Half of all homicides in Bogotá are contract killings

In Bogotá, killing has become a service. Five out of every 10 homicides in the city are contract killings. Between January and March of this year, 134 of the 265 homicides registered in the Colombian capital (50.5%) were carried out by hitmen, according to figures from the Metropolitan Police. The trend has been rising: before the pandemic, these killings represented roughly three out of every 10 cases, explains Andrés Nieto, director of the Security Observatory at Universidad Central. In 2018, for instance, only 161 of the 1,064 homicides registered nationwide — around 15% — were classified as contract killings, according to a study published in the National Police’s journal Criminalidad.

Laura Suárez, head of urban security at the think tank ProBogotá, notes that the reasons behind the surge in contract killings are not entirely clear, partly because the National Police stopped publishing those figures consistently. However, a June 2025 report by Green Party councilor Julián Espinosa — based on data obtained through a formal information request to the criminal investigation unit (SIJIN) — shows the upward trend. In 2022, Bogotá recorded 431 contract killings (42% of all homicides); in 2023, 437 cases (40.3%); and in 2024, the number rose sharply to 606, nearly half of the city’s 1,214 homicides (49.92%).

For Suárez, these figures point to the instrumentalization of violence. “It stems from disputes between criminal gangs vying for control of areas of the city that serve as drug trafficking routes and for controlling illicit economies.” This demonstrates that there is no single dominant structure, but rather multiple organizations competing with each other. “Many gangs, besides being very well-funded, are fighting to control these territories.”

It’s not a new dispute. This conflict has been intensifying for at least a decade and has deepened in recent years, partly because armed groups and their illicit economies have grown stronger across Colombia. The surge in cocaine production — estimated by contested U.N. figures at around 3,000 tons a year — has funneled more money into urban criminal networks. “The gangs in Bogotá don’t operate in isolation: more money means more weapons, more ammunition, and a greater capacity to recruit people,” says Suárez. This dynamic, she insists, has allowed organized crime in the capital to become more sophisticated.

Nieto agrees, and adds another layer: the transformation of crime into a service system. “A criminal portfolio is emerging,” he explains. Instead of a single gang handling robbery, murder, and trafficking, groups now operate within a network in which each provides services to others. In that structure, contract killing becomes a form of “criminal outsourcing.” Murder has rates, conditions, and levels of specialization. “That makes investigations harder because there’s no clear line to follow — it’s a network where someone pays for a service,” he notes.

Another factor driving this transformation is the near‑instant access to firearms. “In areas like San Bernardo [in the center of Bogotá], weapons can be rented for as little as 15,000 pesos [$4.15] for half an hour, and the price goes up if it’s a ‘clean’ weapon,” Nieto says.

This ease of access is tied to the expansion of the illegal arms trade, supplied largely by rural armed groups. “They are intermediaries for the contraband that enters through the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian borders, and they end up supplying urban gangs,” he explains. The result is an increase in the availability of weapons, ammunition, and explosives.

Suárez agrees: “The financing of transnational crime is immense. Today, criminals who were once petty offenders, financed by common theft, are being paid, and now they have resources from drug trafficking. This gives them better weapons, allows them to recruit more people, and enables them to operate in a more organized and sophisticated manner.”

For both experts, the problem is not only criminal but also institutional. Suárez warns that the national government has “abandoned” the cities and weakened their capacity to respond. Bogotá — an eight‑million‑person metropolis with 181 square miles of urban area — currently has the lowest police force ratio in a decade and the lowest among Colombia’s major cities: 206 officers per 100,000 residents.

Suárez points out that intelligence capabilities have also fallen. “It’s impossible for Bogotá to truly understand how crime operates, since it doesn’t originate in the city but in Cauca. If the police don’t understand how it gets from there to Suba or Ciudad Bolívar, it’s very difficult to combat.” She also stresses the need to “recover the data,” noting that security policy is being made “almost blindly.”

Nieto, for his part, criticizes the fact that criminal gangs in Bogotá are not a priority in Colombia’s national security strategy. “The country still operates with a perspective from the 1980s and 1990s, where resource allocation depends on the risk posed by the presence of armed groups.” Since these groups do not exert territorial control in the city, their criminal structures are not a priority at the national level.

That approach is especially problematic given the scale of urban criminal economies. Nieto cites the case of “Camilo,” the leader of Los Camilos, a gang dismantled in 2021 that generated more than 2.6 billion pesos a month — around $70 million at the time — through micro‑trafficking. “He didn’t plant bombs or attack police stations, but he had more criminal income than many fronts of armed groups,” explains Nieto.

Compounding the issue is the loss of key investigative tools, such as the Unified Criminal Inventory once maintained by Bogotá’s Security Secretariat, which the current city administration stopped updating. This system integrated intelligence from the Anti-Kidnapping and Extortion Group (GAULA), the SIJIN, the Police Intelligence Service (DIPOL), and the Technical Investigation Corps (CTI), allowing authorities to map gangs, territorial disputes, and crime patterns — crucial information in a city where homicides and contract killings are concentrated in districts like Santa Fe, Los Mártires, Usme, and Ciudad Bolívar. Urban decay, declining public services, and weak institutional presence create conditions that facilitate criminal activity.

But the violence doesn’t stay confined to those areas. “The contract killing service allows crime to spread,” Nieto explains. “If someone pays to have a person killed, they’ll be killed wherever they are.” This means that even homicides stemming from territorial disputes can occur anywhere in the city.

The experts differ in their view of how the mayor of Bogotá, Carlos Fernando Galán, has faced the situation. Suárez acknowledges progress, particularly in dismantling gangs and monitoring illicit economies. She highlights that Bogotá achieved a 3.4% reduction in homicides between 2024 and 2025 — the only major Colombian city to do so. Nieto, however, is more critical. He argues that the city lacks a coherent strategy and has lost some of the “containment” achieved under previous administrations. Both experts agree, though, that contract killing is central to understanding how and why people are being murdered in Bogotá today.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition