“I was in elementary school when I decided I wanted to get a motorcycle. And the best way to get a motorcycle was to kill people for money,” says Néstor Raul Barrada, one of some 50,000 fighters that have demobilised in Colombia since 2003.
Starting out as a teen sicario or hitman was not unheard of for gang members in the poor barrios that ringed Medellín in the late 1970s and 1980s, although it was more usual to work your way up from errand boy through the realms of protection, trafficking and racketeering.
