace (Snyder and Durán-Martínez, 2009), supplement pay, and advance politicians projects. Indeed, states may even find it more efficient to work through criminals to manage some social sectors (Arias, 2006; Arias, 2017; Jensen, 2006).

Understanding crime requires examining how social life, politics, and economics constitute crime and vice versa. This biography explores the tensions between personal problems and social issues, as C. Wright Mills (2000) put it, to understand how violence is produced by collective experiences and how processes produced by those experiences generate social violence. As Contreras (2012) reformulated this, inhabitants of impoverished urban spaces see life from their own individual perspective. Moving beyond that perspective to understand how broader social trends shape individual life requires a sociological perspective to contextualize the challenges individuals face.

Biography is an important tool for understanding how changes in social dynamics affect individuals and how shifts in social dynamics within communities may respond to choices made across society. Beauchez (2018) shows how capitalism and consumer society influence the experiences of a school dropout who turns to crime exploring how varied social processes affect decisions during his subject’s life. Rodgers (2016), in his biography of a Nicaraguan gangster, in counterpoint shows both how social dynamics drive some individuals toward drug dealing but also how choices by individuals constitute neighborhood-level normative orders illuminating how activities over one gang leader’s life shaped his community. Butti (2022), in her analysis of Medellín gangsters’ recollections, provides insights into the connection between market trends and the development of criminal careers. These biographical analyses, through their examination of sequential life experiences, concretely manifest Mill’s insights by illuminating how social phenomena generate different individual responses and how those responses construct the life of an individual and their communities.

Biography closely relates to the intimate portraits developed of gang members and their communities in ethnographies showing the interplay between social forces, their effects on individuals, and their impacts on communities. Bourgois’ (1995) In Search of Respect illustrates how a small clique of drug dealers in New York’s crack epidemic are drawn to dealing by social forces and how the choices they make shape their communities. Similarly work on gangs in Medellín and Rio demonstrate how gangs emerge from broader dynamics and how gang activities affect the communities where they are embedded (Naef, 2023; Penglase, 2010).

Alejandro’s story, a biography extending five decades, reflects how changes in Colombia’s conflict shaped him and how he shaped places and organizations. He did not have to become a criminal and many of his peers did not. His choices clearly followed social trends that he incorporated into his identity contributing to his violent actions. As he rose within armed structures, he used his status to pursue a particular vision of conflict and politics he internalized through his experience in collective Colombian life employing organization’s he led to realize his vision of conflict constrained by norms he believed he adhered to.

Violent pathways

Criminal lives exist within pathways shaped by economic, political and social factors. Economic and social marginalization contribute to the experience of criminality and violence by individuals and communities (Alves, 2018). Groups and individuals are included within and marginalized from societies in varied ways. Marginalization’s contours and opportunities to overcome it, at times in illicit markets and others in conflict-driven organizations, affect crime and how individuals approach crime and violence.

Politics also matters. Leaders and policies establish frameworks that guide individuals in confronting challenges. The experience of social, political, educational, or security policies also shape how individuals and communities interact. State policies often are borne most heavily by those from disadvantaged backgrounds who lack resources to seek private solutions. Leaders can encourage people on paths that benefit their political projects. These experiences may affect the strategies individuals choose in both criminal and non-criminal life paths.

Individuals in highly violent environments do not have to pursue violent lives. Certain factors magnify those chances, however. Once an individual is initiated into violent groups, various opportunities or pitfalls can emerge. These opportunities take on a path dependence affected by individual experiences and choices. In Colombia, a young person can join a guerrilla group, a gang, or a paramilitary bloc with movement between such organizations determined by local circumstances. Armed groups and illicit markets have pathways determining opportunities for economic success, or lack thereof, and career advancement.

Violence and a violent career, be it criminal or political, then occurs within a socially grounded ideological framework that shapes violence and broader criminal practices. A guerilla and a vigilante will behave differently in their politics and their politics will sometimes shape their approach to economic activities (Mampilly and Gutierrez, 2023). Economics may motivate criminals, but ideology may also shape many of their actions. Varied life experiences and market, political, and social pressures can influence ideologies and violent actors’ illicit projects. Baird (2018) has shown how particular ideologies of masculinity contribute to gang violence in Latin America. Critical frameworks that allow individuals to reassess their experiences and envision new pathways at the intersection of social problems and individual experience may aid in existing a violent life as has been documented on research into religion and gang recovery (Brenneman, 2014).

