ZeroZeroZero (16 page)

The situation has become intolerable. Public opinion no longer buys the rationalization for the killings, which merely repeats the same old story about the victims having supported the guerrillas. The strategy of balancing opposing forces has proven to be a disaster: Just over six months after the AUC is founded, the Colombian constitutional court declares the part of the decree that regulates surveillance and private safety co-ops illegal. Paramilitary groups are supposed to hand over the military weapons they’ve been issued and to respect human rights.

But it’s too late. Carlos Castaño has more than thirty thousand men under his command, and the income from cocaine trafficking is more than enough to supply them with all sorts of military equipment. Declaring them outlaws has only made them more ferocious. In old Hollywood westerns the pistol-carrying hero never turns into a ruthless outlaw. But in the land of coke, that and much worse happens. The Monkey has mutated into one of Colombia’s principal strategists of horror.

El Aro is a tiny village of sixty houses, which are more like shacks than homes, with zinc roofs and rotting doors. Compared to his fellow villagers, Marco Aurelio Areiza, who owns two grocer’s shops, is a rich man. But because El Aro is in FARC-controlled territory, he also risks his life every day. Because Marco Aurelio also sells food to the guerrillas. He’d be crazy to refuse: Who would ever dream of saying no to armed men who emerge from the forest? In the tormented land of Colombia there’s an unwritten law: Collaborate with whoever is holding a gun, regardless of what uniform they’re wearing. In fact, Marco Aurelio also collaborates with Salvatore Mancuso’s army, which comes and accuses him of supporting the guerrillas. It’s a bogus interrogation, because the village and its inhabitants had already been condemned to death days before. El Aro is like a bridgehead, an outpost that must be
conquered in order to get to FARC-controlled areas. Its fate is also meant to serve as a warning to all the other villages.

The 150 men of Mancuso’s Bloque Catatumbo torture and kill 17 people, burn down forty-three houses, steal twelve hundred head of cattle, and force 702 villagers to leave their homes. Marco Aurelio is tortured, his body broken. When the police arrive they find his wife, Rosa María Posada, sitting vigil over her husband’s body. She doesn’t want their children to see his mangled flesh.

 • • • 

Everyone is convinced that drastic change is needed in Colombia. An election campaign is starting up, reigniting the hopes within the country as well as in the White House. One candidate’s résumé boasts not only of his defeat in the previous election because of the handful of votes the Cali cartel bought, but of his miraculous survival—he was kidnapped in the late 1980s while running for mayor of Bogotá, a post he held after his liberation. This politician, so unpopular with the drug lords, seems to be just the man to lead the country.

Andrés Pastrana promises pacification and tight collaboration with the United States. When he wins he opens the doors to the Great Alliance for Change, inviting congressmen from all parties to participate. The wave of optimism and grand negotiations has finally reached Colombia.

As promised, the new president negotiates simultaneously with FARC and the United States. That this does not generate immediate opposition in Washington is probably due not so much to the Democratic Clinton administration as to the global receptivity to negotiations. In war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina the 1995 Dayton Accords are put into effect. The peace process between Israel and Palestine is slowly picking up again, in the wake of the Oslo Accords. But the most encouraging example is probably that of the United Kingdom: Opposing governments are successfully negotiating a permanent truce and IRA disarmament. The end of the lengthy and devastating conflict in Northern
Ireland is close at hand. “Peace” is a word that now flows freely from people’s lips.

And yet Colombia’s ambitious plans will all fail miserably. Because it’s not only a question of men with opposing political objectives ruling illegally; those men can be eliminated in various ways. But cocaine dies hard. Pastrana’s experiment to allow the guerrillas a demilitarized zone—the so-called distension zone—twice the size of New Jersey—turns out to be an ill-considered risk from the get-go. The FARC does as it pleases in its assigned territory and doesn’t even dream of entering upon serious negotiations: It grants no truce; in fact it intensifies its military activity. Kidnappings, whether politically or financially motivated; urban raids; control of cocaine: It’s all the same as before. Disappointment beats down the president’s popularity. When in 2002 the guerrillas go so far as to hijack a plane—a regularly scheduled flight—to kidnap a senator, Pastrana realizes that the moment has come to declare an end to the peace talks. War breaks out again: The distention zone must be reclaimed immediately. Three days later FARC forces abduct Ingrid Betancourt, a presidential candidate for the Partido Verde Oxígeno in the upcoming elections. Convinced that an armed conflict should not deprive citizens of their fundamental rights, Betancourt wanted to bring her platform to the Colombians in that area. But her captivity will last until July 2, 2008—2,321 days—when she is liberated by the Colombian armed forces.

