Purchase and export of cocaine and death of Juancho

I joined FARC when I was 9 years old, and soon learned to trust Don Alfredo; I practically became his right hand.

Don Alfredo was the commander of Vista Hermosa, Meta. The old man was a nice guy. He would take from people who had money and farms to give to those in need.

When he was a kid, his family was killed by paramilitary groups, so he joined the guerrilla to take revenge: He wanted to exterminate paramilitary groups.

This was Don Alfredo’s farm. There was a sign which read, “Welcome to Don Alfredo’s”. Everything in it belonged to him. People would bring processed cocaine and sell it to us.

I was the one in charge of counting the money that came in, I learned to multiply, divide, add and subtract just by counting money.

One day Don Alfredo sent a young boy called Juancho to help me count the coca kilos that were coming in and the money that was going out.

When nobody was looking, he took and hid a kilo of the merchandise.

Nobody knew where that kilo had gone to. It actually turned up about two months later. When a lady came to sell us that one kilo, we asked her how she had gotten that merchandise; the lady said -a kid that looked like this….- and proceeded to describe him, -gave it to us to sell and said we would split the profits…-

The kid was shot with an AK-47 rifle round; they took his life just because he stole a kilo of cocaine.

The last thing Juancho asked, was for his body to be taken to his mom… but that never happened, he simply disappeared.

One day his mother came asking if anyone had seen him, but no one said they had, no one knew anything. Don Alfredo had warned us: “whatever you’ve seen, you haven’t seen anything and you have no knowledge about anything.”

I have never been able to forget Juancho’s death because he really begged for his life. His death truly got to me because this kid didn’t even know what war was about.

I was around Don since I was a kid. He must have killed about a hundred to a hundred and fifty people. They killed him about three years ago in an ambush by the army in Vista Hermosa.