When police officers stopped a young man on a public bus in southern Bogota, they believed they were arresting a contract killer. The investigation behind that moment had taken months. Undercover agents from the Metropolitan Police had tracked his movements quietly and methodically.
Some posed as residents, others blended in as private security guards. They mapped routines, followed contacts, and built files. By the time they moved in, they believed they had everything they needed. They had linked this young man to 12 murders. Then none of it mattered. Before officers could explain the arrest, Andre Leonardo Achie Bolivar looked at them and asked a question, “Which one of the 35 are you looking for?” The confession was immediate, unprompted, delivered without hesitation or emotion. The number alone stunned
investigators. They had prepared for a dangerous suspect. They had not prepared for that. Achieves was 18 years old, thin, quiet, dressed plainly. At an age when most people were still deciding what to study or who they wanted to become, he had already spent years inside Bogota’s criminal underworld as a hired killer.
Colombia had seen violence before. Cartel wars, paramilitary massacres, assassins with decades long body counts. But this case landed differently because of the age of the person responsible. But the story does not begin on that bus. It does not begin with an arrest and it does not begin with murder. It begins in a part of the city where violence was not exceptional and where survival shaped every decision long before crime did.
Southwestern Bogota is a network of districts including Kennedy, Bosa, Tunalito, Suad Boulevard. It was built rapidly and unevenly as waves of internal migration pushed people toward the capital. Entire neighborhoods formed faster than the state could plan for them. Houses went up before infrastructure.
Streets existed before services. Institutions arrived late, if at all. Families came from rural departments, displaced by poverty, conflict, or both. They came looking for work, stability, and proximity to opportunity. What they encountered instead was irregular employment, overcrowded schools, and a public security presence that reacted after violence rather than preventing it.
For many residents, the state was visible mainly through patrol cars and crime scene tape. In these neighborhoods, power was not abstract. It was enforced daily, often visibly. Who controlled a corner? Who decided who sold drugs? Who was allowed to operate and who was not? These were questions handled through intimidation, threats, and killings meant to be understood by everyone watching.
One of the groups competing for that control was Los Camos. They took their name from their original leader, Neestor Agueri, known on the street simply as Camilo. Under his leadership, the group evolved from a local crew into one of the most dominant criminal structures in Bogotaas Southwest.
Their core business was drug distribution, but their power rested on violence. Control was maintained through selective killings. It was fast, targeted, and intended to send a message. Agiri began building his network years before it drew national attention. Born in Yakopi, Kundam Mara, he entered Bogotaas’s criminal underworld in his early 20s.
Over roughly 17 years, he consolidated a microtrafficking operation that spanned multiple districts. He kept a low profile, blending into the city when necessary, reportedly even wearing public utilities uniforms to avoid suspicion while steadily expanding his reach across Bosa, Kennedy, and surrounding areas. By the late 2010s, his alias alone carried weight.
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When a drugrelated murder occurred in these neighborhoods, residents did not ask who was responsible. They assumed Los Camilos were involved. That assumption, whether accurate or not, was itself a form of power. Under Camo, the group expanded beyond petty crime into a multi-criminal enterprise. Drug sales formed the backbone, but enforcement was constant.
Rivals were eliminated. Disloyal members were dealt with internally. Violence was not chaotic. It was administrative. And the people assigned to carry out that violence were often young. Teenagers attracted less attention. They moved through neighborhoods without standing out. They were cheaper to employ.
And if they were arrested, the justice system treated them differently. Reduced sentences, juvenile protections, lighter charges. This was the ecosystem into which Andres Achip was born. His parents migrated from the department of Hila to Bogota before he was born. Part of the same movement that reshaped the city’s southwest.
The family settled in Britia, a working-class neighborhood within Kennedy. They were poor in a way that did not fluctuate. Poverty was the only life he knew. There were six children in the household. Andreas was the youngest. From early childhood, it became clear that he was expected to contribute financially. And this was not about responsibility or discipline.
It was the only way the world works according to his father who had imposed daily earning quotas. When Andreas failed to meet them, he was punished. According to later accounts, his father referred to him as a burden or something in the way. For a child, that kind of environment narrows the world quickly. There is no space for delay, no tolerance for failure, no margin for innocence.
Unable to confront his father directly, Andre displaced that anger outward. The violence he could not return at home found other targets. Achip would later tell journalists that by the age of five, he was already stealing, pickpocketing in the Kennedy district. The money always went home. That in his mind was the purpose. This was not framed as a crime.
