Once upon a time, there was a bricklayer and/or carpenter and/or taxi driver living in the city of Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast. His name was Jorge Enrique Briceño Suárez. At the same time, there was a guerrilla living ‘somewhere in Colombia’. And he, too, had the name Jorge Enrique Briceño Suárez.

Just a coincidence, then. A case of random ‘homonymy’, a namesake with no consequences. But of course not. If that was the case, we would have no story to tell.

So let's start our story with its dramatis personae. Conventionally, the characters populating a drama are persons; and indeed some of our characters, like the ones we have already mentioned, and will repeat here, are people; some even citizens:

• • Jorge Enrique Briceño Suárez, working man of Santa Marta

• • Jorge Ivan Restrepo Llano

And then there is:

• • Mono Jojoy, guerrilla (Jorge Briceño) (Jorge Briceño Suárez) (Jorge Suárez Briceño) (Jorge Enrique Briceño Suárez) (Luis Suárez) (Luis Suárez Rojas) (Victor Julio Suárez Rojas) (Victor Suárez Rojas) (Oscar Riano).

Yes, that's right. The bracketed names are ‘alternatives’. The character, the guerrilla, Mono Jojoy (now, there's an odd name; surely false!) has these other nine ‘to his name’, as it were. The taking of alternative names is very common among the more (in)famous leaders in the world of Colombian left-wing guerrillas, the FARC-EP, the ELN, and of the right-wing paramilitaries, the AUC and their successors, the so-called Bacrims, and of course the drug gangs. Often, as in the case of our character, these are of two types. A ‘nom de guerre’, formed on the model of a standard name (‘Jorge Enrique Briceño Suárez’, for example) and a nickname (like Mono Jojoy).