Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (26 page)

THE PLATOON TROOPS
let out a sudden exclamation. Helicopters circle in the sky like venomous flies, keeping a lookout for potential enemy units. The hastily abandoned house is located on a small ledge in a beautiful valley, where white waterfalls tumble between cliffs and terracotta-coloured roads wind through the green hills. Now all of the soldiers, except the ones on guard, rush out with crackling walkie-talkies, down to the little ledge overlooking the ravine. ‘Here, here! We’ve found it!’

Juan Carlos Rivera stands up and gasps. ‘Check out these hoses.’ He catches his breath. ‘And the buckets there.’ He points to a pile of sacks hidden in the bushes. Then to a stack of white plastic buckets a bit further back. It is 30 degrees Celsius, and beads of sweat from the inside of his helmet stream down his cheeks.

The soothing buzz of the helicopters from above adds to the good feeling. An armed attack is no longer on the cards. The area is secured and everyone who works in the lab has fled the scene.

Major Quiroga arrives, along with Colonel Correa and the rest of the men.

‘Here are 12 55-kilogram bags of active charcoal,’ says Rivera. ‘There are three 25-kilogram bags of caustic soda. And these buckets are full of sulfuric acid and acetone.’

But what is interesting here is not the bags or buckets, but the three thick rubber hoses tied around a few trees and aimed down into what appears to be a never-ending ravine.

‘The lab’s down there, camouflaged in the jungle,’ Rivera says with absolute certainty, even though he has not seen a trace of the building. ‘The liquid chemicals are stored here and then pumped down. That way nothing has to be carried. Now all we have to do to find the lab is to follow the hoses.’

It is 3.00 p.m. The hoses are such a sure indication of the presence of a lab that Major Quiroga at once gives the order to complete the operation. The soldiers exhale. They will be rewarded in one way or another. Today’s war on drugs is completely controlled by statistics: the number of blown-up labs, sprayed hectares, seized kilos, or dead guerrillas. The soldiers are rewarded with wages, promotions, vacations, and benefits, depending on how well they fulfill various quotas. This piecework system has made quantity more important than quality, a situation that has — according to certain critics — not only generated
falsos positivos
, but also led to a number of other systemic failures in the fight.

IN
COCAINE POLITICS
,
Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall suggest that the global cocaine trade has increased since the 1980s not in spite of, but
thanks to
, the US war on drugs. The authors argue that because actual drug traffic is subordinated to other strategic interests, the consequence is often that the CIA and the DEA are more than willing to cooperate with the drug-funded anti-guerrilla networks that have been essential to the opening up and running of various routes from the Andes to the United States and Europe: ‘In country after country, from Mexico and Honduras to Panama and Peru, the CIA helped set up or consolidate intelligence agencies that became forces of repression, and whose intelligence connections to other countries greased the way for illicit drug shipments.’

As to what the legal obscurity that arises when US and Latin American militaries enter in an alliance with strategic paramilitaries to catch a bigger fish — whether it is an Escobar or a FARC leader — actually means to the global drug trade is hard to say. Not surprisingly, CIA involvement in drug trafficking has led to a number of wild, often leftist, conspiracy theories, put forward by people who routinely hold the United States responsible for all of the misery on the planet, but there are also a number of scholars more seriously devoted to the issue. Adriana Rossi, a prominent investigator of Latin American drug-trafficking, is one of those who argues that there is clear evidence that the United States has either facilitated or been directly involved in trafficking on a number of occasions throughout the 2000s. However, the image that the CIA and the DEA present of themselves today is of organisations that have been purged of corruption, the drug scandals among their ranks history. Following a debate in Colombia about whether the Colombian anti-narcotics police had any genuine interest in putting a stop to the flow of cocaine, Jay Bergman, Andean regional director for the DEA and one of the world’s top anti-narcotics officers, stated that such suspicions are myths created by people who don’t understand the realities surrounding the war on drugs: ‘Let me be clear. If you have been doing operations with the anti-narcotic police here for a while, then you have seen so many police officers being killed, that have no legs because they walked into landmines, have been blown up in attacks, or have lost colleagues in combat, that it becomes obvious that that’s just a myth. I have been to more funerals and I have had more tears in my eyes in this country than anywhere else. Trust me, there is not a police officer in this country that doesn’t want to see an end to this.’

