When it came to drug kingpins like Pablo Escobar, they had one way of making sure that nobody
cheated or narc’ed on them: the Colombian Necktie.
No one would doubt that some horrific murders have happened during the endless battle that
is the war on drugs.
We all know about those terrible videos that gangs have posted online, with men kneeling
on the ground before being executed.
You’ve likely heard of a victim in the Mexican cartel wars that ended up in pieces, and his
face sent as a warning gift to another cartel attached to a football.
You might have even heard of Enrique “Kiki” Camarena Salazar, an FBI agent who was tortured
and killed by Mexican drug traffickers.
And it goes without saying that the infamous shower scene in the movie Scarface was inspired
by the acts of the Medellin cartel.
So, if you’re familiar with what we’ve just said, you’ll know that literally, anything
goes in the drug war.
It’s all very gruesome, and bad things definitely happened, but the Colombian necktie is a different
kind of beast.
The question is, how many stories that refer to it are true?
Was it really exported to the USA?
Where did it even come from?
The obvious answer to the last question is of course Colombia, but head over there, and
it’s likely many people have not heard of it.
They’ll probably laugh at you and tell you that you’ve watched too many movies.
It’s real.
Its origins are from a terrible period in Colombian history.
So terrible, this Civil War is called “La Violencia”, “The Violence.”
This period ran from 1948 to 1958.
In short, it was a bloody feud between Liberals and Conservatives.
Around 200,000 died, which was close to two percent of the entire nation.
Most of these victims, and the killers, lived in the countryside.
Looking at descriptions of what happened during that decade you can read things such as “brutal
inhumanity” and “extreme cruelty,” and “spectacular violence.”
The acts of violence became more savage as time went on, with each side upping the ante
after seeing what the other side had done.
People were crucified, hanged, and even quartered in the style of the Medieval Europeans.
The message was, “This is what you’ll get, if you mess with us.”
We have a name for this: psychological warfare.
In a paper written for the Colombia Journal, the psychological warfare that happened during
those bloody years is discussed.
The author wrote, “The foremost purpose of killings and massacres is to send a sharp
message to survivors—relatives, acquaintances, neighbors, even entire villages—that the
armed actors can and quite possibly will strike with unrestrained severity.”
Sometimes it’s not always how the victim or victims were killed, but what they looked
like when their bodies were discovered.
The grizzlier the murder scene, the more significant statement was made.
It was the same back in the day in England, when after someone had been hanged, drawn,
and quartered, their head, or other body parts, would be displayed for the public to see.
In this case, the authorities made the statement.
That’s why enemies on both sides during the Colombian strife sometimes engaged in
what’s called “post-mortem mutilation.”
Another researcher explained it like this, “The point, of course, was not just to kill,
but to communicate.
The blood-splattered tableau mort was meant to demonstrate that there were absolutely
no limits to what would be done.”
Historians say people invented “ingenious forms” of killing, so much so that they
got their own names.
One was “el corte de mica (monkey cut), which consisted of leaving a person’s head
on their chest.
Another act of brutality was called the flower vase (el corte de florero), which meant making
the headless and limbless dead person into a kind of human flower vase.
You can imagine how that was done.
There was the necktie, “el corte de corbata” among many horrific things that were done.
In short, a cut was made into the person’s neck below the jaw.
His or her tongue was then pulled out, so it stretched downwards.
The effect was that the deceased person looked as though they were wearing a tie.
According to the author of this paper, these acts were well-known to combatants.
He said the “Colombian necktie” and the “flower vase” became part of their vocabulary.
A Colombian anthropologist named María Victoria Uribe also documented such cases.
What we’re saying is this kind of death, and post-mortem mutilation is not a myth.
Still, we had a look at some forums to see if any Colombians talked about the necktie.
Here is what one person said: “It was a technique used by the conservative
‘Chulavitas’ to assassinate the ‘mobsters’ or liberals, (and also communists) and thus
simulate the red tie that they wore as an identification of their sympathy with the
liberal party and ideologies contrary to the conservative party.”
That sounds one-sided.
From what we can see, both sides committed horrors.
Now let’s look at how it would feel to die this way.
Before the tie thing was done, the victim had his throat slit.
You can die from two things if this happens.
The first is when the trachea is cut, but somehow, the arteries are not.
The cause of death would be lack of oxygen or and basically, your lungs drowning in your
own blood.
It’s unlikely you would die this way, though, instead you’ll probably just bleed out..
You all know that you have really big veins in both sides of your neck, called carotid
arteries.
When those are severed, it’s pretty much game over.
Lack of blood to the brain will make you pass out, and then your heart will stop.
How long it takes to die, though, can change.
It’s all about the cuts.
This is what someone wrote in a paper published by the US National Institute of Health:
“The length of time it takes to die following an incised wound of the neck depends on several
factors.
