Smuggler Nation (47 page)

Much of the Colombian marijuana supply was smuggled in through the Caribbean to South Florida by boat. Speedboats would zip out and back from the Florida coast, bringing in marijuana loads from mother ships anchored offshore. Government interdiction was minimal, smuggling operations were loosely organized with plenty of freelancers and small local operators (including fishermen who found a much more profitable use for their boats), and the whole business involved only modest risk and relatively little recourse to violence. This was the heyday of marijuana smuggling in South Florida. But it proved to be short-lived. Everything changed by the early 1980s with the avalanche of Colombian cocaine and the ratcheting up of America’s war on drugs.

In Darwinian fashion, more sophisticated, organized, and violent traffickers increasingly came to dominate the trade—building on and adapting the old transportation and distribution infrastructure set up for smuggling Colombian marijuana in earlier years. So in a sense, by helping to stimulate Colombian marijuana exports to the United States, the Paraquat-spraying disaster in Mexico inadvertently helped to pave the way for the rise of the Colombian cocaine industry.
⁸⁴

Cocaine Wars

Cocaine use in America, which had been largely dormant since the 1930s, began to rise in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in part as a result of stricter federal controls over other stimulants such as speed and other amphetamines.
⁸⁵
By 1979 the National Institute on Drug Abuse estimated that cocaine use had nearly tripled in two years.
⁸⁶
By 1980, “the number of cocaine powder sellers [in New York City] outnumbered that of heroin sellers by two to one.”
⁸⁷
Initially, many cocaine users were middle-class and affluent—powder cocaine was a relatively expensive “status drug”—although large numbers of lower-income drug users were inhaling cocaine when they could afford it.
⁸⁸

Cocaine was considered by users, and even by many medical authorities, as nonaddictive, for habitual users did not experience the physiological symptoms of heroin withdrawal.
⁸⁹
As
Time
magazine reported
in July 1981, “Superficially, coke is a supremely beguiling and relatively risk-free drug—at least so its devotees innocently claim. A snort in each nostril and you’re up and away for 30 minutes or so. Alert, witty and with it. No hangover. No physical addiction. No lung cancer. No holes in the arms or burned-out cells in the brain. Instead, drive, sparkle, energy.”
⁹⁰
The magazine’s cover illustration—a martini glass filled with cocaine—captured cocaine’s new status as America’s most fashionable drug. Similarly, the
Time
cover story also captured the upbeat attitude toward the drug: “Whatever the price, by whatever name, cocaine is becoming the all-American drug. No longer is it a sinful secret of the moneyed elite, nor merely an elusive glitter of decadence in raffish society circles, as it seemed in decades past.” It continued: “Today, in part precisely because it is such an emblem of wealth and status, coke is the drug of choice of perhaps millions of solid, conventional and often upwardly mobile citizens.…”
⁹¹

Colombian smuggling entrepreneurs were perfectly positioned to feed America’s growing appetite for cocaine. Colombia first entered the cocaine business in the early 1970s, building on earlier illicit trades in marijuana and tax-evading contraband goods (especially cigarettes and whiskey). Medellín, the country’s most industrialized and export-oriented city, soon became the leading center for the cocaine-export industry. Even as textiles, traditionally the city’s vital export sector, fell on hard times, the illicit cocaine-export sector took off. This also had an enormous economic ripple effect throughout the Andean region, fueling a coca cultivation boom in remote areas of neighboring Peru and Bolivia. Hundreds of thousands of Andean peasant farmers turned to growing the raw material used to process Colombian cocaine for the U.S. market.
⁹²

Medellín’s drug trade entrepreneurs, specializing in refining and wholesale trafficking, led the way in turning cocaine into a mass production industry capable of handling large-scale cocaine shipments to the United States. What started out as a business dealing in hundreds of kilos turned into tons of kilos by the late 1970s. Medellín traffickers were also advantaged by the fact that many Colombians from the same region of the country as Medellín had migrated to the east coast of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, providing a ready-made distribution network.
⁹³
Medellín’s old elites soon found themselves
pushed aside by brash new narco-elites such as Pablo Escobar. Escobar, who began his criminal career stealing gravestones and cars, became the most recognizable face of the international drug trade, even making the
Forbes
list of the top billionaires in the world. Escobar’s fame, fortune, and bravado in directly challenging the Colombian government (including assassinating the country’s justice minister in 1984) made him the world’s most famous outlaw at the time—which in the end would prove to be his undoing.

One of Escobar’s business partners, Carlos Lehder Rivas, is credited with pioneering the transportation of cocaine through the Caribbean to the United States by small aircraft. Lehder started out smuggling marijuana but then upgraded to cocaine. At the height of his trafficking career in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lehder took over Norman’s Cay, a tiny island in the Bahamas, and turned it into his own private
airstrip. Government authorities in Nassau were suspected of taking hefty bribes to look the other way, tolerating Lehder’s transport business until U.S. pressure and media coverage finally prompted them to shut it down.

Figure 14.5 Colombian cocaine trafficker Pablo Escobar, the most famous smuggler of the modern era. In 1989
Forbes
magazine listed Escobar as the seventh-richest person in the world (DEA Museum).

But while Lehder was an air transport pioneer of sorts, he was also simply the latest smuggler to exploit the Bahamas as the most convenient transshipment hub in the Caribbean (recall the role of Nassau in blockade running during the American Civil War, and in supplying Rum Row during the Prohibition era). What was new in the case of moving cocaine is that much of it was now coming into the United States not only by sea but also by air. Moreover, the Bahamas also facilitated the laundering of cocaine money, serving as a world-class financial haven useful to dictators, corporate executives, and drug traffickers alike.

