ABSTRACT
María Munévar of Colombia tells a chilling tale of witnessing the murder of a 16-year-old boy as he was entering his schoolyard. It leads her on a long odyssey of trying to understand how children who are the victims of exclusion, disenfranchisement, and poverty are recruited and trained to become assassins. This phenomenon of sicariato is a manifestation of a cultural complex born out of the accrual of repetitive experiences and memories throughout Colombian history and fed by new violence, generating traumatic events. In the act of sicariato, the pain, humiliation, helplessness, and abandonment that began during colonial times continues unabated, yet now it is imposed by Colombians themselves.
