ZeroZeroZero (35 page)

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Tom Thumb: This tiny hero has to manage without helpers or magic, no resources other than his own vigilant mind. He is the figure who best symbolizes the disparity of forces of those leading the fight against the global cocaine traffic. I’ve felt like him for years, and I steadfastly follow his example. I try to gather up every bread crumb scattered in the dense forest, to pick up every scrap of knowledge that can help me to get through it. Yet the more I try to look closely at narco-trafficking, bordering on the edge of obsession and exhaustion, the more I sense that something is escaping me, or rather that something keeps getting ahead of my imagination. It’s not enough to know, to understand. I need to grasp a more profound dimension, imprint every organ with it, metabolize the mass of notions until they become a mode of natural perception, a second sight. How is it possible otherwise to comprehend that they ship eight tons of cocaine in a single container of bananas, and at the same time have special suitcases made out of fiberglass, resin, and cocaine, which they then treat so as to extract a mere 15 kilos? The first answer is that whoever lost that stratospheric load must have successfully concluded the same operation other times. There’s a good chance that they’re the same ones who developed new suitcases that look like Samsonites for quick restocking via air, and as a future research investment. Because behind all this there is a logic, just one: sell, sell, sell. Sell any way you can, with whatever system, better to sell a lot than a little. But even if it’s less, much less, you can’t do without it. It’s still business, and it can’t be lost. No business in the world is so dynamic, so relentlessly innovative, so loyal to the pure free market spirit as the global cocaine business.

This is the reason cocaine became the merchandise par excellence at a time when markets began being dominated by stocks that were inflated with empty numbers, or securities as intangible as those driven by the new economy, which sold communication and make-believe. But cocaine is tangible. It uses the imaginary, bends it, invades it, fills it
with itself. Every seemingly insurmountable limit is about to fall. The new mutation has already arrived, and it’s called liquid cocaine. Liquid cocaine can make its way inside any hollow object, can impregnate any saturatable material, can dissolve in any drink, any creamy or liquid product, practically without adding any telltale weight. Half a kilo of cocaine can be dissolved in a liter of water. It’s been found in shampoo and body lotion, in shaving cream, glass cleaner, and spray starch, in pesticides, contact lens solution, and cough medicine. It has traveled together with canned pineapple, in containers of coconut milk, in nearly five tons of oil barrels, and in two tons of frozen fruit pulp; it has permeated clothing, upholstery fabric, loads of jeans, canvases, diplomas for deep-sea diving. It’s been sent through the mail as bathroom sets and as pacifiers. It has crossed borders in bottles of wine, beer, and other drinks, from Mexican tequila for margaritas to Brazilian cachaça for caipirinha, but mostly in bottles of rum, like the Colombian brand confiscated in the same month in Bologna and Milan: the Medellín brand, aged three years. And as if rum and Coke, which contains much more coke than alcohol, weren’t enough, they’ve also found it in bottles of Coca-Cola. Cocaine can turn into anything at all, yet it always remains the same.

The island of Curaçao, part of the former Dutch Antilles, now a constituent country of the Netherlands, is perfect for tourism. Along with the pristine beaches and emerald waters typical of the Caribbean, it can count on many months of good weather annually, because it is outside the path of hurricanes. A paradise, in other words. The Donald Duck Snackbar, in the suburbs of Fuik, in the southern part of the island, is a paradise as well—for narco-traffickers. Between a sandwich and a caipirinha, they talk business. Lately the conversation’s mostly about ways to transport cocaine. Controls have grown tighter, so they need new methods.

When you spend years tracking drug traffickers you come to see things not for what they are but for what the traffickers can do with them. I can’t look at a world map anymore without seeing transportation routes, distribution strategies. I can’t see the beauty of a city piazza anymore without asking myself if it would be a good base for pushers. I can’t see the fine, golden sand of a beach anymore without wondering if it would make a good landing spot for an important shipment. I can’t
fly anymore without looking around the plane and calculating how many mules might be onboard, their stomachs full of cocaine capsules.

