A New Life for Narco Properties

El Mexicano's old walled property near La Zona Rosa,will soon host the Chinese embassy.

During past decades, Bogotá was home to numerous properties which everybody knew belonged to narcos, altho few people were likely to say so out loud. Today, with the cocaine trade booming once again, Bogotá is likely newly awash in drug money, altho much less conspicuously.

Villa Adelaida, as seen from the street,
will soon house a restaurant.

Meanwhile, some of those narcoproperties of decades past are finding new lives. The 'Mexicano's' old high-walled estate located just north of the Zona Rosa was recently purchased by the Chinese government and is to be their new embassy site. The Mexicano's old wall could be useful for keeping out anybody inclined to protest against China's many human rights violations.

El Mexicano, whose birth name was José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, was actually Colombian, but liked Mexican music and Mexican money, earning him the nickname. He started out as a hired assassin for emerald kingpins, but decided that drug trafficking was more profitable and became a member of the Medellin Cartel, along with Pablo Escobar. El Mexicano may have been even more brutal than Escobar, and eventually unleashed a brutal battle for control against his old friends in the emerald business. He was killed by Colombian police in 1989.

Not far away, on Calle 70 and Carrera 7a, La Quinta Villa Adelaida has stood rotting away for decades. Built in 1914 by Agustín Nieto Caballero, founder of the nearby Gimnasio Moderno, a high school for children of the traditional conservative elite, the huge house later became the Baron Club,  the site of expensive carousing. However, the club's owner, Manuel Abajo Abajo, a Spanish citizen, was arrested in 1987 for narcotrafficking and sentenced to nearly a decade in prison.
s.

Villa Adelaida in its glory days.

The house passed to control of the government, and has been under renovation the last several years. Plans for the property have included a hotel and shopping mall - but ran into opposition from neighbors, who feared more traffic jams. Next year, if all goes according to plan, an expensive restaurant will open in Villa Adelaida.

Do more narco properties remain in Bogotá? Undoubtedly, many do. However, today's narcos have learned to live less conspicuously to not make themselves targets of authorities and rival cartels. At the same time, the Mexican cartels have taken the most profitable retail trade away from the Colombians, and the Colombian drug traffickers which remain have shifted their centers of operations the big cities to rural areas near the coasts and borders.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

How to Wash Money Clean

How to bring them home.

Imagine that you're a successful drug trafficker. Your cocaine cargo arrived safely in some rich nation, where it sold for thousands of times what it cost to buy the coca leaves and chemicals back in Colombia.

But now you have two challenges: You need to bring that money back into Colombia, and you need to disguise it as legal money.

You might take the first stept by having people swallow pills stuffed with hundred dollar bills or tape wads of bills to their bodies. But that's dangerous and means trusting the couriers.

Or, you might try to transfer the money back into Colombia thru the banking system. But the banks are supposed to have ways of flagging large transfers and investigating their origin.

Or, you could use the dirty money to buy stuff like washing machines, running shoes, or bicycles, import them into Colombia and then sell them to recover your profits. Even if you sell the products at a loss, it's still worth it, since the drug profits were so huge.

In the third case, you've not only brought your dirty money into Colombia, but also disguised it as clean money. That's called money laundering.

Think of the FARC guerrillas, and you think of bombings, drug trafficking, child soldiers and other crimes - but probably not supermarkets.

Yet, according to Colombian authorities, a supermarket chain played a fundamental in the guerrillas'

A Supercundi supermarket, allegedly linked
to the FARC guerrillas.

operations by laundering their ill-gotten gains. The Supercundi market chain had grown quickly after being founded in 2006, and, according to authorities, sold some products 90% cheaper than in a normal store. This week, the government shut down the markets, alleging they belonged to a friend of the FARC, who laundered the FARC's illegal income from drugs and illegal mining and then invested the new, clean money in land, luxury cars and new businesses.

The supermarkets also served a second function for the guerrillas - supplying their fighters with food.

Money laundering comes in many forms.

Years ago, a friend's girfriend told us about her job in a language institute which, strangely, taught almost no classes, and those it did have had almost no students. Whenever someone called asking to enroll, the instruction was to tell them that the class was full.

That sounded like a money laundering operation. Someone with an illicit income had set up the 'school' to be able to justify that income, confident that authorities wouldn't look too closely.

