Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (2 page)

WHAT THESE ANECDOTES
illustrate is that every story about Colombia — and especially about cocaine — is complex or multifaceted. Just when you think an issue has been resolved, a more sophisticated layer emerges. And this continues until everything is so vague and all those involved seem so evasive that the only clear fact is that nothing is as it seems to be.

More than two decades have passed since that cold evening of Galán’s assassination, and it is with mixed emotions I now present a book that’s a bit of a failure. More than a decade ago I promised myself I’d one day write a book on Colombia in which the words ‘cocaine’ and ‘violence’ would be absent. This truly unique place is not just one of the most notorious countries in the world; it is also one of the most beautiful. My love of Colombians and the country’s stunning cultural richness has grown every year since my first trip in 1989, and this passion made me want to write a book about the
other
Colombia. I felt the country deserved it. Of course, it would not be a superficial work that avoided the social and political problems, but rather one that focused on tales other than the same old stories of Colombia as a place of drugs and violence, and nothing more.

In February 2007 I received a grant that made it possible for me to move to Bogotá and start this project. I began to compile amazing stories of Colombian adventures: such as the story of revolutionary newborn Julio, adopted by a Swedish couple, who searched high and low for his family roots on the outskirts of Cali; the tale of the historic city of Cartagena, and its metamorphosis from a dreary port to a hotspot perfectly designed to cater for all of the new global elite’s preferences; the account of young pregnant guerrilla fighter Andrea, and her desperate attempts to keep her baby despite the guerrillas’ instructions to abort it; and the story of beauty queen Ximena and her unsuccessful attempts to become the first Miss Colombia not to have had plastic surgery.

The problem with this project, though, was that while the stories were certainly fascinating, it seemed that no matter where I turned, what I did, or which story I stumbled upon, everything always seemed to lead back to one thing. There was no way of getting around it: the presence of cocaine in modern Colombia was simply far too pervasive to be ignored, at least by a journalist whose main interest is politics. Histories and accounts of Cali, Cartagena, the guerrillas, and the beauty industry, like most issues in the nation, were too interwoven with the cocaine industry and its influence on all aspects of Colombian society to dismiss. Cocaine takes precedence over everything. And it links most things together.

So I soon realised it was essential to revise the project. I decided that the work, contrary to my original intention, must centre on cocaine, its history, and its consequences. I abandoned my first idea and have consequently written a book exclusively about Colombia and cocaine. In many ways it is a tragic turn of events — though I think an inevitable one.

THE PURPOSE OF
this work is not, as some might expect, to offer a solution to the problems surrounding the cocaine industry, but instead to describe these problems. Rather than providing answers as to how all drug-related misery could be eliminated — if such a thing were even possible — my goal is to expose a highly complex global problem at the ground level: to offer detailed accounts, in-depth experiences, and rarely heard opinions from the country that has suffered more than any other as a result of the worldwide cocaine boom and the related war on drugs.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to see cocaine for sale at local supermarkets, but I wouldn’t want to live in a completely drug-free society either. It is my hope that this book will interest as well as provoke those who love drugs, those who hate them, and all in between.

The question that occurred to me in the taxi on that cold night of Galán’s murder — What is Colombia? — would compel me to live a quarter of my adult life in Bogotá. But it was only later I realised that being in Bogotá on that fateful evening meant I had ended up in the centre of a worldwide political drama; that cocaine was the very essence of a number of contemporary global conflicts and debates, a sort of surface-level descriptor of serious problems that would characterise the relationship between rich and poor continents in the years to come: the marginalisation of third-world farmers by free-market economics, the United States’ need to find a new menace in the post-Soviet era, the resurgence of populism in Latin America, postmodern society’s desperate effort to fill the existential gap left by the death of God, and so on.