It was his contribution. By 10, the theft escalated. Pickpocketing was no longer enough. He began breaking into houses with other boys from the neighborhood. They targeted wealthier areas. Shudad, Berna, Villa, Mayor, Lafraua, places that felt distant from his daily reality. They took whatever they could carry and resell.
Jewelry, sunglasses, watches, items that moved quickly and left little trace. This again was described as work as helping his family survive. There was no intervention. No adults stepped in to redirect the behavior. No institutional buffer absorb the pressure he was under. The city did not notice him because the city was not designed to notice children like him unless they became statistics.
And for a child who starts this young, shaped by coercion and normalized violence, the trajectory does not need to be spelled out. The progression is visible. Theft becomes routine. risk becomes familiar. Boundaries erode. Violence stops being unthinkable and becomes eventually functional.
In neighborhoods where gangs operated openly, where killings were understood as tools of enforcement rather than aberrations, that transition happened fast. By the time Los Camos needed young men willing to carry out eliminations, the conditions were already in place. The system did not create Andres Achipis alone, but it did nothing to stop him from becoming useful to it.
And that is where this story is going next. By the time Andres was 11, he had committed his first homicide. Years later, when he described that moment, there was no visible panic in his recollection, no hesitation, no emotional residue. He spoke about it the way someone might recount a scene from a movie or repeat a piece of neighborhood gossip. detached, linear, almost casual.
The act itself was described as something that happened, not something he did. Cause and effect existed, but responsibility did not seem to weigh on him. That absence mattered. Violence at that point was no longer theoretical. It had crossed a line from possibility to practice. And once that threshold is crossed so early, the escalation tends to be fast.
By the time he was 15, the violence had grown more severe. It culminated in a double homicide. Two lives ended within the same trajectory that had begun with theft and survival and had gradually narrowed into something far more dangerous. This time, authorities intervene. Andress was taken off the streets and placed in a juvenile detention facility.
For a brief moment, the story appeared to pause. From the outside, this looked like an interruption that might matter, a point where the system finally intervened early enough to change direction. There was still room, at least in theory, for rehabilitation. He was young. His life was not yet fixed in place.
This could have been the break, the moment that redirected everything. In another version of the story, this is where structure replaces chaos, where discipline replaces fear, where the cycle stops. He finishes school. He gains distance from the streets. Maybe he learns a trade. Maybe he studies. Maybe he becomes an example of early intervention working the way it is supposed to.
But juvenile detention had no such effect. Inside the environment did not separate him from violence. It reorganized it. Detention did not undo what had already been normalized. It placed him among others who carried similar histories, similar instincts, and similar resentments. For many young offenders, these facilities function less as correctional spaces and more as convergence points.
There has long been quiet acknowledgment by police, by researchers, by the people who grow up around these systems that juvenile detention often acts as an early networking site for criminal careers. Connections form, reputations are exchanged, information circulates. It is where younger offenders learn how much worse things can get and how profitable that can be.
Whether this was where Andre first made contact with organized criminal structures is unclear. What is clear is that his time inside did not interrupt his trajectory. Within months, a riot broke out inside the facility. In the confusion, Andress escaped. When he returned to the streets, he did not return anonymously.
Word traveled quickly. In neighborhoods where violence functioned as currency, reputation mattered more than age. The fact that he had killed, the fact that he had been detained, the fact that he had escaped, all of it combined into something that carried weight. He was still young, but he did not hesitate and he did not ask questions.
At 16, he was recruited to Los Camo. Authorities later identified supply connections linking the group to cocoa producing regions such as Pumayo, suggesting upstream ties to larger criminal networks or former paramilitary routes. This was not an improvised operation. It was sustained, organized, and well financed.
Drug sales were only part of the portfolio. Loss Camillos also ran extortion rackets. Local businesses paid for protection. Informal vendors were pressured into compliance. Loans were offered at predatory rates and enforced violently. Contract killings became another revenue stream. Violence was monetized. Kidnappings occurred as well.
In April 2012, three people were abducted in Sawatcha. in an incident tied to debt collection. The message was consistent. Failure to pay had consequences. By the late 2010s, investigators estimated that the organization was generating close to 800 million Colombian pesos per month. While figures for earlier years are less precise, the scale of operations suggest substantial cash flow.
Even during the period when Andreas was first recruited, money was reinvested, weapons were acquired, bribes were paid. Later, police raids recovered firearms, ammunition, vehicles, and detailed lists showing payments made to hitmen, evidence of a structured payroll. Recruitment followed a pattern. Young men from poor neighborhoods were offered cash, protection, or status.