With the snowstorm of Colombian cocaine also emerged the myth that the whole business was tightly controlled by a few hierarchically organized trafficking “cartels.” The cartel myth was created and perpetuated by politicians, journalists, and law enforcement agents looking for a simple and easily identifiable target.
⁹⁴
Over time, use of the term
cartel
was so common that it became a permanent part of the drug war vocabulary. But the reality was considerably more complex. By definition, a cartel exerts sufficient control over a market that it can set prices. But the cocaine trade was in fact hypercompetitive—indeed, ruthlessly so, as is evident from violent competition for turf and market share. Cocaine prices plummeted and purity levels increased during the course of the decade. A kilo of cocaine in Miami was worth between $47,000 and $60,000 in 1982, but it plummeted to between $9,000 and $14,000 by late 1987.
⁹⁵
Overall, wholesale cocaine prices in the United States dropped by 75 percent between 1980 and 1988. Moreover, as law enforcement went after the most visible and well-known trafficking organizations—first targeting Escobar and other leaders of the “Medellín cartel” and then the competing “Cali cartel”—the cocaine business became more fragmented and dispersed, based more on loose, flattened networks than centralized and hierarchical organizations.

As the main gateway to the U.S. drug market in the late 1970s and early 1980s, South Florida became ground zero for both drug profits
and drug violence, with competition over cocaine distribution turning the Miami area into the murder capital of the country. No surprise, then, that South Florida also became the main target of President Ronald Reagan’s escalating drug interdiction campaign. The South Florida Task Force, under the direction of Vice President George H. W. Bush, was launched with much fanfare in January 1982 to block air and sea drug-smuggling routes in the Southeast. Federal funding for interdiction doubled between 1982 and 1987, mostly concentrated in South Florida and the Caribbean.

Traffickers adjusted. As air interdiction improved, traffickers shifted away from direct flights into Florida and returned to sea routes, ferrying in cocaine loads by speedboat from mother ships waiting offshore. As sea interdiction then improved, traffickers turned to using airdrops rather than mother ships—with speedboat crews picking up floating cocaine packages and ferrying them back to shore. Over time, traffickers shifted not only their methods but also their routes, turning westward to move more of their drug shipments through Central America and Mexico.

A tighter interdiction net also accelerated the switch from smuggling pot to coke: as risks and penalties increased, drug traffickers calculated that it simply made more financial sense to transport the much more compact and profitable white powder. After all, a plane flying in $3 million worth of marijuana could fly in $26 million worth of cocaine.
⁹⁶
American interdiction efforts consequently turned into a peculiar form of protectionism, with marijuana growers in California, Oregon, and other states the leading beneficiaries.

Escalation

America’s transformed drug landscape provided a ready-made target for the Reagan-era conservative backlash. President Reagan’s drug-policy agenda was shaped by a large and vocal national constituency that had grown impatient with the permissive attitudes toward drug use and other counterculture activities of the previous decade. At the center of his domestic policy agenda was a set of social policies, articulated most powerfully by the so-called moral majority, which embodied a defense of traditional family values, conservative Christian morality, and patriotism.

President Reagan launched his drug war by using his executive power first to revise executive-branch regulations, organizations, and lines of authority. By the end of his first year in office, Reagan had issued an executive order drafting the entire federal intelligence apparatus into the war on drugs and ordering them to provide guidance to civilian drug enforcement agencies. The president also opened the door, for the first time, to the military’s involvement in the war on drugs by securing an amendment to the Posse Comitatus Act, which had outlawed military involvement in civilian law enforcement for more than a century. The Reagan administration argued successfully that the U.S. Navy be allowed to join civilian agencies, such as the Coast Guard, in interdicting smuggling vessels at sea, and all branches of the military were empowered to assist Customs, the Coast Guard, and the DEA with training, equipment, and information. Funding for the military’s counterdrug role was $4.9 million in 1982, but it would skyrocket to more than $1 billion by the early 1990s.
⁹⁷

In June 1982 Reagan put the federal bureaucracy on notice that the drug war was now a priority mission. The heads of eighteen federal agencies, the vice president, several military leaders, and the commissioner of the IRS were ordered to the White House for a special address: “We’re taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts. We’re running up the battle flag. We can fight the drug problem, and we can win.”
⁹⁸
In his 1983 State of the Union address, Reagan confirmed, “The administration hereby declares an all-out war on big-time organized crime and the drug racketeers who are poisoning our young people.”
⁹⁹
The media helped fuel the Reagan effort, providing extensive coverage that built up the drug threat beginning in 1982. The administration intended to use “a scorched-earth policy” in drug enforcement, according to former Associate Attorney General Stephen S. Trott. It would not only send traffickers to jail but also lay claim under the new forfeiture laws to “everything they own—their land, their cars, their boats, everything.”
¹⁰⁰

The introduction of a new cocaine derivative—“crack,” the “poor man’s coke”—added fuel to the drug war fire. Smokable cocaine had been around since the late 1970s as cocaine “free base,” but not until the mid-1980s was it packaged and mass marketed as crack, with a relatively affordable price that made it popular in poor urban
neighborhoods. There was an important racial and class dimension to the reaction to crack: as dealing and use became more visible in urban black and Latino neighborhoods, the crack trade and related violence came to be powerfully tied to negative images of poor minority Americans.
¹⁰¹