It even happens with diapers. What’s more innocent than a baby’s diapers? They make me think of the woman from the Antilles who was detained at the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in 2009, after police found a kilo of cocaine hidden in her two-year-old daughter’s diaper. There are highly organized gangs that use their own children for trafficking, sticking balls of liquid cocaine inside their diapers. Easy to transport, difficult to pick up on X-rays. But there’s a down side: While it’s true that coke dissolves easily, it’s also true that the crystallization process to render it salable adds not insignificantly to the cost. Even the physically disabled are welcome. Who would ever dream of searching a man with no legs in a wheelchair? No one, as long as the sniffer dog doesn’t discover cocaine in the chair’s frame, as happened to a young Dominican guy in September 2011. There’s no end to it. Cocaine under the cassock of a fake priest. Cocaine in the stomachs of two Labradors. Cocaine in a shipment of two hundred boxes of red roses. Cocaine hidden inside cigars. Candies and cookies filled with cocaine. Loose cocaine inside bags of foodstuffs. Liquid cocaine in condoms tied with elaborate knots.

There’s a school in Curaçao. Aspiring mules come from all over the world. Narcos teach them how to package and ingest the capsules without hurting themselves, because they’ll use their stomachs as storage during flights. During the first phase of their training the mules swallow big grapes, chunks of bananas or carrots, then condoms filled with confectionary sugar. Two weeks before departure the mule goes on a diet to regularize his digestive cycle. The mule has to eat light: to keep down the capsules, which are the size of those containers inside a Kinder Surprise Egg, you have to stick with fruits and vegetables. It takes a mule two hours to swallow the capsules and settle them in the bottom of his stomach. It hurts; it hurts a lot. So the mule paces, palpitates his stomach to make them go down, helps them along with a little
Vaseline, or at most some yogurt. The stomach is a container that needs to be optimized, and even half a glass of water takes up space. A beginner manages to ingest thirty to forty capsules, while a well-traveled professional can get up to 120. The record seems to be held by a man detained in the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in 2009 with 218 capsules, amounting to 2.2 kilos of cocaine.

Each capsule contains 5 to 10 grams of cocaine. If even one of them breaks during the flight, the mule will die an atrocious death from an overdose. But if it makes it to its destination that cocaine, bought for about €3,000 a kilo in the Antilles, in Europe will go for €40,000 to €60,000 a kilo, depending on which country it’s sold in. On the street it can go for as much as €130 a gram. Which is why the couriers have to follow very strict rules: Before they ingest the capsules they take medicine such as antiemetics, anticholinergics, and antidiarrhetics. The in-flight menu is rigorous too: milk, juice, rice. From the moment he swallows the capsules, the mule has thirty-six hours max before expelling them and, finally, as the Colombians say,
coronar
—mission accomplished, in other words. The word
coronar
comes from the game of checkers, when a pawn reaches his opponent’s baseline and is “crowned.”

Europe needs cocaine, lots of it. There’s never enough. The Old Continent has become the narcos’ new frontier: 20 percent to 30 percent of cocaine production worldwide ends up here. Cocaine has attracted a new clientele. If until 2000 it was used almost exclusively by the privileged strata of society, now it’s more democratic. Adolescents, who never used to get near this sort of product, are today the most attractive slice of the market. It was enough for the narcos simply to diversify the offer and flood the European market with cocaine, lowering the price. Today a gram of cocaine costs around €60 on the streets of Paris, compared to €100 about fifteen years ago. According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, about 13 million Europeans have sniffed cocaine at least once in their lives; 7.5 million of them are between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four. The number of
cocaine users in the UK has quadrupled in ten years. The Central Office for the Suppression of Illicit Drugs Trafficking in France estimates that the number of consumers doubled between 2002 and 2006. By now the market has stabilized; it has its consumers and its habits. The soul of commerce is not publicity but habit. It is the creation of needs, which become so instilled in the user’s consciousness that they are no longer considered a need. In Europe, together with the cocaine habit, a silent army has been born, one that marches in close rank, heedless and resigned, with an addiction that has become a custom, practically a tradition. Europe wants cocaine, and so the narcos find ways to get it there.

