June 6, 2014.

Colombia's Bloody Gangs Color Vote

He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston was aware of some heavy piece of apparatus being pushed into place behind his head. O’Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that his face was almost on a level with Winston’s.

BUENAVENTURA, Colombia----On a recent morning, a 20-year-old member of a gang here finished his breakfast of eggs and fried bananas, called his mother to say hello, and then set off to gun down two strangers.

"Three thousand," he said, speaking over Winston’s head to the man in the white coat.

"All the victims say, 'Please don't kill me,' and scream and cry," said Pedrito, an assassin for La Empresa, or The Company, a gang terrorizing this dilapidated Pacific port city. "But I simply do my job."

Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against Winston’s temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain. O’Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his.

The grisly work of such young assassins and the numbing violence here has helped fuel doubts that peace negotiations between President Juan Manuel Santos and a Marxist guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, will end warfare in the country.