Riojas’ criminal beginnings were murky. It’s said he went back and had police files altered, court records erased, various acquaintances from his early life eliminated. It’s known he was arrested at least once by the time he was fourteen—possibly for petty theft. It’s believed he bartered fake lottery tickets, hijacked cigarettes, stole cars, before moving on to something infinitely more lucrative. The particular scourge of their godforsaken country: drugs. Specifically, coca. He started as a runner, a small dealer. He was apparently a favorite of the local contrabandista, who made the fatal mistake of trusting him, promoting him through the ranks. Somehow the severed head of this contrabandista ended up stuck on a pole on a mountain road outside Medellín. Somehow Riojas ended up in charge of the Medellín cocaine trade. This was generally acknowledged to be the first exhibition of Riojas’ particular business ethos. He didn’t compete with rivals. He murdered them. He did it in ways meant to discourage others. Children were murdered in front of their parents. Mothers were raped in front of their husbands. Enemies were tortured and mutilated, their freshly slaughtered corpses placed on public display. More fodder for the newspapers.
Property wasn’t excluded. Warehouses, factories, competing cocaine fields, were torched and obliterated.
The stories grew; the legend took form and substance.
He rose to nearly unimaginable heights.
That’s necessary for a bogeyman. To tower over the cringing. And they did cringe. Not just rival gangs, the Ochoas, the Escobars, who soon disappeared in a series of vicious and prolonged bloodbaths. But the familias who pulled the strings. They bowed down too. Riojas ate the heart of his enemies, then became them. He was elected state senator. They say he’d promised this to his mother. Respectability. They say he’d pledged this to the idols he kept in a secret chapel on one of his haciendas. Santeria, they whispered, the bastard religion practiced throughout much of the country outside Bogotá.
But rulers demand more than obedience. They demand armies. The one belonging to the government was toothless. It didn’t take any particular intelligence to realize that the only army worth fighting lived in the mountains north of Bogotá and called themselves FARC. They spouted Marxist mumbo jumbo about toppling the elite, talked about the people as if the people actually mattered. Under different circumstances, Riojas might’ve sympathized with them, even joined them. After all, he came from the same impoverished background. Now he was another successful capitalista trying to protect his investments. They were the enemy.
He armed his own militia. He gave his most trusted executioners titles. Captain. General. Major. That made them more or less an army. He demanded money from the five familias to fund it.
Now they could have a real war.
Riojas could conduct it the way war was supposed to be conducted. When the USDF wanted to keep campesino villages from harboring FARC guerrillas—not that they had, not that they’d even thought about it, just that they might—they’d pick twenty campesinos at random. You, you, and you. They’d make them dig their own graves, then force their fathers or brothers or uncles to execute them. Whoever refused, joined them in the pit. This was the kind of muscular teaching a simple campesino could understand.
Claudia was captured by the USDF two years after she walked out of that bar.
The boy from the university called and told them.
After Galina had dropped the phone to the floor and stared at it as if it were something alien, after she had reluctantly picked it up and found her voice, she asked the boy if her daughter was dead. Only it wasn’t her voice—it sounded like someone years older.
No, he said. She’d been captured alive.
He didn’t add that it wouldn’t be for long.
He didn’t have to.
For one entire year Galina assumed Claudia was dead.
She thought of having a proper funeral but was always dissuaded at the last moment. Sometimes it was something she found as she cleaned the house. She cleaned all the time now. Ceaselessly, relentlessly, religiously. She’d trudge back from caring for someone else’s daughter or son and immediately grab a mop, a sponge, a dustpan, desperately clinging to routine as a way to stave off thoughts of suicide. One day while vacuuming under Claudia’s desk, she found a birthday card an eight-year-old Claudia had drawn for her in school. A stick-figure mommy holding a stick-figure baby in her arms. Te adoro, the baby whispered.
Galina said not yet. The funeral would wait.
Sometimes memory would be triggered by something completely ordinary. Stuffing a bedsheet into the washer and suddenly remembering Claudia’s first period, how Galina had stood flustered and embarrassed before Claudia’s soiled bed one morning before middle school. Even as her daughter remained oddly composed, even comforting. I know what it is, Mama—it means I can have grandbabies for you.
Galina pushed the funeral off again.
Everything that follows, Galina would find out later.
Claudia was captured in the town of Chiappa. They’d sent her there for supplies, and someone spotted her. Stories about her had been circulating for months. The beautiful university girl with the revolutionary fever. Someone was sitting and waiting for her. He followed her from town, called in reinforcements. When Claudia got back to the ravine where her fellow soldiers in the war against capitalism were holed up and waiting, a USDF brigade was already circling in for the kill.
When she opened the flap of their makeshift tent, just a few shirts strung together to keep out the rain, bullets rained down on them instead.
Three of the guerrilleros were killed. Two made it back through the jungle, one of them dragging a shot-up right leg that was later amputated.
Why wasn’t Claudia killed like the others?
Maybe because they were told not to.
Because Riojas had heard the stories and was curious to see her in the flesh. More than curious. Desirous.
He left a state dinner in Bogotá that night. Someone whispered into his ear, and he flew by helicopter to a hacienda in the north. When he entered the room where Claudia was on her knees, both hands tied tightly behind her back, he was still wearing his tuxedo.
He took his time. Examining her, the way you appraise horseflesh or hunting dogs. Apparently, he had plenty of both.
He must’ve liked what he saw.
You can imagine what happened during the next two days. You can close your eyes and say a prayer and peek. Riojas personally took charge of her interrogation. She came very close to dying. She prayed for it, hoped to God that the next time he beat her into unconsciousness she wouldn’t wake up. Despite having joined the army of the godless, Claudia still believed. Somewhere inside herself she retained her Catholic core. She spoke to it now.
She’d heard the stories: prisoners pushed out of helicopters, fed to the tigers. It would happen to her.
But two days turned into three.
Then four.
An entire week passed.
No one came to take her off in a helicopter, or for a trip to the tiger cage. Yes, there were tigers. She squinted out her window through nearly beaten-shut eyes and saw them pacing back and forth like sentries. In the afternoon someone threw a live pony into the cage and the tigers ripped its throat out.