ZeroZeroZero

by Roberto Saviano

  “I didn’t stop walking, elbowing my way among those men dressed according to the latest dictates of business fashion, and I didn’t stop my targets from coming to see me, but I didn’t stop learning what’s behind my product either; I see new faces, and the old ones fade away and get lost, who knows where. It’s a shitty job.”

  A shitty job that he knows how to do. He talks about it as if he has already weighed the pros and cons of his profession in his head and has decided to keep the cons to himself. Paranoia, for instance. There are pushers who change cell phones and SIM cards once a week. All it takes is one customer to be a little careless and you’re screwed. There are pushers who live like cloistered nuns: no contact with the outside world except when absolutely necessary, and a drastic reduction of one’s private life. Girlfriends are particularly dangerous; they can easily guess what your day job is and can easily take revenge by telling someone about it. Some pushers are even more angsted: They spend their free time erasing all traces of themselves—no credit cards or bank accounts, no ATM cards, and never a signature on a piece of paper. Angst and paranoia. Some pushers, in order to quell the anxiety, do the same blow they push, but only end up feeding their angst. And there are pushers, like the one I’m sitting with, who sound like stockbrokers: “I sell Ferraris, not economy cars. You crash sooner in an economy car; in a Ferrari you last a little longer.”

  There are street pushers who can earn $5,000 a month, and even get a bonus if they sell well. But bourgeois pushers can earn up to $25,000, $40,000 a month.

  “The problem’s not the amount of money you earn, though; it’s that any other job seems impossible, because it would feel like a waste of time. You earn more just by brushing someone’s hands than you would working for months and months, no matter what sort of job it is. And knowing that you’ll be arrested isn’t enough to make you change professions. Even if I were offered a job where I could earn as much as I do now, I don’t think I’d take it, because it would undoubtedly take up more of my time. The same is true for those poor souls who deal on the streets. They’d have to put in a lot more time to earn the same amount of money.”

  I looked at him and asked if he could confirm a sensation I had while listening to his stories, which was that he despises his clients.

  “Yes. I liked them at first, because they gave me what I needed. But over time you look at them and you begin to understand. You realize that you could be one of them. You see yourself from the outside, and you’re repulsed. I dislike my clients because they remind me too much of myself, or what I would become if I decided to enjoy myself more. And not only does the idea repulse me, it scares me.”

  8.

  BEAUTY AND THE MONKEY

  Evolutionary transformation is fueled by vacuums. The story of drug trafficking in Colombia is one of vacuums, transformations, and capitalism.

  Today what was once a vacuum is swarming, like a plot of ground under the entomologist’s lens. Swarming with hundreds of microcartels. Armed organizations that give themselves names that sound like local sports teams. Communist guerrillas who increasingly play the paradoxical role of large landowners, of plantation and production managers. Each one develops his own specialty, carves out his own slice of the action: production, distribution, transportation. Each one defends his own little corner of jungle, mountain, coast, or border. It’s all disconnected, parceled out, ground up. Today the doses of territory, and the spread of power and alliances, for which blood still flows, seem infinitesimal compared to the heyday of the big cartels.

  But if the Colombia of drug trafficking today seems like the land of the Lilliputians to Gulliver, the problem is partly in the eye of the beholder. Or in his mind, rather; in his memory. Eyes see what they expect to see, or they gather in the remains. What they see is based on what they no longer see. So if there aren’t any more big showdowns or massacres, if cartels no longer carry out attacks on presidential candidates or no longer finance presidential elections, if Colombia is no longer a narco-state, and if the big players are all dead or sentenced to life in the United States, you might think the war has been won. Well, maybe not completely won, but at least well on the way to victory.

  Or your gaze might get stuck in the past: Since “cocaine” and “Colombia” are still synonymous—a denomination of origin as inherent as Scotch whiskey or Russian caviar—the imagination continues to picture Colombian drug lords as the most powerful, the richest, the most terrifying in the world. But no regular person knows the names of the big traffickers anymore, or of the major organizations operating in Colombia. And yet, despite decades spent battling the Colombian narcos, the market share the country has lost is much less than one might expect in this era of global commerce. This apparent paradox makes it extremely difficult to grasp the current reality, to see its actual dimensions.

