• • •
To their Italian partners, the use of violence in the New World still seemed excessive, but nonetheless, the Italians were quite happy to form a strong connection with Colombia, to get on well with their new suppliers. The Calabrese mafiosi were as tied to their land as the men of Medellín, yet they shared with the new men of Cali the most salient feature of their success: rule and prosper, without making too much noise. Don’t challenge official power, but rather use it, drain it, manipulate it. It was as if they’d been traveling the same road together for a while.
The narco-state expanded and flexed its muscles. Rather than kill a presidential candidate it didn’t like, it preferred to buy votes to elect one it did. It contaminated every corner of the country, infecting it like a cancer, mutating it in its own image. By now everybody, including the United States and the magistrates who had not been bribed, realized that Cali had become too bloated. Its fall seemed to obey a law of physics: When more growth was no longer possible, it didn’t take much to implode, and Mexico, Colombia’s North American cousin, started getting in on the action. The narco-state, presided over by the cartel, starts to vacillate, and then unravel.
The end of the Cali cartel was the last real revolution of Colombian drug lord capitalism. And with it went the whole colossal, systemically pervasive structure. It was like a beam of bright light penetrating the dark shadows for the first time, scattering cockroaches in all directions; friends became enemies, every man for himself. Some Cali cartel deserters joined the Norte del Valle cartel, which from the beginning was merely a pale imitation of the one that preceded it. Brutal without being charismatic, greedy without any particular business skills or inventiveness, incapable of keeping internal rivalries at bay, they were so scared of extradition and the betrayal of informers that they became paranoid. But times were different now. Times had changed because capitalism had changed, and the Colombians were the first to realize it.
The rest of the world was optimistic, euphoric even. It was heading toward the new millennium convinced that peace, democracy, and liberty were destined to conquer the globe. President Bill Clinton was reelected in November 1996, and a few months later Labour Party leader Tony Blair—who was convinced that a social democratic agenda must be coupled with greater free markets in order to keep step with modernity—was elected prime minister in the UK. On Wall Street, until early 1997, the Dow Jones Index climbed to levels never seen before, and the NASDAQ—the world’s first electronic stock market, which is dedicated to tech stocks such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, Apple, and Google—was up big. What’s more, Steve Jobs had just returned to the helm at Apple, confident he would be able to lead the company out of crisis, and, as we all know, he succeeded brilliantly.
In keeping with the spirit of the times, the euphoric West asked for more and more cocaine. Coke was a white stain on all the optimism. And coke was identified with Colombia. It was unacceptable that in this era of creative capitalism and commerce without borders, a nation could be so rich in resources but so oppressed by a criminal monoculture. The Cali cartel had been taken down, the narco-state had been crushed. Marxist guerrillas holed up with their hostages in the jungle or mountains were an anachronism; they no longer had any reason to exist. The superpower that defeated the world communist bloc thought that all it would take to return Colombia to the free world was a concentrated effort.
The United States didn’t attach enough importance to what Mexico had become, right under their noses. Or rather, they realized it only in spurts, in individual daily reports that ended up on this or that desk, disjointed alarms about stability and public safety. Blinded by optimism, they couldn’t or didn’t want to see that what was emerging in Mexico was nothing other than the dark side of that same global capitalism they were proud to have opened every door to, to have loosened every restriction. Their gaze, also, was imprisoned in the past. Working off a borrowed plot, they wanted to write a happy ending for Colombia’s story.
• • •
Latin American stories are complicated. They’re not like those Hollywood tales where the good are good and the bad are bad. Where if you’re successful it’s because you deserve it, because you earned it with your talent and your skill that, in the end, are nothing more than the fruit of your moral virtue. So it’s easier to understand the transition that takes place in Colombia by tracing two success stories.