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I’m sitting with Mamadu, a young African man with a sweet but determined face. He tells me he was supposed to be named Hope, but then his parents discovered that in other parts of the world it was a girl’s name. He was born at the time that his country, Guinea-Bissau, was experimenting for the first time with multiparty elections. On the horizon loomed an uncertain future but one full of expectation after all the wounds of civil war and repeated coups. His family was originally from the town of Bissorã, but they moved to the capital, Bissau. History repeats itself. People sacrifice their roots for the hope of progress; the city becomes the Eden everyone dreams of. But the hope with which Mamadu’s parents wanted to bless the birth of their son is betrayed once again: civil war, coups, and endemic poverty bog the country down in a deadly immobility. Mamadu learns the art of getting by—the profession that, since the beginning of time, employs the most people—and starts to develop the characteristic that many international bureaucrats associate with people from his country: resignation.

But something has changed recently. His continent has become white. It has become an important landing base for narco-traffickers.

“Your country’s the center of the world now,” I say to him.

Mamadu laughs and shakes his head with symmetrical slowness.

“I’m serious,” I insist. “Your country deals in one of the most sought after products there is.”

“Why are you making fun of me, my friend?” Mamadu says, serious now. “What resources? Cashews, maybe? Locusts?”

The truth is, Guinea-Bissau, like the countries that border it, is exactly what the narco-traffickers are looking for. Africa is fragile. Africa is the absence of rules. The narcos work their way into these enormous vacuums by taking advantage of tottering institutions and ineffective border controls. It’s easy to give birth to a parallel economy, to transform a poor country into an immense warehouse. A warehouse for a Europe increasingly dependent on white powder. If you add the fact that the citizens of Guinea-Bissau, by virtue of their colonial past, are allowed to enter Portuguese territory without a visa, then Mamadu’s country really is the center of the world.

Mamadu tells me about the day in 2009 when he happened to pass by the residence of the president of the republic, João Bernardo Vieira. At first he mistook the shots for firecrackers, which he’d always been afraid of, and he turned in the direction of the noise in order to look the little dynamiters in the face. But there was only a throng of people that drew aside in a disorderly fashion as two cars, tires squealing, slalomed their way through the terrified passersby. On the ground the crumpled body of some man he didn’t recognize. It wasn’t until the next day that Mamadu, glancing at the headlines, learned that it was the president of the republic. Many people saw his execution as a form of revenge at the hands of the military for the killing the day before of the army chief of staff, Batista Tagme Na Waie. Others read the assassination as retaliation on the part of Colombian drug traffickers in Guinea-Bissau for the dismissal of Rear Admiral Bubo Na Tchuto, chief of staff of the navy, on suspicion of conspiring with the drug cartels (a charge to which he would plead guilty in a U.S. court in May 2014). For Mamadu it was simply another wound.

In 2007
Time
magazine defined Guinea-Bissau as a paradise for traffickers, a state that welcomes drug traffickers and distributes their goods. It helps if you have an archipelago off your coast, eighty-eight islands where small aircraft laden with drugs can land. An open zone for the cartels’ personal use. An earthly Eden, practically uninhabited and covered in lush vegetation, bordered by pure white beaches and sliced through by improvised landing strips. It is on one of these strips that the Cessna that changed Mamadu’s life landed. Cessnas are perfect for this sort of job: They’re nimble and fly at a maximum altitude of sixty-five hundred feet, thus avoiding being picked up by radar. The drugs are crammed inside, in fruit crates stacked one atop another and stashed between the metal panels of the plane. The goods are unloaded and taken to the mainland, and from there they take off for Europe, following three major routes: land, which passes through the Atlantic coast of Mauritania and through Morocco, or over tracks in the Sahara before heading up through Turkey and arriving in the Balkans; sea, the most popular route, where commercial fleets of private container ships carry huge amounts of cocaine; and finally air, where couriers or mules usually ingest capsules filled with cocaine.

