Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (18 page)

The Cuban Revolution was still ten years away, and for the younger generation socialism was becoming a more and more attractive alternative to what they viewed as their continent’s increasingly anachronistic realities. Many thought that perhaps some sort of revolution was inevitable; the idea that the state would remain under the sole control of the most backward Latin American landowning families was not only undesirable, but also, they reasoned, unlikely.

What was particularly unique about April 1948, as described by Mark Bowden in his book
Killing Pablo
, was that it was the month of a historic summit. All the foreign ministers of the North and South American countries met in the Colombian capital to form the Organization of American States, the OAS, a United States–sponsored pan-American collaboration project. The official objective of the organisation was to give South and Central American governments a bigger voice, but an equally important goal was to fight communism, a lightning-rod topic that for these few days transformed the city of Bogotá into a hotbed of all sorts of political debates. Confrontations broke out between institutionalised establishments and young revolutionaries, similar to the protests that would occur 50 years later at economic summit meetings in cities such as Seattle, Prague, Genoa, and Gothenburg. Thousands of critics of imperialism — one of them a 21-year-old student called Fidel Castro and another a 20-year-old freelance writer called Gabriel García Márquez — marched on the streets, organised protests, and held public meetings in which they blasted the OAS as a tragic tool invented by Uncle Sam to promote capitalism. The day before the conference a furious mob attacked the Ecuadorian delegation; 24 hours later, newspaper headlines sounded alarms about ‘terrorists’ after the police arrested someone in the process of priming a bomb; and not long after that, soldiers, members of the police force, and angry demonstrators began to flood the streets.

With all these new political tensions as a backdrop, Colombian politics had also started to change. The Liberal Party — the leftist party of the day, bolstered by urbanisation and industrialisation — had elected a new radical leader, who would soon go down in history as one of Latin America’s most beloved: Jorge Eli
é
cer Gaitán. For the first time Colombia had a politician who had managed to rouse the urban working classes as well as the traditionally ignored peasant population (most of whom were practically serfs). All opinion polls for the upcoming 1950 presidential election predicted victory for Gaitán, a 49-year-old attorney. During the OAS conference he happily took his place in the revolutionary drama, fervently criticising the new organisation and addressing the people in the streets. Gaitán used his great oratory talents to speak out against the Colombian landowning elite and against capitalism like no one had ever done before. The CIA, as Bowden notes, later called him ‘a staunch antagonist of the oligarchical rule and a spellbinding orator’.

The young Castro, already self-assured, requested a meeting with Gaitán to discuss politics, the future, and the possibility of a new Latin America. Around midday on 9 April, just two hours before the scheduled meeting with Castro, Gaitán and a group of people left his office on Seventh Avenue in Bogotá, the scene where most of the day’s violence would later unfold, to go to lunch. Not long after setting off they encountered a dishevelled man, who let them pass but then suddenly turned around and, revolver in hand, ran right into the middle of the group and fired. He did not say a word. Gaitán quickly broke away in an attempt to seek refuge in a nearby building but failed, and soon it was too late: the new hope of the Colombian left had been shot multiple times through the head and chest. He was dead before 2.00 p.m.

The crowd that witnessed the incident lynched Juan Roa Sierra, Gaitán’s assassin, on the spot and dragged his corpse up and down the street until his limbs fell off. Theories about who else was behind the assassination weren’t in short supply, and soon came to include every entity imaginable, from the CIA to hot-headed communists — who perhaps saw the postponement of an inevitable revolution had Gaitán’s reformism reached the presidential palace
.
A theory with more credentials is that right-wing extremists from the conservative party paid Roa Sierra to carry out the deed.

Murder mysteries in Colombia are rarely solved, and the events of 9 April 1948 remain an open wound that has continued to generate sadness and anger in the soul of the country. But more than anything else, the violence lingers. During that morbid afternoon it was not only Gaitán and his assassin who died, but also all hope for a peaceful future. Since that day in the late 1940s the traumatic cycle has taken place at intervals: a new, popular politician with a social agenda suddenly rises to prominence, only to be murdered.

Gaitán’s assassination ushered in the most violent decade in one of the most violent countries in the world. Dreams of happy and prosperous times ahead were dashed, and the massive rioting that ensued in Bogotá after Gaitán’s death — some of the worst in recorded history — is referred to as El Bogotazo. The wave of violence that followed, as later meticulously described by Colombian writers Arturo A
lape
and Orlando Fals Borda, was so devastating that even those who had been involved in it were shocked. President Mariano Ospina called for military action — but when troops fired shots into the crowds rather than at individual rioters, they only made matters worse. It was not long before violence spread to other parts of the country, and soon Colombia entered into a brutal ten-year period in which more than 200,000 people were murdered, a period that soon came to be known simply as La Violencia.

Gaitán’s assassination led to antagonism and fighting between interest groups across the nation, culminating in a furious war, with everyone against everyone else — the military against the peasant rebels, big corporations against labour unions, the government against the opposition, and conservative Catholics against liberal atheists. Killing became a morbid form of art, a ritual. The Catholic Church, which played a key role in the aestheticisation of violence, used its authority and influence to spread the idea that liberalism was extremely dangerous, not only because it would lead to political reform but also because it would end in widespread atheism and the dissolution of social norms. Liberals were viewed as ideologically contagious, and killing became an absurd way to deal with the blasphemous plague. Children were murdered slowly in front of their parents, men’s testicles were cut off and shoved into their mouths, and women were raped and killed, after which their stomachs were cut out and pulled over their heads. Such methods — soon copied by all parties — took on different connotations and became a sort of signature for various groups. One of the many grisly killing procedures entailed cutting the throat of a victim and pulling the tongue out through the opening, leaving the mutilated body with a ‘necktie’.

