Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  It was in this environment that the two phenomena were born which would play the most decisive role in the fate of modern Colombia: Pablo Escobar and the FARC. During the Violencia era the conservatives set the military on anything that smacked of progressive liberalism or communism. Later, however, the elites in the two dominant parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, realised that the outrage this was causing could potentially lead to a popular uprising among the nation’s poor majority. Consequently, the military seized power in 1953, and in 1957 the two parties entered into a treaty, establishing the National Front. With this pact the two groups agreed to share power by alternating the presidency and allocating an even number of government mandates between them. The Front was necessary, temporarily at least, to subdue the violence, but it soon became a permanent fixture, which in practice meant that all opposition became illegal. It remained in effect until 1974 — the height of the marijuana bonanza — when the parties re-instituted the democratic system in which candidates campaigned in open elections.

  During these years of violence the army was also waging war against small, isolated peasant communities in Central Colombia, who were demanding social and economic reform. As time went on, the people in these peasant communities — under the guidance of men such as Pedro Antonio Marín, later known as Manuel Marulanda or Tirofijo — took up arms in an effort to defend themselves against military attacks and to declare their status as independent republics. The government, using Cold War logic and supported by the United States, responded with renewed military campaigns, which caused many of the peasants and their leaders living in the ‘republics’ to flee the central mountains and establish new communities elsewhere, mainly in the southeast valleys close to the Amazon. Sixteen years after Gaitán’s assassination, in 1964, these peasant movements evolved into the FARC. Half a century later, this guerrilla group, the oldest in Latin America, still controls vast parts of rural Colombia.

  But things changed over time in regard to strength and values: if the FARC in the 1960s was a weak military movement whose political objectives garnered strong support, today the FARC is, in contrast, a military machine whose political ideas are vague and whose practices are supported by virtually no one. Over the years, the guerrillas became dependent on the Soviet Union, and when support from the Eastern Bloc began to dissipate, the FARC, a self-identified party of war, became heavily involved in just about any sort of activity that could help it to generate the resources needed, activities that included kidnapping — but, most of all, producing cocaine.

  VIRGINIA VALLEJO AND Pablo Escobar became a couple in 1982, the year they met, and their relationship lasted until 1987. She helped him to further his political agenda, and in April 1983 Escobar celebrated with champagne after Colombia’s leading weekly newspaper featured a story that portrayed him as ‘the Robin Hood of Medellín’.

  Vallejo was Escobar’s mistress during the period in which he was transformed from a mere local politician to the most notorious terrorist in the world. And, in the beginning, she loved him. Like everyone else who fell under Escobar’s spell, she enjoyed his sense of humour and his sheer wildness. (Years later, once thousands of people had been killed and all of Medellín had been besieged by the American and Colombian militaries in pursuit of ‘the most dangerous man in the world’, Escobar’s calmness and sense of humour were intact. In the very last interview before his death, when asked by Colombian journalist Germán Castro Caycedo if he thought he was ‘bigger’ than Al Capone, he responded: ‘I am not very big, but if I recall correctly, Al Capone was five centimetres shorter than me.’)

  When he was young, Escobar and his friends used to occupy themselves by emptying Marlboros of their tobacco, refilling them with high-calibre marijuana and selling them to unsuspecting customers on the street. They would follow them around until the innocent victims succumbed to hallucinations, causing the boys to double over laughing; this was the sort of thing he found amusing.

  In the 1960s, when both he and Virginia were teenagers, the country was still reeling from the aftershock of La Violencia, and the Church’s hypocriscy regarding values, such as the sanctity of life, was getting more and more obvious to a new generation. One day it was morally sanctionable to kill, the next day it was the worst sin. Life, many young people concluded, seemed absurd. This quite rational rejection of rationality would later not only be integral to Nobel Prize–winning literature, but would also contribute to the fact that the very concept of reason later developed into somewhat of a national joke; people who expected or attempted to determine the outcome to anything by using logic or rationality always seemed to end up losing in Colombia.