We analyze this in the life history of Alejandro, a bright and talented man skilled at working in difficult conditions. Having faced many challenges and sought paths for advancement at the nadir of Colombia’s conflict, Alejandro worked with various organizations in crime, conflict, and social activities. In Colombia’s conflict, prospects exist for talented people willing to engage in violent activities to succeed and achieve leadership. Alejandro’s experiences fostered a political vision. He also developed a capacity for leadership and public speaking unusual among criminals and paramilitary offering him important opportunities.

The next section outlines the recent history of Colombia, Antioquia, and Medellín to develop a nuanced account of the context of Alejandro’s his life. The experiences reflected in this history emphasize the role of marginalization, state policy and leadership, and emergent ideologies in shaping Alejandro and Colombia’s politics.

Medellín, antioquia, and Colombia: Recent historic and conflict dynamics

The violence, tensions, and opportunities during different eras of Colombia’s conflict, nested in Antioquia and Medellín, affected Alejandro’s life and shaped his violent trajectory. We offer here a detailed history of Medellín and surrounding regions over the past several decades. This background provides an essential foundation to understand the broader social dynamics affecting Alejandro’s life. Who he associates with, where he lives, what he does, and what he values are affected by local, regional and national processes that affected him and millions of others.

Alejandro was born in the early 1970s at the conclusion of the Frente Nacional, a peace agreement between the then-dominant Liberal and Conservative parties that ended La Violencia, a civil conflict that occurred between 1948 and 1958 that left roughly 200,000 dead (Bushnell, 1993). The Frente Nacional involved shared political patronage and developmental investment. La Violencia had reshaped Medellín as migrants from peripheral regions of the Antioquia Department filled the city, tightening the labor market and stressing social relations with the sequalae of that conflict (Roldan, 2002), dynamics that exacerbated social tensions amid state retrenchment in the later 1970s.

Despite the emergence of various new guerrilla group in the 1960s, the 1970s were calm in Medellín. This changed by the early 1980s with growing drug trafficking, which coincided with post-Frente Nacional neo-liberal retrenchment decreasing agricultural subsidies and political patronage. These shifts opened space for cocaine traffickers like Pablo Escobar and other members of the so-called Medllín Cartel as rural peasants and unemployed urban youth sought out new market opportunities and many Colombians looked for sources of patronage beyond the government. Common people and local elites knew the Escobar fortune’s dubious provenance but also saw him as a traditional benefactor providing social support amid state cutbacks. Escobar built football fields, hosted public festivities parties, and gave speeches in working-class areas. In 1982, he created Medellín sin Tugurios (Medellín without Slums) to construct homes for the poor. He founded Medellín Civil, a newspaper where he published somewhat leftist opinions. He was elected to congress as an alternate on a major party ticket (Salazar, 2001).

Dynamics in Medellín’s shifted further in the mid-1980s as Escobar initiated a war with the state. In 1983, Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla accused Escobar of narcotics trafficking. Escobar resigned from congress and had Lara assassinated (Salazar, 2001). This started Escobar’s conflict with the government, a period during which he paid cash rewards for the murder of public officials. Oficinas de sicariato (assassination offices) supported Escobar in these and other killings. Some young people saw sicariato not only as an economic and social pathway but also as a mode of self-protection in a city increasingly mired in violence.

Just as young people were joining sicario gangs, other modalities of armed groups multiplied in Medellín and Antioquia. Medellín-based drug traffickers founded Muerte a los Sequestradores, a proto-paramilitary group (Salazar, 2001) after the kidnapping of the sister of prominent traffickers. Similarly, rural landowners reacting to guerrilla taxes and kidnappings, organized self-defense forces (Sola and García, 2003). From 1986 onwards, guerrillas formed milicias populares, independent units that incorporated local gangs, to control city neighborhoods and extortion rackets, quickly taking over much of Medellín (Medina Franco, 2006).

With violence rising, reaching an astounding 400 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, the government organized the police-led Bloque de Búsqueda (Search Bloc) to pursue Escobar, eventually murdering him in December 1993. Escobar’s killing disarticulated many of Medellín’s armed structures. With the end of the conflict, violence dropped somewhat and guerrillas expanded their control.

Amid rising insurgent activities, many groups and leaders reacted. Some gangs sought to constrain the milicias populares (Gutiérrez Sanín and Jaramillo, 2004). The city government armed and provided resources to some of these groups as security cooperatives (Giraldo Ramírez and Mesa, 2013). Paramilitary forces intervened in the city. Initially, the Bloque Metro (BM) represented right-wing forces. Diego ‘Don Berna’ Murillo Bejarano, an erstwhile Escobar associate and later antagonist, organized the Bloque Cacique Nutibara (BCN), a paramilitary formation that incorporated local gangs (Civico, 2012). Homicide rates again soared in this guerrilla-paramilitary conflict at the end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s.

