An epidemic of murder among young men is devastating Latin America.
From Tom Phillips in Pereira, Columbia

WALK though the iron gates of the San Camillo cemetery and beyond the ornate headstones of the rich and you reach a staircase that leads down to a muddy wasteland dotted with rotting white wooden crosses.

Many of the crosses have been snapped in two by the wind and rain. Hundreds of others are nameless, the only clue to their occupants' identities the initials "NNM", scrawled on to the crosses in black marker pen: No Nombre Masculino (Unidentified Male).

In his cramped, musty office near San Camillo's entrance the cemetery's director Alvaro Martinez Garcia shook his head as he opened up file after file of monthly burial records.

"Violent death, violent death, violent death," he repeated, thumbing through his records. "One, two, three, four, five, six."

Welcome to the frontline of a Latin American murder epidemic that is raging across the continent, decimating a generation of young people from the rural backwaters of the Brazilian Amazon and Colombia to the inner-city ghettos of Rio de Janeiro and Caracas, where nearly 3000 people lost their lives last year.

A study released this week by the Sangari Institute, a Sao Paulo-based research group, shows that a young person in Latin America is 70 times more likely to be murdered than a young person in the UK.

"We are living a crisis among the young people of Latin America," the study's author, Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz, told the BBC this week.

Dubbed the Map of Violence, the study focuses on the murder rates between 1994 and 2005 in 83 countries and paints a depressing portrait of life as an impoverished Latin American teenager. The top five countries in the ranking of teenage murders are all Latin American nations; El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala and Brazil.

"It is an epidemic, a plague on our continent that kills more people than Aids or any other known epidemic," Jose Miguel Insulza, the head of the Organization of American States, warned a Latin American leaders at a conference in Mexico in October this year.

The causes behind the murder epidemic vary, ranging from gang violence to drug-feuds, the legacies of civil wars and forced migration, death-squads, police corruption and drunken bar brawls. The victims, however, have one thing in common; human rights groups across Latin America say the overwhelming majority of victims are young, black males from poor backgrounds aged between 15 and 24.

On the receiving end of this murder epidemic are places like the Cementerio San Camillo, a drab inner-city graveyard in the Colombian city of Pereira, where thousands of midges fill the air clinging to the dull, lingering stench of death.

Nestled in the rolling mountains of western Colombia, Pereira is a crossroads town of nearly 600,000 inhabitants. Long famed as a shady hangout for prostitutes and drug traffickers, the city is a popular place to amass narco-dollars and quickly burn them on tacky country mansions or in the city's innumerable brothels.

Gang violence is endemic in the city's impoverished shantytowns or comunas and dirt-cheap drugs such as bazuco, a noxious side-product of cocaine sold for around 10p a hit, have made the city a regional Mecca for wide-eyed drug addicts. The city's squalid jail bursts at the seams with scrawny prisoners, many of their bodies disfigured by knife wounds and disease.

Government figures show Pereira has one of the country's highest murder rates. Each month between 10 and 20 unidentified bodies roll up at the San Camillo cemetery, Garcia says, often because the family is too scared to claim the body or because they are so badly mutilated they can no longer be recognized.

"It is a very delicate situation," Garcia sighs.

At the sharp end of Latin America's homicide crisis are young men like El Zurdo ("Left Hander"), a 21-year-old pandillero, or gang-member, from Villa Santana, a notoriously violent slum in Pereira's suburbs.

To reach Zurdo's territory, you turn off the main-road out of Pereira and climb a steep hillside, past grazing cows and clusters of stray dogs.

Two hundred metres ahead the first homes come into sight - tightly packed shacks cobbled together from wafer-thin red bricks and painted strips of bamboo. Old men with Panama hats lounge on their doorsteps, watching the world drift by.

Villa Santana could easily be mistaken for a sleepy rural community, until, that is, you run into the local gang members.

Picking his way through the undergrowth on the community's outskirts Zurdo reflected on his baptism into the world of homicide. Some years ago, he explained, fellow gang members forced him to execute a rival, with a single shot to the head.

"In the beginning it shooting someone is strange. But when you don't try something you don't have the experience to know what it is going to feel like," said Zurdo, who carries a weighty 38mm pistol in his belt and earned his nickname because of his ability to shoot the weapon with his left hand.

El Zurdo, who admits to half a dozen homicides, went on: "Now it feels just like shooting into thin air."

A few streets away Carlos Galeano, another gang member who said he made his money fixing shoes and selling guns to the local gangsters, slipped a Scorpion revolver onto his multi-coloured duvet and reached for a photo album filled with pictures of him with his childhood friends.