Others were coerced. The gang also absorbed Venezuelan migrants beginning around 2013, 2014, reflecting broader demographic shifts and increasing competition at the lowest levels of the criminal economy. Territorial control was enforced ruthlessly. If an independent dealer or rival crew attempted to operate within Los Camilos’s zones, they were identified and eliminated.
Surveillance came first. Routines were mapped, then hitmen were dispatched. The killings were selective and deliberate. Sakariatos meant to be understood by those watching. Even within the organization, discipline was absolute. Disloyalty was not tolerated. Questioning authority was treated as defiance.
Andre himself would later be implicated in the killing of subordinates who challenged internal orders. This was the environment Camilo controlled and this was where Andre Achip came into the picture. Not as an outsider, not as an anomaly, but as someone whose upbringing, early violence and lack of restraint made him immediately useful.
Camilo’s organization was not chaotic. It did not rely on impulse or disorganization. It operated on clear internal rules. Information flowed upward. Orders flowed downward. Violence flowed outward. Decisions were centralized. Surveillance came first. Names were passed up the chain. Authorization followed. Then the enforcement phase began.
Each killing was meant to solve a problem, reinforce a boundary, or send a message. Andre entered this structure at the bottom of the hierarchy, but only formally. In practice, his role was immediately operational. His assignments were simple. eliminate rival sellers, remove perceived threats, enforce territorial control.
He was not involved in planning or logistics. He was an instrument and he proved effective. Payment was made per killing. Investigators later established that he typically charged between 600,000 and 4 million Colombian pesos per murder. The amount depended on the target. Low-level street dealers were paid at the lower end.
rival leaders or individuals tied to competing organizations were worth more. This was not arbitrary. The pricing reflected risk, visibility, and the message the killing was intended to send. Within the organization, Andres quickly gained a reputation for reliability. He did not hesitate. He did not ask questions.
He did not renegotiate terms. When he was sent, the task was completed. But his violence was not confined to assigned hits. As his reputation grew, the boundaries between professional killings and personal violence began to dissolve. He did not compartmentalize. The same logic he applied on the street carried into his private life.
At 17, he entered into a relationship with a girl who was 12 years old. The age difference alone raised alarm. Her family intervened attempting to separate her from him. According to police records, that intervention proved fatal. Investigators later concluded that Andre murdered the girl’s mother and an uncle for opposing the relationship.
There was no evidence of provocation beyond resistance, no indication of panic. The response was direct. Eliminate the obstacle. In another incident in December 2012, he killed a young man known as Elsado during a robbery. Investigators believe the act was impulsive. The killing served no strategic purpose.
These cases mattered because they demonstrated something critical. Andreas did not limit lethal violence to the underworld. He used it as a general solution to resolve disputes, assert dominance, or satisfy impulse. The line between necessity and desire no longer existed. By early 2013, still only 18 years old, he had developed a reputation across several neighborhoods in Bogota Southwest.
He was known as young, efficient, and unhesitating. Fear followed his name. He had his methods. Firearms were his primary tool. They allowed speed and minimized exposure. They were used when noise did not matter or when the objective was to end things quickly and leave. When discretion was required, he used a knife, silent, direct, no witnesses if possible.
Between 2009 and 2013, Camilo’s organization was linked to at least 50 targeted homicides. Investigators later concluded that Andres carried out most of them personally, although not all were documented, but the pattern was clear. Outside of the killings, he lived quietly. He took construction jobs. He worked as a laborer.
He avoided unnecessary attention. To neighbors, he was unremarkable. Another young man trying to earn a living. That normaly was deliberate. It allowed him to move freely. It reduced suspicion. It bought time. In mid 2012, Camo was arrested and charged in dozens of murders. The arrest was significant.
Camo had been the central authority. The organizer, the filter through which information and orders passed. His removal weakened the structure, but it did not dismantle it. The drug routes remained. The territorial disputes continued. The violence did not slow. If anything, it intensified. With Camilo out of the picture, enforcement became less controlled. Power vacuums formed.
Rival groups tested boundaries. Internally, the organization relied increasingly on those already proven to act without hesitation. Andre stepped forward. According to authorities, even after Camilo’s arrest, the wave of homicides continued. In some areas, it spiked. The structure had lost its head, but its most effective weapon remained active.
That escalation forced a response. Bogota’s Metropolitan Police organized a special task force known as the Kazahomomasas or in English homicide hunters. Their focus was narrow. Identify the individual responsible for the spike in killings. Track his movements. Build a case. For 2 months, undercover agents shadowed Andre.
