The True Story of ‘La Quica’
Dandeny Muñoz Mosquera trained Pablo Escobar's sicarios (assassins) and it took police over a decade to capture him.
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Dandeny Muñoz Mosquera — most commonly known as ‘La Quica’ — was the first person ever to be prosecuted by the United States government for acts of terrorism committed on foreign soil. He is responsible for blowing up an airplane, scattering human body parts and scraps of metal over a 3-mile radius in Colombia. He also once blew up an entire daycare center for children in an effort to kill a few police officers.
La Quica trained Pablo Escobar’s sicarios (assassins) — rumored to have numbered in the thousands when the Medellin Cartel was at its height. He personally commanded 140 of them, most of whom were just impoverished teenagers looking to make money by killing people.
He is directly responsible for the deaths of at least 220 people, carving “KK” on a lot of their bodies posthumously. This was because his job was to kill policemen and civil servants and he needed to prove he was responsible in order to be paid.
In short, La Quica is one of the world’s most infamous assassins.
Poverty Drove Him to Work for the Cartel as a Kid
The Medellin Cartel in Columbia was started in the early 1970s by Pablo Escobar as a smuggling network. During the 80s, it brought in up to $60 million per day in profits from cocaine distribution alone, making Pablo Escobar one of the richest men in the world. At the time of his death in 1993, he would have been worth $59 billion in today’s money.
However, despite the wealth of the Medellin drug cartel, the city of Medellin was unbelievably poor. What did Pablo Escobar plan to do about that? He planned to use the loyal citizens of his hometown as soldiers, that’s what. La Quica was one of those soldiers.
Born in 1965, Dandeny Muñoz Mosquera —who later used other aliases such as Juan Diego Diaz or ‘La Quica’ — was the youngest of 9 children and grew up in extreme poverty. ‘La Quica’ is Colombian slang meaning ‘the fat girl’ and he was nicknamed that after a favorite aunt of his whom he supposedly resembled. The nickname stuck with him for the rest of…