  In Medellín, the apparent absurdity of life and a seemingly wildly changeable system of values gave rise to a subculture known as Nadaismo, ‘nothing-ism’ — the Colombian answer to the Beat generation in the United States — and to the chagrin of his God-fearing mother, Pablo became one of the movement’s most active members. Nadaist doctrine was based on the books The Right Not to Obey by philosopher Fernando Gonzáles and The First Manifesto of Nadaismo by thinker Gonzalo Arango; both men were from the province of Antioquia, of which Medellín is the capital. The credo of the movement was a sort of irrationality of contrasts that vacillated wildly between pronounced atheism and profound spirituality, and in whose cultural practice the term locura — madness — was central. Nadaists were leftists, oppositional, and dirty, and did everything they could to shake up the establishment. But most of all, they smoked dope.

  One night the year after Virginia and Pablo had met, Nadaismo by then a thing of the past, the two sat down with some men in one of the open bars in Hacienda Nápoles, where a gentle breeze offered some relief from the heat. It was a special gathering. Pablo had brought together those men who, in 1983, were Colombia’s foremost mafiosi. They were all impressed when he introduced his new companion.

  ‘Virginia, this is Gonzalo, a loyal compañero who loves food and enjoys the best things life has to offer.’

  As Alonso Salázar relates in his biography of Escobar, in front of her sat a man who seemed to be trying to conceal his hick background by forcing his most noticeable attribute onto the group without realising that it was having the reverse effect. Wearing a sombrero decorated with a gaping snakehead and rooster-feather tassels — with a little horseshoe stamped on the right side as a good-luck charm — he scoured the scene with an uncertain gaze and uttered some words in a strange dialect. A thick silver chain with a medallion in the shape of Christ hung around his neck, and his wrists and hands were adorned with bracelets and a ring set with a giant emerald. But what set him apart from the others most was his bad breath.

  José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, El Mexicano, was Escobar’s ally in the construction of one of the most extensive cocaine-smuggling empires in the world. While Escobar was a diplomatic man from the city, anxious to distinguish himself as a politician with leftist sympathies, El Mexicano was a staunch right-wing conservative whose sensibility reflected his origins in rural Colombia, with its propensity for violence; he was brusque in temperament and had a reactionary distrust of all that was modern. Having no faith in the banking system of the new world, Gacha buried his money in various hiding places in Magdalena Medio. After his death, millions of dollars were discovered by the police and by cunning peasants — though most of his fortune still, to this day, lies rotting away in the vast open spaces along the Magdalena River.

  In another armchair sat Gustavo Gaviria, Pablo’s cousin, who Virginia already knew since the two men were as close as Siamese twins. They not only did everything together, but also did it in the same way. If Pablo bought a new house, Gustavo bought one just like it. If Gustavo’s aeroplane landed at Nápoles, you could bet your bottom dollar that Pablo’s was not far behind. If one became interested in motorsport, so did the other. And so on. Gustavo was a calm man, driven more by common sense than unadulterated passion, and much later — after the
CIA, DEA, and the Colombian army had seized Medellín in pursuit of Escobar — he tried to convince his beloved cousin that the two of them should trade all the bloodshed for a life of peace and tranquility. ‘Pablo,’ he said, ‘we have so much money that we’ll never be able to spend it. Why don’t we just move to a different country?’ But Escobar would not hear of it. Medellín, he felt, was his.