The first years of the millennium were an important inflection in Colombian history. Amid worsening violence and expanding guerrilla activity, in 2002 Colombians elected as president Alvaro Uribe, a native Antioqueño landowner supportive of paramilitaries. That year government forces allied with the BCN undertook Operation Orión, expelling guerrillas from their remaining Medellín stronghold. The action left nearly 100 dead. Scores disappeared, discovered years later in a mass grave (Agudelo and Henao, 2020). Shortly thereafter the government began demobilization negotiations with paramilitaries leading to the November 2023 demobilization of the BCN in return for participation in a truth process and modest benefits for its troops. Operation Orión secured Medellín under state-paramilitary-criminal control with Don Berna at its center.

Operation Orión and the subsequent demobilization began a period of lower conflict and had three dynamics. First, it began a period of known as ‘Don Bernabilidad’ in which paramilitary-allied criminals held political sway in much of the city managing resources and political participation in working-class neighborhoods. Second, it consolidated Don Berna’s control over the criminal underworld through the Oficina de Cobros de Envigado, a criminal protection racket that succeeded the Medellín Cartel’s 1980s-era structures. This new arrangement managed conflict among the city’s gangs. Third, the benefits associated with the demobilization were limited to low-ranking paramilitaries and important commanders. The so-called mandos medio (middle bosses) interests were not taken into account. These middle ranks were made up of gang leaders and experienced criminals who continued illicit activities because the earning potential they had in those markets was much higher than the benefits offered to them as foot soldiers by the demobilization agreement. Their ongoing illicit activities served as a basis for perpetuating crime and conflict in Medellín.

Don Berna himself was imprisoned in 2005 for ordering the murder of a politician. From prison he maintained control of armed activities in the city through 2008 when Colombia extradited him generating a vacuum that contributed to conflict. The leadership of the Oficina de Envigado devolved into an extended confrontation that ultimately focused on two rising criminal leaders, Sebastián and Valenciano. This caused Medellín’s third great weave of homicides. Sebastián’s faction triumphed but he was arrested and extradited in 2012.

This conflict reflected a shift in illicit markets away from Medellín as rural trafficking groups with market ties to newly dominant Mexican cartels, involved themselves in urban criminal networks partially displacing the now somewhat weakened city-based crime groups. Many Medellín gangsters sought livelihoods in rural areas outside Medellín. In 2013, the ‘Pactos de Fuzil’ (Rifle pacts) reorganized Medellín’s underworld to accommodate outside trafficking groups with operations in the city, to reduce conflict, impose discipline on gangs, and eliminate the gang frontiers that impeded movement between working-class neighborhoods. ¹ The result was a new, looser, criminal collegial authority referred as the Oficina or, colloquially, La Ofi. This authority manages crime in Medellín today.

Alejandro’s experience of crime and violence, outlined in the coming sections, was distinctly influenced by the phases of this history. He skillfully maneuvered through these shoals to advance his career as a criminal and armed leader. These experiences influenced his ideology and enabled him to shape organizations that he led, dictating in small ways how crime and conflict operated in these regions of Colombia.

Childhood

Alejandro was born in a middle-class Medellín neighborhood at the end of the Frente Nacional and ahead of the explosion of violence brought by the drug trade. His childhood was characterized by his family’s downward mobility. He told us,

After living in a middile class neighborhood . . . because of my father’s alcoholosim we lost many things and we went to live in a poor neighborhood, in an unpaved high risk zone . . . It was hard for us, especially for my mother to see us come home dirty, after a childnhood of means . . . My mother suffered much in that transitiotn from abudnance to shortage . . .

His abusive father went bankrupt and eventually Alejandro drove his father from their home. The family survived on his mother’s meager bakery income.

Alejandro reached adolescence as drug trafficking exploded in Medellín. An ambivalent student, Alejandro sought peer approval disrupting school activities. Groups associated with the trade had disposable income offering appealing opportunities to young people. The Priscos, Pablo Escobar’s first gang of sicarios, had a satellite outfit in Alejandro’s neighborhood. Along with other children he vied for the attention of these older adolescents seeking maintain their motorcycles, symbols of their wherewithal. A bright child, Alejandro learned from mechanics how to service these prized vehicles to get the gang members’ attention. He said,

. . . my friends and I lined up to wash the Priscos motorcycles, as a way to join the group, and they began to give us tasks like guarding weapons and doing other errands . . . my interest was to impress them . . . I could be valued for what I did and the girls could look up to me . . . so one of the tasks was to wash the motorcycles and I would do more than they asked, like a bonus to earn more recognition . . . for example washing the motor, I put vaseline or oil on so the hoses would last longer and from there others called on me to wash their motorcycles.