According to the new president, Álvaro Uribe, the approach to take is that of an iron fist. The state must show its muscle and take back the country. Besides, the world is no longer what it once was. In one day the Twin Towers and the world’s optimism collapsed. The only possible response now is war, it seems. In Colombia the war on terror coincides with the war on drugs. There can be no victory without a victory over drug trafficking.

And so, despite their differences, Álvaro Uribe will maintain one of his predecessor’s key efforts: Plan Colombia, the major pact with the United States to end the production and sale of cocaine. Pastrana had
announced emphatically, shortly after his election in 1998, that he was negotiating a Marshall Plan for Colombia with the United States. As in postwar Europe, billions of dollars were supposed to pour in to revive the country, help Colombians free it of cocaine, and support those campesinos who agreed to convert their fields back to far less profitable but legal crops. But the actual plan, signed by Bill Clinton in 2000 and reconfirmed by George W. Bush until the end of his term, takes a different direction. A slow and costly social and economic transformation suddenly seems like a utopia. There’s not enough money, trust, or consensus. There’s not enough time. Funding depends on being able to show results. So everything rests on the quickest option, that of force.

The use of force translates, first of all, into a war on cocaine. Victory will be declared only when not a single leaf of cocaine is left growing in Colombia. Plants are uprooted, fields carpet-bombed with fumigation planes, lands made barren with aggressive weed-killer treatments. From an environmental point of view, the cost is extremely high. The ecosystem of the country’s virgin forests is compromised; the ground and aquifers are filled with toxins; Colombia’s land is burned or polluted, incapable of producing anything of value in the short term. From a societal point of view, the consequences are equally grave. The peasants, lacking alternatives, abandon the devastated areas en masse and start growing coca in more inaccessible zones. The dispersed cultivation and the displaced campesinos’ vulnerability work in the drug lords’ favor. What’s more, the narcos invest in methods to make the fields more fertile, which allows them to double the number of annual harvests.

The result is that after years of a literal scorched-earth policy, Colombian cocaine still represents more than half of all the cocaine consumed worldwide.

The other part of Plan Colombia’s use of force is directed toward individual criminals. The U.S. military bolsters the Colombian army’s actions against drug lords and narco-terrorism: logistics, arms and equipment, special forces, intelligence, training. On the eve of the attack on the Twin Towers, AUCs were included on the White House’s
blacklist of terrorist organizations, but that wasn’t enough to ruin long-standing good relations with the Colombian military machine, let alone with part of the political and economic establishment. President Uribe, who is respected by the paramilitaries, negotiates the demobilization and disarmament of the Autodefensas, but the success is merely superficial. Most groups have no intention of laying down their arms, or of renouncing drug trafficking, and they continue controlling the cocaine business and spreading terror under new names.

Even though it led to significant disarmament and killed off the primary FARC leaders, one after another, the brutal war against the guerrillas was not able to get to the root of the problem either. Today FARC still has nine thousand members and ELN—Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army), Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla army—three thousand, but more important, they still control a conspicuous part of the cocaine production, having become increasingly involved in processing in addition to cultivation. While it’s true that Plan Colombia, with its use of military force, helped to weaken FARC, paradoxically, precisely because of the fragmentation and dislocation of cocaine cultivation, their role as one of the major players in Colombian drug trafficking was confirmed.

In short, if Colombia today is no longer the extremely dangerous country it was ten or twenty years ago, international antidrug policies in South America can take the credit only if one also accepts that, in part thanks to those policies, the conflict was shifted farther north, to Mexico.