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of exactly what happened in the span of those 20 years, between 1989 and 2009. Using Colombia’s troubling experience as a prism, but hopefully without further vic
timising the country or its inhabitants, I have tried to point out some truly global stories about power and poverty in today’s world. I hope, of course, that the reader will find food for thought in them.

COCATURISMO

Medellín as heaven

‘I don’t take insults from anyone.

Everyone who has called me gay is dead, except my mother.’

—
ALONSO, HIT MAN

AMONG A SEA
of dancers Håkan, a young Swedish guy, towers over everyone else. After sticking his key in the three-gram bag he is holding and digging around a bit, he pulls up a small mound of snow-white powder that he holds up to his girlfriend, who snorts it with a quick
nschh
.

‘Clubbing here is just a
liiiiiiittle
bit better than at home.’ He licks off the powder that is stuck in the steel grooves of the key, paying no mind to the policemen, who have taken bribes in exchange for turning a blind eye to the goings-on inside the club. It is 4.00 a.m., and before the cocaine has even had time to kick in Håkan places a pill on his middle finger and shoves it into his girlfriend’s mouth, his arm outstretched. She swallows it with a gulp, licking his hand playfully in the process.

‘I love Colombian women. They’re real women. So fucking female.’

She is barely half his height and tries clinging to his neck, but he keeps pushing her off; he isn’t in the mood to make out. Eventually he grabs her behind, lifts her up off the floor, and sticks his tongue in her ear.

The club is in a hexagonal building in an industrial district. The pounding bass fills the room, where hundreds of dancers wearing sunglasses stomp away in the dark. ‘Alexi Delano deejayed here a while ago,’ Håkan says. ‘It was the best party I’ve been to. It was absolutely incredible. He’s Swedish, too.’

Swedish. He could just as well have been German, American, British, or Spanish. In fact, he could have been from almost any wealthy Western nation, for Håkan is just one of thousands in the latest crop of young globetrotters making their way to Medellín, the new mecca of drug tourism. The city that in the 1990s was known as ‘the murder capital of the world’ has since been transformed into an urban paradise where the sky’s the limit — at least, for those who have the money.

In El Poblado, an area of Medellín filled with tranquil shopping malls, sushi bars, and internet cafes, a new hostel has opened every other month for the last year. Economic globalisation has transformed the traditional backpacker into the flashpacker: a well-to-do traveller seeking a combination of comfort and adventure, reflecting the trend in tourism whereby travellers are more interested in themselves than in tourist attractions. For today’s young travellers,
seeing
the Amazon or Patagonia is nowhere near as thrilling as
doing
Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, or Medellín. Publishing powerhouses such as Lonely Planet now have more city guides than travel guides, as most traditional destinations have become so mainstream and consumerised that the so-called undiscovered places have to be sold in order to keep the money carousel going. Hanging out in, as opposed to visiting, the Third World is the new thing to do.

All this factors into the appeal and sudden success of Medellín. The city not only has superficial attributes and attractions — a perfect climate, good shopping, wild clubs, and hip people, all conveniently kept separate from violent gangs — but what makes Medellín truly special, and so attractive to the new travelling avant-garde, is something best described as an electrical charge in the air. A myth. In contrast to the tired old nostalgic stories of tango in Buenos Aires, of beaches in Rio de Janeiro, or of the revolution in Havana, Medellín has a more titillating product that, carefully packaged, can be sold with a great deal of success: cocaine. But cocaine packaged in such a way that the actual powder is just one aspect of the experience.

Today, ‘flashpacker’ is an established term within the travel industry and an important demographic for hostel operators in many of the world’s poorest nations. Those who run the hostels are often former backpackers themselves, mainly from the United States or Europe, and they know perfectly well that what today’s travellers are seeking is not just high-calibre drugs at bargain prices, but also something that can add a bit of cultural cred to the experience. Consequently, experiences such as the Pablo Escobar tour — a guided excursion offering travellers a peek into the life of ‘the world’s greatest outlaw’ — have become successful, and it is easy to see why: the violent story of the rise and fall of the Medellín Cartel is indeed an incredible and, of course, highly marketable chronicle.