His mechanical abilities and diligence attracted their business and his ‘adoption’ as their ‘mascot’. He received a group nickname bringing Alejandro into criminal activities at 12. Other boys in the neighborhood who lost business washing motorcycles resented this. Of this experience Alejandro said,

An old guy in the group gave me a weapon to defend myself against the guys . . . It was a .32 caliber revolver. That same day I see it as an opportunity to transcend, so I grab it and make the other boys run away . . . And being in that group was the oporutnity and with that I could gain a post, climb, and help the family finances, to have the resoruces we had before my father’s crisis.

Enabled by his youthful appearance, Alejandro conducted intelligence on their targets. Gang duties rotated though the order changed if a killing required specific skills, such as driving or physical strength.

Alejandro’s participated in many crimes but was arrested after he murdered a police informant. He said,

My first arrest is for sicariato when I was fifteen. In Arboleda there was a man snitching causing the arrest of our guys. The police told us who the guy was. [The gang] gives me the order and I kill him . . .

The arresting officers, who were on the gang’s payroll, sought to release Alejandro, but the victim’s family followed him to jail to ensure his incarceration. Detained, Alejandro picked a fight to prove himself and was stabbed. The guards moved him to an adult wing where he encountered neighbors who defended themselves amid constant fights. He was released 15 days later. Alejandro’s mother returned him to school from which he was soon expelled for bombing an administrator’s car.

Pablo Escobar’s war with the state, which began around this time, initially affected Alejandro little. His gang earned more fighting. As opposing groups of guerrilla milicias infiltrated the city, Alejandro remarked that he began to find his ‘tendency’, by which he meant he identified with counterinsurgents against guerrillas.

Alejandro nearly died in 1988 when the military surrounded his gang in a neighborhood alley, killing many. Alejandro fled to Cali, Colombia’s third largest city. There the police caught him with a gun and took everything leaving him homeless. He found a job in a shoe factory and worked diligently in Cali for several years. Alejandro returned home to see his family for Christmas in 1993, a few weeks after Escobar’s death. He returned permanently shortly thereafter.

Consistent with the insights of Mills (2000), Bourgois (1995), and Contreras (2012) this first period of Alejandro’s life reflects how broader social phenomena affected his life. During Alejandro’s childhood Medellín experienced a relative calm as the Frente Nacional ended and elements of Colombia’s contemporary conflict brewed. Economic dislocations and growing drug market opportunities put money in the hands of criminals who became leaders for some city youth. Alejandro’s neighborhood was at the center of these cultural and economic shifts. He joined an important gang, participated in the gang-state conflict and its brutal wave of homicides, and survived by fleeing the city.

Rising gang leader

The disarticulation of Escobar’s armed organizations in 1993 opened space for new armed groups. Guerrillas and paramilitaries, often allied with the city’s many gangs, expanded leading to the guerrilla-paramilitary conflict of the 1990s. Alejandro resettled in Medellín during this period and became a gang leader.

When Alejandro returned, his neighborhood’s guerilla-affiliated milicia popular questioned him. Alejandro told them he had not considered further gang involvement and participated in a program to recuperate youth from gang activities. The day after his questioning, though, some friends discussed organizing to stop the milicia. With support from merchants, he mobilized around 30 to do just that. Alejandro convinced roughly 40 milicianos to switch allegiance, winning the conflict. His new group undertook local improvements with government support and earned money by protecting delivery trucks. Asked if this was a vacuna [vaccine], a Colombian term for extortion, Alejandro responded ‘it was a patria, an unusual expression suggesting patriotism (for an extended discuss of vacunas and their ambivalent interpretation in Medellín, see Naef, 2023).

Alejandro’s group operated at the edges of the law selling beverages, administering a sports program, and managing a restaurant, a business the government shut down. Alejandro said of this time,

Some of the young people in the group were merchants or worked for them, thus they had their own interests. Clearly at that moment the Priscos no longer existed, we are a neighborhood group that I led . . . But in parallel I was also part of a legal youth organization and I work promoting a city program . . . I lived between illegality and legality.

Alejandro said he negotiated with nearby groups ‘like generals rather than politicians’. These terms point to an emerging underlying ethics he perceived of mutual obligation among honest warriors rather than corrupt politicians, ideas he referred to often. Military leaders, for him, are more honest than politicians. A group defending their neighborhood gets their businesses closed by a feckless state because it lacks licenses. In this telling, men protect their communities while the government impedes that emphasizing some of the gendered aspects of violence and protection in Medellín (Baird, 2018).

