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Gangland hit at Amador concert

by Eric Jackson

Carlos "Oso Yogui" Mejía had led an interesting life for the past decade. Jailed five times on serious criminal charges --- three armed robberies and two drug offenses --- he was never convicted. He ran with the politically connected gang led by former DEA informant David Viteri (now in jail awaiting trial on money laundering charges), which is embroiled in bloody warfare with their rivals from El Chorrillo's Pentagono. According to La Prensa, on September 30 he was in Chiriqui to take part in a heist of some $3.5 million in drug sale proceeds coming into the country from Costa Rica.

And thus it would not seem all that unusual, given those circumstances, that a hit man from a rival organization would have ended Mejía's life with a couple of gunshots fired at point-blank range a few days later, on the evening of October 4.

What was unusual was that this particular gangland hit took place just outside the Figali Convention Center on Amador, as a large crowd of people were leaving a Marc Anthony concert that had ended a few days before. The gunman had been laying in wait by Mejía's SUV, and after the shooting a couple of municipal police officers gave chase and fired shots, but the killer managed to escape into the mangroves, and apparently back to El Chorrillo.

It was the second assassination of somebody with a tie to the Viteri crowd in two days. On October 2 two young men, believed to be members of the El Pentagono gang, showed up at the apartment of Viteri's ex-sister-in-law, Kirian Castillo, which is located on Santa Ana's Calle 17. They shot her four times, killing her. Castillo had a PRD hack job, working for the representante in Santa Ana.

Meanwhile, life goes on for what passes "as usual" in gangland. True, David Viteri is in jail and thus for the time being can't make any more televised threats against rival mobsters on the PRD-aligned MEDCOM channels. But then Harmodio "Moyo" Veliz Ballesteros, reputedly a member of the Viteri gang and serving a 42-month prison sentence for weapons charges after having been on the lam for several months, was given a 15-day furlough by a circuit judge. According to El Siglo, Moyo has since been seen tooling around the metro area in $100,000 Ferrari.