But to better understand what exactly went wrong, you have to go back to those confusing times of transition, torn between hope and uncertainty, times in which the fates of the Beauty and the Monkey collided.

 • • • 

Natalia is living happily in Miami, taking care of her newborn baby girl. Her only sadness is that her mother keeps trying to convince her to
leave her husband. She takes little interest in what Julio does or why; every now and then he has to leave suddenly for some trip. Now he too deals with the big fish of the drug world who are floating to the surface, in order to negotiate a surrender with the United States, especially since a coordinated DEA and Colombian police investigation resulted in the biggest roundup since the days of the narco-state—thirty or so arrests, including that of Fabio Ochoa, an important, historic member of the Medellín cartel, who was trafficking in cocaine with his new partners. The investigation’s code name, Operation Millennium, says a lot about the exemplary value assigned to it. The United States is already looking to the future, to Plan Colombia’s ratification. Encouraged by the extradition agreement and the collaboration with the new Colombian presidential administration of Andrés Pastrana, they’ve sent a signal they want everyone to hear, even the Mexican traffickers, whom the antidrug agency has begun to recognize as a growing threat. In fact, the operation also involves Mexican authorities. And it is then that the arrest warrant for Armando Valencia, alias Maradona, is issued. Maradona, who, together with Alejandro Bernal, a Colombian from Medellín who had been like a brother to Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Lord of the Skies, was managing a new and important cocaine import alliance.

The evil must be eliminated at its source, in other words, in Colombia. This is the fundamental error at the base of the United States’ efforts. You can rip up a plant, but you can’t uproot the desire for well-being that leads to addiction, any more than you can eradicate greed. Cocaine is the fruit not of the earth but of man.

But the United States, convinced that the war on cocaine is the same as the war on Colombian cartels, waves an initial victory flag. Fabio Ochoa is the big trophy, flaunted on the front page, but there were other bosses in their sights too who’d escaped capture by a hair’s breadth. How was that possible? The DEA’s office that coordinated Operation Millennium is not in touch with the group in Miami. Nevertheless, Baruch Vega is contacted to find out if there are any moles working for the drug lords. The ubiquitous photographer sets up a
meeting on neutral ground in Central America with his new informers: one is Julio Fierro and the other an AUC member who trafficked for Carlos Castaño.

The official policy of the stick is complemented by the unofficial policy of the carrot. There’s a line of people interested in understanding how the Narcotics Traffickers Rehabilitation Program, as the Miami DEA agents called it, not without some bureaucratic irony, works. At the same time, the certainty that more and more prominent figures are turning traitors sows discord among the traffickers, in particular within the Norte del Valle cartel and in the tight ranks of the Autodefensas.

Right at the peak of this feverish, underground agitation, Natalia Paris receives a fabulous offer. She’s invited to be a special guest on Colombiamoda, the most important fashion event in the country. She dons a little white number that could be a wedding dress if not for the enormous silk wings on the back. A crown of flowers graces her flowing hair. She’s twenty-eight and has a daughter who is learning to walk, but she still looks like a young girl. Her hazel eyes roam the audience as if to embrace these Colombians who had welcomed her back so warmly, but in truth she’s searching for one person in particular. Julio had promised to join her there so she wouldn’t have to endure other men’s longing gazes on her own. They also planned on taking advantage of his clandestine return to have Mariana baptized. But Julio Correa, aka Fierro, has vanished into thin air.

Natalia spends months at the public prosecutor’s, between interrogations and attempts to identify her husband in the photos of dead bodies, sometimes mere masses of butchered flesh, that they place before her. But in vain. Each time it’s not him she feels a moment of relief, an absurd, stabbing hope. It’s obvious by now that he’s been kidnapped, but he might still be alive. She has to keep hoping, praying, hugging her child, casting out every negative thought about what the child’s father may have suffered.

Julio César Correa’s properties in Colombia are sequestered. Natalia Paris’s U.S. visa is revoked. Her ad contracts are canceled. It’s the end.
Her mother had warned her, she who knows all too well what it means to end up alone with an eight-month-old baby girl. Doña Lucia was right after all.