The first is the story of a woman. The prettiest and most popular girl in the whole country. The girl who all the men dream of having, the girl who all other girls dream of being. The exclusive model for a lingerie brand and for Colombia’s most popular beer. A line of beauty products known all over Latin America named after her. Natalia Paris. A sweet face, golden locks, honey-colored skin. Girlishly petite but with explosive breasts and glutes. Feminine perfection in miniature. Natalia is the one who created a new model of beauty, that same mix of playful naïveté and supersexy seduction that Shakira—also short, blond, and Colombian—established all around the world, thanks to her powerful voice and wild wiggles, but Natalia’s star rose first. The other story is about a man who as a boy was saddled with a nickname that doesn’t do him justice: El Mono, the Monkey. He doesn’t have the grotesque features of a howler or a spider monkey, the most common species in Colombia; at most, his slightly sunken eyes might make you think of a gorilla: There’s something frightening in his fixed gaze. His mother is Colombian, his father an Italian who left the town of Sapri to make a better life for himself in the New World. El Mono is named after his father, Salvatore Mancuso, and he fulfilled his father’s immigrant dream of integration and success, in his own way.
Both the Beauty and the Monkey were born in cities in the north, the most densely populated and developed part of the country, to families that work hard to achieve the relative ease of the middle class. Natalia’s father is a pilot who dies when she was only eight months old, but her mother is a woman of vigorous temperament and principles, and she’s a lawyer, a career that has given her financial autonomy. Salvatore is the second of six children, his father an electrician who, after years of hard work, manages to open first an appliance repair shop, and then an auto repair shop.
Their parents save in order to send them to good schools, which is also a way of keeping them, as much as possible, away from bad company and street violence. Natalia attends a Catholic boarding school, goes to Boston to study, and enrolls in college with the idea of becoming an advertising agent. But in the meantime, her modeling career takes off. While still a teenager she lands her first important contract: Her radiant smile promotes a toothpaste made in the United States. Then she becomes the poster girl for Cristal Oro beer, a sunny presence in a tiny bikini who winks from the walls of houses, in magazines passed from one person to the next at the hairdresser’s, on huge billboards along the highway. She is everywhere, admired and recognized in a way that had never happened to a Colombian model before. The most common dream of every attractive girl in Colombia was—and still is—to become a beauty queen. The long lead-up to the Miss Colombia pageant is sheer madness. A circus of glossy magazines lands on the Cartagena de Indias beach, and schoolchildren in Cartagena are given two weeks’ vacation. A 24-carat, gold-plated crown with an emerald—the national gem—in the center is placed on the winner’s head, and during her year as Miss Colombia she is received by the president of the republic.
But there are also hundreds of minor beauty pageants. Wherever they’re held, the aspiring beauty queens are eagerly awaited. The hearts of the people of Colombia swell with the desire to make up for their tough daily lives, to forget the violence, the injustice, and the political scandals that seem as if they will never end. Colombians are a happy people, that vibrant happiness that develops as an antidote to fatalism.
But that’s not enough to explain the proliferation of the phenomenon. In Latin America, and in particular in drug-trafficking countries, beauty pageants are also fairs where thoroughbreds already
belonging to a particular stable are paraded. The contest is often fixed from the start: The girl who belongs to the most powerful owner wins. The best present you can give a woman is to buy her a beauty queen’s crown, a gift that also makes the prestige of the man who chose her shine. That’s how it went for Yovanna Guzmán, who was elected Chica Med when she was with Wílber “Soap” Varela, one of the leaders of the Norte del Valle cartel. But even when that’s how it goes, the less fortunate girls can still hope to be noticed by other drug lords who flock to the pageant to choose a new lover, or try their luck in the next pageant.
