Our Lady of the Assassins (Spanish title: La virgen de los sicarios) is a semi-autobiographical novel by the Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo about an author in his fifties who returns to his hometown of Medellín after 30 years of absence to find himself trapped in an atmosphere of violence and murder caused by drug cartel warfare.

The brief sections below attempt to give the reader a basic understanding of some main approaches to what undoubtedly is a central work in Colombian fiction of the 1990s.

An elaborated and discussed fictional work dealing with events related to the drug trade and its deleterious consequences in Colombian society.

A writer named Fernando returns to Medellín, after an absence of 30 years, to find the place transformed into Colombia's "capital of hate."

The second largest Colombian city was the main scene where the mafias wanted to dominate the nation by terrorists attacks, using very young killers from the slums, who were known as sicarios.

Most of them were boys ready to kill for money, the same offered by the criminal organizations, to exterminate those who would dare to challenge the power of the mafias or put in danger their business.

Pablo Escobar provided numerous things to impoverished neighborhoods, including housing, sport areas, electricity and schools, a factor that gave more popular power to the mafias, who were praised as heroes of the people.

After the death of Pablo Escobar on 2 December 1993, by a special unit of the National Police of Colombia, the Medellín Cartel went through an organizational crisis and the sicarios formed gun groups in the barrios.

The situation worsened when Colombian guerrillas infiltrated the cities trying to bring their war, traditionally in the countrysides, to the main urban centers.

[3] The Colombian mafias and especially the Medellín Cartel imposed a modality of crime with the hired killers (sicarios in Spanish) to murder political opponents or any authority that could put in danger their dirty business.

My poor grandfather died without knowing neither the elevated train not the sicarios, smoking Victoria cigarettes that I guess, you have not heard even mention.

Medellín as the birthplace of several writers has been the space for many other literary and documentary works of authors like Tomás Carrasquilla, Fernando González, Porfirio Barba Jacob, Manuel Mejía Vallejo, Gonzalo Arango, León de Greiff and many others.

The reasons why an entrepreneurial urban center and the leader of the national economy during the 1950s and 1960s began to overflow with violence is a complex sociological matter that involves society, politics and the culture of contemporary Colombia.

The work of Vallejo put in evidence a nostalgia for the lost role of a city dominated by the social chaos and far from the presence of the State.

"Colombia is a country of a deep Catholicism mixed with strong tendencies of popular religiosity, which was born out of Spanish traditions in the Middle Ages, the ancestral beliefs of Afro-Americans and the American aborigines.

Popular religiosity appears as an alternative manifestation to the official religion as a way for people to seek their own relationships with the divine, out of vertical structures of power.

In Medellín, one of the most Catholic and conservative regions of the country, the popular religiosity got an unusual tone when it mixed with the urban violence and hired killers.

Pope Pius V asked the Christian world to pray to Mary under the advocation of Maria Auxilium Christianorum to defeat the enemies of the Church.

She is enough for protection, because "you alone overcome every error in the world; in anxieties, in struggles, in every difficulty defend us from the enemy" and we do not fear because "at the hour of our death receive our souls into paradise".

For other sociologists, the Marian devotion of the young sicario is a cult to their mothers, la cucha ("mom" in the local jargon of Medellín).

He discovered a very strong matriarchal society with the absence of the figure of the male parent and the cult for the mother, the real one, who in the Medellín slums was in charge of the growing of the family.

According to critics, the decision of Vallejo of speak in first person breaks the most obstinate tradition of literature of using an omniscient narrator who knows everything and sees everything, the novelist who can cross with his eyes the walls and reads the thought.

Melo, the work is written in an admirable style and sometimes poetic, where the jargon of the sicarios is mixed with local expressions and Antioquian terms in such a way that alternate among the cynicism and the sensibility, the moving and the aggressive.

Medellín has been a recurrent setting for different works of literature and studies in Colombia since the beginning of its Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century with authors like Tomás Carrasquilla, León de Greiff, Fernando González, León de Greiff and Porfirio Barba Jacob, to the writers, journalists and film directors of the second half of the 20th century like Gonzalo Arango, Alonso Salazar, Víctor Gaviria and Fernando Vallejo.

Barrios and barrios of slums gathered one upon one in the slopes of the mountains, thundering each other with their music, poisoned of love for the neighbor, competing the longing of kill with a reproduction fury... in the moment that I write, this conflict is not yet resolved: they continue killing and born... but let's continue walking up: while upper on the mountain better, more misery.The main characters are three: Fernando, Alexis and Wilmar.