Close to Medellín are the remains of Hacienda Nápoles, Escobar’s 3000-hectare ranch, complete with an airstrip, a bullring, and a private zoo. In its heyday in the 1980s, four planes a day took off from the property, bound for Miami and loaded with cocaine, and returned just as full with money. In Medellín there is also Barrio Pablo Escobar, a neighbourhood of 400 houses that Escobar had built and donated to homeless families in the city. There are also the remains of La Catedral, the legendary prison Escobar designed himself and from which he fled effortlessly in 1992 — an incident that brought shame to the White House and the Colombian government as the entire world watched. In another part of the city people can visit the roof where the man known as El Patr
ó
n, who in 1989 made
Forbes
’ list of the top-ten richest men in the world, finally met his death in 1993. The killing of Escobar was the result of a controversial joint effort in which the US Central Intelligence Agency, the National Police of Colombia, and the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (the DEA) conspired with hired assassins and the drug mafia — a cooperative operation that caused great political rifts and had an impact on both nations for many years to come.

But Medellín’s attraction as a destination for cutting-edge travellers also reflects an ever-increasing interest in visiting, albeit at a safe distance, the site from which one of the biggest criminal complexes in the world originates. The illegal drug trade today generates an estimated 300 billion USD globally — far more than the gross domestic product of most countries — and the world’s two main hard drugs, heroin and cocaine, are linked to two nations: Afghanistan, where 90 per cent of the world’s heroin is produced; and this country, Colombia, where 60 per cent of the cocaine consumed globally comes from.

If heroin breeds misery, cocaine has successfully held on to its image as the narcotic for those wishing to disassociate themselves from junkies. It is the undisputed drug of choice for the wealthy in the world’s richest nations, and it has been growing in popularity, with no sign of slowing, since German chemists first isolated the alkaloid in 1860. Cocaine continues to find its way into new parts of the world — Eastern Europe and certain parts of Asia are booming markets — and, perhaps to an even greater extent, into social milieus previously untouched by the white powder. While the trend for ‘clean living’ is growing within the elite classes of the United States and Europe, environments often socially safeguarded from drug abuse, cocaine use among middle- and working-class Americans and Europeans is on the rise.

Håkan pushes his girlfriend away and vanishes into a swarm of dancers. He has stains from a red lollipop around his mouth, visible as he approaches another blond young man, who has a plastic bottle in his back pocket.

‘Nice parties here, eh? Acid? Ecstasy? Cocaine?’

Their eyes meet and they exchange the goods.

Suddenly an army of smiling former fashion models bursts onto the scene, dispersing over the dance floor, moving like green projectiles into the crowd. They’re promoting a new brand of cigarettes and are all wearing identical form-fitting tops that coordinate with the colours on the cigarette packets. They scurry about, handing out free smokes to anyone who wants one. And everyone does. Håkan and his new friend are in paradise; they throw their arms in the air, flapping their hands around in a way that’s reminiscent of the 1990s rave scene.

Globalisation and increased travel have brought together all sorts of subcultures, which have gelled in a relatively short period of time. Behaviour that is banned or discouraged in one country may not only be possible but encouraged in another, and many of the poor nations in the Southern Hemisphere have developed into recreational regions for an entire gamut of activities stigmatised and criminalised elsewhere in the world. These safe havens are not so much a consequence of different laws in these countries but of mass corruption, and specifically the fact that the poorer members of the police force can be bought easily. This club is called Carnival, a name that unintentionally, yet amicably enough, finds itself at the intersection of Catholicism, hedonism, and commercialism, all three of which manifest here on a nightly basis: in a nation where corrupt policemen can obtain instant absolution, young Europeans can obtain immediate sensual gratification — and both can come together in a diabolical dancing circus where cash is the indisputable king.