Pointing to each of their faces he reeled off a list of names. "Nene, Diego, Carlos and Julian."

"All dead," he said.

Across the continent similar scenes are playing themselves out, fuelled by a clandestine arsenal of firearms smuggled through scantily policed borders.

If the weapon of choice for a gang-member in Pereira is a 38mm pistol, their counterparts in the slums Rio de Janeiro prefer AK-47s and anti-aircraft machine guns, often siphoned off from the Bolivian and Argentine armed forces. On Rio's black market such weapons can fetch thousands of pounds.

"The injuries we treat are injuries from weapons of war," says Dr Marcelo Soares, a Brazilian surgeon and the director of Rio de Janeiro's Getulio Vargas hospital, reputedly the ER that treats the highest number of gunshot wounds in Latin America each year.

"They are injuries that lead to death, if not immediately, then because of the consequences."

Last year Soares's ER, which is located in north Rio near a notorious network of slums called the Complexo do Alemao, treated 767 victims of "PAFS" or firearms perforations, up from 473 in 2006. 191 bullet-ridden bodies were simply dumped on the concrete patio outside the ER. The hospital's surgeons, many of them more experienced than actual war zone doctors, carry gruesome video recordings of patients on their mobile phones: hollow skulls ripped open and emptied by the impact of high-calibre rifle shots, bloodied limbs, and puncture wounds, mementos of their participation in this low-intensity, undeclared war.

"You end up with psychological trauma because of this," Soares admitted.

"We always have to expect bullet-wound victims here," said Dr Pedro Worms, a 33-year-old chest surgeon at the Getulio Vargas hospital as he waited for the latest victims in the hospital's Trauma room known as the Red Room'. "Today, thank God, I haven't heard anything but it is only a question of time."

Next door, in the hospital's observation room, Marilton de Assis, a 19-year-old motorbike taxi driver from a local shantytown, sat fiddling with a Bible. Two weeks ago his left thigh had been shattered by a rifle shot during a shootout between traffickers and police. A metal bar protruded from his swollen leg inches below a filthy white nappy, which doctors had wrapped around his groin.

The wave of homicides in Latin America has spawned an avalanche of often-quirky anti-violence initiatives across the continent, including blogs, street protests, alcohol bans, gun amnesties and even works of art made from decommissioned weapons that are aimed at raising awareness.

In 2006 anti-violence campaigners in El Salvador set up a blog named 100 Days In The Republic Of Death, which gives a day-by-day account of 100 days of carnage, with photos of victims.

Since May 2007 activists in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco have monitored the death toll on a website, based on the US Iraq Body Count, called Pernambuco Body Count.

Brazil's Globo newspaper recently began publishing a daily column called The Face Of Death, which lists the previous day's victims, while next month Brazilian human rights activists and celebrities will stage a mock trial at which government authorities and members of the police will be "prosecuted" for their roles in the violence.

Pereira's town hall, meanwhile, has gone even further, trying to encourage the city's gunmen to surrender their weapons by enlisting their girlfriends in a sex strike. Their idea was: No cease-fire, no sex.

Analysts say there is some light at the end of the tunnel for Latin American countries with some of the world's highest murder rates. Recent years have seen a modest drop in murder rates in both Brazil and Colombia, the result, authorities say, of pioneering policing projects and amnesties on weapons. In Sao Paulo, South America's largest city, the homicide rate fell from 36 per 100,000 people in 1999 to 11.6 per 100,000 in 2007, according to local authorities.

But with drug use on the rise and the streets still awash with weapons, the bodies continue to pile up in mortuaries and on street corners across the continent.

It was 4pm and under a viaduct in Pereira's grimy city centre hundreds of shoppers squabbled for a better view of the city's latest homicide; a limp corpse, a crimson puddle and a handful of spent cartridges scatted on the ground. During the four days the Sunday Herald spent in Pereira at least nine people met violent deaths: shot, stabbed or bludgeoned to death by members of rival gangs.

"It is intolerance," deadpanned police chief Colonel Ignacio Farjado, standing metres from the motionless body. "Every city in the world has these problems."

The scene in itself was nothing new to the curious bystanders, used to the sight of death on their streets. But one detail caught everybody's attention. Wrapped in a pair of white socks, the teenage victim's feet poked out awkwardly from the hems of his jeans. Just minutes after he was executed in this busy downtown thoroughfare, somebody had stolen his shoes.