Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  José looks up from his plate. His best friend was killed yesterday. Shot in the eye. Buried this morning. Who did it? Why was it done? No one knows. No one wants to know. ‘It’s incredibly easy to have someone killed here,’ he says. ‘All you have to do is go to los paras and say that this or that person is a guerillero. Or you go to the guerrillas and say that this or that person is a paraco.’

  Edgar finishes his lunch, licks off his milk moustache, and says that it’s time to get back to work. The first ‘washing’ of the leaves is done. Now they have to be soaked in fuel three times, for at least 40 minutes each time, so that ‘the product’ is released from the leaf pulp. But before standing, he gives Luis a kiss and reflects for a moment on how he defines la ley. For him, the law is in a constant state of flux — in the sense that what it decrees is constantly changing, as well as its being in the hands of different groups at different times — but in any case it always refers to whoever is strongest militarily at the moment.

  ‘The law is whoever gives the orders,’ he says.

  DOGS AND CHICKENS scatter around the drums and barrels, while eight-year-old Diana clings to her father’s leg. By now the leaves have been completely voided of all the desirable alkaloids, and soon the raw cocaine will be separated from the fuel, water, and chemicals before it is finally ‘broken’, which results in a white, cheese-like substance: the paste itself. ‘Tomorrow I’ll sell it in the village,’ Edgar says. ‘There’re plenty of guys there who’ll buy it. One of them will then take it somewhere else, where the product will be turned into pure cocaine; but as to where they go exactly, hardly anyone knows. Someplace deep in the jungle. But it’s extremely dangerous to know the exact location.’

  The ‘guys’ Edgar is talking about are those who, in terms of rank, are just above the cultivator in the cocaine-production hierarchy. The hierarchy has four levels, roughly speaking, wherein the farmer with his simple paste lab is at the bottom. Ranked above the farmer is the itinerant middleman, who purchases the paste from the cultivators and sells it to the refining laboratories, and this is the task that generates so much of the violence associated with cocaine production. The exchange between the farmers and the refining laboratories is always under the supervision of an armed group, the guerrillas or one of the paramilitary groups, and this organisation either manages all of the dealing itself — usually in those areas under FARC control — or the transaction is overseen by individuals who have been given the organisation’s consent to conduct such business. Since the FARC was forced out of the villages of Putumayo around the turn of the millennium all of this is now handled by the paramilitaries, and there is no longer a cocina in the neighbouring area, which means that purchasers must now work in alliance with the police and military to make it past the roadblocks lining the only road out. This also means that the price the farmers get for their paste drops; the further from a cocina the paste is sold, the lower the rate is, since a number of costly fees — bribes being the greatest expense — are added to the business transaction. According to today’s market value in Putumayo, one kilo of paste is worth the equivalent of 700 USD. That same kilo in Buenaventura or by the Venezuelan border, where there are hundreds of labs, goes for 1000 USD.

  ‘It’s always good to have a cocina nearby,’ says José. ‘The rate goes up immediately.’

  Together Edgar and José empty the barrels of fuel, and José says he believes some of the cocinas that have disappeared from Putumayo will eventually be built again. Following the massive efforts of Plan Colombia, the government, police, and the DEA — the body that, in effect, controls the drug war — now all declare that they have the situation under control and, according to official statistics, cultivation in the province has almost been completely eradicated. But any newcomer to the area will see farmers busy at work in minutes. Plenty of coca remains, but not like in the old days, when it was on large plantations, easily detectable by aircraft and satellite surveillance. Rather, coca bushes today are dispersed among other crops. Camouflaged.

  José thinks that criminal groups are not only trying to evade the police and the DEA when they decide on a location for a lab; they’re also on the lookout for a particular culture. ‘Things are pretty calm here today, and there aren’t any big fields, so the police don’t interfere much. It would be easy for the mafioso to build a cocina here now. They always want to be where the inhabitants have a tradition of cultivating and selling paste because then everything runs so smoothly. They know people aren’t going to talk here. That we keep quiet. Just work. Everybody knows this is best for everyone.’

  The middlemen who buy and sell the paste, most often young men, make much larger profits than the farmers because the sale price greatly exceeds the purchase price. But fights and uncertainties can arise over who controls an area, and these territorial disputes often result in the death of the middleman if he makes a false move: buys or sells without the consent of ‘the law’, sells to an agent not affiliated with the organisation in charge, or is careless with what could be deadly knowledge — the location of the lab.

