Chaos of Colombia Assists Mass Murderer To Elude Detection

BOGOTA, Colombia -- On Friday, October 30th, 42-year-old drifter Luis Garavito confessed to the slaying of at least 140 boys between ages 8 to 16 during a five-year killing spree, which ended only because of an arrest for an unrelated rape charge. He would befriend the children. Then, taking them on long walks until they tired, he tied them up with nylon rope, slit their throats or beheaded them and bury their bodies.

Colombian police described him as a cunning serial killer, a glib predator and a "solitary sadist." But it is also clear that, whatever his personality traits, Colombia's deepening social disintegration provided him with the perfect environment in which to operate.

Many, if not most, of Garavito's victims appear to have been street children, from poor families or separated from their parents by poverty or the political violence that has displaced 1.5 million Colombians in little more than a decade. Such children -- grimy, hungry, morose and poorly dressed -- have become a familiar sight on the corners of Colombia's large cities and towns, where they beg, sell newspapers or chewing gum, or shine shoes.

"Kids disappear all the time in Colombia, especially those from the poorer strata," said Timothy Ross, a former journalist who now works with juvenile prostitutes and youthful drug users on behalf of a private social services agency here. "They tend to come from unstable homes anyway, but the deep social instability produced by military, political and economic displacement has fragmented families even further."

Authorities said it was because there was no one to notice that the children were missing or to inquire about their whereabouts that Garavito was able to go on killing for so long without being detected. But his arrest has brought an avalanche of criticism from poor people, who say that they find police officials indifferent, abusive or corrupt.

By his own account, Garavito seized on the social convulsions Colombia is experiencing as a result of three decades of armed conflict and turned them to his own advantage. He often passed himself off as a priest, social worker, teacher or representative of charitable foundations. At other times, he posed as a handicapped or displaced person himself to gain sympathy. He kept a list of his victims, but not by name, and some of the remains are so badly decomposed that it will be difficult if not impossible to identify them.

The Guinness Book of World Records lists another Colombian, Pedro Armando Lopez, known here as the "Monster of the Andes," as the largest-scale serial killer of modern times. He is believed to have killed more than 300 girls and young women in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru before being captured in Ecuador and convicted of 57 counts of murder there in 1980.