  Also at Nápoles were the Ochoa brothers and Carlos Lehder. The former represented an entire family, an upper-class clan with a high social standing in Medellín. The Ochoa family had earned their fortune well before the coca boom by breeding and selling thoroughbreds. Lehder, a vain man who spoke fluent English and had refined taste, was the most important and eccentric character in the group. The 33-year-old was arrested in the United States in 1974 for smuggling marijuana, but released in 1976. After that, he contributed more than anyone else to the industrialisation of the cocaine trade by creating a sophisticated logistics network from Colombia to the United States, causing both production and income to increase simultaneously. Before meeting Lehder, Pablo Escobar and Gustavo Gaviria had been nothing but a couple of car thieves. The clever half-German was the visionary of the group and had all the necessary contacts in the United States. One day in 1978 he put down 190,000 USD in cash on the largest house on Norman Island in the Bahamas, and the year after, he took control of the rest of the island, on which he built a kilometre-long runway. The whole island was transformed into a hub for refuelling and repacking, where cocaine could be transferred from one plane to another, or to a boat, which would carry it the 120 remaining kilometres to Florida. Lehder took a percentage on all shipments and soon became one of the richest men in the world. His innovations led to improved cooperation between the production, smuggling, and distribution segments of the cocaine industry, and his organisational skills expanded the Medellín Cartel’s capacity dramatically.

  The most curious thing about the young man, however, was not his financial ambitions in relation to cocaine, but rather his political aspirations. Like Escobar, he was also a radical, in a twisted sense, and his hatred of the United States fuelled his desire to turn cocaine into a sort of insidious weapon against the empire of the north — one could, he thought, undermine Uncle Sam from the inside by turning him into pathetic drug addict, while at the same time stealing his money.

  The last man to whom Virginia was introduced was Fidel Castaño, the father of Colombian paramilitarianism — a man who, in his own way, would factor into Colombian history as much as Escobar himself. By 1983 Castaño had already ceased working as a drug smuggler and had become involved with a scheme that, in comparison to Lehder’s grandiose ambitions of a global political enterprise, was actually quite local and down-to-earth. Castaño had unusual mannerisms: he was soft-spoken but firm, athletic but refined, wealthy but restrained. He had no class complex with which to contend and, unlike the others, opted not to travel to Nápoles by plane or in a gold-plated Ferrari, but instead by bus or on foot. He had purchased Montecasino, an architectural wonder and the most beautiful building in Medellín, and the enormous art and wine collections he housed there were the envy of connoisseurs everywhere. What Castaño needed was not more money, but a strategy to hold on to what he had.

  Every year it seemed as if a new guerrilla movement was forming, mutating, being resurrected, or expanding, and the landowning families, such as the Castaños, watched as uniformed revolutionaries either kidnapped or killed their relatives on nearly a weekly basis. In 1981 the FARC took Fidel’s father, Jesús María Castaño, hostage and Fidel, the eldest son, immediately started negotiating for his safe release. The FARC demanded a ransom of ten million pesos, 200,000 USD. After it was paid, the rebels announced that the sum had been increased to 50 million pesos. After scraping together this money as well, Fidel sent it to the guerrillas via courier, after which the Castaños waited on pins and needles for their father’s return. But the old man was never released. After they received the money the FARC killed Jesús María Castaño, and when Fidel found out what had happened, he made a vow both to himself and to his country that he would not rest until Colombia was completely liberated from ‘the pestilence that goes by the name of communism’. If no one would help him, he was prepared to do it alone.

  With this, a Rambo was born; in the coming years, Fidel and his younger brother Carlos would kill thousands of people — initially mainly guerrilla soldiers, but soon an ever-increasing number of civilians. The Castaño brothers came up with a two-tier strategy in which they would not concentrate on the ‘fish’ itself, but on ‘draining the water from the lakes in which the fish swim’: trade unions, leftist parties, student movements, social workers, women’s organisations — all entities of society in which guerrillas could be imagined to be cavorting would be eradicated. The other aspect of their strategy was based on the knowledge that this war would be extremely expensive and could only be won if enough money was raised — and they already knew that there was only one activity that could generate the funds they needed: narcotics. The armed contra war would be based on the enormous returns from drug trafficking and on the traffickers’ eternal need for protection. Fidel became Pablo’s military right-hand man.

