QCOSTARICA — The indiscriminate recruitment of hitmen by criminal groups in the last two years to carry out homicides in the midst of the struggles between the criminal organizations, has revealed a particular phenomenon that is under analysis by theOrganismo de Investigación Judicial (OIJ): their “useful life” is very short.
The OIJ have studied the almost 2,000 homicides that have occurred since 2021 to date and noted that the gunmen (sicarios in Spanish) are usually killed in the midst of these conflicts, approximately one year from the time they began their criminal career.
Furthermore, in this short life span, hitmen would carry out a maximum of 5 murders and then being themselves victims of the bullets.
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“We started reviewing cases in 2022 and we see that the suspect is A, we link him to up to four homicides and the fifth homicide, that is an example, the suspect is killed. Then this other person who killed him is linked to three or four other homicides and then they kill this second one, and so on, it is a chain of death and violence, where practically when a person starts in that criminal structure, normally in that position as a hitman, a year later he ends up dead,” explained Michael Soto, deputy director of the OIJ.
Soto explained that once they have more detailed information on most of the cases, they could present a formal study to make visible this situation that involves many young people in the country who end up lifeless due to their monetary ambition and social visibility.
“We have not technically proven it, but from the experience of the review we have done of all these cases at some point we could go deeper with a study, but basically the useful life of a hitman in Costa Rica could be around a year, as I said we have to deepen it. That is to say that whoever gets in ends up dead very quickly and there is this escalation of violence, death, death, death or jail. It may seem incredible, but many times by putting someone in jail linked to these types of activities, we are almost saving them,” Soto added.
Although they are still people who have families and people who depend on them in one way or another, for criminal groups they are just pawns who are easily replaceable in case they fall into one of the operations, whether due to an arrest or be killed in a counterattack by a rival group.
“The majority die quickly, they come from these areas of urban-marginal misery, unfortunately they do not finish their formal education and some percentage end up in jail if they do not end up dead. They are pawns of more astute individuals who see them as elements of change to fulfill a function and if they kill them nothing happens because they put someone else in, with no substitutables and the loss means nothing to the organization,” said Soto.
Executed by their own people
Although the span of a year and the cycle of five murders is not a rule, the police are interested in the issue, because although it was a known pattern years ago, the numbers for this type of fatal attacks were few.
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However, some hitmen who manage to overcome this barrier of time and number of executions are victims of the same organization, since it has been detected that the same criminal leaders order their deaths in the midst of internal struggles due to differences in criteria or unfulfilled orders.
Soto said that they know of cases in which he has mediated thefts of drugs, money or even clandestine love affairs, for which murders are carried out between gang members.
“The same group orders them to be killed, and perhaps the one who orders them to be killed also suffers the same fate and is killed for something else. It is a cycle that we have noticed very strongly during these last two years. It has been like this in other years, but now we see it more evident,” said the OIJ deputy director.
The majority of the homicides this year are due to revenge, setting of scores, or arguments. Statistics indicate that the majority of victims of fatal attacks this year are very young, in the age range of between 18 and 39 years old.
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Almost 850 homicides have been committed so far this year, a record mumber, that worries the authorities in view of the fact that December is historically been the most violent month of the year.
Source: Crhoy.com
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