But Natalia, who did not have to go through anything of the sort in her rise to stardom, suddenly finds herself more envied than Miss Colombia. Her mother would never have allowed her to exhibit herself in a setting where every courteous display of attention is tantamount to a risk. The people who hang around a set are easier to keep an eye on. She goes with Natalia to every appointment, and is her manager and guardian. And she gives her a breast enlargement—two sizes—for her eighteenth birthday, though she never imagines that this further investment in her daughter’s already winning image will make her the forerunner of an epidemic that will soon become all the rage. Even girls from the poorest countryside and the most derelict barrios start prostituting themselves in order to scrape together enough money for breast implants—the prerequisite for getting into the good graces of some boss, which is the only chance they have to better themselves. This is the story the Colombian TV series Sin tetas no hay paraíso (Without Breasts There Is No Paradise) tells. Shown all over the world in toned-down versions, the original was based on Gustavo Bolívar Moreno’s rigorous reportage about the southwestern department of Putumayo, a traditional coca-growing area.
Lucia Gaviria—Natalia’s mother—is always on the lookout. The opportunity that fate has given her daughter must be cultivated fully for as long as it lasts, but it would be a grave error to depend on it. She too had posed for some fashion photo shoots in her youth, but without her law degree, who knows how she would have managed after she was widowed. You have to keep your head on your shoulders and your feet on the ground, aim for safe and solid goals. That beauty is an ephemeral asset, and that a Colombian woman must use other means to earn and to maintain control over her life, to be the author of her own destiny—of these lessons, Natalia’s mother is the best teacher, because she is the perfect model. She has a new partner now, and a second child: a normal family, one that is proud to know that’s what they are, especially in this time and place, which is overrun by such unbridled madness.
• • •
Colombia is the country of a thousand faces. One minute you’re blinded by the sun reflecting off white walls, and the next you’re hit with a sunset, the colors of which light the landscape on fire. If Colombia is disorienting, Montería is energized by its contradictions. A city on the banks of the Sinú River, it is the capital of the department of Córdoba. Simple cottages and skyscrapers burst through tropical trees, dozens of different ethnicities are jammed together in an often impossible cohabitation.
Montería is where Salvatore Mancuso Gómez is born and raised, in a house his father builds with his own hands. His sons, even as little boys, tag along when he goes hunting, fascinated by his treasure: a small arsenal they are never allowed to get near. Don Salvador—which, thanks to an error at immigration, is how he is known in the registrar’s office—raises his children with a firm hand. To maintain their relative social and economic tranquillity, he sets down strict rules that are beyond question.
But in the end his severity pays off. Monkey’s recklessness is limited to his youth, when he is the little boss of the neighborhood, and the other children, in homage to the fuzz that sprouts on his body before any does on theirs, give him that nickname. Or during motocross season in the 1980s, when he wins the national championship and turns the Bianchi brothers, his Italian compatriots who run a Yamaha dealership in Montería, into sales champions.
Like Natalia’s mother, Don Salvador knows that a boy needs gratification, needs such moments of fleeting glory, as long as they don’t risk derailing his life. Salvatore is a good son. He finishes high school and goes to study in the United States; if he fails to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh, it’s not because he lacks the will to study but because he’s too homesick. Especially for Martha, whom he married before he was even eighteen, and little Gianluigi, just a few months old. Don Salvador insists he really wants his tenacious son to build a life for himself in the United States, but he can’t help but yield to the reasoning of a young father. Salvatore returns to Colombia, and he and Martha move to Bogotá, so he can finish his studies there.
Once again the second-born son’s plans diverge from those of his father, and once again his father will not be able to stop him: Salvatore doesn’t want to become an engineer; he wants to become a farmer and animal breeder, a real old-fashioned Colombian. It also seems that he plans to avenge his father, who, after thirty years of sacrifice, had finally managed to buy some land but was forced to sell his beloved finca when he refused to give in to the guerrillas’ extortions. What can you say to a son who stubbornly wants to finish what you couldn’t? That it’s too dangerous, too hard? The Mancusos are proud people, and in the end Salvatore takes a degree in agrarian studies, returns to Montería, and settles with his family on the Campamento farm that Martha has just inherited from her father. The soil is rich, the farmhouse a jewel to be treasured. Don Salvador backs the loan his son needs to transform his business into a lucrative, exquisite dream. It means getting up at dawn and toiling as much as—even more than—the campesinos. Putting his father’s philosophy into practice is hard work. Two years go by, and the hacienda Campamento arouses the admiration not only of the other farmers but of the guerrilla fighters as well, whose appetites are ravenous.