It was in this environment that the two phenomena were born which would play the most decisive role in the fate of modern Colombia: Pablo Escobar and the FARC. During the Violencia era the conservatives set the military on anything that smacked of progressive liberalism or communism. Later, however, the elites in the two dominant parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, realised that the outrage this was causing could potentially lead to a popular uprising among the nation’s poor majority. Consequently, the military seized power in 1953, and in 1957 the two parties entered into a treaty, establishing the National Front. With this pact the two groups agreed to share power by alternating the presidency and allocating an even number of government mandates between them. The Front was necessary, temporarily at least, to subdue the violence, but it soon became a permanent fixture, which in practice meant that all opposition became illegal. It remained in effect until 1974 — the height of the marijuana bonanza — when the parties re-instituted the democratic system in which candidates campaigned in open elections.

During these years of violence the army was also waging war against small, isolated peasant communities in Central Colombia, who were demanding social and economic reform. As time went on, the people in these peasant communities — under the guidance of men such as Pedro Antonio Marín, later known as Manuel Marulanda or Tirofijo — took up arms in an effort to defend themselves against military attacks and to declare their status as independent republics. The government, using Cold War logic and supported by the United States, responded with renewed military campaigns, which caused many of the peasants and their leaders living in the ‘republics’ to flee the central mountains and establish new communities elsewhere, mainly in the southeast valleys close to the Amazon. Sixteen years after Gaitán’s assassination, in 1964, these peasant movements evolved into the FARC. Half a century later, this guerrilla group, the oldest in Latin America, still controls vast parts of rural Colombia.

But things changed over time in regard to strength and values: if the FARC in the 1960s was a weak military movement whose political objectives garnered strong support, today the FARC is, in contrast, a military machine whose political ideas are vague and whose practices are supported by virtually no one. Over the years, the guerrillas became dependent on the Soviet Union, and when support from the Eastern Bloc began to dissipate, the FARC, a self-identified party of war, became heavily involved in just about any sort of activity that could help it to generate the resources needed, activities that included kidnapping — but, most of all, producing cocaine.

VIRGINIA VALLEJO AND
Pablo Escobar became a couple in 1982, the year they met, and their relationship lasted until 1987. She helped him to further his political agenda, and in April 1983 Escobar celebrated with champagne after Colombia’s leading weekly newspaper featured a story that portrayed him as ‘the Robin Hood of Medellín’.

Vallejo was Escobar’s mistress during the period in which he was transformed from a mere local politician to the most notorious terrorist in the world. And, in the beginning, she loved him. Like everyone else who fell under Escobar’s spell, she enjoyed his sense of humour and his sheer wildness. (Years later, once thousands of people had been killed and all of Medellín had been besieged by the American and Colombian militaries in pursuit of ‘the most dangerous man in the world’, Escobar’s calmness and sense of humour were intact. In the very last interview before his death, when asked by Colombian journalist Germán Castro Caycedo if he thought he was ‘bigger’ than Al Capone, he responded: ‘I am not very big, but if I recall correctly, Al Capone was five centimetres shorter than me.’)

When he was young, Escobar and his friends used to occupy themselves by emptying Marlboros of their tobacco, refilling them with high-calibre marijuana and selling them to unsuspecting customers on the street. They would follow them around until the innocent victims succumbed to hallucinations, causing the boys to double over laughing; this was the sort of thing he found amusing.

In the 1960s, when both he and Virginia were teenagers, the country was still reeling from the aftershock of La Violencia, and the Church’s hypocriscy regarding values, such as the sanctity of life, was getting more and more obvious to a new generation. One day it was morally sanctionable to kill, the next day it was the worst sin. Life, many young people concluded, seemed absurd. This quite rational rejection of rationality would later not only be integral to Nobel Prize–winning literature, but would also contribute to the fact that the very concept of reason later developed into somewhat of a national joke; people who expected or attempted to determine the outcome to anything by using logic or rationality always seemed to end up losing in Colombia.

In Medellín, the apparent absurdity of life and a seemingly wildly changeable system of values gave rise to a subculture known as Nadaismo, ‘nothing-ism’ — the Colombian answer to the Beat generation in the United States
—
and to the chagrin of his God-fearing mother, Pablo became one of the movement’s most active members. Nadaist doctrine was based on the books
The Right Not to Obey
by philosopher Fernando Gonzáles and
The First Manifesto of Nadaismo
by thinker Gonzalo Arango; both men were from the province of Antioquia, of which Medellín is the capital. The credo of the movement was a sort of irrationality of contrasts that vacillated wildly between pronounced atheism and profound spirituality, and in whose cultural practice the term
locura
— madness — was central. Nadaists were leftists, oppositional, and dirty, and did everything they could to shake up the establishment. But most of all, they smoked dope.

One night the year after Virginia and Pablo had met, Nadaismo by then a thing of the past, the two sat down with some men in one of the open bars in Hacienda Nápoles, where a gentle breeze offered some relief from the heat. It was a special gathering. Pablo had brought together those men who, in 1983, were Colombia’s foremost mafiosi. They were all impressed when he introduced his new companion.

‘Virginia, this is Gonzalo, a loyal
compañero
who loves food and enjoys the best things life has to offer.’

As Alonso Salázar relates in his biography of Escobar, in front of her sat a man who seemed to be trying to conceal his hick background by forcing his most noticeable attribute onto the group without realising that it was having the reverse effect. Wearing a sombrero decorated with a gaping snakehead and rooster-feather tassels — with a little horseshoe stamped on the right side as a good-luck charm — he scoured the scene with an uncertain gaze and uttered some words in a strange dialect. A thick silver chain with a medallion in the shape of Christ hung around his neck, and his wrists and hands were adorned with bracelets and a ring set with a giant emerald. But what set him apart from the others most was his bad breath.