“A mule?” Mamadu had asked Johnny.

“A mule, Mamadu. You’ll take a little trip to Lisbon and then you’ll come back. Aren’t you happy?’

The person talking, Mamadu recalls, is a buff Nigerian who has shuttled between Abuja, Nigeria, and Bissau for twenty-five years. He goes by the name of Johnny and is an old friend of Mamadu’s father. He says he can give him a hand. Mamadu’s parents have gone back to their village: If you have to die of hunger, you might as well do it close to your own family, in the place where you were born. Johnny stands there in his fake Alexander McQueen suit, and as he talks he keeps touching Mamadu on his shoulder, arm, chest. He’s a salesman, and he knows that to place his goods, it’s not enough to be convincing; he has to establish a contact. Mamadu is hypnotized.

“Lisbon?”

“Lisbon, Mamadu. A few hours’ flight, then you take a walk around the old city, pick up a tourist or two, and catch the plane home.”

Getting drugs to Europe is easier than you’d think. All you need is a commercial flight, a passenger, and an indefinite amount of cocaine safely stored in special wrapping in the bottom of his stomach. Sure, it’s happened that the wrapping breaks during the flight and the mule spends hours in excruciating pain before landing in Lisbon as a cadaver. But most shipments are successful, in part because modern wrapping materials are resistant to gastric acid, to the point that you need to cut them with a knife to open them after they’ve been expelled,. They used to use condoms, but that’s prehistory.

“I have to fly?”

“How else are you going to get to Europe, Mamadu? Swim?”

Solving transportation problems is the narco-trafficker’s most pressing business challenge. To get the cocaine to the west coast of Africa they invested several million dollars constructing a veritable highway, the A10, so called because the ocean route travels right along the 10th parallel. Traffic is always heavy on the A10—there’s a constant coming and going—but only the tip of the iceberg is visible, thanks to the most spectacular seizures. Like the one on the
South Sea,
a cargo ship intercepted by the Spanish navy with 7.5 tons of cocaine onboard. Or the
Master Endeavour,
the huge merchant ship intercepted by the French navy with 1.8 tons of cocaine: The traffickers had drained the well deck in the stern of the ship normally used for drinking water so as to hide the precious cargo. Sometimes the big cargo or fishing ships moor off the African coast and wait for smaller craft—sailboats, dugouts, or coasting vessels—to shuttle the cocaine ashore. Commercial routes are busy day and night but the increased maritime surveillance and the numerous record confiscations have thrown them into crisis, to the point of forcing the narco-traffickers to aim higher, to opt for those agile airplanes. The most extraordinary example is that of the Boeing 727-200 that landed on a makeshift runway smack in the middle of the
Mali desert and was burned on-site so as not to leave any trace. Investigations following the discovery of the fuselage gave rise to the hypothesis that the traffickers were transporting cocaine and arms and that Islamic radicals had let them use their secret runways to reach Algeria, Morocco, and Egypt, as well as provided them with jeeps and trucks. From there the drugs were supposed to make their way up to Greece and the Balkans, eventually arriving at the heart of Europe. This hypothesis was bolstered by discoveries made a few months later: The Boeing 727-200 was registered in Guinea-Bissau, had taken off from Tocumen International Airport in Panama, and was supposed to stop for refueling in Mali. It did not have authorization to fly, and its crew members were carrying fake documents, possibly from Saudi Arabia. Faced with a burning plane carcass, all the investigators were thinking the same thing: If the narcos can afford to get rid of a vehicle estimated to be worth between $500,000 and $1 million, how much cocaine did they manage to get in? A plane of that size can carry up to 10 tons of cocaine.