Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (34 page)

The cocaine exporters of tomorrow — Colombia remains a main source for the foreseeable future — will, in other words, not only need to decentralise more and cease using violence, but also to carefully embed all drug activity in legal business operations. The Mexican mafia’s violent large-scale model will most likely collapse at some point during the 2010s, just as the great Medellín and Cali cartels did in the 1990s, and once Bergman and his men have killed off Loco Barrera and the others he refers to as ‘dead men walking’, the decentralised landscapes of modern drug trafficking will be colonised by the white knights of tomorrow.

‘The smartest people are those who stay under the radar. People moving ten kilos a month to Japan at 100,000 dollars a kilo,’ says Bergman. If you buy it here, he goes on, nodding towards the outside, for 2000 dollars, and spend another 15,000 to move it to Japan — and you have a route into the country — you still make almost a million dollars every month. ‘That’s more than Cuchillo makes!’ he concludes. ‘Because at the end of the day he has to pay all his people, pay for his weapons, et cetera. While you live as a comfortable businessperson in the nicest neighbourhood in Bogotá. So I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of small-scale Colombian drug traffickers staying well under the radar screen making fortunes.’

WHEN CÉSAR GAVIRIA
became head of state in 1990, after Galán’s assassination and young Juan Manuel’s plea for him to ‘save Colombia’, the new president looked north and said a prayer: ‘The demand for drugs is what fuels the drug industry. If the US and the industrialised nations of the world do not find a way to reduce consumption, we will never solve this problem. It doesn’t matter how much we fight, how many lives we lose, how many sacrifices we make — the problem will always remain. The industrialised world has to find a way to reduce the demand for narcotics.’

Exactly 20 years later María Jimena Duzán — who was in the 1980s a journalist for
El Espectador
, the paper whose office was bombed by Escobar — sits among bookshelves in her home in Bogotá. She says that Gaviria’s wishes have not been granted, but also that he was wrong. Or at least halfway wrong. ‘Demand isn’t the reason for our problems. The fact that millions of gringos and Europeans consume cocaine doesn’t explain why almost all of it is produced here. Why not in Ecuador or Venezuela? Argentina or Brazil? Colombia’s problem is that the inhabitants in half of the country have been used to living outside the law. What needs to be done here is for the state to show its presence in all those left-behind areas — and not just militarily. Most people growing coca in our jungles have never seen anything of the state except its army.’

María Jimena Duzán’s home was blown up in 1982, and her sister — a young documentary-filmmaker on the verge of revealing liaisons between the cartels and the state — was murdered in 1990. Duzán’s adult life coincides time-wise with the country’s cocaine drama, and now she sits here in denim and grey boots, surrounded by books on a topic she is familiar with: war. Carl von Clausewitz’s
On War
. Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter’s
The Iran Contra Connection
. Norman Mailer’s
Why Are We at War?
And her own, a classic in its own right —
Death Beat: a Colombian journalist’s life inside the cocaine wars
.

‘The progression of the cocaine mafia here is completely logical,’ Duzán says. ‘The first generation tries to gain control over the state with weapons and fails. The second generation doesn’t make the same mistake and works in a more civilian way. What’s unique about Colombia is that we now have a third generation, which has practically taken over. Pablo Escobar never succeeded in his political ambitions, though several of his relatives and allies are in positions of power today.’

María Jimena Duzán has followed the growing impact of cocaine on the nation, and the world, for the past 35 years, and is today one of the country’s most influential authors and journalists. Her analysis about what happened in the past, what is happening now, and what will happen in the future is both positive and negative: her negative perspective applies to Colombia, her positive one to the rest of the world. Behind the country’s polished façade of an exuberant economy, a strong military, a reduction in violence, and a thriving tourism industry lurks a populist dynamic that in some ways resembles that in Italy — a nation whose authoritarian structures have been impressively updated. Just as Italy’s political culture has been ‘mediatised’, María Jimena Duzán believes Colombia’s has been ‘narcotised’, which has resulted in incalculably negative consequences for democracy: ‘The alliances between large landowners and the drug mafia have been legitimised. That’s what’s happened.’

