Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  Plan Colombia had thus borne fruit in a number of ways, but not in any of the ways for which it was intended. Although the AUC had been dismantled — in the sense that the organisation no longer fought in standardised units throughout the country, and that its leaders had been imprisoned — in reality the criminal syndicate had only abandoned its political project, not its financial one. The paramilitaries no longer existed as an anti-guerrilla army, but they continued to live on as a drug-trafficking network. In some ways this was also true of the guerrillas, though in reverse: the FARC had been severely crippled as a guerrilla or terrorist organisation, but its role as protector of the farmers, transportation routes, and laboratories remained intact in many areas, or was taken over by the mutating powers of the paramilitaries.

  It was in many ways a stroke of genius on the state’s part to forge attacks on guerrillas under the guise of fighting drugs. Outside remote areas, support for the FARC is now practically non-existent. After the kidnappings of strategic individuals from the oligarchy, as well as, in the early 2000s, many others, loathing for the politically misguided rebels spread throughout the land, a hatred that persisted among all social classes. The fact that Álvaro Uribe had started out in the circles of Pablo Escobar’s mafia — and that he was personally responsible for the growth of the paramilitary element — was of little importance to Colombians, as long as he kept the FARC in check. No one cared about drugs; all that mattered was the FARC. Uribe’s policies had resulted in a reduction of the number of kidnappings and various other crimes, and by the end of the decade — when command of his Uribismo, a sort of right-wing version of Argentina’s Peronismo, was handed over to his defense minister and protégé, Juan Manuel Santos — he was the most popular president the country had ever had.

  Popularity went to Uribe’s head, and in 2008 the war on drugs went international in a way that turned the entire region into a ticking time bomb. With US support, the Colombian military initiated full-scale bombing of one of the guerrilla camps — in Ecuador. A diplomatic crisis ensued. At least 20 people were killed; Ecuador’s sovereignty was compromised; and the Brazilian foreign minister proclaimed that Colombia had, by taking military action within other nations, ‘put the countries of South America in a situation in which the security of the entire region is in jeopardy’. Most of the world condemned the attack, but the United States, under George W. Bush, stood up for Colombia’s right to defend itself against ‘drug terrorism’.

  Under mounting pressure, Uribe apologised, but it was too late. The political paranoia associated with the war on drugs was so great that the nightmares of the bordering countries appeared to be coming true. Colombia, the only lasting trouble spot in South America, had started to infect its neighbours; the guerrillas were spreading, the coca was spreading, and even the contra war was now spreading to the surrounding regions. In December 2009 Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez recommended to the United Nations that it send troops to Colombia, because Caracas regarded the domestic unrest in its neighbour as ‘a serious threat to international peace and security’.

  Colombia took the opposite stance. Although the attack within Ecuador had admittedly been a mistake, the Colombian government, surrounded by politically hostile neighbours, was feeling more and more like Israel every day: alone, vulnerable, and misunderstood — but militarily superior, and with the United States on their side. The fact that the FARC had camps along the other side of the southern border was seen as proof that the socialist government in Ecuador was actually supporting the Colombian guerrillas in its war on the state, and the fact that guerrilla fighters moved around Venezuela easily supported Uribe’s conviction that Hugo Chávez was more than just an ideological brother of the jungle communists. The FARC leaders, exhausted from repeated defeats, were pleased with this escalating tension, convinced that nothing would be better for their historic struggle for revolution than a full-scale war between Venezuela and Colombia. They set aside their rivalry with the ELN, a competing guerrilla group, and in January 2010 the two rebel movements announced that they had formed an alliance with ‘Latin America’s other left-wing forces’ to combat the threat that they still, to this day, regard as an overarching problem: US military expansion on their continent (now being deceptively administered by a smart black president with support from virtually the entire Western world).

