Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (38 page)

5 Mañana: the future of the powder

The main interviews in this chapter were conducted between 2008 and 2010, a period in which I was following in detail the left and liberals’ fight against right-wing efforts to dismantle the 1991 constitution, including the symbolic paragraph on ‘the personal dose’ (Case C-221,
de la Corte Constitucional
, 1994). Carlos Gaviria, leader of the social democratic party Polo Democrático and leftist presidential candidate in the 2006 election, was chief judge in the constitutional court in the 1990s and the intellectual architect of what became the national legislation on personal use. Audio of his defence of ‘the personal dose’, right before the government’s victory, is available under the heading ‘Ponencia the Carlos Gaviria I and II parte’ at
Dosis de Personalidad
(www.dosisdepersonalidad.com).

I interviewed the following people: Aldo Lale-Demoz, director, UNODC Colombia; Alfredo Rangel, head of the think tank Seguridad y Democracia; Ariel
Á
vila, researcher, Nuevo Arco Iris; Carlos Gaviria, founder of the party Polo Democrático and former presidential candidate; Gustavo Duncan, political scientist; Ivonne Wilches, psychologist and activist for the personal dose; Jay Bergman, regional DEA head; Juan Manuel Galán, senator; Melissa Alvarez, activist for the personal dose; María Jimena Duzán, author; Piedad Córdoba, senator.

Other information, analysis, and speculations in this chapter are based primarily on María Jimena Duzán’s
Crónicas que Matan
, Mike Jay’s
Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century
, Alfredo Rangel’s (et al.) books
La Batalla Perdida Contra Las Drogas
and
Narcotráfico en Colombia
, Tom Feiling’s
The Candy Machine
, Misha Glenny’s
McMafia
, and Gustavo Duncan’s
Los Senores de la Guerra
. Some dates on how the power behind drug trafficking became concentrated to Mexico, and the number of people employed by the Mexican cartels, was taken from a study featured in
The Wall Street Journal
(28 December 2008), and statistics on the increase in cocaine prices over the years are from the UN
World Drug Report 2009
. The report of the three former presidents,
Drugs and Democracy
, can be downloaded from the website for the American Commission on Drugs and Democracies (www.drogasedemocracia.org). A complete text of the RAND report
Controlling Cocaine
may be downloaded from their website (www.rand.org). Noam Chomsky’s commentary on the RAND report and his analysis of the drug war were presented at the seminar ‘The US War on Drugs in Latin America’ at MIT on 15 December 2009. A compilation of Chomsky’s ideas on cocaine production and its global contra war are available on a CD called
An American Addiction: drugs, guerrillas, counterinsurgency
. The section on ‘decertification’ and US economic sanctions on nations that deviate from the global prohibition policy is based on information from Feiling’s
The Candy Machine
. Swedish journalist Tomas Lappalainen’s
’Ndrangheta: en bok om maffian i Kalabrien
deals with connections between the Italian and Colombian mafias and the role played by the former in the currently booming European market. The arrest of 320 mafiosi in different parts of the world, including the top level of the ’Ndrangheta, on 13 July 2010, was extensively covered in the international media. The consequences of this crackdown on cocaine distribution in Europe, however, are still uncertain.

The story of
Jairo Villegas
was published in the article ‘Así Operan Las Alas De La Mafia’ (
El Tiempo
, 14 February 2010), and the quotes I have used from national police chief Óscar Naranjo were published by several news-media outlets during the dissolution of the so-called Pilot Cartel in early 2010. The data on the reduction of Colombian cocaine production comes from the UNODC
World Drug Report 2009
. The quote from Carl Bildt was published on his blog http://bildt.blogspot.se/ on 28 May 2006.

César Gaviria’s statement on the hopelessness of the war on drugs if the issue of demand continues to be ignored is from Marshall and Scott’s
Cocaine Politics
. A detailed account of Colombia’s tragic history with regard to how the decentralisation of politics in the 1990s also paved the way for the paramilitary takeover of large parts of the countryside may be found in Mauricio Romero’s
Paramilitares y Autodefensas
. The elimination of the left-wing party Unión Patriótica, touched upon in my interview with María Jimena Duzán, has been analysed in a number of books, but nowhere with the same chilling accuracy as in Steven Dudley’s
Walking Ghosts
— the best book written about the state’s sordid war against dissidents and the FARC’s cynical games with people’s lives. Information on the 40,000 people (38,000, to be exact) killed by paramilitary groups comes from the regional public prosecutor’s office and covers only the period between 1987 and 2003. This figure is constantly changing both because paramilitary leaders are always making new confessions and because new mass graves are being discovered regularly. According to some sources, the number has already surpassed 50,000 and may even be significantly more.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s essay ‘El Otro Estado’ was published in several newspapers, including the Spanish
El Pais
(10 January 2010). The commission assigned to draw up a new anti-drug policy for the United States is called the Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission. The mandate for its work has been published under the heading of ‘Text of H. R. 2134: Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission Act of 2009’ and is available on the United States Congress website: www.govtrack.us. References to the ‘global framework’ and ‘UN conventions’ in the text refer to
The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs
(1961),
The
Convention on Psychotropic Substances
(1971), and
The
United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances
(1988), all ratified by the vast majority of the world’s nations. The common aim of the conventions is to promote and enforce the notion that there should be no use of the listed drugs — including cannabis, cocaine, and coca leaves — other than for strictly medical or scientific purposes.

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