  The alleged Lilliputians are no longer the absolute lords of cocaine, but it’s calculated that Colombia continues to produce around 60 percent of the cocaine consumed worldwide. And coca plants continue to take root in every cultivatable clod of Colombian soil.

  How can this be? What does it mean?

  The first answer is elementary, the basic principle of capitalism. If demand holds, if, in fact, it continues to grow, it would be absurd to cut off the supply, or even to reduce it significantly.

  The second answer is that the decline of the Colombian cartels corresponded to the rise of the Mexican cartels and of all the new, powerful players in the criminal economy. Today the Sinaloa cartel directs the cultivation and production of coca plants, cocaine paste, and cocaine in Colombia just as multinational corporations direct the cultivation and processing of fruit.

  But all this does not fully explain what happened in Colombia. It’s important to understand, though. Important because Colombia represents a matrix of the criminal economy, and its transformations reveal the full adaptive capacity of a system that has one fixed constant: white powder. Men die, armies disintegrate, but coke remains. This, in short, is the story of Colombia.

  • • •

  In the beginning there was Pablo, Pablo Escobar. Before Pablo, the drug trade was on the rise in Colombia, with its ideal conditions for producing, storing, and transporting cocaine. But it was in the hands of “coke cowboys,” who were too weak to impose their own rules and too scattered geographically to impose the law of the strongest. There was a vacuum, and Pablo filled it right away. The first evolutionary step in Colombian drug trafficking began with this ambitious young man, who was determined to become so rich that he’d have more influence than the president. Starting from nothing he accumulated wealth, gained respect, and conceived of the first cocaine distribution network, using small boats and single-engine planes. To safeguard his operation he relied on an old Colombian saying: plata o plomo, money or lead. If you were a police officer or a politician, you either accepted his bribe or you were dead. For Pablo, who became Medellín’s godfather, the cocaine business was simple: All you had to do was take a walk in the poor barrios and enlist the kids, who were ready to do anything—bribe people here and there, or pay off a friendly banker to help you bring the money you laundered back in. He said as much himself: “Everybody has a price. The important thing is to figure out what it is.” The vacuum filled quickly, and the Colombian system became a monopoly, its distribution network extending to the most important points on the American continent. Everything was done in high style: intercontinental flights crammed with cocaine; affable customs officers who let in thousands of containers of flowers full of white powder; submarines for really big shipments; even an ultramodern tunnel that ran from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso, Texas, the private property of a millionaire who lived more than twenty-five hundred miles away. Colombia ruled; Pablo Escobar ruled. And the godfather of Medellín reached an agreement with the godfather of Guadalajara. Mexico looked, learned, pocketed its percentage, and waited its turn.

  By the early 1980s Pablo was making half a mill
ion dollars a day; he had ten accountants. The Medellín cartel was spending twenty-five hundred dollars a month just on elastic bands to bundle its rolls of cash. This was capitalism at its beginning. Large concentrations of wealthy entrepreneurs were laying down the law and penetrating every fiber of society. It was a conservative capitalism, in which the captains of industry vied with one another in flaunting their power and their wealth, without skimping on gifts for the people. Pablo had four hundred public housing units built, and he opened a spectacular public zoo right on his estate, Hacienda Nápoles. Robin Hood capitalists—unscrupulous, bloodthirsty, ruthless spendthrifts. Capitalists in their infancy, though, at the top of rigid pyramidal structures. They felt like giants and considered themselves the incarnations of a sovereign power they’d earned with money and lead—the only legitimate form of power. Pablo even offered to eliminate all of Colombia’s public debt, because the country was already his, because the government of Medellín was stronger and wealthier than that of Bogotá. So if the government caused them any trouble they felt justified in waging a head-on war: car bombs, killings, attacks on enemy politicians and judges. A presidential candidate—the front-runner—was assassinated. But Escobar and his faithful failed to realize that the very thing they believed to be a show of strength was actually their weak spot. A body rots once its head is cut off. When Pablo fell, his organization died, creating another vacuum.

