Lawlessness Rampant in Streets of Medellin, World’s Cocaine Capital : Colombia: An anonymous warning tells citizens to be indoors by 9 p.m. to avoid ‘being surprised by killer bullets.’

Copies of a typewritten warning have been circulating in Medellin for nearly a month. To avoid “being surprised by killer bullets,” the anonymous message says, people should not gather at night in bars, cafes, streets or parks.

“Any group found in these kinds of establishments and places after the designated hour, 9 p.m., will be wiped out no matter who they may be,” the message says.

It is not an idle warning. These are dark days of extraordinary terror and bloodshed in Medellin, a city of 3 million people that is known as the cocaine capital of the world.

Death squads gun down groups of young men in bars and on corners. Assassins paid by drug traffickers shoot police officers in the back.

There is also deadly fighting between armed gangs, murders committed to shut the mouths of informers and a variety of other homicidal violence. Bombs blamed on “narco-terrorists” killed more than 50 people and wounded nearly 200 in Medellin during the first six months of the year.

The carnage has reached such an alarming level that some compare it to war. “Civil War in Medellin?” asked the title of a recent cover story in the Colombian news magazine Semana.

Much of the killing is blamed on the notoriously violent Medellin drug cartel, headed by fugitive drug lord Pablo Escobar, but local analysts say members of government security forces are also responsible for an alarming number of deaths.

Father Javier Tobon, Roman Catholic vicar for Medellin’s poor and dangerous northeast side, pointed at a copy of the anonymous warning against nighttime gatherings. “People say this comes from the police,” Tobon said.

And people on the northeast side take the warning seriously. “Here, after 9, you don’t see anyone,” the priest said. “The anxiety of the people is overwhelming.”

Tobon estimated that the northeast is home to 200 gunmen who kill for a fee. Known as sicarios , the killers come from armed youth gangs that wage turf wars against one another, much as Los Angeles gangs do.

“There are schools for sicarios ,” Tobon said. “I know of several.”

The schools, sponsored by the Medellin cartel, train unemployed boys as young as 14 to shoot and to drive getaway motorcycles, he said.

Tobon and other priests have counseled sicarios to stop killing but usually without success.

“They recognize that they are into something bad, but they are earning a living,” he said, adding that a sicario who quits could be killed as a traitor.

Escobar and the Medellin cartel have ruthlessly used sicarios to kill traitors, rival traffickers, judges, government officials, politicians, journalists and others who get in their way. Lately, their main targets have been police officers, but the cartel is not the only force behind police killings, Tobon said.

“Pablo has ordered killings, but others also have killed policemen for revenge against the institution, for abuses they have committed,” the priest said.

An independent human rights committee in Medellin says that about 170 police officers have been killed in the metropolitan area this year.

“We are all scared, it can’t be denied, but we have to go out on the street,” said a husky black policeman in a green-and-white patrol post at a busy intersection.

The officer said he sleeps in a police barracks for security, going home to his wife only once every two weeks. Most of the police officers killed have been gunned down in the modest neighborhoods where they lived.

“I call before I go home and ask if any strangers have been around,” the officer said.

Another officer at the patrol post said drug traffickers are to blame for the cop killings. He said drug lords are retaliating for tough anti-trafficking action by a specially trained police unit called the Elite Corps.

“It has hit them hard, seizing a lot of laboratories, money and properties,” the policeman said.

A lawyer who belongs to the local human rights committee said killings of police officers have triggered increasingly brutal excesses by police. He accused Elite Corps members of operating as death squads at night, shooting down groups of young men in neighborhoods where sicarios are known to live.

“Those police are very tough in the fight against narcotics traffic and very tough against the whole population,” the lawyer said. He asked not to be identified by name because four members of the human rights committee have been killed.

Since the beginning of January, he said, more than 3,000 civilians have been shot to death in metropolitan Medellin, and he blamed more than half of the killings on members of security forces.