All the millions that have been pouring in from cocaine since the 1990s were welcomed with open arms by those rural clans whose power was threatened by the 1991 constitution. When Colombia adopted this statute, a key tenet was the rights of minorities to traditionally inhabited areas, and the nation was hailed the world over for having created a genuinely multicultural state where indigenous peoples and blacks, after 180 years of institutionalised racism, were guaranteed ownership rights in specific territories. But these areas were often in remote and isolated parts of the country — exactly the kind of land that would prove attractive to drug traffic in the coming years — and it was these vast virgin areas that the nation’s agrarian elites had long since used however they saw fit, employing a supply of conveniently poor and drifting peasants as day labour in a semi-feudal system. What was new about the constitution, Duzán says, was that it not only gave displaced ethnicities nominal rights to land, but also that it created a new legal order — completely new institutions — intended to implement gradual landownership reforms throughout the country. And this is where it went too far. The elite revolted. And cocaine became their weapon.

‘Basically, the problem here is that the national government doesn’t govern the entire country. We are still in the process of building a state. Large parts of the country are in the hands of regional elites, who see no reason to abide by the law the way that people in the cities have to. Outside the urban areas is a wild Colombia — feudal, archaic, and reactionary — and it’s in those milieus all sorts of armed groups are thriving. The guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug mafia — they all live in the past. As if the state doesn’t exist. The greatest challenge for Colombian democracy is to overcome this. To become a real state. The 1991 constitution was a first step and it saved many lives, but it threatens a certain type of power that is traditionally strong here — the power of the extreme right and the guerrillas. It benefits civilians, not armed groups. It supports people who obey the law. Since the neo-rightists came to power, the constitution has been their worst enemy, and politics just strives to undermine it.’

But as usual in Colombia it is much more complicated — or tragic — than that. One progressive objective that the ‘world’s most modern constitution’ had was to decentralise politics: to give more power and autonomy to villages, municipalities, and regions. The problem was that this was planned without consideration for the archaic power structures that essentially govern the rural parts of Colombia. Loaded with economic and social strength, large landowners were thus given carte blanche to establish their own political parties in line with their own interests, and after the guerrillas’ earlier half-hearted attempt to civilise themselves by launching a political party was quashed by private armies acting in alliance with the regular military — 3000 elected socialists were executed in the course of just one decade — the way was paved for what was to come: the auctioning off of local and regional political platforms to the highest bidder. The state’s inability to prevent guerrilla attacks on landowners’ property made the rural oligarchy increasingly reliant on drug trafficking, not just to fund local armies but also to establish political parties. This was what, by the end of the first decade of the 2000s, became known throughout the world as ‘the paramilitary political scandal’: a third of the Congress, the majority supporting the government, were funded by drug money. And it soon became apparent that most major elite political groups — not just the rural reactionaries, but many urban liberals as well — had been using drug money in their fight against the FARC.

In June 2010 Juan Manuel Santos — minister of defence in the Uribe administration, responsible for the attack on Ecuador, and a son of the largest media mogul in the country — was elected president. ‘What has happened in Colombia over the past 20 years,’ says Duzán, ‘is that all the major political groups have been united by a common enemy: the FARC. Their frustration over their inability to wipe out this guerrilla plague has led to a tacit agreement to combat the FARC with all the means at their joint disposal. New political classes and parties have been born in this way, and the two old parties have been imbued with the same objective — and they have all entered into different alliances with the drug mafia in order to achieve their goals. This is the political concept about which no one speaks openly, but which today is the root of the efforts of people like Álvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos: to defeat the FARC by whatever means possible. And the immense problem we now have to handle is the fact that large portions of today’s political establishment have grown together with the dark forces of the drug trade.’

