A Colombian cartel, a brutal murder, and the fighter who won't let himself forget

Elder Ramos

In the last hour before the fight starts, Elder Ramos travels back in time.

He does this before every fight, just as he’ll do it before his fight Saturday against fellow welterweight Derrick Kennington at a Glory Fights event in Annandale, Va.

He’s done it since he was in middle school, wrestling strange kids in a strange land as people shouted instructions in a language he didn’t understand. Maybe he can’t not do it, whether it helps him or not.

In that time-traveling hour Ramos is a boy again, back in Colombia. He’s playing soccer out in the yard when he hears the sound of a truck winding its way down the hill toward the home he shares with his mother, his three sisters, and his three older brothers. As the truck gets closer, he can hear people screaming.

“The truck came around the corner and stopped just like it was a taxi or something, dropping someone off,” Ramos told MMAjunkie. “They got out and cut a rope off the back of the car, and you could see a trash bag over someone’s face. All you could see was the rope, the trash bag, and the body. I recognized it was my brother right away because of the jersey.”

The soccer jersey on his brother’s body was the same one that Ramos, a self-described “annoying kid,” used to love to borrow – or, OK, steal, if you want to get technical about it – when his brother wasn’t looking. He’d get yelled at, sure, but it was worth it.

Ramos idolized his older brothers. Maybe he idolized them even more when he got old enough to realize what they really did for money, how they worked for the Cali Cartel, doing their small part in the country’s enormous and notoriously violent drug trade.

Ramos was just a kid then, easing into his unsteady teenage years. His only goal in life was to be just like his brothers.

“I remember one of my brothers telling me, ‘You want to be just like me? Well, I’m the mirror of your future,’” Ramos said. “I remember that conversation like it was yesterday. Within two years of that, they were all three dead.”

It was then that Ramos’ mother made a difficult decision. If Elder stayed in Cali, she knew where he’d end up. She sent him to the United States to live with his father, a man he’d never met, a man who’d left the family and moved to Virginia when Ramos was still an infant. Ramos was 14, didn’t speak a word of English, and had never been outside Colombia. His whole life was about to change, whether he liked it or not.

For the first couple weeks, life in the U.S. with his father was almost fun, like a vacation. Ramos knew nothing about this new country or its culture, but there was some element of adventure to it all.

“After that I wanted to go home and see my mom,” Ramos said.

His father wasn’t an easy man to live with. They were strangers to one another, he and Elder, and his father was a strict man who insisted on a level of respect that he hadn’t earned, at least in the eyes of the son who’d grown up without him.

“I didn’t even meet him until I was 14,” Ramos said. “I didn’t know the guy. I knew his name, but couldn’t tell you his favorite food, his favorite color, nothing.”

Elder Ramos

They argued often, and Ramos didn’t hide his desire to go home to Colombia. The way his father explained it, there were only two ways that could happen. The first involved Ramos using the money he didn’t have to buy a plane ticket he didn’t even know how to acquire. The other involved him getting himself into enough trouble to get deported.

“I thought, ‘That sounds easy,’” Ramos said. “I knew how to get in trouble.”

School provided the perfect opportunity. For a few weeks, kids had been calling him a spic. At first Ramos had no idea what the word meant, and they said it in such a friendly way – ‘Hey, spic! What are you up to, spic?’ – so as to mock his non-existent English. Then a classmate who spoke Spanish explained it to him. Here, Ramos figured, was his ticket home.

He made his move in P.E. class. He grabbed one of the kids, picked him up and slammed him, got on top and started pummeling him until the P.E. teacher pulled him off. As Ramos waited to hear when he’d be shipped home to Colombia, the P.E. teacher, who also happened to be the school’s wrestling coach, offered him a choice between two punishments.

“He said I could either go out for the wrestling team, or I could be suspended,” Ramos said. “I didn’t know what wrestling was and I didn’t know what suspended meant. My friend told me that suspended meant you went home for five days. The way I looked at it was, I’ll be home with my dad for five days. I didn’t want to do that.”

This is how Ramos ended up on the wrestling mats, despite the fact that he had no idea how the sport worked or even what the rules were. He lost a lot of matches via disqualification that year. He punched opponents, even broke one kid’s nose. By the end of the season, he finally started to figure it out. The next year he was team captain.

Somewhere in here is where he first developed his unique pre-match visualization process, the one that takes him all the way back to Colombia, to the day the truck pulled up dragging his brother’s body behind it.

“When I would wrestle, all through high school and college, I would get ready by telling myself that the guy I’m going to wrestle is the guy who killed my brothers,” Ramos said. “This guy killed my brother. Now he’s going to go against me. That’s how I get ready for my fights now. I sit there and warm-up mentally for about an hour, telling myself, ‘He killed my brother.’ So when it’s time for me to get in the cage, I’m completely gone. I’ve been doing the same thing since middle school. I try to visualize the guy that I saw that day. I wish I could have done more, could have done something, when I was there. But I couldn’t.”

You could almost call it a form of therapy, even if Ramos can’t say if that’s why he does it. You could also call it unconventional motivation, but then, he’s not even sure he needs that to get excited about fighting. It’s his passion. It has been ever since he discovered wrestling.

“Wrestling basically changed my life,” Ramos said. “I used it as an outlet. I didn’t want to be at home, because my dad and I would fight all the time. Staying home was not an option for me. But after wrestling, by the time I got home I was so tired from practice that I couldn’t really fight with him. It really allowed me to express my feelings. I could go out there and be rough, be aggressive.”

That outlet eventually led to a college scholarship to George Mason University, but that turned out to be a step Ramos wasn’t ready for at the time. He was still relatively new to this country, still working on his second language, and being too close to home in Virginia allowed him to get drawn back into some of the same unhelpful social circles he’d gravitated toward in high school. He wound up on academic probation, and after a brief stint at the University of Kentucky, he dropped out and moved back to Virginia to work full-time and raise a family.

Elder Ramos

These days Ramos has a wife and kids, a business pouring concrete, and he’s even back taking college courses. He’s also still fighting full-time, turning what started as a hobby to aid him in the wrestling off-season into a force that guides his life.

Where will it lead him? That part’s tough to say. He just turned 30. He has bills to pay and a family to look after, both here in the U.S. and back in Colombia, where he still sends money to his mother and his nephew, the child of one of his slain brothers.

He’s been offered one-off fights by Bellator, he said, but he’s “not interested in being somebody’s stepping stone.”

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” Ramos said. “But I love to fight. I really do.”

When each fight is over and his time-traveling routine is complete, even Ramos can’t say if it’s helped him to go back to where he was that day in Colombia, when he was just a boy.

If nothing else, it keeps him from forgetting. It keeps that day locked in a special room of his mind, to be accessed when he needs it. It helps him remember where he started, and, in a strange way, how lucky he’s been along the way.

“My brothers, they were doing the wrong things, getting involved with the cartel, with drugs,” Ramos said. “But they tried as best they could to keep me away from it. I’m a believer that everything happens for a reason in life. Not that it was good that they passed away, but something drastic like that had to happen for me to change my life. Otherwise I’d be right there with them in Colombia. I’d probably be dead by now.”