  The vacuum Pablo’s death created was a warning sign: Colombian drug trafficking had to take another evolutionary step. Like capitalism itself, it had to adapt to changes, incorporate social and economic mutations, free itself of tradition, and cross the threshold of modernity. A new species of narco was ready; in fact, it had already begun to proliferate, colonizing more and more territory. Flanked by powerful natural allies, it didn’t have to bleed itself dry in its battle to gain control. Pablo had been a real macho, a striking symbol of untamed sexuality. But now that dominant stereotype was broken, thanks to Hélmer “Pacho” Herrera, one of the bosses of the neohegemonic Cali cartel. Openly gay, Pacho wouldn’t have been able to take two steps under Pablo. But for the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers who founded the Cali cartel, business is business, and if a homosexual can pave the way for Mexico, can plant distribution cells right in New York City, then who cares who he sleeps with. Even women were accepted. Medellín’s old sayings fell out of use: People stopped saying that all women did was spend money and spoil business. Women knew how to do everything, and they did—from money laundering to important negotiations. “Ambition” was no longer a dirty word.

  Another difference: Some of Pablo’s associates were practically illiterate; they didn’t even know who Gabriel García Márquez was, Colombia’s greatest writer then living. They were proud that their power had been born of the people, and they needed to identify with them. Cali bosses, on the other hand, recited verses by Colombian poets and knew what an MBA was worth. The new narcos were capitalists just as Pablo’s were, but they were more sophisticated. They were at home among the elite of the New World. They played at being honest businessmen, wore elegant clothes, knew how to behave in high circles, and moved about freely. No more bunkers and deluxe homes hidden away somewhere. The new narcos loved the light of day, because that’s where they did their business.

  The nature of trafficking changed too. Now you had to guarantee shipments, using fake companies or exploiting those legal channels in which it was easy to pass off illegal goods. And then there were the banks. First the Banco de los Trabajadores, then the First Interamericas Bank of Panama, prestigious and respected credit institutions that the new narcos used to launder money from the United States. The more territory they gained in the legal economy, the more maneuvering room they had to grow their cocaine business. Construction companies, factories, investment firms, radio stations, soccer teams, car dealerships, shopping centers. The symbol of this new mentality was a chain of American-style drugstores called Drogas la Rebaja, Discount Drugs.

  Pablo’s pyramid structure—a dinosaur that had been limping along—had been surpassed. Narco-businesses now established “production objectives,” actual multiyear plans. The Cali cartel was divided into five strategic sectors: politics, security, finance, legal support, and drug trafficking.

  Violence and terror were not done away with, though: Plata o plomo was still the order of the day, but while plata still flowed freely, plomo had to be weighed more carefully, applied more professionally and with more common sense. Before the hit men were youths yanked out of poverty; now they were former or corrupt soldiers. Well-trained mercenaries. Politics became one of the many sectors of society to finance. The money injected into the political system was like an anesthetic: It paralyzed Congress, making it incapable of mounting any threats while conditioning its actions. The last, weak link that tied drug traffickers to their lands was broken as well. To do business the country must be at peace, a fictitious, papier-mâché peace that needs shaking up every now and then—a warning to remind Colombians that those in charge are always there, even if they’re unseen. Henry Loaiza Ceballos, alias the Scorpion, was a real pro in this regard. One day in April 1990 he ordered hundreds of campesinos to be chopped to pieces with chain saws: Under the leadership of Father Tiberio de Jesús Fernández Mafla, the Trujillo parish priest, they had organized a march to protest the armed conflict and call for better living conditions in the countryside. Father Tiberio’s body was found—hacked to bits—in a bend in the River Cauca. Before death took him he was forced to witness the rape and murder of his niece. Then Scorpion Loaiza had the priest’s fingers cut off and forced him to eat them, along with his toes and his genitals. Father Tiberio is buried in a park honoring the Trujillo victims. The inscription on his tomb—something he’d said during his last Easter mass—is prophetic: “If my blood can help a much-needed peace to be born and blossom in Trujillo, I will spill it gladly.”