Alejandro’s group was part of an emerging paramilitary movement in the city that achieved great importance in the late 1990s. The first major paramilitary group in Medllín was the BM which, like milicias populares, grew by incorporating gangs. By this time, Don Berna led the Oficina de Envigado. Amid growing conflict-related violence, Don Berna expanded his hold on the city’s illicit organizations and politics by seeking to control the city’s paramilitary movement. Don Berna formed the BCN that competed with the BM to ally with gangs, tying them to the Oficina de Envigado. The BCN rapidly displaced the BM and for several years thereafter dominated paramilitary and criminal activities, collaborating with state forces to displace the guerrilla groups.

In 1997, the BM sought to incorporate Alejandro’s gang in part to win a cut of his contracts with the city. Alejandro refused. Eventually the BM invited him to a town several hours away from Medellín for a conversation. He said he could not refuse and reported the trip to a city agency he worked with. In that meeting the BM accused him of killing an affiliate on the Oficina de Envigado’s behalf and wanted 25 million pesos from a city program he managed. Two days after he departed, his government patrons informed the BM’s representatives that the city knew they had kidnapped him leading to Alejandro’s release. Alejandro recounted this saying

. . . they kidnapped me to take away the money from the city project and I am saved . . . because the city government raises the alarm about my kidnapping. But in retaliation we kill ten (of their) members. . . that got don Berna’s attention . . . and so I join [the BCN] with the guys under my command but subordinated to a coordinator . . .

Alejandro’s gang subordinated itself to Don Berna and Alejandro began to work for him regulating other gangs, moving up in the underworld.

Alejandro’s life at this time life reflected Medellín’s varied social crises. He became a gang leader in reaction to guerrilla incursions. He participated in private protection and state subsidies where armed groups secured their neighborhoods for a fee from businesses and received subsidies from the state to restrain guerrilla expansion. His rise as a gang leader reflects the ambivalences of roles extortion markets play in contemporary Medellín (Naef, 2023). Echoing the effects of capitalist markets in Beauchez’s (2018) biography of Garoche and Butti’s (2022) analysis of Medellín gangs, paramilitary groups eventually become interested in extortion markets and seek to incorporate local anti-guerrilla gangs into their structures to gain control of state subsidies and extortion.

Paramilitary rise

Alvaro Uribe’s ascendance to the presidency and the rollback of guerrilla operations in the early 2000s opened space for paramilitaries to expand criminal and political operations. A third of Colombia’s congress and many local politicians were investigated to dealings with right-wing armed actors (Lopez Hernandez, 2010). In Medellín, former gang members sought opportunities in politics under paramilitary guidance and paramilitaries allied with the Don Berna-controlled Oficina de Envigado maintained order among the gangs

Alejandro, in his late twenties, participated in 2002’s Operation Orión, gathering intelligence in the Comuna 13. He said, ‘I actively partivipated in the intelligence on the milicianos and the guerrillas that were in the Comuna 13 to develop jointly with the army Opertion Orión and thus retake control of the comuna . . .’ He infiltrated the area by visiting the University of Antioquia, masquerading as a protest singer. Activists invited his band to the Comuna 13 where he sang to FARC members. Later he debriefed security forces.

Alejandro did not demobilize in 2003 because he felt that negotiations should not occur among ‘friends’ since allies ‘do not make peace with each other’. The government, he said, abided by the agreements with the paramilitary leaders and soldiers but not with mandos medios. He denied being one of these middle-level commanders during the demobilization because he, as part of Don Berna’s gang-regulating structure, had no immediate command, reflecting the precision of how he saw the gang-paramilitary hierarchy. Still his history as a gang leader and earning potential in illicit markets allied him more with this group than with foot soldiers, for whom negotiated payments and job retraining were compelling incentives, or paramilitary bloc commanders, who received special consideration in the agreement.

After the demobilization, Giovanni Marín, a paramilitary political leader associated with the Corporación Democracia (CD), a legal interest group that acted on behalf of demobilized paramilitaries under Don Berna’s leadership, asked Alejandro to provide political training to demobilized paramilitaries. Marín and the CD’s leaders sought to advance the paramilitary movement by winning public office to control city funds. Alejandro instructed paramilitary fighters on political campaigning to win seats on locality councils. Alejandro noted, ‘The idea was to get the most seats on the Juntas Comunales’. He said, ‘we won 187 seats’. Two well-known non-governmental organizations (NGOs), however, conducted a study, Alejandro said, that showed that ‘the paramilitaries had put pressure on residents to vote for them’. The government vacated the elections.

