MURDEROUS METROPOLIS

Thousands Die Each Year On The Mean Streets Of Medellin

Medellin, Colombia -- A young assassin splashes holy water on his trigger
finger and mumbles an inaudible prayer to an effigy of the Virgin Mary.

Alex, 21, who goes by the nickname "Satan," comes every Tuesday to this
whitewashed church on the southern edge of Medellin, the city that was once
the stronghold of the late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and epicenter of the
world cocaine trade.

Like many of the young guns locked in bloody gang wars in this northwest
industrial hub, Alex is a devout believer in the protective powers of Mary
Auxiliatrix -- known locally as the Virgin of the Sicarios, the name given
to the armies of hired assassins that surrounded Escobar in his heyday in
the late 1980s and early '90s.

"I don't ask the Virgin to give me good aim but just ask her to keep me out
of danger," said Alex, a crop-haired member of a gang called "The Shaven
Heads, " as he sat on the church steps.

In his pocket, he carried a small plastic figurine of the Madonna holding
the baby Jesus. His second-most valued possession is a pair of expensive
Adidas sneakers taken from the feet of a friend who was cut down in a
recent gunfight.

Alex refused to say how many people he has killed. Coyly, he said he never
waits around to count the corpses once he has emptied a magazine from his
Israeli-made Uzi 9mm submachine gun.

With an average of 5,000 killings a year, Medellin-- a metropolis of about
2 million inhabitants -- is one of the world's most violent cities. In
comparison, there were 667 homicides last year in New York, a city with
four times the population.

Medellin's estimated 220 gangs and 8,500 gang members fight turf battles on
a daily basis. They also kill for a price, which varies from $100 to
eliminate a love rival or someone who won't pay back a debt to $200,000 for
a prominent politician.

"If you pick up a gun, it is because you are ready to die," Alex said. "I
would like to die of old age, but I'm sure I'll go down in a hail of bullets."

The church of the "Virgin of the Assassins" is in Sabaneta, a town on the
outskirts of Medellin. It is one of the few neutral areas where rival
gunmen can mingle without fear of being attacked.

Some say the cult of Mary Auxiliatrix -- reflected in gang members' tattoos
and hastily erected street shrines in the poorest neighborhoods --
flourished after Escobar dropped in at the Sabaneta church many years ago.

Escobar, who died in a rooftop shootout with police in 1993, is still
revered by many of Medellin's poor for bringing employment -- albeit in the
drug trade -- low-cost housing and soccer fields to city shantytowns.

Each day, unseen hands change the roses and daisies on his grave. His
simple tomb is encrusted with a heavenly chorus of cherubs, and an epitaph
reads: "Here lies the doctor: Pablo Escobar. A king without a crown.
1949-1993. "

Away from the tranquil cemetery, across town in the "Northeast Commune,"
the city's poorest neighborhood, violence rages.

A teenager tosses away a marijuana joint, tucks a rosary inside his T-shirt
and aims a .38-caliber Scorpion revolver across "the Frontier" -- a deadly
urban flash point that is as prominent as the bricks in the former Berlin Wall.

The winding 300-yard-long street marks the boundary between the turf of a
gang called "the 29," which has forged a pact with Colombia's largest anti-
Communist paramilitary squad, and a neighborhood controlled by "the
Militia," which remains loyal to the National Liberation Army, the
country's second-largest Marxist rebel group.

"I never wanted problems but the militias told us to either join or leave,
so we decided to take up arms and come back to the neighborhood," said
Esteban, 25, the leader of "the 29," whose name is derived from a major
neighborhood thoroughfare.

Graffiti echo his words on a wall on one side of the Frontier: "Welcome to
the 29. We are from here and we will stay here -- forever."

With a semiautomatic pistol crammed into the belt of his Bermuda shorts,
Esteban concedes that he and fellow gang members earn a living by robbing,
peddling drugs and demanding "contributions" from local businessmen and as
paid hit men.

But with city unemployment at 21 percent and Colombia slowly coming out of
its worst recession on record, he believes gang members are not entirely to
blame for eking out an existence through violence. "Many of us want to
work, but we are just standing around on the street corner waiting for the
opportunity," he said.

Andres, 19, another member of "the 29," swapped his school books for a
German-made Koch MP-5 9mm submachine gun when hooded members of a rival
gang burst into a classroom looking for him one day. He still dreams of
finishing school and studying architecture.

In a nearby shack, a stereo system blares out the anthem of Medellin's
young assassins, a ballad titled "Nobody Is Eternal in This World." It was
a favorite with Escobar's lieutenants at the height of the drug war -- an
unbridled campaign of bombings, kidnaps and killings -- waged by the
Medellin cartel against the state in the late 1980s and '90s.

With Escobar long gone, Colombia's outlawed paramilitary forces, notorious
for the massacre of suspected leftist sympathizers in the countryside, have
formed an alliance with about 100 Medellin gangs. They offer them political
and military training in return for fighting an estimated 50 gangs that are
loyal to leftist guerrilla groups. The remaining groups have no links to
either warring faction.

A local right-wing warlord who identified himself only as Camilo said he
commands a gang called the Metro Bloc, which is a unit of the feared
paramilitary Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Cordoba and Uraba. He said his
group wants to extend its control over rival gangs, to cut down on
extortion, crime and drug-selling.

"The drug trade left a huge legacy in Medellin, and the young kids were
living on dreams: Live well for a few months and then end up in a jail or
in the cemetery," said Camilo. "Of course, there is a war against the
(leftist) militias, but our aim is for peace between the gangs."

For the time being, however, there is little prospect of an end to the
violence on Medellin's mean streets. In fact, some observers believe things
could even get worse.

At Medellin's Chief Investigator's Department, a senior member who asked to
remain anonymous because he has been targeted for death by several gangs
sat in his office polishing a Jericho 9mm pistol.

"These gangs are left over from the days of Pablo Escobar," he said. "There
is inequality coupled with loss of values, and that is a very dangerous
time bomb."