The paramilitary political scandal revealed patterns resembling a huge conspiracy. From above, the White House had showered the government with financial support in the name of the war on drugs, and from below that same government had grown strong thanks to political interests with deep roots in the drug trade. As a result, Colombian right-wing populism — an inverted version of the Venezuelan Chavismo — is today one of Latin America’s most stable political forces.

María Jimena Duzán sighs. ‘The guerrillas demolish, destroy, and murder. The mafia buys. Eighty per cent of congressmen own land, and most often large estates. No one cares about the fact that many of them have built their power by exporting cocaine — no one gives a damn about that. And for them, the important thing is that the government helps them in their struggle for landownership.’

That is the Colombian part of the story. As for the future for the rest of the world, she is more optimistic. María Jimena Duzán adheres to the common argument in today’s Colombian drug debate, that legalising cocaine would be the best thing for this country — although not necessarily for others — but she also says that this is a utopian idea, and therefore pointless to discuss. There are simply too many forces working against it. Mainly economic ones: all of Switzerland, she says, would collapse, as well as large parts of the US financial sector, where much of the drug money ends up. An equally important factor in legalisation being a non-starter is that global drug-policy collaboration is regulated in UN conventions, and those are not based on reason and science but on dogma — sometimes Marxist, sometimes religious. The growing choir of liberal and secular voices in some parts of the West now calling for decriminalisation cannot change the fact that prohibition is strongly supported in every other corner of the world: China, the United States, Japan, the Arab world, Russia, Africa, the Nordic countries, and Eastern Europe; all but a few EU and Latin American countries are against it.

‘We waited far too long. It’s too late now.’

Her argument is in line with what Mario Vargas Llosa writes in his essay ‘The Other State’, in which he suggests that drug-funded criminality is the ‘greatest threat to Latin American democracies’ today, and asks how most governments can continue to support the idea that drugs must be illegal, despite the overwhelming amount of research suggesting the contrary. The answer is, he writes, that politicians the world over in the 1970s and 1980s really did think — in contrast to their views on alcohol and tobacco — that they could not only combat the problem but actually
obliterate
it. That belief has since been abandoned by most analysts, but if a phenomenon is to be legalised it must be done relatively soon after the illegal markets have begun to expand; otherwise it will be impossible, since an ever-swelling bureaucracy with growing interests in keeping the phenomenon illegal will become too strong. According to Vargas Llosa, this is exactly what has happened with drugs: ‘The biggest obstacle today is that all those institutions and individuals who are making a living on the repression of drugs are all fighting — which is completely logical — tooth and nail to defend their livelihood.’

María Jimena Duzán agrees, but thinks, like most other Latin American politicians — the Christian right being the exception — that there is now a window of opportunity for a new policy, one that defends neither legalisation nor the war on drugs, but constitutes a humanisation of the fight. Pragmatism. Change.

After the three former presidents sounded the alarm on the consequences of the war on drugs, US Congress appointed another commission whose sole objective is to recommend a new policy to President Obama — and thus to the world. The conclusions are still to be presented, but the investigators started off by listing a collection of facts that can be read as heralding either success or disaster: today five per cent of the world’s population lives in the United States, but 17.2 per cent of the world’s consumers of illegal drugs; 100 per cent of all cocaine and 90 per cent of all heroin consumed in the United States is produced in the Andes, mostly in Colombia. In the transit countries — Haiti, Ecuador, Jamaica, and Venezuela, but especially Mexico and Central America — drug trafficking is the economic backbone of organised crime, which threatens legal systems, political institutions, and the security of citizens. A war is currently being fought between the Mexican cartels and the nation’s security forces, the former overseeing the wholesale market for all the cocaine sold in the United States today. Drug-related violence has escalated dramatically since president Felipe Calderón launched the nation’s military-led war on drugs in 2006. Over 90 per cent of all the weapons used in drug-related killings come from the United States. Between 1980 and 2008 the United States spent 11.3 billion USD on the war on drugs in Latin America, but during this same period the number of life-long abusers of cannabis, cocaine, and heroin has been steadily on the rise; over the past 30 years the total number of hardcore addicts across these three drugs has doubled.