Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  Two years earlier, around 1980, he had fallen in love — just like the rest of his countrymen — with a person he had seen in a television commercial for Ricchi pantyhose; as soon as he saw her he exclaimed, ‘I want her!’ Moreover, she was also a smart and socially aware journalist hosting her own news program: Virginia Vallejo was on her way to becoming the country’s most celebrated female media personality, just when he needed her. Using all his available resources, Escobar did everything within his power to make sure that she would accept his invitation to Nápoles, and after some time his men could deliver the message that she had finally taken him up on his offer. Señorita Vallejo was going to come.

  IN 1982, LARGE parts of both urban and rural Colombia were under the control of various guerrilla movements battling two age-old problems: that Bogotá, the political centre of the nation, was in the hands of a small, wealthy elite; and that 97 per cent of all the land and wealth was owned by just three per cent of the population. These rebel movements were made up of Marxists or Maoists of one kind or another, and they were devout admirers and supporters of the Cuban Revolution. Financially they relied on support from the Soviets, kidnappings, and stealing cattle from landed proprietors, but also on creative collaborations with small farmers located all over the nation and with the new, expanding urban proletariat.

  Most loyal to Cuba was the National Liberation Army, Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), a movement originating in the 1960s and based on the so-called liberation theology, an ideological cross between Marxism and Catholicism that was sweeping across Latin America during this time. The ELN’s objective was, somewhat paradoxically, to solve Colombia’s historical problems — poverty, corruption, concentration of landownership, and the political exclusion of the majority — through armed combat, in a way that was both Christian and communist.

  Camilo Torres Restrepo, a radical and extremely popular priest known for his good looks, had joined the ELN in the 1960s but was killed early in the first battle. Nonetheless many men of the cloth, disillusioned by the landowning elite’s determination to maintain injustice through violence, chose to follow in his footsteps, and for a long time the social arm of the movement was just as important as the military one. In the early 1970s the Colombian military nearly succeeded in finishing off the movement, but the ELN managed to recover after two new lucrative sources of income were discovered: kidnappings and extortion of foreign-oil companies. Its Christian roots did not prevent the movement from carrying out a vast number of fatal bombings, though its high moral standards did deter the ELN from becoming involved in the drug-production revolution, which, in the years to come, would characterise all the successful armed movements in Colombia. In terms of military strategy, this mistake would have fatal consequences; from 1990 on, the movement would begin to lose ground to other armed groups. Twenty years later, it would be a mere skeleton of its former self.

  Around this time, the early 1980s, there was also the Popular Liberation Army, Ejército Popular de Liberación (EPL), originally a Maoist guerrilla group that was predominantly active in the banana-producing region of Urabá. This unusually fertile area east of the Panama border, better known as the Darién Gap, was a small yet strategically important strip of land linking North and South America.

  Barely ten years later, in 1991, the EPL laid down its arms and formed a political party, the representatives of which were soon murdered in a series of historic massacres. They were attacked both by other guerrilla groups, accused of treason and of collaborating with opponents of the revolution, and by the military and its paramilitary groups, accused of still being engaged in guerrilla activities, albeit in civilian guise. In the 1990s, when Urabá became a popular route through which cocaine was smuggled out and North American arms in, locals began to find dismembered body parts in the ditches and rivers on a daily basis. In a paramilitary offensive known as Operation Genesis, designed to consolidate control over this drug corridor in the north, the area was cleansed of all guerrillas. Thousands of innocent people were murdered, and the landed proprietor, Carlos Castaño, commander of the attack, who allied himself with the generation of politicians who would rise to power in the 2000s, became to Colombia in the 1990s what Pablo Escobar was in the 1980s: the spin doctor of cocaine.

