Roberto Saviano - ZeroZeroZero

Together they devise a military plan. They divide up the region on a map, assigning surveillance and patrol duties for each area. The farmers communicate via radio, so they can report suspicious presences and have military escorts whenever they make a move. Their experiment in self-defense takes off, and Salvatore’s prestige grows even more.

But he never loses sight of the larger goal. His work follows him home every evening. And one evening he gets some bad news: While defending a group of contras under attack, Major Fratini’s helicopter was shot down, and Fratini was kidnapped by the EPL — the Popular Liberation Army — one of the many Colombian guerrilla groups. His body is found the next day: He’d been tortured to death. Unforgettable images. Images that deepen the ruts in Salvatore Mancuso’s path.

• • •

The very blond girl who appears on bars of soap and school notebooks all over Colombia has become, now more than ever, a friendly presence in her hometown, offering gaiety and comfort. To the rest of the world it seems that Medellín has lost the one person who had made it famous — Pablo Escobar. But for those who live there, Natalia’s shining star attests to all things good and beautiful and eases the anxiety created by the death of Colombia’s lord and master. Yes, because if on the one hand there’s a sense of relief, on the other there’s a sense of fear. Fear of a vacuum. Not of the vacuum itself, but rather of who and how many will step forward to fill it. Pablo Escobar was killed in the same year as Major Fratini, Monkey’s fraternal friend. Now that the king is dead, all those who were his enemy can try to elbow their way in. The guerrillas come forward, Cali gains ground, and a vigilante group calling itself Los Pepes, for Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar, or People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar — which seems like a sarcastic response to MAS — puffs out its chest. The rival Cali cartel had bribed Los Pepes to get rid of Escobar, and Los Pepes’ members had sown terror primarily in his own fiefdom. Now what will they do, these men trained and equipped for killing? Will they leave? Will they want a slice of territory to manage? The only thing people know for sure is that there’s no hoping Los Pepes will simply fade away. Irregular armies don’t simply dismantle themselves.

The government shares the people’s concern. The state’s major antagonist is dead, but the breeding grounds of conflict are multiplying, which is a problem. A problem for the Colombian people, naturally, but also for a leadership hoping for an image boost after the demise of the country’s most famous antihero. Instead it looks as if civil war might break out again, worse than before. Colombia’s presidents, one after another, are aware of the limits of their own power. The best they can do is aim for a balance of forces. They need the counterrevolutionaries to check the guerrillas, but the vigilantes need to be curbed somehow as well. They think they’ve finally hit on the right strategy with Salvatore Mancuso’s approach, which a growing number of hacienderos are imitating. Self-defense needs to be legalized further so that even those groups born as armed wings of cartels — the most ferocious and best equipped formations — will be interested in banding together. So, in 1994, a decree is issued to regulate private vigilante groups and their collaboration with the army, extending the military’s exclusive use of certain weapons to groups that now call themselves CONVIVIR — Cooperativas de Vigilancia y Seguridad Privada, or Special Vigilance and Private Security Services. Mancuso is the head of the Convivir Horizonte, expanding the original cadre by ten or so men armed with pistols, rifles, and machine guns.

Now that he has the full right to do so, Salvatore wants to prove his worth and to avenge the friend who initiated him into the use of weapons. Accompanied by an army battalion he walks in the forest for thirty days, surviving on canned goods so as to avoid lighting a fire and alerting his enemies. In the tract of Cordillera that separates Córdoba from the northern tongue of Antioquia they come upon a mountain. The overhanging rock cliffs terrify the men, many of whom turn back. But, urged on by the Monkey, enough of them make it to the top to make a surprise attack on the region’s FARC stronghold. Shooting breaks out, but Salvatore and his men come out alive.

• • •

A private army is operating in the same area as Mancuso, the Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá, or the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá. The army renamed itself in light of the law on CONVIVIR forces, so as to legally provide armed protection to farmers and breeders. It belongs to the Castaño brothers, who have a long history of implacable hatred for guerrilla fighters and who were born into money. Wealth is what has defined their lives. The sons of Don Jesús, a breeder so highly regarded as a politician and so convinced of landowners’ rights to rule that he was one of the first men whom the FARC came after on his finca , in order to teach him a lesson. It seems like centuries have passed since that day thirteen years ago, since that interminable wait, till that moment when the brothers finally knew for sure that, despite the ransom they’d paid, their father would never come home again. The black hole of their existence. They’ve been at war ever since, a war that — on principle — takes no prisoners. They fought on their own, hiring a hundred or so men willing to do anything. They sent them into the area where Don Jesús had been held hostage and had them kill, impale, and chop to pieces every human being they could find there to teach the people who supported those villains a lesson. They developed a good relationship with Pablo Escobar, and had Carlos, the youngest Castaño brother, join MAS, which educated him in every conceivable method of dirty war.

But then the Castaño brothers broke with Escobar, who, in his megalomaniac paranoia, had had some of their friends killed. Realizing that he planned to have them killed as well, they accepted the invitation of the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers of the Cali cartel and formed Los Pepes. They became the pack of dogs in the hunting party out to get their former ally, whose partners and relatives they murdered. So now they’re practically right back where they started: a vigilante group bigger and wealthier than the others.

In the last decade the Castaño brothers have grown even wealthier. The cocaine lords have paid them extremely well. They’ve also paid their enemies well. The Castaño brothers would have already crushed FARC and all the other communist bastards, would have already destroyed all their support networks, if the guerrillas’ anticapitalist insurrection had not been financed by cocaine money. But it costs money to maintain a permanent war, and that’s why the insurgents have entered the drug business as well.

When the Castaño brothers invite Salvatore to join forces, he takes his time in answering. He’d prefer to just carry on as before, knowing, perhaps, of their long-standing ties with drug trafficking. But then one day, on his way home with his wife, his first-born, Gianluigi, and his second son, who is barely two years old, he runs into a roadblock between Montería and his estate: a FARC ambush, a kidnapping attempt. He hides his agitation so as not to scare his children even more, but a few days later he tells Martha that he can’t keep going it alone. He agrees to merge with the Castaños. And then, when his first arrest warrant for murder arrives, he leaves Campamento for good. From that day in 1996 he stops being Salvatore Mancuso. Now he is only El Mono, the Monkey, El Cacique, Santander Lozada, Triple Cero, and all his other adopted battle names. He is no longer a rice grower and horse breeder but an underground warlord.