Alejandro said that during this period the city became more peaceful as the Oficina maintained a paramilitary-criminal order, referred to as ‘Don Bernabilidad’. Alejandro and Marín traveled the city managing gang conflict and undertaking ‘correctives’. Things began to change in 2006 when scandals about ongoing paramilitary activity and their national political alliance became public (Lopez Hernandez, 2010). Alejandro left Medellín to avoid arrest and pursue new opportunities.

During this period, Alejandro’s life reveals important elements of how social context affects and is affected by gang activities. His developing skill and growing stature enable him to begin affecting broader structures and social norms as Rodgers (2016) noted occurred among gangsters in Managua. The engagement between gangs, paramilitaries and the state reflect some of the ways that non-state violence is promoted by state policy and activities in South Africa, Brazil, and Mexico (Arias 2006; Jensen, 2006 interview with Mexican civic leader, 2 January 2025).

Ascent to command

The early 2010s transformed Medellín’s underworld. The shift of the control of the drug trade to Mexico strengthened Colombia’s export-focused coastal criminal groups. This altered dynamics for Medellín’s gangsters including Alejandro who had to seek out new economic opportunities competing to control broader trafficking networks. Alejandro succeeded as a leader in emerging post-paramilitary criminal organizations during this time.

According to Alejandro, things worsened in Medellín after Don Berna’s extradition when 12 leaders emerged at the heart of the Oficina. They formed an ‘armored center’, but power vacuums, he said, created conflict among them. The two most powerful factions that emerged from these were led by Sebastián and Valenciano (Perea Restrepo, 2014). Valenciano was a mafioso who ran coastal trafficking routes. Sebastián dominated criminal operations in Medellín. This conflict drove homicide rates to around 100 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010, in Medellín’s third tragic homicide wave.

Alejandro missed the Sebastián-Valenciano war. He said, ‘At that moment I have taken refuge in Oriente’, a region of Antioquia where Medellín gangsters then sought new opportunities. There he became a leader of the Paisas, a powerful criminal group that was a rural franchise of the Oficina de Envigado. In October 2008, Alejandro endangered himself when he violated a principal tenet of criminal behavior for which his boss nearly executed him. Alejandro did not wish to make public this event’s specifics. He said the issue involved a commitment to abide by a norm of reciprocity and his consequent refusal to follow important directives. Alejandro said this ‘mistake’ changed his life. After violating the ‘code’, he asked his boss to send him to a dangerous place to earn back his life. He reported, ‘The Oficina condemned me to death, but they commuted it, but sent me to a difficult area and told me that if I succeed in surviving they will forgive me my life. . . ’

He went to the Caribbean Coast to lead the Paisa’s Cordoba operations. Initially he controlled three municipalities on ‘the beach’ and had to build corridors to supply those with cocaine. He secured the Paisa’s presence in 23 Cordoba municipalities. Alejandro said that his group fought from San Bernardo to Loreto and then Monteria, the department capital. Then they went to Belén and Caucasia, in Antioquia’s northeastern Bajo Cauca region south of Cordoba, where his group made an alliance with Sebastián prior to his arrest.

Asked about his goals, Alejandro said that ‘We were maintaining economic control, military control, access to the political systems’. Economic control, he said, ‘is power, the exclusivity’. His group controlled criminal rents and cocaine labs that other groups rented. When traffickers moved cocaine from the laboratory to ‘the beach’ they paid him a toll. And then the traffickers paid for storage at the dock. Alejandro’s group charged to load cocaine. He paid the police, coast guard, guides, guards, and warehouse staff.

When Alejandro went to Cordoba, he was a leader of the Paisas. Medellín traffickers sold their area to the Rastrojos, a powerful post-paramilitary organization that Alejandro then worked for as their political leader, abandoning military leadership. During this time the Rastrojos were Colombia’s largest criminal organization, and Alejandro was one of its leaders. This change removes Alejandro from direct military command opening the possibility of him beginning an effort to escape criminal life. He said,

. . . In 2010 a mafia group call the Comba buy [out] the Oficina in the zone, the franchise in the war and rename themselves the Paisas Rastrojos. They name new people [as leaders] and I end up between the financial and political structure of the group. There I see the opportunity to leave. It is the opportunity to begin to ask for my exit.