In the early 1990s, the country where Salvatore is starting to make a name for himself is like a gangrenous Wild West. For years now it has been impossible to keep track of all the guerrilla violence in the department of Córdoba: extortions; executions; cattle rustling; kidnapping of innocent people, women and children included. The guerrillas take advantage of the lack of political leadership and the inability of the police to control the situation. A decade earlier the farmers and breeders of the department of Antioquia gathered for the first time, in Medellín, to try to find a solution to the problem. The Association of Middle Magdalena Ranchers and Farmers (ACDEGAM) was born. Nothing revolutionary, they were simply acting on a 1965 decree that gave farmers the right to take up arms in self-defense, with the help of the authorities. Soldiers and farmers arm in arm in an all-out war, where what counts is not the monopoly of force that characterizes every modern state but the identification of a common enemy to annihilate. Yet the situation for farmers in Antioquia and Córdoba remained alarming, the worth of their lands and livestock having fallen to one-fifth its previous value.
Salvatore Mancuso knows all this far too well, just as he knows of the acronyms, manpower, and locations of the insurgents. For years he has listened to the stories of oppression and assembled all the examples he could of people confronting those parasitic bandits who fatten on the fruits of honest people’s labor. He is ready. If an immigrant electrician, worn down by a lifetime of work, didn’t cave, then neither will his son, in the prime of his life and prepared to die for his land and his men. Let them try something, if they dare.
It’s just past dawn, the sun’s slanting rays speckle the ground ochre. Three shadows, lit from behind, approach Salvatore. Emerging into the light, they take on the appearance of guerrillas. Salvatore grabs his rifle and without thinking twice, points it at them. They tell him that their boss wants to see him, but Salvatore refuses to go with them.
Parrita works on Salvatore’s finca. He’s a sharp kid, barely twelve years old, not afraid of anything. The men tease him, tell him he’ll be afraid once he grows up, that Colombia teaches you respect for those who are s
tronger than you. But Parrita just shrugs his shoulders. He’s a cocky kid, and Salvatore likes him. Salvatore sends for him, gives him a two-way radio, and tells him to follow the three guerrillas, to find their base, and to lie in ambush, awaiting further orders. In the meantime, Salvatore starts organizing; he convinces the colonel of the Junín battalion of Montería to lend him some men and, following Parrita’s directions, he flushes out the three guerrillas and kills them.
Salvatore Mancuso has taken his destiny into his own hands. There’s no going back now unless he wants to lose everything he has built for himself. Word spreads from farm to farm about the young haciendero who defied the terrorist thugs in a way no one had ever dared to do before. Not even Pablo Escobar, who, when the daughter of Don Fabio Ochoa Restrepo, a big horse breeder and primogenitor of a high-ranking criminal family in the Medellín cartel, was kidnapped, founded a group called MAS, Muerte a Secuestradores (Death to Kidnappers) in keeping with his theatrical bent. The most powerful man in Colombia shouted threateningly and loaded the avengers with money and weapons. But an immigrant’s son, rather than sending others to do the job, silently took the law into his own hands. Salvatore himself, rather than his farm, became the example to follow. The Montería soldiers get him the permissions he needs to turn his estate into an armed fort and provide him with bodyguards. They’re galvanized as well, and start calling Salvatore cacique, because he’s a chief now, a leader, recognized by the local community. One man in particular bonds like a brother with Salvatore: Major Walter Fratini, vice commander of the battalion that came to his aid during his first retaliation against the guerrillas. They’re both of Italian descent, and they share a love of guns and good wine.
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