The same month in which Bergman made these comments, the Colombian government was forced to fire 25 police officers, including their commander, in Bahía Solano, a village on the Pacific coast. One day they were working against the trafficking, the next day with the traffickers. But this was nothing new, and not at all unique for Colombia. Interaction between the mafia and the police has a long history in Latin America, and in November 2008 it was revealed that Noé Ramírez, one of the highest-ranking Mexican police chiefs, had accepted 450,000 USD a month from the cocaine clan Beltrán Leyva, and that both the head of Interpol in Mexico and the head of a special organised crime unit, as well as four other police officers, had been on the cartel’s payroll.

The authorities’ schizophrenic relationship with the war on drugs, and with drug trafficking itself, plays a key role in Adriana Rossi’s theories about the paradox in which governments whose militaries have been funded by anti-drug money often become better drug exporters than they were before they had the financial means. Colombia is just one example. Its experiences may, some fear, be repeated in the West African states that are now being infiltrated by new and old cocaine-smuggling networks, who are in the pursuit of new routes to Europe; states whose police forces are benefiting from substantial foreign military aid.

Everything is a result of the corrupting influence of drug trafficking and the mafia’s demand for good infrastructure. When Don Mario, an anti-communist warlord and one of Colombia’s biggest drug barons, was arrested in April 2009, the government was forced to replace the police officers along the coast, all the way up to Panama. All were, or were assumed to be, links in the drug king’s efficient transport chain. Just like the police officers in Bahía Solano, drug smugglers were disguised as anti-drug soldiers, and were superbly equipped in both roles. After they had been replaced a new cycle of corruption began, and a couple of years later, Don Mario’s successors had bought so much loyalty that it was time for a new raid. And so, according to the critics, it continues: more corruption, more military, more trafficking.

A 2001 report by Human Rights Watch gave a detailed account of the dynamics at work between the military and the mafia in cocaine production in Putumayo. Payment to the officers rose according to rank. A lieutenant received 1500 USD a month and a captain up to 3000 USD, while the colonels received their dollar transfers via intermediaries so that if the system was discovered, they would not be directly responsible. Or, in the words of Scott and Marshall: ‘Aiding foreign military and intelligence forces in the name of fighting the war on drugs risks empowering the very forces responsible for protecting organised criminal syndicates.’

This is exactly what happened to one of Colombia’s biggest drug lords, Pedro Oliverio Guerrero, alias Cuchillo, who controlled large regions in the eastern plains. When the DEA and the narcotics police launched a major operation in 2008 to arrest him, they failed, for reasons that gave rise to a number of concerns about how armed forces with funding from the war on drugs actually operate. Like many of the nation’s most successful Mafiosi, Cuchillo was a former officer in the Colombian army. In 2007, in his ambitions to take control from the law-enforcement authorities and to eliminate the guerrillas in the area, he doubled his own private army — the paramilitary group Ejército Revolucionario Popular Anticomunista Colombiano (ERPAC), Colombia’s Anti-communist Army of the People — to 2000 soldiers and successfully made the government’s regional soldiers work for him. When the DEA-led operation was launched, Cuchillo was nearly killed in a shootout, but because so many of the members of the army in the area were now on his payroll, the drug king eventually managed to elude the special commando. Moreover, when an investigation later explained how and why the operation had failed, despite all its resources and meticulous intelligence, a familiar yet revealing trend became known: a large amount of the arms seized from the ERPAC had come from the army, and Cuchillo’s five closest guards, who died in combat, had all been former soldiers and officers. But most disturbing for those arguing that the army was ‘clean’ was a satellite-phone conversation that the operation commando eavesdropped upon three hours after the shooting. An indignant Cuchillo was heard asking someone in the army: ‘How in the hell could three Black Hawks get in here without anyone informing me?’

