Santandercito's senseless slaughter — senseless to me, anyway

@wwaycorrigan

[For an audio/vlog version of this story, click here.]

I've long held the opinion that we'd have far more vegetarians in the world if we all had to kill our own animals.

Many of us like meat, but how many of us would be willing or able to slaughter the actual animal providing such fare? I'm pretty sure I'd struggle in any case. And I don't think I'm on my own in this.

Bloodletting: The site where Jairo breathed his last after receiving a fatal stab wound to the heart.

A load of bull

Even though I grew up and laboured on what effectively is a beef cattle farm, our family enterprise is but just the first step in the chain: the cows my father keeps have calves each year that, when they are around a year old, he sells to other farmers who then feed them to 'finish' them, i.e. once sufficiently meaty, have them sent to a factory to be killed for human consumption.

Thus, I was removed from the slaughter. There was no life-ending blood on my hands, not directly anyway.

The closest I came to delivering the fatal blow to one of our herd was when, on an extended visit to Ireland from Colombia, I helped my father take a bull calf to the local factory.

This young bull had contracted a disease that prevented my father from selling him in the normal way — some EU directive was at play, a bovine infection that Europe wanted to eradicate; hence the animal couldn't be sold as livestock to another farm. The young bull's meat, though, was considered fine for human consumption.

So he was locked away from the rest of the herd and fattened up until he was deemed ready for butchering. A few days after his date with destiny, his body was brought back to the family home in conveniently packaged portions and placed in a deep-freeze, to be eaten as our family saw fit.

'The savage nature of it is particularly disturbing. To stab somebody in the heart requires one to be face to face with the target. It also requires physical force to plunge the knife into the body of the victim; one really has to mean it.'

My normally omnivorous mother, who was effectively chief caterer to this bull during his isolation period, couldn't bring herself to eat his meat. The sight of it made her feel sick.

I had less of a connection with him, so I didn't feel as bad eating his flesh. Had I been charged with ending his life, though, there's a good chance he would have received a last-minute pardon. In fact, I felt rather uneasy just forcing him off the cattle trailer at the factory. The little bull, clearly smelling blood, did his best not to follow the path to his demise.

Bloodletting

I am, however, quite a queasy sort. The only time I was allowed to donate blood here in Colombia — see 'Your Irish blood's not wanted here' for more on why I now can't give blood — I became faint on seeing it flow through the tubes and into the adjacent bag. Indeed, the mere thought of it now is making me a little nauseous.

Others seem less bothered by blood. Just as well, or we'd have no one willing to work in the life-saving health sector. Less critically, and perhaps less benignly, we'd also have little to no meat to enjoy.

Unquestionably malignantly, on the other hand, there are those who have no problem with bloodletting for purely nefarious purposes; nothing revelatory in that, of course.

Mercifully, though, most of us will not have our lives brutally cut short at the hands of a crazed killer. Nor do many witness such an act.

Now while Colombia is somewhat more violent than my native Ireland, I like to reassure myself that, for the most part, the killings happen at a safe distance from me. And at that, these days, those who do the killings tend to focus their wrath on fellow Colombians; a case of taking the law into one's own hands in a country where the justice system frequently fails its less powerful citizens.

I still, more or less, believe that as a foreigner I'm less likely to be deliberately killed in Colombia. I can no longer say the same for killings occurring at a safe distance from me.

Brutal beast

At around five o'clock in the evening on Sunday 06 September 2026, the senseless, savage stabbing of Jairo Manuel Avilés Martínez, an acquaintance of mine, happened just a couple of metres in front of me. I had been the last person to chat with Jairo, apart from the man, another acquaintance — for legal reasons, I won't give his name here — who fatally thrust a six-inch knife into his heart. A brutal, cold-blooded, calculated assault, inflicted without warning.

Jairo's murder — for what else can it be but murder? — came just three months after the killing of another acquaintance of mine from Bogotá's Santandercito barrio. However, as I described in Mingling with Colombia's killers, this earlier homicide was gangland-related. It was, to put it crudely, strictly business. The young guy who was killed knew, forced or otherwise, that he was engaged in potentially deadly dealings.

From all that I can gather, Jairo's murder was nothing of the kind. His killer had some sort of a grudge, no more, no less.

The savage nature of it is particularly disturbing. To stab somebody in the heart requires one to be face to face with the target. It also requires physical force to plunge the knife into the body of the victim; one really has to mean it. It's certainly not for the queasy amongst us.

If I were told I had to kill somebody and I had to do it with either a knife or a gun, I'd choose the gun. At least one can put some distance between weapon and target with a gun; not so with a knife.

For sure, many of us at times get angry with our fellow humans to the point where malice aforethought may enter the mind. Some may even consider it more acceptable to do away with another person than an innocent animal. Yet few are capable of following through on these homicidal thoughts.

For most of us these days, the slaughter — be it of animals for consumption or humans because they are considered a threat — happens at a safe distance from our everyday lives. Let somebody else deal with those blood stains.
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