  Virginia only had sketchy information on all of this, and no idea of what was really going on. Despite the fact that by 1983 crack and cocaine addiction were already major problems in the United States, most people in Colombia were completely oblivious to this knowledge; using cocaine was certainly looked down on, but the notion that it could be extremely dangerous, and could destroy individuals and their families, was not widely known. With a shrug of the shoulders, average citizens and politicians alike declared that the white gold was something gringos simply seemed to want in massive quantities, and because it was apparently in such high demand, many Colombians figured that, in a way, it wasn’t all that big a deal if someone opted to produce it. Another widely held belief in Colombia in the early 1980s was that cocaine was well on its way to becoming legalised, and that the recent rush was a way for those already involved in the industry to position themselves for an upcoming legitimate market. The example Escobar used to illustrate his own aspirations was the Kennedy family, who had made their fortune on liquor smuggling during the Prohibition Era, a fortune that later helped to establish them as one of America’s most powerful political dynasties. The first generation criminals, the second generation presidents — that was his dream.

  Most of the eccentric men around the table that evening were in their thirties, and it was impossible to imagine then that such a tight-knit fraternity would dissolve in a national bloodbath, and even more difficult to fathom how the rest of the story would play out — that all of these friends, one by one, would stab each other in the back.

  ON 17 NOVEMBER 1986, Colonel Jaime Ramírez Gómez was executed in front of his family. He was a key witness in the murder trial of justice minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, who had been assassinated by a motorcycle-riding gunman on 30 April 1984. Exactly one month to the day after Ramirez’s murder, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper El Espectador, Guillermo Cano Isaza, was shot dead after leaving the editorial offices in his humble car.

  As Fabio Castillo establishes in his book Riders of Cocaine, the three men, Ramírez, Bonilla, and Cano, had three things in common. Unlike most other people at that time, they had not only decided to name and shame people such as Escobar and Gacha, but they had also dared to speak the truth: that the drug mafia was intent on buying the entire country, a goal they were well on their way to achieving. Between 1976 and 1980 total deposits made at metropolitan banks across the nation more than doubled. Several political movements founded with drug money were on their way to making it into Congress. The justice system was bought. These three had made this information public, and it was the same type of individual, a unique character, that had killed each of them. He was a sort of traveling salesman in death, a central figure in modern Colombia — el sicario.

 
When Escobar began to suspect those such as Bonilla and Cano as potential obstacles in his climb to the top, he responded with a strategy that is still practised by his disciples in Mexico to this day: all opponents must be killed, every last one of them. But high-status victims — including politicians, journalists, police chiefs, and prosecutors — were just a mere drop of blood in the ever-growing bloodbath of Medellín in 1985, a year in which 1698 murders were committed. A year later the already shocking death toll in the city had doubled, reaching 3500. Yet another term — el sicariato, contract killing — made its way into the Colombian lexicon, and it was in the midst of this chaos that Escobar’s minion Isaac Guttnan, one of the most sinister characters in history, founded the most effective killing machine Colombia had ever seen: a killing academy for motorcycle-gunmen in Medellín.

  The demand for murder had quite simply exceeded the supply of hit men — or at least competent hit men. Boys living in the shantytowns needed the skills to commit murder flawlessly, and in order to teach them all they needed to know, Guttnan purchased an estate on which he began educating young men in the art of riding a motorcycle at top speed while firing a machine gun at a target with absolute precision. The trick was to time the two activities perfectly and to do so with confidence — to shoot at a 90-degree angle relative to the movement, the ultimate goal being to ensure that the trajectory of the bullet and the direction of travel together formed a perfect perpendicular cross. The final exam was to make a perfect hit, and the criteria by which the hit was assessed included whether the subject died immediately, as well as how fast the getaway was made. Alias Quesito — the sicario who killed Lara Bonilla, the murder that launched Escobar’s full-scale war on the state — had attended the academy and would later say in an interview with British journalists James Mollison and Rainbow Nelson that he, like many of his fellow hit men, ‘was just a kid looking for money’.