IN BUENAVENTURA —
far from Cuchillo’s arid plains — the Coast Guard searches among the city’s poor canoe-borne folk, and Captain Edwaer Picón and his men will soon, they hope, find a big amount of pure cocaine, perhaps tonnes. Gasoline vapors from all sorts of boat traffic mix in the warm coastal winds as the military boats pass through the entrance to the harbour and take aim at one of the hundreds of creaky wooden piers surrounding the downtown area.

‘The negro is the problem. Crazy by nature.’ Captain Picón blocks the sun with his right hand and gazes out at the city.

This is the most cocaine-dense area in the world. Of the almost 500 tonnes of cocaine Colombia exports annually, a quarter passes through Buenaventura, an over-populated urban island. A month ago, almost 3.5 tonnes were seized in the commercial harbour. Alongside the concrete pier belonging to the Coast Guard is a turquoise
volador
— a boat with four 250-horsepower engines — that was confiscated two weeks ago with almost two tonnes on board. On a nearby litter-strewn beach is a steel-hulled vessel, which was recently seized with 160 kilos onboard. In the course of a year, between 15 and 20 tonnes of cocaine are confiscated in the district of Buenaventura — perhaps a tenth of everything that goes through — but as to exactly how many thousands of kilos are hidden here among the other traffic on any given day, it’s anyone’s guess. Maybe three. Thirteen. Or 30. No one knows.

‘Just look at them,’ says Picón, squinting and pointing at all the hustle and bustle around the piers.

The city, circular in shape and linked to the mainland by a 200-metre bridge, is divided into three sections. In the north is the main port, whose thousands of different-coloured containers resemble a huge mosaic laid out over parking spaces and cargo ships in the gated area. In the middle is the commercial district, with its damp-damaged concrete buildings. In the south is ‘the problem’: the African-Colombians and their ramshackle housing, a chaotic maze of traditional, rudimentary wooden houses on rickety posts that manage to treacherously obscure the boundary between land and sea. In reality, large parts of the city are built right on the water. It has expanded — like a spontaneously swelling social and economic amoeba — because the armed conflict has meant a population migration from rural to urban areas.

On the surface
los esteros
, as these poorer areas are called, look like total anarchy: a jumble of shantytowns with too many inhabitants stuffed into spaces far too small. Yet beyond that first impression of chaos lies a sophisticated community completely and rationally organised by the marginalised masses of the new urban proletariat. Despite all the city’s bloodshed — this is the most violent part of the country, one of the most violent places in the world — almost everything happens against a backdrop of levity. Happily playing children. Open doors. Laughter. Beautifully decorated homes. Gossiping neighbours.

Every once in a while men loosen their canoes from the posts that support their houses, and as they paddle out into the bay they look like black specks against the slowly moving walls of red, green, yellow, black or blue container vessels. ‘They may give the impression of poor fishermen,’ says Picón. ‘But in reality they’re often informants, who’ll start texting from the moment we arrive.’

The Coast Guard is white, Buenaventurans black. The former are here temporarily, stay in hotels, operate big military boats, and spend time and money at brothels in the city at night. The latter are here for good, live in shantytowns, paddle canoes, and sell their nightly services to those visiting the city’s brothels. The gap between people of European and African descent is nowhere more pronounced than on the Colombian cocaine coast — the entire region along the Pacific Rim — and it is here that the war on drugs has also been gradually transformed into a war between cultures, in which a particular lifestyle has come to be viewed as a symbol of the nation’s drug industry and become subject to eradication. The war on drugs is no longer a fight against the flow of cocaine, but a fight for what is usually called progress, modernisation. It is large scale against small scale. Shopping centre against fishing family. Square concrete buildings against scattered wooden structures. Cars against canoes. Industry against craftsmanship. The government claims that all they are doing is fighting poverty, but many inhabitants argue that what the state is actually fighting is them. Their lifestyle. And the guerrillas, always ready to exploit the tension between people and state, are lying in wait.