In one shooting spree, gunmen in a utility wagon killed 30 people with automatic weapons as the death car raced through the streets of a northeastern neighborhood called Manrique, Semana magazine reported in June. Later in June, two dozen gunmen who arrived in six utility wagons executed 19 young men in a discotheque called Oporto.

On the night of June 28, a death squad pulled 14 youths from their homes on the northeast side and shot them to death in the streets. Earlier that night, a bomb set off on an avenue near a police station had killed or fatally wounded 20 people who were passing by.

Police seize scores of young suspects in roundups and turn them over to judges, but the judges often release them for lack of evidence.

“The criminal justice system doesn’t work,” the lawyer said. “What works is the system of death and torture.”

He said complaints of police torture are numerous, and some of those who have complained are relatives of drug traffickers.

According to one rumor, police hunting for Escobar, the drug kingpin, detained and tortured his sister. In retaliation, Escobar is said to have offered a bounty of $4,000 for every police officer killed.

In much of Medellin’s deadly violence, it is not clear who does the killing or why.

“You don’t know where the fire comes from or who will be the victim,” said Carlos Giralda, a professor of psychiatry. “Here, anyone can be a target at a given moment.”

Giralda is a member of a study group on violence at the University of Antioquia in Medellin.

Historian Cesar Hurtado, another member of the study group, said armed street gangs have been operating in Medellin slums since the early 1980s, when urban guerrillas distributed weapons in a failed attempt at political organization. Attempts in the 1980s to “clean up” the neighborhoods with death-squad tactics fueled hatred of the police, Hurtado said.

The poor and violent neighborhoods became a source of manpower for cocaine-trafficking organizations that needed sicarios. Today, Hurtado said, sicarios kill not only for traffickers but for anyone offering a fee, sometimes as low as $30 or $40.

Members of neighborhood gangs also are active in kidnapings for ransom and holdups, sometimes raiding apartment buildings with automatic weapons. “In these neighborhoods, there are agencies that rent weapons,” Hurtado said.

Government authorities and concerned citizens have been proposing programs of educational and social action to fight the poverty and backwardness in neighborhoods where much of the violence is spawned. But Hurtado said those are long-range solutions that probably will not be very effective as long as the cocaine business offers poor youths a way to get rich quick.

“The business is always going to generate violence,” he said.

Anthropologist Hernan Henao, coordinator of the study group on violence, said the only way to stop drug-related violence is to negotiate peace with the Medellin cartel as if it were a subversive political movement. He said the traffickers, using their money and power, have penetrated the lower and middle classes of the city to such a degree that capturing or killing a few leaders will not solve the problem.

“If the drug traffickers are the main agents of institutional destabilization, they would have to be given political recognition,” Henao said.

President-elect Cesar Gaviria, who takes office Aug. 7, has ruled out negotiations with traffickers.

Meanwhile, the Medellin metropolitan branch of the National Police is taking measures aimed at controlling the violence. Jorge Ferrero, newly appointed chief of the Medellin police, said the local patrol force is being increased from about 3,500 members to 4,000.

A new patrolling strategy will emphasize increased mobility and more police presence in the streets at all hours, especially in the most violent neighborhoods, Ferrero said in an interview.

Patrol posts in dangerous areas are being reinforced with more men. Police will also seek more support and cooperation from residents, “showing them that this is not just a problem for police but for the whole city,” Ferrero said.

“What this is here is war,” he added. “This is a war.”

But he said many of the slain police officers were not victims of the “war” but of such things as crimes of passion. And he denied that police were involved in death-squad murders, blaming mass killings on gang clashes.

To protect police from the violence, most will be housed in barracks, Ferrero said. And most married police officers will be transferred to other cities.

Before the interview in his second-floor office, Ferrero came downstairs to join a brief ceremony for a policeman who had been killed the day before.

Ferrero recounted later how the policeman was killed: “He was on his way home for lunch, and a sicario shot him in the back.”