Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (10 page)

This is Putumayo, the epicentre of the shady side of contemporary cocaine history. The remote province, which until the 1980s was an almost entirely uninhabited jungle region, attracted residents thanks to the coca boom; but during the first decade of the 2000s it became the foremost military target of the US-led war on drugs. In the years prior the new millennium nearly half of all the coca plantations in the country were here, which explains why the province became a strategic target for the largest-ever coca-eradication campaign: Plan Colombia, a US-led attempt to eliminate all coca plantations in Putumayo within a five-year period through herbicide spraying.

BANANA LEAVES ARE
brushing against the tin roof of the lab when Ester, a slight woman in large boots, comes up lugging a huge sack — about 20 kilos, she guesses. She is the fifth person so far who has come to sell coca leaves to Edgar. He takes it, weighs it, and promises to pay her once he has sold the paste.

The green leaves rustle like dollars bills as he pours the contents of her sack out onto the wooden floor. Eight years ago, when the American and Colombian armies began herbicide spraying in Putumayo, he and the others signed a contract promising to give up growing coca. But contracts, agreements, forms, and signatures are every bit as watertight for the bureaucrats in the capital city as they are vague concepts for the illiterate farmers whose lives are caught up in an economy founded on nothing but loyalty to whoever happens to have the weapons at any given time. Edgar and his family — his wife Nelcy and their four children — sold a bull in 2007 so that they could invest in the DMG, a money-laundering pyramid scheme that was enormously popular at the time, causing quite a stir in the district for several years before collapsing. Everyone lost money. So now they consider it God’s blessing that they can grow the only crop that can make up for the loss and turn a quick profit.

The physical consequences of the worldwide demand for cocaine are felt all the way down to the bottom of the cocaine hierarchy. There is barely enough time to produce a few kilos of cocaine paste before the global drug trade swoops down over the Andean countryside like an octopus, with its ominous, illegal tentacles sucking up the fruit of the farmers’ labour in exchange for little but fast cash.

Edgar starts up his shearing machine again. ‘
Es lo mismo acá
. Coca is synonymous with money here.’

His story, like the whole region’s, is a circular chronicle reflecting both the successes and failures associated with the war on drugs, and it shows just how integrated cocaine production has become with other, more general problems plaguing Colombia today: rural poverty, armed conflict, absence of government, and most importantly, coca as an ‘economic mattress’.

In the 1980s Colombia was where cocaine was refined from the coca paste imported from Bolivia and Peru. But by the 1990s, after eradication campaigns had taken effect in those countries, the number of plantations in Colombia increased rapidly. The ‘balloon effect’ — as long as there is demand, you can put the squeeze on any region because there will always be new ones — gave birth to new cultivation regions, such as
Putumayo, a jungle area where a waning oil boom had suddenly left workers unemployed and unable to provide for their families.

During the oil boom, foreign companies had made all the oil profits
—
with support from the Colombian government
—
and when it was over they pulled out without having made any lasting social investment. It was a well-known socioeconomic pattern: the resource was gone and the people living there were left destitute. The state, which had had very little legitimacy even before this happened, now had none at all, and the guerrillas had no trouble positioning themselves as a more credible authority in the region by offering protection for the desperate inhabitants in their newfound livelihood: coca farming.

A rumour, that there was white gold to be found along the banks of the rivers marking the border to Ecuador, spread like wildfire to the neighbouring provinces, and in just 15 years the population of Putumayo tripled. Nelcy, Edgar’s wife, originally hails from the neighbouring province of
Nariño,
like most other inhabitants of the region
.
But there were no jobs at home, so in 1997 she and her oldest daughters became economic refugees in Putumayo, where they could
raspar
, pick coca leaves, to get by. Edgar is also from
Nariño; he came here in 1996, with his brother and some friends. Before meeting Nelcy he also worked as a leaf-picker, but after the two joined forces they were able to purchase a couple hectares and start to cultivate for themselves. They soon had two children.

Ester’s route to Putumayo was different, but no less typical. She and her six children immigrated from Huila, a province in the central mountain region, to southern Putumayo during the coca boom. Like other settlers, the family made their home deep in the jungle; however, when the oldest son turned 18 he was drafted into the army, a process that dragged the family into one of most classic recurrent problems
plaguing
rural Colombia. In the late 1990s Putumayo was under the control of the FARC, which made every family that ‘cooperated’ with the military a legitimate target for the guerrillas.
Thousands of families in Colombia have seen loved ones punished, often murdered, by the rebels for this reason, and now it was Ester’s family’s turn. In what was almost a routine move for the guerrillas, the son who went off to serve in the armed forces was labelled a
sapo
— a snitch, an informant — and told that if he did not opt to return home immediately to join the guerrillas instead, his family would be murdered within 24 hours. Ester took the remaining children and they all managed to escape with the clothes on their backs, having to leave everything else behind: the house and land, animals, furniture, and toys. But she did not have the means to get very far; just to another corner of Putumayo, where they moved next door to Edgar and his family and were once again able to carry on doing the only thing they knew how: growing coca.

José, a man who has come to give Edgar a hand, arrived in 1981 and is now part of the whole mythical history surrounding Putumayo and the green gold.
As early as 1952 author William S. Burroughs, then in Putumayo in search of
yajé
— one of the Beat generation’s psychoactive favorites — pointed out the eternal curse of the region in a letter to Allen Ginsberg. ‘As a matter of fact,’ Burroughs wrote in an attempt to describe the situation of a few farmers, the land in the Putumayo region ‘is poor and there is no way to get produce out’.
José arrived here as a young settler, and says it was the very shortage of roads that determined how things turned out around here. When the farmers did successfully manage to produce a modest surplus of bananas, yuccas, corn, and other things, it just lay there and rotted, as there was no way for them to get the products out to customers. And since then, the combination of poor soil and lack of markets has come to characterise every geographical area of strategic interest to those in the cocaine industry.