Another time, a tourist told me he'd tried to book in a Bogotá hostel, only to be told that it was
completely full. That sounded strange, as it wasn't busy season. Since the hostel had a nice website, I decided to visit it to drop off publicity. The place had no sign, and the woman who answered the door seemed to have no knowledge of a hostel there. Someone had come by once and talked about perhaps opening a hostel there, she said.

That sounded like a small-time money laundering operation.

During the narcos era, many drug traffickers bought sports teams to obtain social status and launder money, since authorities couldn't easily monitor their incomes. The athletes' international travels provided nice opportunities to smuggle drugs.

The Cali drug cartel, ironically, purchased the Rebaja drugstore chain to launder their money. And the San Andresitos stores, known for selling imported clothing and electronics, are also notorious for laundering money.

Money laundering, which affects - and often even benefits - all of us, is yet another economic distortion caused by prohibitionism. Legalize drugs, and this phenomenon, like many others, would simpy disappear.

A La Rebaja pharmacy on Plaza San Victorino, in Bogotá. The chain used to be owned by the Cali Cartel.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Fiscalía's New Museum

Inside Bogotá's newest museum - the Fiscalia's.

Add to Bogotá's memorable museums its newest one: The Fiscalía's.

Carlos Lehder.

Yep, seriously. The Fiscalia, or Attorney General, the agency charged with accusing and prosecuting criminals, has played a key role in the biggest dramas in Colombia's recent decades, many of which are on display in the new museum. Most impressively, the museum also includes the government's own sins.

The museum is also unintentionally a testament to the violence, corruption and general mayhem which drug prohibitionism has inflicted on Colombia. Not surprisingly, one subject the museum does not touch is decriminalization - despite its demonstrated success - because it would take away the Fiscalia's business.

Everybody's heard of Pablo Escobar, but many fewer know the name Carlos Lehder - even tho he was crazier and perhaps even richer than Escobar. Lehder admired both John Lennon and Adolf Hitler. He tried starting his own populist political party. And he even bought a Caribbean island, kicked off the inhabitants and used it to party and stockpile cocaine. But he was so unstable that Escobar supposedly betrayed him to the DEA. Lehder is still rotting away in a U.S. federal prison.

Model of an early drug-smuggling sub.

Supposedly, Escobar bought a used Soviet submarine to smuggle cocaine north, but never actually used it. Today, drug cartels build home-made diesel submarines and even aquatic drones, load them with cocaine and send the drug north.

Martyred Justice Minister
Rodrigo Lara Bonillo.

Another less-remembered character of the era was the crusading Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonillo, who prosecuted members of the Medellin cartel and was gunned down for it in Bogotá in 1984. His killing triggered the war between the government and Esocbar.

In the end, the leaders of the less-famous Cali cartel were captured and extradited to U.S. prisons, where some still remain. In contrast, many Medellin cartel leaders gave themselves up and received short sentences in Colombia - despite being much more murderous.

A jet ski which supposedly
belonged to Pablo Escobar.

Both the Medellin and Cali cartels were destroyed during the 1990s, and the paramilitaries and most guerrillas have also since disbanded. Yet, today Colombia probably exports record amounts of cocaine.

Bloque de Busqueda members looking at Esocbar's corpse
on a Medellin rooftop in 1993.

However, foreigners, particularly those recently arrived in Colombia, may not recognize other episodes - such as the Proceso 8000.

In the Proceso 8000, Liberal Party Pres. Ernesto Samper's (1994-98) presidential campaign was discovered to have received money from the Cali cocaine cartel.

The investigation brought the conviction of other government officials, but Samper himself was found 'neither guilty nor innocent' by a Congress - altho today few doubt he knew about the dirty money. It led to Washington canceling Samper's U.S. Visa - a huge embarrasment for a close ally - and the U.S. The episode was named after a folder containing key documents - altho I did not see that folder in the museum.

Cali cartel leaders on their
way to prison in the U.S.

One might trace Colombia's rejection of its traditional political parties and the eventual election of Pres. Uribe partially to the Proceso 8000 scandal. After Samper, came Pastrana's failed negotiation with the FARC, and then Uribe's U.S.-backed military offensive against the FARC, which many believe forced them to the bargaining table - albeit at a huge cost in human rights. The hard-right Uribe did not come from either of the two traditional political parties.

Display about the FARC guerrillas.

After the end of the Cali and Medellin cartels, the violence and narcotrafficking didn't let up. Colombia still had to deal with the socialist FARC and ELN guerrillas, which were born in the 1960s, and their right-wing paramilitary enemies.

A captured FARC document listing weapons,
including gun cartridges and explosives.

