When a Hitman Becomes a Star
A man of athletic build is walking along the sweltering streets of Medellin, the second most important city in Colombia. Despite his gray hair, the man moves with feline lightness and bounce inherited from his past ‘job,’ to which he devoted his best years.
In the busy afternoon streets, he is often stopped by complete strangers, who ask for autographs and selfies or seek to simply give him a hug or shake his hand.
The man is well known in this city, although he hasn’t been here for the past quarter of a century. No, he is not a famous actor or a politician, and he did not win any international sports competitions.
The man is a hitman and a member of a notorious drug cartel that took the lives of tens of thousands of people, including 250 people murdered by this man alone. He has just spent 23 years in jail for his crimes.
Thus begins Escobar’s Hitman, a documentary produced by the Russia’s English-speaking TV channel RT.
The gangster known for his alias ‘Popeye’ has been released from prison and is now quite a respected resident of the city, where he once committed brutal murders. This is not another fantastic plot from Hollywood. The documentary shows a real-life story. A paradox on the edge of mass insanity, still waiting to be dissected by mental health experts.
Could it be that all of the city residents are members of the drug cartel? Or that they are all gangsters and drug addicts, relatives and friends of the mafia?
Not at all. Medellin is full of decent people. There are those who sacrificed their lives in the war against drug trafficking; those whose relatives and friends were tortured by the cartel; honest judges, police officers, and politicians who opposed the rampant gang violence.
But they are not in demand. Nobody stops them in the streets for selfies or invites them to star in movies. Some of them are abandoned by the very state that they had strived to defend.
Marred by political corruption, indifference, and blatant disregard of moral principles, the city discards and abandons its true heroes, while a vicious murderer is propelled to stardom, as he prepares to act in Hollywood and feels as good as the first astronaut on earth. And that is despite having the blood of hundreds of people on his hands.
This is a society in desperate need of spiritual leaders, who could stop a wrongdoer and tell him, «This is wrong, don’t do that.» Who could explain, what is right and what is wrong. Who could provide moral principles that would, like beacons, guide one’s actions and judge one’s life.
But, what if there are none? What if there are no people who can tell the difference between black and white, no people about whom Allah Almighty speaks in the Quran (meaning): «And when there comes to them information about [public] security or fear, they spread it around. But if they had referred it back to the Messenger e or to those of authority among them, then the ones who [can] draw correct conclusions from it would have known about it.»
Then, we face the depravity described above. The murderer becomes a star, and those who defended the people from the villain are forgotten and eke out a miserable existence.
The story has an important moral. Alims and imams are the luminaries of the Ummah. If we do not respect them and thank the Almighty for having them among us, we will find ourselves in a situation where assassins will become the idols of our children and will freely walk the streets of our cities.
ROBERT KURBANOV