Alejandro, now in his mid-30s, was allied with Sebastián in 2009 and 2010. Together they fought the Urabeños, their common enemy in mountainous southern Cordoba. Two of Alejandro’s subordinates tried to kill him. His colleagues, Alejandro reported, were unhappy he spent money feeding peasants. Discussing his social approach to crime, Alejandro said he once gave forty 32-inch televisions to a village. He said that helped the drugs move through the area for a year. He said, ‘if you kill a peasant you have to pay the police to move the drugs’. ‘Supportive peasants’, he continued, ‘even help to carry goods . . .’

Alejandro had always been hardworking and talented. Pushed out of Medellín by the dangers of fraying paramilitary project, he worked in rural areas, his life reflecting broad changes in Medellín’s underworld and the capitalization of markets there (Butti, 2022). To save his life, he accepted a dangerous job building trafficking networks to the Cordoba coast. He succeeded at this by bringing his background of providing community services to his operations. In doing so, he brought his own social experiences to changing the criminal industry, rising to become one of the key leaders of Colombia’s largest criminal groups at the time reflecting some of the observations that Rodgers (2016) made about the gangsters he observed in Managua. During this final period, he began his exit from criminal life.

Political leadership, arrest, and prison

In 2012, Alejandro relinquished command and was ordered to Medellín. As a local gangster who had ascended to national heights developing importance beyond the city, he was now quite respected in Medellín’s underworld. In 2010, he facilitated contacts between the Oficina and the ‘Notables’, a group of Medellín civic leaders negotiating peace between Sebastián and Valenciano. He also facilitated negotiations with Medellín’s Catholic Church regarding social projects.

Alejandro was subject to an arrest warrant and shuttled among five residences, each with a different woman pretending to be his wife. He reported that he was arrested after a wiretap caught him ordering pork chops delivered to a safe house. He agreed to a plea deal to eliminate some charges. Because Alejandro was captured as a Rastrojo, the Rastrojos sent a lawyer which he refused to avoid further obligations. He completed the plea agreement without a lawyer present.

Colombia’s penitentiaries have many problems. The system is overcrowded with some prisons having three times the inmates legally allowed. ² Corruption is common. The incarcerated pay for dignified conditions of reclusion. Rehabilitation opportunities are limited. Convicts are illegally mixed with accused prisoners. As in other Latin American prison systems, inmates often control prison life (Bergman and Fondevila, 2021). There are better prisons for public officials, criminal leaders, and others with power and influence.

Alejandro was imprisoned in Medellín and quickly became an advocate for prisoner rights. Officials retaliated, sending him to Cundinamarca, a distant region, far from his family. When he started organizing there, the director told him he could send him to worse places. In Cundinamarca he convinced judges to provide him administrative relief because he was not well known there.

Alejandro reported a tranquil prison stay helping other inmates. Old criminal associates stopped requesting favors. Politicians and collaborators saw he had lost his uses. He explained this with a poker metaphor,

From the moment one starts in this you are an instrument, an armed appendage and on the political side a wildcard, a token to do things and discard, in the game of poker, the joker is cast aside, not the ace . . . and I wasn’t the ace.

Alejandro realized he had done much for others but not his family, who suffered the most. It was dangerous for Medellín women to visit because the Cundinamarcan women treated them with hostility. With his family in penury and visiting at their own risk, abandoned by criminal associates, Alejandro developed relationships with Christian pastors. He reported his relationship with God grew, changing his life. His wife told him that if he returned to war, she would leave.

Alejandro reported he had never made any money because he was not a trafficker. As he put it, ‘The one who gets rich is the owner of the merchandise. We work for them, but we are not partners in the business. For that you need a great deal of money’. He did not control the capital and never became wealthy.

As an adolescent Alejandro became involved in crime to fit in. Schooling did not inspire him, he said, but most importantly, the girls paid more attention to the corner guys. He said the political ideas came later in reaction to the ‘left’s’ abuses. That led him to leadership and a vision of himself as a hero defending his country.

Alejandro said he realized in prison he was just another criminal. He became disappointed with the paramilitary groups that defeated the guerrillas but afterwards pursued agendas inconsistent with their political commitments. Then politicians like Uribe, who called people to join the autodefensas, undertook actions as abusive as those of the guerrillas’.

One of the remarkable things when interviewing former fighters of Alejandro’s generation is how they view themselves as ex-combatants in a counterinsurgency. Powerful players in the underworld and politics exploited these views. Young gang members, sometimes conflict displaced, were concerned about guerrilla incursions. Influential politicians made unfulfilled promises to them. Few of these young people became wealthy. Many suffered for those promises. Alejandro survived at great cost to himself and his family.

