The Truth About Date-Murders in Colombia
Does "Devil's Breath" really turn you into a pliable zombie? How dark is the sex industry?
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Tou Ger Xiong, 50, went from his home in Minnesota to Medellín, Colombia, looking for romance. Instead, he found death.
Tou Ger was a well-known public speaker and activist from Minnesota’s Hmong community; his father had served in the U.S.-backed guerrilla force in Laos that fought against communists in the Vietnam War era. Tou Ger reportedly met a woman on line and was excited to meet her in person in Colombia, a country he had been to before and said he adored.
While on his vacation, Tou Ger called his brother to ask for help with $2,000, which his brother rapidly transferred. The following day, police found Tou Ger’s lifeless body in a forest on the outskirts of Medellín. A woman had lured him into an apartment where men had beaten him, stolen his cards, watch and phone and got him to call friends and family for money. They then drove him out of town, smacked him with a blunt object and threw him over a 260-foot cliff.
Colombian police tracked the gang because the woman, identified as Sharit Gisela Mejía Martínez (below), had transferred some of the money to a PayPal account in her own name. This March, a Colombian court sentenced Mejía, and three men to 28 years each for the robbery and murder.
Tou Ger is the most high-profile in a series of killings of foreign tourists in Colombia, especially in the cities of Medellín and Cartagena, which are also major sex tourism destinations. In many cases, the victims have been killed after meeting women on dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble. In various cases, women have drugged them with a substance called Scopolamine, known as “The Devil’s Breath,” which people in Colombia tell me will leave you like a pliable zombie while they rob you. The U.S. Embassy in Bogota has issued a specific security alert for “risks of using online dating applications” in Colombia, especially Medellín.
Yet beyond the headlines, how high really are the risks for foreigners going to Colombia? Who are the gangs behind these robberies and how many have been caught? Are any of the victims themselves up to no good? And does Devil’s Breath really do everything it is rumored to in letting the robbers control you?
Going to Colombia (where I also interviewed Medellín Cartel founder Carlos Lehder), I looked deeper into the murders and robberies of tourists as well as issues of Colombia’s sex industry.
“Colombia, the only risk is wanting to stay”
In the nineties and early noughties, Colombia was considered a virtual no go for tourists with guerillas, paramilitaries and drug cartels controlling swathes of the country and gunmen kidnapping passengers en masse off buses. But this changed…
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