In the late 1970s, just as the marijuana boom was winding down and coca was taking off, settlers from the north came and introduced the wondrous crop that solved all problems at once: coca grows well in poor soil, yields four harvests a year, and most importantly, has a market in which the dealers will come right to the door to collect the product. It was not even necessary for the farmers to purchase seeds; they were simply given to them by these passing benefactors. In the desperate years, i
t was as if God had answered their prayers.

Shortly thereafter, life in Putumayo was turned upside down. Money literally started pouring in. The enormous value placed on cocaine in recently globalised metropolitan areas had extreme consequences, of course, for the poor farmers’ understanding of the raw material, the leaves they were wading around in. Money generated from coca farming opened the floodgates for capital and for consumer goods, the likes of which none of the destitute inhabitants in the district had ever seen before.
According to Swedish anthropologist Oscar Jansson, author of
The Cursed Leaf
, for the farmers it was as if dollar bills — or clothes, watches, tools, motorcycles, beer, television sets, alcohol, parties, music, and sheer joy — were growing on the very branches of their coca bushes:

It was as though nature itself had offered them a magical pimp between their desire and the very object of their desire. The leaf was
green gold
, and coca paste was
white gold
. To those poor tropical pioneers who had colonized Putumayo in search of a plot of land, it was a gift from heaven — they rejoiced in exploiting it.

But all good things come to an end. Putumayo had experienced what scholars call a ‘cosmetic modernisation’ under the thumb of international organised crime, and by the late 1980s the effects of the hangover were already being felt. It was not just that people became greedy and began to obtain firearms to protect their stashes of money, or that the habit of smoking coca paste,
basuco
, had spread to the farmers; it was mostly due to the inevitable arrival of violence. From 1987 on, Putumayo was the textbook example of the contemporary Colombian conflict, which later spread like a poisonous disease throughout the rest of the country. But now, unlike in the past, everything revolved around cocaine. The illegal nature of the narcotics industry makes it dependent on the backing of some kind of private violent instrument of enforcement. The forms of this arrangement may vary from country to country, but in Colombia the drug mafia was able to grow freely without obstruction. And soon they became the primary driving force behind the corruption of national institutions and political systems.

When police attacked the plantations belonging to the
Medellín
Cartel in the central Magdalena Valley in 1987, the group began setting up new regions for cultivation in remote Putumayo and they paid their leaf-pickers in coca paste. Not far from where Edgar lives today, the cartel built the notorious El Azul, a giant lab where paste from the district and that flown in from Peru and Bolivia was refined into a tonne of high-quality cocaine every week. However, it was only a matter of months before the FARC, who had territorial control, began placing demands on these activities, and after a while the cartel started to receive armed protection on the basis of conditions set by the guerrillas: that the drug lords respect the FARC’s monopoly on the right to bear arms in the area, that they pay an agreed ‘tax’ to the guerrillas, and that they not pay the lab workers in coca paste. The latter condition was greatly appreciated by the people of the region, as many families had seen their relatives fall prey to the paste.

The agreement was honoured for a while, but soon the laws of capitalism trumped local arrangements. The men of the
Medellín Cartel — Pablo Escobar, José Rodríguez
Gacha
, Fabio Ochoa, and Carlos Lehder — increasingly began to look upon the
FARC
as
financial parasites; the guerrillas imposed ‘taxes’ on exports, which quickly rose in proportion to revenues. Despite their already enormous earnings, the cartel felt that the amount of money going to the guerrillas was excessive, and the drug lords wanted to drive down the costs.
Some of Gacha’s paramilitary groups in Magdalena Medio were moved down to Putumayo, and it was here in 1988 that the Colombian mafia’s long tradition of anti-guerrilla warfare began. Escobar’s at that time well-known flirtations with the left, as well as with various guerrilla groups, were now definitely over.
Los Masetos and Los Combos, the cartel’s private armies, began killing off FARC men, and it was not long before Putumayo was an ever-expanding war zone.

While the FARC were certainly leeches, sucking the blood out of a lucrative but illegal financial endeavour, the private armies strictly protected the owners’ profit interests. A classic Marxist conflict consequently took root in the narcotics-driven war in Colombia, and to this day it continues to play a crucial role in the understanding of what is happening and why it never ends. The guerrillas not only took payment in order to be able to buy arms, but also, more or less, raised costs by playing the roles of both the trade union, attempting to negotiate the workers’ conditions, and of the state, investing in infrastructure, while the function of paramilitary groups was and continues to be the opposite: to eliminate everything that drives up production costs.
This tension between labour and capital, going back to pioneer days in Putumayo, has intensified over the years and today continues to play a significant role in the dynamics of relations between the drug mafia, the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, and the coca farmers.

In the 1990s the FARC finally fought back with a vengeance when it instigated a violent attack against the Los Masetos camp in El Azul, leaving 77 paramilitaries dead. As a result the guerrillas regained control of the area, and yet another tragic tradition was spawned and later integrated into the dynamics of Colombian violence: the FARC’s strategic games with the civilian population, often coca farmers, in the circles of war.
From this point, one of the guerrillas’ most common tactics became forcing the farmers, usually at gunpoint, to participate in various demonstrations against the central government
—
supposedly under the banner of ‘social justice’
,
when it was actually about defending ‘the right to grow coca’.
The
Medellín Cartel lost control over Putumayo, and the more coca was cultivated, the better it was for the FARC, for two reasons: first, the ‘taxes’ they now charged the farmers helped to strengthen the movement monetarily and militarily; and second, expansion in coca cultivation showed that the government was losing control of the nation — which is what the guerrillas always have to demonstrate to reinforce their own legitimacy.