Some posed as residents. Others disguised themselves as private security guards. They mapped his routines, his roots, his cover jobs. They watched him leave construction sites, board buses, move through neighborhoods where he was both feared and invisible. The surveillance was patient, methodical.
No arrests were made until they were confident they had the right target. In late April 2013, the operation concluded. Police intercepted Andreas while he was riding a public bus in the Bosa area of Bogota. He was on his way to a construction job where he had recently been working. He did not resist.
There was no chase, no confrontation, and before officers could explain why he was being arrested, he spoke. He told them how many people he had killed. 35. The number stunned investigators. At the time of his arrest, police had evidence linking him to 12 homicides. 35 went far beyond the scope of the charges prepared.
That figure would never be fully reconciled in court. Some cases lacked witnesses, others lacked bodies. Many could not be conclusively proven. But the number never disappeared. It followed him through interrogations, through media coverage, through public memory. It became inseparable from his name. Not as a boast, not as a myth, but as a measure of how far the violence had gone before the system caught up.
And for Bogotaas Southwest, the damage was already done. In custody, Achipese continued to display the same emotional flatness that had characterized his behavior on the streets. In a televised interview with Noticius Caracall in 2013, he spoke openly about his crimes. His tone was calm, his language was precise. He explained how the killings were carried out, how targets were approached, and how decisions were made.
At no point did he show visible distress. The descriptions were delivered as explanations, not confessions. At one point he claimed that after killing his victims, whether by firearm or knife, he would ask them for forgiveness. The statement was presented without elaboration and without any visible emotional reaction.
Whether this was genuine belief, post hawk rationalization, or a learned narrative meant to soften perception was unclear. What stood out was the absence of remorse in his delivery. During the same interview, Achipese mentioned that he had a three-year-old son. He said he hoped the child would have a different future, that he would not turn out like him.
The statement was noted widely at the time, not because it contradicted his behavior, but because it existed alongside it without tension. There was no acknowledgement of contradiction. Fatherhood and mass violence were discussed in the same register as parallel facts rather than opposing realities. As Achipis was processed through the justice system, public attention intensified.
His age, the scale of his admitted violence, and his demeanor drew interest far beyond the neighborhoods where the killings had occurred. Psychologists, criminologists, and forensic specialists were asked to explain what kind of individual commits dozens of murders before reaching adulthood and how that progression goes unnoticed for so long.
In May 2013, Colombian media published expert assessments of his psychological profile. The conclusions were uniform and bleak. Psychiatrists diagnosed occupies with psychopathic personality disorder. The diagnosis was based on a consistent lack of empathy, absence of guilt, emotional detachment, and a sustained pattern of violating social norms without internal conflict.
Experts emphasized that his upbringing likely played a significant role in shaping this pathology. The physical abuse inflicted by his father, the constant pressure to produce money, and the absence of emotional protection or positive adult intervention created an environment where violence was normalized early and reinforced repeatedly.
At the same time, specialists were careful to note that environment alone does not fully explain the outcome. Not every abused child becomes a killer, but in Achapis’ case, predisposition and circumstance appear to reinforce each other rather than counterbalance. Several criminologists went further. They described him as effectively irredeemable.
Their reasoning was not ideological. It was statistical. Individuals who begin committing lethal violence at such a young age display no remorse and escalate rapidly are considered extremely likely to reaffend if released. One psychologist described a as unacino poor vocion, a murderer by vocation. Some commentators drew comparisons to American contract killer Richard Klinsky, known as the Iceman, who also experienced severe childhood abuse and later became a prolific, emotionally detached murderer.
But diagnosing Achipas was one thing. Containing him was another. Despite his confession to 35 killings, authorities only had solid evidentiary cases for 12. These were the murders supported by eyewitness testimony, forensic evidence, ballistic matches, or corroborated intelligence tying him directly to the scene.
The rest existed in a gray zone, known, suspected, admitted, but not legally provable. Achip was formally charged with 12 counts of murder along with related offenses such as illegal possession of firearms. He did not claim innocence. There was no retraction of his earlier statements. The legal process proceeded slowly, as it often does in Colombia’s courts.
Ultimately, he was convicted on those 12 homicide charges. The conviction placed him among the most prolific killers ever tried in Bogota’s judicial system. His age at the time of the crime set him apart even further. There are few documented cases globally of individuals convicted of that many murders before reaching adulthood.