  The third level of the hierarchy consists of those responsible for the refining process; that is, for turning the paste into pure cocaine. It is here that the criminal structure dissipates into a social and economic haze; everything is top-secret, the labs are carefully hidden, and the bosses work under assumed names. This is also where the really big profits start to be made. One kilo of paste is purchased for about 700 USD, while that very same kilo, after being refined into pure cocaine and reaching its final market, will have a street value of around 27,000 USD. (Yet before it goes out onto the market it will be chopped into gram-sized packages, to be sold by whichever group happens to be in charge of the retail end. At this point it will go for about 100 USD per gram, resulting in a gross profit of around 100,000 USD per kilo. But in order to increase profits, during the final stage of production the cocaine will be ‘cut’ with various powdery fillers to increase its weight. The adding of what, on average, will end up being one-third cornstarch or talcum powder to pure cocaine could raise the street value to just over 130,000 USD per kilo. The enormous profits that will be generated in the destination markets will remain in those markets — in Swiss, American, or offshore banks all over the world, part of the global financial network from which Colombia and other producing nations, and particularly the most isolated areas within those countries, are cut off.)

  This third level is the lowest in the hierarchy of refined cocaine, but even these traders become millionaires after just one month of production. Their strategic role is to offer the necessary low-level infrastructure, and to manage all necessary contacts — mainly handling bribes to the police, the military, and the politicians — to ensure that exporting cocaine out of the country goes on unhindered.

  The highest level of the hierarchy that can be physically traced to Colombia consists of the so-called drug lords, los traficantes, who ‘own’ the routes, and have all the manpower and capital necessary to ensure that shipments make it to their final destinations. In the days of the Medellín and Cali Cartels the Colombian mafia also controlled the retail end, but during the first decade of the new millennium the US market passed into the hands of organised crime in both Mexico and North America. But no cocaine trade in the world can happen at all without contacts in the country of origin, and large parts of the European market are still governed by the Colombian mafia in sophisticated collaboration with Old World underworld organisations, particularly Italian ones.

  Of course, these emperors of powder never turn up in the muddy recesses of Putumayo. Since the fall of Escobar a large number of his successors have been arrested or killed in Colombia and Mexico, but there are always new ones waiting in the wings. When Arturo Beltrán Leyva, head of one of the largest cartels in Mexico, was killed on 11 December 2009, the killing was carried out in the midst of vast opulence: world-famous musicians and 20 high-class prostitutes were entertaining
drug lords at a Christmas party, in a house with 280,000 USD in pin money on the premises. What was most interesting about this, though, was what the authorities did the day after. Beltrán Leyva’s blood had barely had time to dry before the police had completely shifted their attention to the individual who would emerge as his successor; no one — least of all the DEA — expected the drug lord’s death to have even the slightest effect on narcotics trafficking. In Mexico alone, the drug war had resulted in 22,000 victims in the past three years — low figures when compared with those of Colombia, but serious nonetheless, since the number of murders has increased every year — while drug trafficking just carried on.

  Edgar empties a drum of a urine-coloured liquid through a hose and admits that he does think sometimes about the fact that what he is making generates misery, and that when all is said and done this work does factor into an illegal activity that leads to violence and death, not just in Colombia but all over the world. Yet such considerations are only transient. He has never seen pure cocaine, does not even really know what the continent of South America is and, since coming here 14 years ago, has never travelled further than the 70 kilometres to where his mother lives. José is more experienced in the ways of the world, and has not only cultivated and processed paste but has also been a cocaine courier, transporting the finished product over the mountains and into Ecuador. Once. When the cocinas were still local, he and a friend left around lunchtime on a Saturday, each with 12 kilos, arriving in Ecuador on Monday morning. There they found two older men sitting at a restaurant, waiting to give them 300 USD. José and his friend had never earned such a large sum of money, even after several months of work. Now they had made it in just 48 hours. ‘For us, coca has always been a way to resolve economic hardships,’ he says. ‘We don’t think about the fact that what we do leads to some mafioso getting rich, buying weapons, and killing people. People here don’t think about things like that. Everybody grows coca so they can keep on living here, so they won’t have to move. There’s no feeling here that coca is implicitly evil. Of course we know that this or that drug lord does terrible things, but that’s their problem.’

  WHEN PLAN COLOMBIA was introduced, its primary objective was to reduce the number of cultivated coca hectares in Colombia by half within five years. Between 2000 and 2006, 857,000 hectares in different parts of the country were sprayed with the herbicide glyphosate, resulting in the de facto eradication of 85,000 hectares. In 2004, 136,000 hectares were sprayed, resulting in the eradication of just 6000 hectares, and in 2005 the situation was even worse: after the dosage of herbicides was raised — and 139,000 hectares were sprayed — the number of fields cultivated that same year actually increased by 6000 hectares. Towards the end of the decade a million hectares had been sprayed, but cultivation and production continued. The balloon effect was at work: following recurrent herbicide spraying efforts in Putumayo in 2004 the number of fields indeed shrank to 4400 hectares, but as soon as the focus shifted away from the region and the military began spraying elsewhere, the coca cultivators resumed planting. The following year, Putumayo was the province that experienced the greatest increase in the number of coca fields, a trend that remained unchanged until the planes returned again.