  But there was one major difference: posterity held that the great Colombian cocaine boom was linked closely to the rise of the Medellín Cartel, but in truth both cultivation and production soared after Escobar was assassinated, when the increasingly sophisticated business was taken out of the hands of lower-class men from Medellín. In 1993, the year of Escobar’s death, 40,000 hectares of coca were grown in Colombia — 20 per cent of all the coca cultivated in the world — and that same year more than 90 tonnes of cocaine was produced in the country, or 13 per cent of the total amount produced globally. Seven years later coca was grown on 160,000 hectares in Colombia, constituting 73 per cent of all the coca cultivated in the world, and it made 640 tonnes of cocaine a year, or more than 80 per cent of the global total. This was a striking development, and a consequence of the modern drug industry’s increasing reliance on the state and on status — a sordid story that Virginia Vallejo herself would later play a crucial role in unravelling.

  Another actor in the revolution of the 1980s was an urban, intellectual, more liberally oriented movement called the M-19, a guerrilla group notorious for its spectacular actions. Formed on 19 April 1970, after one of the most fraudulent elections in history resulted in the conservatives coming to power once again, the M-19 was composed of academics, artists, blue-collar workers, feminists, radical members of the middle class, and Marxist military officers. By the early 1980s the group was one of the foremost guerrilla movements in Colombia. Unlike the other armed revolutionaries, who resided in the mountains and jungles, the M-19 was a distinctively urban organisation that, owing to its largely unorthodox and off-the-wall tactics, attracted a great deal of media attention. On New Year’s Eve 1979, in an effort to expose the military as ineffectual and at the same time show off its own strength, the M-19 set out to embarrass the military by digging a long tunnel to a secret depot and stealing 5000 weapons. Some time before this event they had made off with the sword of the country’s historic liberator, Simón Bolívar, taken from a well-guarded museum to expose symbolically that the sitting government was illegitimate.

  The M-19 identified with other urban guerrilla movements such as the Tupamaros in Uruguay or the Montoneros in Argentina, but the organisation’s image as largely harmless to democracy gradually began to crumble after a number of guerrilla cells within the group began to seek out funding by kidnapping certain individuals, including members of various mafia families. Most devastating was when they kidnapped Martha Nieves Ochoa, one of the sisters of the Ochoa mafia family — Escobar’s most important ally — and demanded a ransom of more than ten million USD. Rather than give in to their demands, the drug lords formed a vigilante group called the MAS — Muerte a Secuestradores, Death to Kidnappers — which soon began decimating the M-19 by executing the rebels one by one in a series of ruthless murders. Ultimately, this unique guerrilla group was forced to sign a peace treaty with the mafia.

  Not long after that, in 1985, the last remaining cells of the movement incited one of the most tragic incidents in Colombian history. In an act that shocked the nation, 35 members of the M-19 took more than 300 judges, lawyers, and jurists hostage inside the Colombian Palace of Justice, demanding that the Supreme Court justices bring incumbent president Belisario Betancur to trial for having committed what the rebels claimed was treason: acting against the people’s desire for peace in a 20-year conflict. When the military found out what was going on, they descended upon the Palace of Justice and — against the hostages’ explicit demands, as a compromise could have easily been reached — Betancur gave his generals the go-ahead to ‘handle the situation’. The building, located in the heart of the capital, was stormed by tanks, artillery, and an eli
te force. Over 100 people were killed, including 11 Colombian Supreme Court justices; the Palace was completely destroyed; and only one of the 35 guerrilla soldiers managed to make it out alive. Moreover, a large amount of evidence and legal records were destroyed, and 11 people, who were arrested by the military after leaving the building, would later ‘disappear’.

  Since then a widely accepted theory has been that men from the Medellín Cartel, and Escobar in particular, paid the guerrillas two million USD to carry out the deed, the purpose being to destroy crucial evidence against the mafia. The movement’s surviving representatives, several of whom are today successful politicians, have vehemently denied the accusation, and a great deal of controversy still lingers about whether it is true. Other facts and theories — many of which are presented in Ana Carrigan’s book El Palacio de Justicia — suggest that several of the Supreme Court justices, some of whom were progressive human-rights advocates, were on the verge of revealing a number of incriminating cases that would prove once and for all that the military had made extensive use of torture and played a key role in several unexplained civilian massacres. These theories hold that the excessive use of violence at the Palace could only be explained by a military plan to do away with certain justices and destroy documentation housed in the Palace. Another similar theory suggests that the Betancur administration had, despite the rebels’ perception, made considerable progress in peace negotiations with a number of guerrilla movements, and that a social and political settlement to this national conflict was well within reach — a compromise the oligarchy was determined to put a stop to at any cost.