This last phase of Alejandro’s career offered insights into the dynamics of gang desistance. His reflections indicated the importance of reconsidering old understandings and ideologies. With the help of his church and his wife, Alejandro realizes that he was not a patriot but a common criminal who was not protecting his family. In this context it suggests how shifting religious (Brenneman, 2014) and gender (Baird, 2018) frameworks, as well as other ideological developments can aid in these efforts.

After prison

Alejandro returned to Antioquia a year and half later. He eventually moved from prison to house arrest. After a week at home, his wife sent him to work at her advertising firm. He spent 4 years under house arrest, mostly working for his spouse. During this time, he said a foreign pastor helped him understand God’s forgiveness. He and his wife now help lead their church. He acknowledges he has less power, but says he is a father, husband, and a rescuer of children for God. He is training as a lawyer.

Alejandro worried about the evolving nature of criminal actors and its implications for Colombians. In particular, he noted more criminals were foreigners with Venezuelans and Mexicans playing larger roles. Venezuelans, for their part, are integrated with Colombian life across many sectors due to proximity and history. Mexico, in contrast, dominates the global cocaine trade and Mexican criminal groups oversee Colombia’s cocaine trade. For Alejandro, neither Mexican nor Venezuelan criminals want stability in Colombia or maintain the reciprocal arrangements supporting poor Colombian’s that Alejandro valued as a criminal leader. This shift, he believes, will degrade Colombia especially for the poor.

We concluded our interview asking about Alejandro’s ongoing underworld ties. At various points Alejandro alluded to continuing illicit obligations saying he represented a powerful imprisoned criminal. In 2023, as Colombia debated the Petro Administration’s Total Peace policy, Alejandro communicated this convict’s support for negotiations to Medellín’s criminal groups. This positions Alejandro as an elder statesman somewhat disconnected from criminal activities but with credibility from his political work, religious activities, and prisoner advocacy.

Alejandro’s authority as a representative of a convict complicates his story. The unnamed convict continues to have decisive importance in Medellín. Alejandro, as his messenger, derives protection. So, in a business that is difficult to exit alive, this protection affords Alejandro the ability to live in Medellín as he grows progressively less important to criminal life.

Conclusion

Alejandro’s biography provides important insights into the experience of gangsterism, its connections to broader social dynamics, and its implications for society. We draw four implications from this for debates about gangs and research on them.

First, consistent with Mills and writing on gangs (Beauchez, 2018; Bourgois, 1995; Butti, 2022; Contreras, 2012), Alejandro’s biography shows in both broad and specific ways how wider social tensions encourage some toward crime and shape criminal careers. The biography sheds light on the general issues like inequality, market opportunities, and the capitalization of drug markets. Alejandro became a criminal in part because of the robust opportunities the cocaine trade brought to Medellín in his youth. It also shows how more context specific issues such as the shift of cocaine market dominance to Mexico affected life for Medellín gangsters as they competed with coastal traffickers for income driving Alejandro out of Medellín and eventually to the Cordoba lowlands to advance his career.

The biography shows the emergence and development of norms and ideologies. Alejandro made a point to note his own experiences and how they formed his understanding of crime. This, in turn, shaped his behaviors and justified his violent and criminal activities. While these views can change over the career of a gang member, the biography reveals where they emerged from in Alejandro’s life and how they shaped his violent activities. This resonates with some writing on gang practices in other contexts (Arias and Rodrigues, 2006; Brotherton and Barrios, 2004).

Consistent with Rodgers (2016) insights, Alejandro’s biography shows how over the course of a criminal career, an individual’s formative experiences can influence his criminal activities shaping the organizations he leads and the communities he interacts with. The biographical narrative shows not just the emergence of norms and ideas through specific experiences but also how those ideas affected his leadership in organizations emphasizing the arc of ideas and their effects on social life.

The last section of the biography emphasizes the importance of new frameworks of ideas for thinking about existing criminal activities. Consistent with the literature on religious conversion in leaving a gang life (Brenneman, 2014), this essay suggests that ideas and perspectives on gangsterism can be reshaped over time. Alejandro’s biography shows how these changes may be rooted in other concepts such as masculine responsibility (Baird, 2018) for the family or norms of reciprocity which can be repurposed from perspectives that support gang activity to ones emphasizing integration into the legal market, protecting one’s family, and contributing to a community.

Finally, the essay makes clear the importance of biography in studying gangsters. By looking at a life story it is possible to see how the different pieces of one life come together providing insights into how such behaviors originate, develop, change, and end. It is unusual for scholars to have an opportunity to interview a former gangster in such depth. This type of research, however, provides insights not available through research focused on a particular gang or moment. As such they reveal elements of these stories and connections in them.