  The Colombian right, which, in the early 2000s, had consolidated its power, now looked on with apprehension as troops guided by Marxism made moves on both sides of the border. The political climate that was thought to have brought about a historic victory for Colombia during the first decade of the new millennium — leading to less violence, fewer kidnappings, stronger institutions, and an improved investment climate — was again under threat. The war on drugs had, in the view of the right, saved the country. The alliance between Bogotá and Washington was absolutely essential to Álvaro Uribe’s political career, and the only way to motivate the United States to maintain its presence was drugs. A war with Venezuela, the government feared, would make the FARC immediately send all of its remaining troops to serve on Chávez’s side, and Colombian democracy would be attacked at the same time both from within and without, with such brutal force that all the US resources in the world would not be able to stop it.

  All sides now depended on cocaine, in rhetoric and in politics. The Colombian right wing believed that if the United States did not continue to provide military aid for the nation’s war on drugs, Colombia would be attacked by Venezuela, the FARC, and Ecuador, and be dragged into the Bolivarian Revolution. On the other hand, if the United States were to change the course of its anti-drug policy, opting to pull its military support out of South America, Hugo Chávez would have lost his strongest rhetorical weapon — that is, the idea that ‘the empire’ was increasingly closing in each day, and could intervene against his revolutionary nation at any time. The same forces were at work in Bolivia, where the president, Evo Morales, a coca-cultivator-cum-politician, had based his entire career on opposition to the US war on drugs, and he took the DEA accusation that Morales’ government had been involved in drug trafficking as a simple confirmation that he had always been right: Washington would never, not even under Obama, allow a social and economic uprising in Latin America.

  Colombia’s activation of six flight battalions, the construction of a new military facility along the Venezuelan border, and an offer to let the United States use the nation’s military bases — all of this decided in the early 2010s — was the ultimate proof for the new and emerging revolutionaries in Latin America. Álvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos attempted to counter their growing unpopularity in parts of the region by asserting that the only thing they intended to fight was drugs, and Washington agreed. The problem was that, ten years after Plan Colombia had been put into effect, cocaine was no longer just a drug. It was everything.

  THE WAR ON drugs was formed not only by regional turmoil, but also by major geopolitical changes. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the FARC lost all financial and ideological support from the Soviet Union, after which taxes from cocaine trafficking and kidnapping became its primary sources of income. Meanwhile, in the United States drugs replaced communism as a threat to the West, and just one year into the first round of Plan Colombia, 9/11 took place.

  In the beginning — when Richard Nixon coined the term the ‘war on drugs’ — the policy was also a reaction to revolutionary political trends of the hedonistic 1960s, which Republicans feared posed a fundamental threat to family values in the United States and other parts of the world. Debates about abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, drugs, and a number of other issues pertaining to bodily autonomy were beating down all political doors and rocking the very foundation of American Christianity. Moreover, Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ campaign in the early 1980s proved completely ineffectual, not only against the propagation of crack among the poor, but also against cocaine use among the more affluent. In the 197
0s 16 million USD were invested annually in the fight against drugs, a number that 35 years later — after George W. Bush had given his support to Plan Colombia — had grown to 18 billion USD per annum. Today the United States has spent a total of 500 billion USD on what Dick Cheney, a key strategist for the war on terror, in 1989 already viewed as a geopolitical matter and called ‘a high-priority national mission’.

  Until George H. W. Bush took office, the White House’s formal strategy had always been to stop the entry of drugs into the United States at its southern borders, but as the Berlin Wall came down, a number of events coincided, causing sweeping changes throughout the entire narcotics complex. In Colombia, Pablo Escobar and his men not only assassinated Rodrigo Lara Bonilla and Luis Carlos Galán; they also caused the explosion of Avianca Flight 203, in which two American citizens were among the 107 people killed. Just a year before that, a bomb had brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, resulting in the death of all 259 passengers, and as international air travel was perceived as an integral part of the free Western lifestyle, demand grew to punish those who had attacked an open and vulnerable system in cold blood. Three years earlier, in 1986, Ronald Reagan had declared that drugs were ‘a threat to US national security’, and this defence-oriented definition would soon be vital to the military expansion of the war on drugs.