They include whether the venous or arterial systems are severed and whether there is air
embolism.
In some instances, victims with a single carotid artery cut have moved for about 10 minutes.”
As for pain, a US doctor wrote that the “surge of endorphins” and utter shock at what is
happening will likely block out the pain.
If the windpipe is cut, the person will be struggling to breathe, rather than thinking,
“ouch.”
If the carotid arteries are totally severed, there will be shock, but the person should
pass out quickly.
Either way, it’s not a nice way to go, but it would be a better way to die if the cut
went right through the main arteries.
It would be over in seconds.
A shabby cutting technique would prolong the torture.
So it looks as though this was indeed a thing back in those dark days, but what about more
recent times?
We found an article written in Spanish, and since this writer’s Spanish is about good
enough to order a beer and ask for directions, he used an online translation tool.
The necktie was written as “corbata Colombiana”, but we’re sure that’s the same as “el
corte de corbata.”
The article explains that in 2009, in Ayacucho, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, police discovered
a murder scene in a hotel.
The article said, “He had a cut in his throat with the extraction of his tongue, according
to the DDI of that town, who reported to the person in charge of the investigation.”
After two months, police identified the victim as Iván Andrés Telles, a man with links
to drug trafficking.
Besides that case, we can’t find any more recent cases, although we read a translated
news story which said a person had been fined for threatening to give someone a Colombian
necktie.
That happened in Spain in 2017, and the fine was 180 Euros ($213).
Ok, so now let’s move over to the USA, where on occasions the media has talked about this
vile act.
In 1995, AP news published the headline, “Colombian Necktie’ a Grisly Fate for Drug Snitches.”
This was the first paragraph, “In Colombia’s drug underworld of the 1980s, snitches met
with a gruesome fate: Their throats were slashed and their tongues pulled out through the wounds,
according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.”
If the DEA said so, then it must be true…you would think.
A spokesperson for the DEA said it’s what drug cartels did to folks who’d talked to
the police or even the DEA.
That’s something we’ll come back to.
One reason why the Colombian necktie was talked about back then is that it was brought up
at the trial of O.J. Simpson, perhaps the biggest circus event the American justice
system has ever put on.
Simpson’s defense attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. talked about the murders Simpson was on
trial for, which involved a very brutal knife attack.
Cochran said such deep wounds looked like the work of Colombian drug traffickers who’d
attempted to do what he called a “Colombian Necklace.”
In linguistics, his mistake is called a “malapropism.”
He used the wrong word, but it sounded close enough.
No one was really buying into this far-out theory, which was about a believable as saying
Jason Voorhees had committed the murders.
A law professor would have agreed with that, at the time stating it was like saying, “Martians
might exist and then asking if it is possible that Martians committed this crime.”
Even the head of Colombia’s anti-narcotics police said it was balderdash, stating that
he’d never come across cartels doing this, and it was only something that existed during
the period of “The Violence.”
He said, “Colombian traffickers have killed many people, but they do not use this method.”
Simpson, by the way, wasn’t convicted of the murders during that trial, so maybe it
was Martians, or Jason Voorhees, that did it.
We can find no news items which state that anyone in the US has been killed and had their
tongue splayed on their chest.
We can’t even find an instance of cartels doing it in Colombia, so that story of the
Argentinian murder is quite original.
Even that isn’t written about in English, and we struggled to find any more information.
However, in 2018, US news reports talked about a woman named Priscilla Ellis.
She was apparently a proponent of the necktie type of mutilation.
The authorities heard her asking a hitman to kill someone who had testified against
her in a fraud trial, telling the guy she wanted the mother of another witness to receive
a Colombian necktie.
Ellis’s 40-year prison sentence got much longer.
She later apologized, saying no neckties would really have been done.
This is the thing with the Colombian necktie.
It’s talked about a lot in the US, but there isn’t much to show for all the chatter.
You have to ask when did it first enter the American lexicon?
In 1985, The Washington Post discussed it briefly, but only in reference to a Chuck
Norris movie called “Code of Silence”.
In one scene, a Colombian drug trafficker wearing a very smart suit walks up to Norris.
With evil written all over his face, he says, “One day, I would like to give you a gift
of a Colombian necktie.
It’s very special.
You slit the throat, you pull out the tongue, and you, hahaha, will look beautiful.”
Norris doesn’t look phased at all, and smiling, he replies with his typical bravado, “Why
don’t you give it to me right now.”
Suffice to say, he kicks everyone’s behinds in the end.
So, movies like that, plus the O.J. Simpson thing, put the word on the street that gangs
were doing this kind of thing.
But, from what we can see, they didn’t.
As far as organized crime is concerned, Colombian Neckties are apocryphal.
Now you need to watch, “Scientists Agree THIS is the Worst Way to Die.”
Or, have a look at...