“I don’t have a problem with your style,” Nieto said, choosing his words carefully. He knew nothing at all about this lieutenant colonel. “I think there is a time and a place for a more . . . for your approach. I simply wish there was more coordination.”
“And here I am,” Juan Pablo said, “coordinating.”
Nieto considered complaining about the raid on El Alemán, which had happened on his turf and which he had only been informed of as it was happening. As far as he could see, that raid hadn’t led to any decrease in narcotrafficking. If anything, the opposite. And most of the individual players hadn’t changed. Javier Ocasio, a former army officer turned paramilitary turned narco, had been a lieutenant for the Urabeños in La Vigia before the takeover and was now the second in command after the takeover. Meanwhile, sources had dried up, and Los Mil Jesúses had solidified control of the town. They’d put up a candidate for mayor to challenge the insufficiently corrupt incumbent. They’d put pressure on the head of the local police outpost, a talented noncommissioned officer named Diego Murillo, who had recently claimed to be sleeping with a loaded pistol under his pillow. And the Fundación de Justicia y Fe, which he’d tangled with in the past but which did good work in the town, claimed to have had their movement and operations increasingly curtailed in the name of “public order.” In short, the space for civic-minded leaders to operate was withering.
“I should mention,” Juan Pablo said, “that we have requested that Los Mil Jesúses be listed as a Class A Organized Group.”
“Ah.” That changed things. “You want to know what kind of havoc might occur if there’s a decapitation strike.”
“Well, yes. Yes, of course.”
There was something the lieutenant colonel wasn’t telling him. It bothered Nieto. But he went on and started to explain the challenges such a strike would present. That Jefferson had somehow brokered a peace with the Urabeños but that if the army took him out the truce probably wouldn’t outlast his death. That the second in command, Javier Ocasio, was generally considered unstable. That Nieto didn’t have the resources to control the chaos that would follow a decapitation strike. And then the lieutenant colonel interrupted.
“There’s a couple of university students in the town,” Juan Pablo said. “With the foundation.”
“Ah.”
“It would look bad if a few children from Nacional got caught up in something like this.”
Nieto started to chuckle. Of course! God forbid the violence in La Vigia affects someone from the capital! And students at a university, no less! Valuable lives. Lives of the sort that got him a direct conversation with a senior officer in the special forces.
“Is there any way,” Juan Pablo went on, “of escorting them out of the town?”
Unbelievable.
“Oh, I really wish there was a way,” Nieto said with great pleasure. “But you know what us poor rural police forces are like. Underfunded. Underequipped. We just don’t have the resources for that kind of thing.”
The conversation was short after that. Toward the end, the lieutenant colonel did ask one more fairly significant question.
“There is another theory I have heard,” he said. “That this kidnapping was not the Mil Jesúses. That it was a cocalero association in conflict with the Jesúses.”
“Ah,” Nieto said. That was unlikely, but not out of the question.
“The FARC started as peasant self-defense forces,” the lieutenant colonel continued. “If the cocaleros aren’t just organizing, which is bad enough, but turning to violence, that is something we need to know. So is it possible?”
What he thought wasn’t as important as what consequences it would have in terms of where army resources were deployed. The army’s approach was the kinetic intelligence approach, knowing the territory so as to prepare the battlefield. Pushing hard. Rustling feathers. Kicking up dirt to see what settles. An approach well geared to units that helicopter in, shoot things up, and then leave others to deal with the consequences. The approach he had been trying to bring to his region, with limited success, was the approach he had been taught at the General Santander Police Academy back in 2004, a form of intelligence gathering that was less about generating targets than expanding a network of sources and community relationships, knowing every block on a street, every rural road, and every peasants association. Then you know who lives there. What they do. Who matters. Then you can do prevention. Then you can expand the “culture of legality.” Or hope to.
The raid on El Alemán had blown things up in La Vigia, opening the door to Jefferson and the Mil Jesúses. But he still had good networks in the rural areas. If the journalist was out there, he’d get firm intelligence eventually, and then he could let the army know. Until then, maybe it wouldn’t be terrible if they started kicking up dirt in La Vigia. He’d lost control there anyway.
“Your source,” Nieto said, “and the valuable intelligence they provided. Was it for the El Alemán raid? What I want to say is . . . is the source connected to the Mil Jesúses? Because the Mil Jesúses are the only group that matters in La Vigia right now, and no one does anything without Jefferson’s approval.”
That was, like all the best lies, more or less true.
6
As they raced back to La Vigia, as Agudelo spit questions at Abel, as Abel furiously punched numbers into a satellite phone he’d produced from seemingly out of nowhere, Valencia felt a shiver go through her. Not from fear. She felt her heart beating faster. She felt the sharpness of things. The trees speeding by, the poverty of the shanties ahead of them. There were people walking in the street, people who seemed more alive than they had an hour before. Like many young people, who value their lives little because they have such little understanding of what effort it took