The government didn't defeat any of these groups. The paramilitaries demobilized during the mid-2000s, receiving up to 8-year terms, despite horrific crimes. The government also negotiated a controversial demobilization deal with the FARC and is now talking to the ELN.

FARC propaganda.

A laptop belonging to FARC leader 'Mono Jojoy' recovered
after he was killed in a government bombardment in 2010.

Probably the darkest chapter in recent Colombia history was paramilitarism - the right-wing death squads organized by landowners with government and military collaboration, which carried out many massacres, often of campesinos, including women and children, based only on suspicion of sympathy for the guerrillas.

The jeep driven by police investigating crimes in
1989 in Santander Department. 

One of the more notorious of the massacres carried out by paramilitaries with collaboration from the regular military was that of La Riochela, in 1989 in Santander Department. Fifteen judicial investigators had traveled to a remote area to investigate killings. Paramilitary fighters stopped them and cold bloodedly murdered twelve of them under orders from a Medellin cartel leader and with support from the regular military. After the killings, the 'paras' hid their weapons in a military base.

Victims of the La Rochela massacre.

Yet another dark chapter involving the regular military were the 'false positives' killings during the

Uribe government. At that time, the military gave military units rewards of bonuses and time off for killing guerrillas. Some units responded by kidnapping poor young men, killing them and disguising them as guerrillas in order to collect the rewards. The killings received national attention when a group of young men were kidnapped from Soacha, in south Bogotá, and later found dead near the Venezuelan border, labeled as guerrillas.

An exhumation kit for buried corpses.

Running thru the museum's displays, of course, is the subject of drug trafficking, which has helped finance nearly all of Colombia's violent groups (and some non-violent ones).

A cocaine.making lab. Lots of chemicals involved. Cocaine is niether green nor organic.

And cocaine can and has been smuggled inside nearly everything.

Coffee beans with cocaine inside.

'Candies' used for smuggling cocaine.

Colombian clock used for smuggling cocaine.

Pool balls, used for smuggling cocaine.

A car tire used for smuggling cocaine.

Unsurprisingly, the museum does not touch the subject of decriminilizing drugs, a policy which has produced lots of benefits when tried in Portugal. That doesn't surprise, because such a policy would reduce the Fiscalia's business.

The Museo de la Fiscalia is located in this building on Carrera 13 just south of Calle 19, in central Bogotá.

You can leave your bike in the parking lot across the street. Admission is free. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Grow a Leaf, Go to a U.S. Prison

FARC leader Timochenko, accused by the U.S. and Colombia
of  'controlling the production, manufacture, and distribution
of hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United States
and the world,' could soon be in Congress.

Alias Timochenko and other leaders of the FARC guerrilla group, which produces and traffics a big chunk of the world's cocaine (as well as committing countless other crimes), likely will receive little more than symbolic punishments, as well as protection from extradition, before moving into politics, under the peace agreement announced recently.


Yet, while the kingpins who earn millions will likely walk free, impoverished campesinos who grow the coca leaf and earn trifles could end up in U.S. prisons.

Coca farmers like these men could soon be
subject to extradition under a U.S. law.

Those are the dirt-poor peasants who plant coca leaf because they see no alternative to feed their families and may have been pushed into the business by threats from narcotraffickers. They are simple people who may have only vague understanding of what happens to the leaves after strangers buy them and haul them away.

This is thanks to the Transnational Drug Trafficking Act of 2015, now making its way thru the U.S. Congress. According to the Congressional Research Service's summary, the act 'Amends the Controlled Substances Import and Export Act to prohibit the manufacture or distribution of a controlled substance...by individuals having reasonable cause to believe that such substance or chemical will be unlawfully imported into the United States.' If the act passes passes and Colombia cooperates, then the peasant farmer who made a pittance from his coca leaves will turn on the TV in a U.S. federal penitentiary and watch the guerrilla leader who earned millions exporting those leaves making a speech in the Colombian Congress.

According to El Tiempo, only a few dozen campesino farmers are imprisoned in Colombia for the single crime of growing coca leaves. However, some 60,000 Colombian campesino families make their living by growing coca leaf, earning little more than a $1,000 per year per household. All of them - or at least the heads of household - would be subject to extradition and traial and imprisonment in the U.S. The would require lots of new U.S. federal prisons.