Achip was incarcerated at La Pakot prison in Bogota, a highsecurity facility where he awaited sentencing and served his term. Given the severity and volume of his crimes, many expected an exceptionally long sentence. But Colombia’s legal framework does not permit life imprisonment or capital punishment. Sentencing is further influenced by age at the time of the offenses, procedural factors, and sentence reduction mechanisms tied to behavior, work, or study while incarcerated.
Details of Occup’s sentencing were not widely publicized when the judgment was first handed down. Only later did it become clear that the prison term was far shorter than public expectation. Colombian media eventually reported that Achipese served approximately 7 to 8 years in custody. He was arrested in 2013.
On December 16th, 2020, he was released 7 and 1/2 years for 12 proven murders for 35 admitted ones. And for the system, the story was no longer about what he had done, but about what would happen next. And when news broke around 2020, there was unease. The early release was the result of redency, a provision within Colombia’s legal system that allows inmates to reduce their sentences through documented good behavior, work assignments, or educational programs completed while incarcerated.
In Achape’s case, a judge approved a substantial sentence reduction in 2020. The ruling allowed him to leave prison years before the original term would have expired. The decision stood in sharp contrast to the fate of his former superior. Camo, older and tried as an adult, received a 27-year sentence for his role in dozens of murders.
The difference was not moral. It was legal. Ate was approximately 26 years old when he walked free. In the eyes of the state, he had completed his sentence for the 12 murders that could be proven in court. There was no formal declaration of rehabilitation, no public assessment of risk. The release followed procedure.
What followed did not. Within a short period after leaving prison, Achip returned to criminal activity. There was no prolonged attempt at reintegration, no documented effort to distance himself from former networks. Instead, he re-entered the same environment he had left, this time with greater notoriety and fewer constraints.
Law enforcement intelligence indicates that he became involved with the successor faction of his former organization, commonly referred to as Los Camos II. The structure retained many of the same territorial interests and methods operating primarily in Bogota’s southwest and the neighboring municipality of Swatcha.
By 2021, Atapiz was no longer functioning as a contract killer. He had moved into a leadership role. He coordinated operations. He issued orders. He oversaw drug distribution routes and sanctioned killings. His authority was reinforced by reputation rather than formal hierarchy. Those around him knew who he was and what he had done.
Time in prison had not diminished his standing. Instead, it had enhanced it. For younger recruits, he represented survival and return. For rivals, he represented unfinished business. His name carried weight in the same neighborhoods where his earlier crimes had taken place. Authorities began to notice patterns.
Homicides linked to microtraicking disputes increased in areas previously controlled by Los Camillos. Surveillance pointed to the reactivation of old roots and the emergence of familiar enforcement tactics. Informants identified Achipis as a central figure once again. By late 2022, the National Police and the Fiscalia General Dean launched a coordinated operation targeting Los Camillos 2.
The investigation involved months of intelligence gathering, surveillance, and wiretaps. The objective was not disruption. It was dismantlement. In December 2022, the operation concluded. Achip then 28 years old was arrested along with 21 other alleged members of the organization. The arrests were carried out across Bogota and Sawatcha.
Authorities seized firearms, ammunition, narcotics, vehicles, and multiple mobile devices used to coordinate activity. The scale of the seizure reflected an organization that was once again fully operational. Investigators linked Occup wave of violence. Between 2021 and 2022, he was suspected of involvement in 36 homicides.
The number was noted not only for its severity, but for its familiarity. It closely mirrored the body count he had claimed as a teenager nearly a decade earlier. There was no indication of restraint, no evidence of moderation. The pattern appeared continuous. Following his arrest, Achipis was charged with multiple offenses, including aggravated criminal conspiracy, drug trafficking, several counts of homicide, kidnapping, and illegal possession of firearms.
The charges reflected both his leadership role and direct involvement in violence. As of the most recent reports, he remains in custody, awaiting trial. This time, the legal context is different. He is no longer a juvenile offender. The crimes occurred after a prior conviction. The pattern of reaffending is documented.
Prosecutors are expected to seek the maximum penalties permitted under Colombian law. Public scrutiny has intensified. Questions surrounding his initial release. How a confessed mass killer served fewer than 8 years have become part of a broader debate about sentencing, rehabilitation, and public safety. The system followed its rules.
The outcome remains contested. Now with Achip back behind bars, authorities face a second and likely final opportunity to contain the trajectory that began in childhood and escalated uninterrupted into adulthood. Whether this time the system holds remains an open question.