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the imminent threat of drug-funded criminality somehow gave the disoriented US military new relevance. Above all, the intelligence units, which had lost a clear mission, were reorganised. When Escobar’s attacks, a domestic cocaine epidemic, and the fall of communism all coincided in the one year, Cheney was not alone in formulating a possible future direction for the military: ‘narcoterrorism’, at the time a completely new concept, turned into the impending threat to the West.

  Escobar became the bin Laden of the era. Between 1989 and 1991, US military spending on international anti-drug operations more than doubled, and virtually all of this funding went to Colombia; in the eyes of Washington, the bombing of Avianca Flight 203 had transformed the Medellín Cartel into a direct threat to US citizens, which in turn turned its drug lords into legitimate military targets. Until 1991 Executive Order 12333, an initiative to curb human-rights violations by the CIA, had limited the United States’ right to kill citizens of other nations outside of the States, but not long after George Bush senior took office, the order was amended to ensure that such actions could be carried out if US national security was felt to be under threat. The fact that cocaine was spreading like wildfire among America’s youth, along with the frustration that there were now apparently individuals who could be blamed for the suffering, was instrumental in the government’s decision to rouse public opinion in favour of legislative change, giving the United States the green light to attack individuals in other countries with or without the consent of that state.

  If 1989 was the year drugs surpassed communism as the ultimate threat to the West, 9/11 would — indirectly — play an even greater role in the evolution of the anti-narcotics war, particularly in Colombia. The war on drugs was a legal and geopolitical precursor to the war on terror, and the rhetorically effective term ‘war’ has been crucial to both. The word promises a temporary state that will eventually end, a psychologically potent pledge that in both cases has been central to mobilising resources and galvanising public support. But it is, critics argue, a highly misleading concept, because while both these of ‘wars’ can be fought, neither can ever truly be won. The war on drugs prompted the United States to increase its military and judicial authority in order to take military action in other nations over threats to ‘national security’, while the war on terror made it possible for Washington to drastically extend these actions, though this time in reference to the right to defend the nation against global terrorism. In neither case has the ‘the war’ been won or even ended, though in both instances it has led to significant changes in global power relations — such as the United States’ takeover in a number of weaker states, as they become the de facto government.

  In Colombia, the combination of 9/11 and the ongoing war on drugs led to the perception that the nation’s century-long internal conflict could only be solved by the military. Until 2001 the White House, much of Colombia’s political elite, the European Union, and the majority of ordinary Colombians were of the opinion that one of the longest civil wars in the world could only be solved politically — through a dialogue, in which negotiations between the government and the guerrillas would lead to a peace accord whereby the guerrillas would surrender arms in exchange for basic social and political reforms. The introductory negotiations for Plan Colombia, which the European Union played a central role in, simply outlined how such a peace process could be strengthened and improved. But then came the change in the world order following 9/11, and the war on terror was born. The role of the European Union became marginal. The Colombian mafia was able to gain congressional seats, while the US and Colombian militaries fought against terrorism with the new conviction that guerrilla war, drug trafficking, and terror were synonymous. Most of the massive sums built into the military budgets earmarked for ‘fighting drugs’ went exclusively to funding military attacks on the FARC, and by 2010 the world was faced with a dismal situation that surprised some more than others: the Colombian guerrillas were decimated, the concentration of landownership in the country increased dramatically — and the number of tonnes of cocaine transported from the Andes to the United States and Europe remained unchanged.

  THE PLATOON TROOPS let out a sudden exclamation. Helicopters circle in the sky like venomous flies, keeping a lookout for potential enemy units. The hastily abandoned house is located on a small ledge in a beautiful valley, where white waterfalls tumble between cliffs and terracotta-coloured roads wind through the green hills. Now all of the soldiers, except the ones on guard, rush out with crackling walkie-talkies, down to the little ledge overlooking the ravine. ‘Here, here! We’ve found it!’