It hardly seems likely that entombing a few Colombian peasants in a U.S. prison would have any impact on drug production. After all, there are innumerable other hungry and fearful farmers waiting to take their places. And doesn't the U.S. have any better uses for its tax dollars than to fly peasants north, put them on trial and imprison them for decades - such as, perhaps, treating addicts in the U.S.?

Meanwhile, Colombia itself seems to be heading in the opposite direction: decriminalizing coca farming, in favor of encouraging peasants to shift to legal crops.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Importance of Barry Seal

Barry Seal

Barry Seal, the legendary drug plane pilot, is back in the news, thanks to a film about him starring Tom Cruise, who is now in Colombia.

Expect an exciting, shoot-em-up flic - which ignores Seal's real importance on the hemisphere's history.

Seal certainly did have an exciting life. According to the Spartacus website, Seal smuggled arms to Fidel Castro's Cuban rebels and later to the forces trying to overthrow Castro; Seal flew in the Vietnam war and for decades worked for the CIA. Seal eventually discovered that he could make lots more money hauling illegal substances than passengers - some perhaps for the CIA. Some even link Seal to the John F. Kennedy assassination. Seal was caught smuggling quaaludes into Florida, indicted, and agreed to cooperate with U.S. authorities. In a plane equipped with hidden cameras, he picked up a load of cocaine in the Nicaragua ruled by the leftist Sandanistas, whom the Reagan administration considered a communist threat to the hemisphere.

The photos Seal brought back showed showing Medellin cartel leaders Pablo Escobar, Jorge Luis

Medellin cartel leaders load cocaine
onto Seal's plane in Nicaragua.

Ochoa and others loading cocaine into a C-123 transport plane with the help of a Nicaraguan government official - great evidence for the Reagan administration of the Sandinistas' evil nature. Reagan released the photos to win support for the U.S.-financed Contra war against the Sandinistas.

Seal was murdered in Feb. 1986 by Medellin cartel hit men while serving probation in a Salvation Army halfway house in Baton Rouge Louisiana.

The U.S. Congress had prohibited aid to the Contras, who had committed severe human rights violations. In response, the Reagan administration cooked up the scheme known as Iran-Contra, in which the U.S. illegally funnelled money from arms sales to Iran to the Nicaraguan Contras. Many say the scheme was worse than Watergate, but Reagan's popularity and great media skills enabled him to save his presidency.

The Contra scheme was later dropped, and Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was eventually elected president of Nicaragua, where he has shown himself to be a competent administrator but has restricted media rights and perpetuated himself in power. If Nicaraguan dictatorships of previous decades handed the nation's resources over to U.S. companies, Ortega seems to be giving them to the Chinese.

Seal may or may not have changed the America's history, but he was certainly a part of it.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Imagine That! The FARC and Al Qaeda!

A report that the FARC guerrillas are collaborating with al Qaeda to smuggle their drug shipments

The report was published in Morroco's
al Massae newspaper.

across the Sahel region in north Africa on its way to Europe made headlines today - but should be no surprise.

According to the report, the FARC pay a tax of 15% of the cocaine's value to al Qaeda of the Magreb in return for free passage across the Sahel region of north Africa. The story was published today in Morroco's al Massae newspaper, based on local police reports. Al Massae is not a leader in world journalism, and the Morrocan police are not Scotland Yard. However, it'd be difficult to believe that a FARC-al Qaeda link did not exist.

The huge and barely governed Sahel region in north Africa.

After all, profits seek and find the shortest route, and narcotraffickers' goal is to get their product to market. Does anybody believe that the FARC, who kidnap, massacre civilians, recruit children and plant car bombs would shy away from working with al Qaeda just because the fundamentalist Islamic group kidnaps, massacres civilians, recruits children and plants car bombs?

In the past, the FARC have cooperated with terrorist organizations such as the Irish Republican Army and ETA, the Basque separatist group. Why would they avoid al Qaeda?

The FARC will cooperate with anybody - and I suspect that nearly anybody, including legal International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Center for Public Integrity details how the minerals coltan and tungsten mined and trafficked by the FARC were allegedly sold to legitimate businesses, which used them to manufacture cellphones, computers and other electronics we all use every day.

al Qaeda in the Magreb militants
show off their weapons in the desert. 

corporations, will do business with the FARC, just as long as they expect to profit from it and not suffer bad p.r. or lawsuits. This report by the

Barring effective law enforcement - a rarity in much of Africa and Latin America - illicit goods will flow to where they generate the most profit. For example, I've heard that Colombian cocaine trafficked thru Africa on its way to Europe is traded for blood diamonds, which are then smuggled back to South America.