  And so it continued. But these drastic statistical ups and downs pertaining to Edgar’s home turf were far from the only consequences of Plan Colombia. What upset its harshest critics most of all was that herbicide spraying seemed to be driving the coca cultivators away, scattering them all around the country like rats that had been disturbed in their nest; when satellite imagery was studied to determine the pattern of spreading coca fields during the first decade of the new millennium, it looked as though someone had sneezed in an ashtray. Having been concentrated to six provinces at the beginning of the implementation of Plan Colombia, by now the fields and the dynamics of violence had spread all over the country, and today, cultivation can be found in 24 of 32 of the nation’s provinces. In a veritable exodus, coca cultivators in Putumayo fled to the even poorer neighbouring province of Nariño, the place from which most of them had originated. And when the planes followed in pursuit, the fields were relocated up along the ecologically vulnerable Pacific coast. Today, large parts of the country continue to be sprayed with poisonous herbicides.

  Environmental and human-rights organisations have since sounded the alarm, claiming that an ecocidio, ecocide against the entire nation, is underway. In terms of biodiversity, Colombia has more species of flora and fauna than any other country in the world but Brazil: there are 1800 native bird species — 20 per cent of all the bird species in the world — 3300 animal species, and more than 55,000 plant species. Colombia is home to 90 indigenous peoples, living on 638 reservations in a vast range of climates, from icy glaciers to vast deserts. Over 40 per cent of the country is located in the delicate Amazon rainforest, and the greatest diversity of species is found within a range of 600 to 1200 metres above sea level — the very level where virtually all coca cultivation occurs.

  At first the nature reserves in the country were protected by law, but over time the Colombian government was forced to give in to the second Bush administration’s demands that these areas also be sprayed, and after six years of meagre results, the efforts to eradicate coca fields were expanded; in 2006 key national parks and indigenous people’s reservations in Colombia were sprayed for the first time. The Washington Office on Latin America, WOLA, is just one of a number of organisations to have delivered harsh criticism of Plan Colombia in general, and ecological criticism in particular. In a report entitled A Failed Strategy, WOLA states: ‘The majority of all coca fields sprayed with hazardous herbicides today is carried out in those areas which house the greatest biodiversity and which are ecologically irreplaceable.’

  But not everyone agreed that no results had been achieved. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which regularly examines cultivation patterns in Colombia via satellite imagery, in 2006 the number of cultivated hectares had dropped to 80,000, half the 160,000 that had been cultivated in 2000. The problem is that these statistics, which are published every year to a great deal of media fanfare, lost their credibility ages ago, since critics claim that it is impossible to differentiate, with aerial surveillance, between new, small, and hidden fields, as when seen from the air coca plants are virtually indistinguishable from other types of shrubs. That same year the other well-funded organisation monitoring anti-drug progress in Colombia — the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy — published a report claiming that in 2006 there were 160,000 hectares of coca in the country, an increase on the previous year of 13,000 hectares — and 160,000 hectares is the same number of cultivated hectares when the spraying began in 2000. There was thus a discrepancy of 80,000 between the hectarage found by the two organisations. This was a joke and, as WOLA summed it up after it attempted to set the record straight, no one has any idea as to how much coca there is in Colombia today — just that it is an incredible amount.

  The loss of credibility generated by this numerical exercise, combined with political populism, culminated with the publishing of UNODC reports from 2007 and 2008. In light of the growing criticism of Plan Colombia it became increasingly important to present clear findings, and several UN statisticians resigned after the political pressure to lie about the statistics became too great. When the figures for the Colombian coca fields in 2007 were presented — showing a dramatic 27-per cent increase from the year before — the then president, Álvaro Uribe, shot back with indignation that this was impossible as the efforts to eradicate drug fields had been intensified that very year, and the Colombian government declared the organisation incompetent. But in 2008, the UNODC, using the same survey methods, reported an equally dramatic reduction in the number of cultivated hectares, after which the government built a large media campaign around the statistics from the recently debunked organisation, claiming that the war on drugs was nearly won. According t
o Francisco Thoumi, an economics professor appointed by the United Nations to coordinate the UNODC World Drug Report and based in Vienna from 1999 to 2001, the entire system — in both Colombia and at the UN level — has been corrupted by political interests. After it was proven that their research had been manipulated time and time again, he resigned in protest, stating: ‘The statistics the UN produces today with regard to drugs and drug production are purely political. Data and statistics are systematically falsified to serve various purposes. It’s all just very tragic.’

  But even if the Colombian government’s logic had been right — that the statistics for 2007 were completely wrong, while those for 2008, based on the same methodology, were correct — their successes would still only have been successes from a national perspective, not a global one. According to calculations by the UNOCD for the same year, the amount of cultivated hectarage gained in Bolivia and Peru was now proportionate to what had been lost in Colombia, and thus just as much coca was being cultivated in the Andes by the end of the first decade of the new millennium as at the beginning. And the same applied to cocaine production: in 2002, 730 tonnes were produced in the Andes, while in 2008 it was 820 tonnes, more than half of which was produced in Colombia. After ten years, 6.8 billion US dollars, and a million sprayed hectares in Colombia, nothing like a reduction in cultivation or production had occurred in the Andes.