  An unresolved mystery to this day, the tragedy of the Palace of Justice goes down as one of the most violent episodes in Colombian history and remains a very sensitive topic. But whatever the truth is, two things are abundantly clear: first, that the building was not set on fire simply to get at the 35 guerrillas; and second, that Pablo Escobar stood to benefit greatly from the incident. Evidence against him was lost in the destruction, and the Colombian justice system, the cartel’s enemy number one, was brought to its knees.

  Before the Palace of Justice massacre, Escobar and his partners had initiated a campaign of intimidation and terror under the motto ‘better a tomb in Colombia than a prison in the United States’, in order to prevent their extradition to the United States. Following the massacre, the Supreme Court justices — fearing for their lives right after being appointed to their posts — declared in a self-abasing decision that extradition was no longer an option. The official reason for their ruling was ‘legal technicalities’. Escobar rejoiced. Many working-class individuals and leftist intellectuals supported his fight against extradition, since it fit in well with the anti-imperialist rhetoric about national sovereignty that had wide support at the time. The leading weekly, Semana, also lauded the decision, writing that extradition would be considered a ‘violation of Colombian dignity’. Another newspaper called the ruling ‘a victory of the people’. Escobar toasted to the decision and arranged a public fireworks display for the people of Medellín.

  But during the 1980s, a decade replete with guerrilla movements, the ELN, EPL, and the M-19 were mere minor thorns in the government’s side compared to the armed group that had actually controlled much of the nation’s territory (during some years, as much as half) since the 1960s: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the FARC). Like other armed organisations, the FARC formally came into being in the 1960s, but has its roots in a historical time and place widely regarded as marking the birth of modern Colombia: Bogotá, 9 April 1948.

  IN 1948 BOGOTÁ was one of Latin America’s new intellectual metropolises, a place where people discussed literature and philosophy in the bookshops and cafés lining the beautiful city avenues. It was a time of optimism, and the streets were aflutter with all sorts of activity, from the universities and museums to the cathedrals and the thriving downtown area, with its streetcars crisscrossing the city. The increasingly politically aware population anticipated the coming decade eagerly.

  The Cuban Revolution was still ten years away, and for the younger generation socialism was becoming a more and more attractive alternative to what they viewed as their continent’s increasingly anachronistic realities. Many thought that perhaps some sort of revolution was inevitable; the idea that the state would remain under the sole control of the most backward Latin American landowning families was not only undesirable, but also, they reasoned, unlikely.

  What was particularly unique about April 1948, as described by Mark Bowden in his book Killing Pablo, was that it was the month of a historic summit. All the foreign ministers of the North and South American countries met in the Colombian capital to form the Organization of American States, the OAS, a United States–sponsored pan-American collaboration project. The official objective of the organisation was to give South and Central American governments a bigger voice, but an equally important goal was to fight communism, a lightning-rod topic that for these few days transformed the city of Bogotá into a hotbed of all sorts of political debates. Confrontations broke out between institutionalised establishments and young revolutionaries, similar to the protests that would occur 50 years later at economic summit meetings in cities such as Seattle, Prague, Genoa, and Gothenburg. Thousands of critics of imperialism — one of them a 21-year-old student called Fidel Castro and another a 20-year-old freelance writer called Gabriel García Márquez — marched on the streets, organised protests, and held public meetings in which they blasted the OAS as a tragic tool invented by Uncle Sam to promote capitalism. The day before the conference a furious mob attacked the Ecuadorian delegation; 24 hours later, newspaper headlines sounded alarms about ‘terrorists’ after the police arrested someone in the process of priming a bomb; and not long after that, soldiers, members of the police force, and angry demonstrators began to flood the streets.