The European Union's 'security strategy in the Sahel' calls the area "a crisis-shaken region where frontiers blur. Poverty and the fragility of state infrastructures have given free rein to parallel powers, militias, arms-runners and drug dealers."

In a situation like that, there's only one way to stop the FARC, al Qaeda and other outlaw groups from profiting from Colombian cocaine, and that is decriminalizing the drug so that instead legal (if not always law-abiding), tax paying companies buy and sell it.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Narcotrafficking: A Political Act?

Pablo Escobar: Political actor?

Pablo Escobar would have loved it: Narcotrafficking, one of the world's greediest, most violent industries, may be designated a 'political crime' in Colombia - labeling it, in a sense, an altruistic act.

Inspector General Alejandro Ordoñez has, predictably - and accurately - condemned the idea as a gift to criminals. "It's intended to legally protect the FARC's cocaine capos," he said, and would allow the guerrillas to legalize their drug wealth.

But Pres. Santos will push forward with it, as another maneuver to motivate the FARC to continue with the peace negotiations in Havana. The rub with the peace talks, of course, is that few guerrillas will be willing to sign a treaty if it means trading comfortable lives in Havana for a prison cell.

The United States government, which has publicly backed the negotiations, won't support this sort of

Escobar cuonts his loot in a Caracol TV miniseries.

impunity, since it considers narcotrafficking an international crime committed within U.S. borders. But Colombia has given monsters, such as paramilitary leaders who have confessed to thousands of murders, short prison sentences. So, why exclude drug trafficking guerrillas, who, after all, were supposedly financing a political agenda?

The impunity for drug traffickers is only the latest political gymnastics intended to keep the peace talks moving. Santos also seems to be forgiving the FARC in record time for the kidnapping of Gen. Alzate, and he barely blinked a few weeks ago at the guerrillas' murders of two NASA indigenous people. To keep the military in his camp, he wants to broaden the jurisdiction of military courts - even tho many human rights organizations warn that this could mean impunity for atrocities committed by soldiers.

A political act? Wreckage of the 1989 Avianca
bombing planned by Escobar.

Pablo Escobar himself tried to disguise his narcotrafficking empire up as a principled enterprise opposed to U.S. 'imperialism' and in favor of humble Colombians. And Escobar was briefly elected to Congress. In fact, Escobar's aims were to enrich himself at the cost of massacres and tearing apart Colombian government and society.

The political cover given to the FARC guerrillas is mostly a charade, but perhaps a necessary one if Colombians want them to turn in their arms and sign a peace treaty.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

How Colombian History Changed in Connecticut

George Jung, cheery smuggler.
(Photo: GeorgeJung.org)

Forty years ago this year, a California hippy and a Colombian-American from Armenia found themselves sharing a prison cell in Danbury, Connecticut, USA. Their chance meeting in 1974 would change Colombian history and make Pablo Escobar possible.

They made an odd couple - one was a hippie, the other an admirer of Adolf Hitler and megalomaniac. But what they had in common overcame their differences: a taste for illegal drugs, a German heritage, a disrespect for the law, and, most of all, an ambition to make a whole lot of money very fast.

George Jung, born in 1942 in Boston, had built himself a

Carlos Lehder arrested in Florida.

business flying planeloads of Mexican marijuana into California, when a customer ratted on him to the police. Carlos Lehder, born in Armenia, Colombia in 1949, was doing a four-year prison term after getting caught in Miami with 200 pounds of marijuana.

In their shared prison cell, Jung described to Lehder his system for flying planeloads of Mexican pot
across the border into California, from where the weed was distributed nation-wide. Lehder told Jung how inexpensive cocaine was back in Colombia.

The men's eyes lit up with the potential profits, and they turned the Danbury Correctional Center into a school for drug smuggling studies. Lehder proceeded to interview other inmates for information about narcotrafficking. He even interviewed an imprisoned banker about money laundering methods.

After their release, the two teamed up to fly planeloads of Colombian cocaine into the U.S. Until then, coke had been smuggled north ounces at a time in toothpaste tubes, in false bottoms of suitcases, and in people' stomachs. Jung and Lehder inaugurated an era in which planes carrying hundreds of kilograms of drugs landed on secret airstrips in Florida and Lousiiana or tossed their bundles into the Caribbean to be scooped up by speedboats and run into Florida inlets.

Worse for wear: George Jung
more recently.