  Juan Carlos Rivera stands up and gasps. ‘Check out these hoses.’ He catches his breath. ‘And the buckets there.’ He points to a pile of sacks hidden in the bushes. Then to a stack of white plastic buckets a bit further back. It is 30 degrees Celsius, and beads of sweat from the inside of his helmet stream down his cheeks.

  The soothing buzz of the helicopters from above adds to the good feeling. An armed attack is no longer on the cards. The area is secured and everyone who works in the lab has fled the scene.

  Major Quiroga arrives, along with Colonel Correa and the rest of the men.

  ‘Here are 12 55-kilogram bags of active charcoal,’ says Rivera. ‘There are three 25-kilogram bags of caustic soda. And these buckets are full of sulfuric acid and acetone.’

  But what is interesting here is not the bags or buckets, but the three thick rubber hoses tied around a few trees and aimed down into what appears to be a never-ending ravine.

  ‘The lab’s down there, camouflaged in the jungle,’ Rivera says with absolute certainty, even though he has not seen a trace of the building. ‘The liquid chemicals are stored here and then pumped down. That way nothing has to be carried. Now all we have to do to find the lab is to follow the hoses.’

  It is 3.00 p.m. The hoses are such a sure indication of the presence of a lab that Major Quiroga at once gives the order to complete the operation. The soldiers exhale. They will be rewarded in one way or another. Today’s war on drugs is completely controlled by statistics: the number of blown-up labs, sprayed hectares, seized kilos, or dead guerrillas. The soldiers are rewarded with wages, promotions, vacations, and benefits, depending on how well they fulfill various quotas. This piecework system has made quantity more important than quality, a situation that has — according to certain critics — not only generated falsos positivos, but also led to a number of other systemic failures in the fight.

  IN COCAINE POLITICS, Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall suggest tha
t the global cocaine trade has increased since the 1980s not in spite of, but thanks to, the US war on drugs. The authors argue that because actual drug traffic is subordinated to other strategic interests, the consequence is often that the CIA and the DEA are more than willing to cooperate with the drug-funded anti-guerrilla networks that have been essential to the opening up and running of various routes from the Andes to the United States and Europe: ‘In country after country, from Mexico and Honduras to Panama and Peru, the CIA helped set up or consolidate intelligence agencies that became forces of repression, and whose intelligence connections to other countries greased the way for illicit drug shipments.’

  As to what the legal obscurity that arises when US and Latin American militaries enter in an alliance with strategic paramilitaries to catch a bigger fish — whether it is an Escobar or a FARC leader — actually means to the global drug trade is hard to say. Not surprisingly, CIA involvement in drug trafficking has led to a number of wild, often leftist, conspiracy theories, put forward by people who routinely hold the United States responsible for all of the misery on the planet, but there are also a number of scholars more seriously devoted to the issue. Adriana Rossi, a prominent investigator of Latin American drug-trafficking, is one of those who argues that there is clear evidence that the United States has either facilitated or been directly involved in trafficking on a number of occasions throughout the 2000s. However, the image that the CIA and the DEA present of themselves today is of organisations that have been purged of corruption, the drug scandals among their ranks history. Following a debate in Colombia about whether the Colombian anti-narcotics police had any genuine interest in putting a stop to the flow of cocaine, Jay Bergman, Andean regional director for the DEA and one of the world’s top anti-narcotics officers, stated that such suspicions are myths created by people who don’t understand the realities surrounding the war on drugs: ‘Let me be clear. If you have been doing operations with the anti-narcotic police here for a while, then you have seen so many police officers being killed, that have no legs because they walked into landmines, have been blown up in attacks, or have lost colleagues in combat, that it becomes obvious that that’s just a myth. I have been to more funerals and I have had more tears in my eyes in this country than anywhere else. Trust me, there is not a police officer in this country that doesn’t want to see an end to this.’