  With all these new political tensions as a backdrop, Colombian politics had also started to change. The Liberal Party — the leftist party of the day, bolstered by urbanisation and industrialisation — had elected a new radical leader, who would soon go down in history as one of Latin America’s most beloved: Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. For the first time Colombia had a politician who had managed to rouse the urban working classes as well as the traditionally ignored peasant population (most of whom were practically serfs). All opinion polls for the upcoming 1950 presidential election predicted victory for Gaitán, a 49-year-old attorney. During the OAS conference he happily took his place in the revolutionary drama, fervently criticising the new organisation and addressing the people in the streets. Gaitán used his great oratory talents to speak out against the Colombian landowning elite and against capitalism like no one had ever done before. The CIA, as Bowden notes, later called him ‘a staunch antagonist of the oligarchical rule and a spellbinding orator’.

  The young Castro, already self-assured, requested a meeting with Gaitán to discuss politics, the future, and the possibility of a new Latin America. Around midday on 9 April, just two hours before the scheduled meeting with Castro, Gaitán and a group of people left his office on Seventh Avenue in Bogotá, the scene where most of the day’s violence would later unfold, to go to lunch. Not long after setting off they encountered a dishevelled man, who let them pass but then suddenly turned around and, revolver in hand, ran right into the middle of the group and fired. He did not say a word. Gaitán quickly broke away in an attempt to seek refuge in a nearby building but failed, and soon it was too late: the new hope of the Colombian left had been shot multiple times through the head and chest. He was dead before 2.00 p.m.

  The crowd that witnessed the incident lynched Juan Roa Sierra, Gaitán’s assassin, on the spot and dragged his corpse up and down the street until his limbs fell off. Theories about who else was behind the assassination weren’t in short supply, and soon came to include every entity imaginable, from the CIA to hot-headed communists —
who perhaps saw the postponement of an inevitable revolution had Gaitán’s reformism reached the presidential palace. A theory with more credentials is that right-wing extremists from the conservative party paid Roa Sierra to carry out the deed.

  Murder mysteries in Colombia are rarely solved, and the events of 9 April 1948 remain an open wound that has continued to generate sadness and anger in the soul of the country. But more than anything else, the violence lingers. During that morbid afternoon it was not only Gaitán and his assassin who died, but also all hope for a peaceful future. Since that day in the late 1940s the traumatic cycle has taken place at intervals: a new, popular politician with a social agenda suddenly rises to prominence, only to be murdered.

  Gaitán’s assassination ushered in the most violent decade in one of the most violent countries in the world. Dreams of happy and prosperous times ahead were dashed, and the massive rioting that ensued in Bogotá after Gaitán’s death — some of the worst in recorded history — is referred to as El Bogotazo. The wave of violence that followed, as later meticulously described by Colombian writers Arturo Alape and Orlando Fals Borda, was so devastating that even those who had been involved in it were shocked. President Mariano Ospina called for military action — but when troops fired shots into the crowds rather than at individual rioters, they only made matters worse. It was not long before violence spread to other parts of the country, and soon Colombia entered into a brutal ten-year period in which more than 200,000 people were murdered, a period that soon came to be known simply as La Violencia.

  Gaitán’s assassination led to antagonism and fighting between interest groups across the nation, culminating in a furious war, with everyone against everyone else — the military against the peasant rebels, big corporations against labour unions, the government against the opposition, and conservative Catholics against liberal atheists. Killing became a morbid form of art, a ritual. The Catholic Church, which played a key role in the aestheticisation of violence, used its authority and influence to spread the idea that liberalism was extremely dangerous, not only because it would lead to political reform but also because it would end in widespread atheism and the dissolution of social norms. Liberals were viewed as ideologically contagious, and killing became an absurd way to deal with the blasphemous plague. Children were murdered slowly in front of their parents, men’s testicles were cut off and shoved into their mouths, and women were raped and killed, after which their stomachs were cut out and pulled over their heads. Such methods — soon copied by all parties — took on different connotations and became a sort of signature for various groups. One of the many grisly killing procedures entailed cutting the throat of a victim and pulling the tongue out through the opening, leaving the mutilated body with a ‘necktie’.