For several years, Lehder even owned a small island in the Bahamas, where he partied and stockpiled
cocaine shipments. With his millions, Lehder not only created a right-wing political party in Colombia, but also built a giant nude statue of another one of his idols - assassinated Beatle John Lennon. Meanwhile, however, Lehder antagonized other drug kingpins with his instability and own chronic drug abuse.

For his part, Jung also worked with other drug cartel leaders, including Pablo Escobar. Once, while they were talking at Escobar's hacienda, a plane landed and two of Escobar's goons pulled out a struggling man. Escobar excused himself, walked over and shot the man, and returned and resumed the conversation. Jung's life hit the big screen in the movie 'Blow' starring Johnny Depp.

Johnny Depp, left, plays Jung in the movie 'Blow.'
He's counting money with Carlos Lehder. (Foto: Flickr)

One of Jung's unrepentant web pages paints a cheery portrait of him, and recalls that during his career he sometimes earned $15 million per plane flight. On another website, he markets a line of clothing named Smuggler Ware.

The avalanche of cocaine produced lots of thrills, kept bankers working and partying all night and ruined countless lives, especially in poor neighborhoods in cities like New York and Los Angeles.

The Jung-Lehder innovation created Pablo Escobar, the Ochoa brothers, the Cali and Medellin cartels and a whole generation of violence, which still marks Colombia today.

It also produced characters like Barry Seal, as well as conspiracy theories - containing an element of truth - about U.S. government involvement in cocaine smuggling.

Jung and Lehder later separated. Both were arrested and ended up in U.S. prisons. Jung was released this year and at last report was living in a California halfway house. Lehder is still in prison in Florida, hoping to spend his final years in Colombia or Germany.

If these two men had not found themselves in the same prison cell in 1974, would Colombian - and world - history have been different? Not by much, I think. Perhaps the cocaine avalanche would have come a few years later, in less volume. But someone else would have realized that drugs were much more efficiently smuggled by the planeload than the stomach load and Colombian-American huistory would have followed the same lines.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Bogotá's Homicide Rate Dips, but the Region's Stays High

'Bogotá is no longer one of the most violent' cities, boasts the headline.

Bogotá's media celebrated a dip in the city's homicide rate to 'only' 16.7 per 100,000. That's still a terribly high number by world standards, but moderate in Latin America and positively low in the general context of Colombia, whose national rate is about 33 homicides per 100,000 people.

Bogotá's homicide rate, meanwhile, is half that of Medellin, where 34 people were murdered per 100,000 residents last year. But Medellin's homicide rate was a great improvement over the previous year, when the city suffered a rate of 52 homicides per 100,000 residents. And Colombia's third-largest city, Cali, ended last year as the world's 6th most violent city, with 90 homicides per 100,000 people.

For its part, Latin America is the world's most violent region.

Colombia's national homicide rate, in the low 30s per 100,000 population, is still the highest in South America, but way below some Central American nations. (Actually, Venezuela almost surely has a higher homicide rate than Colombia's, but Venezuelan authorities stopped releasing homicide numbers years ago.)

According to the police's statistics, many of these murders stem from gang battles. But those gangs aren't fighting for carrots. They're fighting over drug sales and territory in which to market illegal drugs. So, Colombia's violence is directly related to the outlawed drug economy. (During the most violent years of the Medellin Cartel, that city's homicide rate neared 350 per 100,000 people, perhaps a world record.)

But Colombia's violence pales in comparison to that in some poor Central American countries, whose police and legal systems are no match for the power of the cartels which traffic drugs across their territories. San Pedro Sula, , Honduras, had 187 homicides for each 100,000 residents last year. Some cities in northern Mexico, where drug cartels battle to control the United States market, have homicide rates almost as high.

Colombia's homicide rate peaked during the final years of the Medellin and then rose again during the early 2000s, when the war against leftist guerrillas was at its hottest.  

To put that in context, the World Health Organization labels a rate above 10 homicides per 100,000 people as 'epidemic.'

Unlike epidemics caused by viruses and bacteria, this one is completely human-caused, and therefore humans can stop it. But the region is far from trying the only realistic: ending the policies of drug prohibition, which push this multibillion-dollar market into the hands of violent, outlaw groups which settle their differences with guns and bombs.

In Bogotá, Mayor Petro may deserve credit for the city's homicide drop because of the restrictions he placed on gun ownership.

Bogotá is near the bottom of this ranking of the homicide rates in 15 cities in the Americas. 

Yet, the North and South American cities are far more violent than these European cities. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours