Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  The same month in which Bergman made these comments, the Colombian government was forced to fire 25 police officers, including their commander, in Bahía Solano, a village on the Pacific coast. One day they were working against the trafficking, the next day with the traffickers. But this was nothing new, and not at all unique for Colombia. Interaction between the mafia and the police has a long history in Latin America, and in November 2008 it was revealed that Noé Ramírez, one of the highest-ranking Mexican police chiefs, had accepted 450,000 USD a month from the cocaine clan Beltrán Leyva, and that both the head of Interpol in Mexico and the head of a special organised crime unit, as well as four other police officers, had been on the cartel’s payroll.

  The authorities’ schizophrenic relationship with the war on drugs, and with drug trafficking itself, plays a key role in Adriana Rossi’s theories about the paradox in which governments whose militaries have been funded by anti-drug money often become better drug exporters than they were before they had the financial means. Colombia is just one example. Its experiences may, some fear, be repeated in the West African states that are now being infiltrated by new and old cocaine-smuggling networks, who are in the pursuit of new routes to Europe; states whose police forces are benefiting from substantial foreign military aid.

  Everything is a result of the corrupting influence of drug trafficking and the mafia’s demand for good infrastructure. When Don Mario, an anti-communist warlord and one of Colombia’s biggest drug barons, was arrested in April 2009, the government was forced to replace the police officers along the coast, all the way up to Panama. All were, or were assumed to be, links in the drug king’s efficient transport chain. Just like the police officers in Bahía Solano, drug smugglers were disguised as anti-drug soldiers, and were superbly equipped in both roles. After they had been replaced a new cycle of corruption began, and a couple of years later, Don Mario’s successors had bought so much loyalty that it was time for a new raid. And so, according to the critics, it continues: more corruption, more military, more trafficking.

  A 2001 report by Human Rights Watch gave a detailed account of the dynamics at work between the military and the mafia in cocaine production in Putumayo. Payment to the officers rose according to rank. A lieutenant received 1500 USD a month and a captain up to 3000 USD, while the colonels received their dollar transfers via intermediaries so that if the system was discovered, they would not be directly responsible. Or, in the words of Scott and Marshall: ‘Aiding foreign military and intelligence forces in the name of fighting the war on drugs risks empowering the very forces responsible for protecting organised criminal syndicates.’

  This is exactly what happened to one of Colombia’s biggest drug lords, Pedro Oliverio Guerrero, alias Cuchillo, who controlled large regions in the eastern plains. When the DEA and the narcotics police launched a major operation in 2008 to arrest him, they failed, for reasons that gave rise to a number of concerns about how armed forces with funding from the war on drugs actually operate. Like many of the nation’s most successful Mafiosi, Cuchillo was a former officer in the Colombian army. In 2007, in his ambitions to take control from the law-enforcement authorities and to eliminate the guerrillas in the area, he doubled his own private army — the paramilitary group Ejército Revolucionario Popular Anticomunista Colombiano (ERPAC), Colombia’s Anti-communist Army of the People — to 2000 soldiers and successfully made the government’s regional soldiers work for him. When the DEA-led operation was launched, Cuchillo was nearly killed in a shootout, but because so many of the members of the army in the area were now on his payroll, the drug king eventually managed to elude the special commando. Moreover, when an investigation later explained how and why the operation had failed, despite all its resources and meticulous intelligence, a familiar yet revealing trend became known: a large amount of the arms seized from the ERPAC had come from the army, and Cuchillo’s five closest guards, who died in combat, had all been former soldiers and officers. But most disturbing for those arguing that the army was ‘clean’ was a satellite-phone conversation that the operation commando eavesdropped upon three hours after the shooting. An indignant Cuchillo was heard asking someone in the army: ‘How in the hell could three Black Hawks get in here without anyone informing me?’

  IN BUENAVENTURA — far from Cuchillo’s arid plains — the Coast Guard searches among the city’s poor canoe-borne folk, and Captain Edwaer Picón and his men will soon, they hope, find a big amount of pure cocaine, perhaps tonnes. Gasoline vapors from all sorts of boat traffic mix in the warm coastal winds as the military boats pass through the entrance to the harbour and take aim at one of the hundreds of creaky wooden piers surrounding the downtown area.

  ‘The negro is the problem. Crazy by nature.’ Captain Picón blocks the sun with his right hand and gazes out at the city.

  This is the most cocaine-dense area in the world. Of the almost 500 tonnes of cocaine Colombia exports annually, a quarter passes through Buenaventura, an over-populated urban island. A month ago, almost 3.5 tonnes were seized in the commercial harbour. Alongside the concrete pier belonging to the Coast Guard is a turquoise volador — a boat with four 250-horsepower engines — that was confiscated two weeks ago with almost two tonnes on board. On a nearby litter-strewn beach is a steel-hulled vessel, which was recently seized with 160 kilos onboard. In the course of a year, between 15 and 20 tonnes of cocaine are confiscated in the district of Buenaventura — perhaps a tenth of everything that goes through — but as to exactly how many thousands of kilos are hidden here among the other traffic on any given day, it’s anyone’s guess. Maybe three. Thirteen. Or 30. No one knows.

  ‘Just look at them,’ says Picón, squinting and pointing at all the hustle and bustle around the piers.

  The city, circular in shape and linked to the mainland by a 200-metre bridge, is divided into three sections. In the north is the main port, whose thousands of different-coloured containers resemble a huge mosaic laid out over parking spaces and cargo ships in the gated area. In the middle is the commercial district, with its damp-damaged concrete buildings. In the south is ‘the problem’: the African-Colombians and their ramshackle housing, a chaotic maze of traditional, rudimentary wooden houses on rickety posts that manage to treacherously obscure the boundary between land and sea. In reality, large parts of the city are built right on the water. It has expanded — like a spontaneously swelling social and economic amoeba — because the armed conflict has meant a population migration from rural to urban areas.

  On the surface los esteros, as these poorer areas are called, look like total anarchy: a jumble of shantytowns with too many inhabitants stuffed into spaces far too small. Yet beyond that first impression of chaos lies a sophisticated community completely and rationally organised by the marginalised masses of the new urban proletariat. Despite all the city’s bloodshed — this is the most violent part of the country, one of the most violent places in the world — almost everything happens against a backdrop of levity. Happily playing children. Open doors. Laughter. Beautifully decorated homes. Gossiping neighbours.

  Every once in a while men loosen their canoes from the posts that support their houses, and as they paddle out into the bay they look like black specks against the slowly moving walls of red, green, yellow, black or blue container vessels. ‘They may give the impression of poor fishermen,’ says Picón. ‘But in reality they’re often informants, who’ll start texting from the moment we arrive.’

  The Coast Guard is white, Buenaventurans black. The former are here temporarily, stay in hotels, operate big military boats, and spend time and money at brothels in the city at night. The latter are here for good, live in shantytowns, paddle canoes, and sell their nightly services to those visiting the city’s brothels. The gap between people of European and African descent is nowhere more pronounced than on the Colombian cocaine coast — the entire region along the Pacific Rim — and it is here that the war on drugs has also been gradu
ally transformed into a war between cultures, in which a particular lifestyle has come to be viewed as a symbol of the nation’s drug industry and become subject to eradication. The war on drugs is no longer a fight against the flow of cocaine, but a fight for what is usually called progress, modernisation. It is large scale against small scale. Shopping centre against fishing family. Square concrete buildings against scattered wooden structures. Cars against canoes. Industry against craftsmanship. The government claims that all they are doing is fighting poverty, but many inhabitants argue that what the state is actually fighting is them. Their lifestyle. And the guerrillas, always ready to exploit the tension between people and state, are lying in wait.

  ‘Over there,’ says Picón to one of his men. ‘Steer over there.’

  THE HISTORY OF those who have suffered the most at the hands of the global cocaine industry is as old as the boom itself. As the country’s largest port, ever since the 1980s Buenaventura has been seen as an attractive area, over which many have vied for control. It was from here that those taking La Fany, the classic route of the Medellín Cartel, departed for Mexico with almost ten tonnes of cocaine a month; it was here that the FARC took over when they became reliant on the drug trade in the 1990s; and it was here that civilians were killed by the thousands when the state regained control in the 2000s, with the help of the paramilitary death squads.

  The flow of cocaine has continued to grow irrespective of which armed group has been in control, and since the early 2010s an ever-increasing importance has been placed on the aesthetic aspects of the war on drugs. Like every other place in Latin America in which the drug industry has gained a foothold, the government has ignored the Colombian coast along the Pacific for as long as Colombia has existed as a nation. The commercial port in the city from which 40 per cent of the nation’s exports are shipped has been the central power’s only object of interest, while the Afro-Colombian inhabitants next to it have been left to fend for themselves to the best of their ability, without state support. This has resulted in a peculiar, but in many ways functional, settlement along the southern part of the island; as the number of poor though picturesque pole houses has increased, so has the amount of trash, gravel, and other debris in the water beneath them. This has caused the island to expand in an organic way, a process that has been uncomplicated for two reasons: because the sea and small-scale fishing have been the only reliable means of livelihood, and because, since the water belongs to everyone, there is never a need for anyone to purchase land they cannot afford. Over time, the city’s destitute have established a strong cultural identity, and many residents proclaim that, were it not for the poor health care, the absence of schools, and the ubiquitous violence, life here would be paradise.

  The problem is that cocaine strategists have found this type of environment ideally suited to their needs. When the tide rolls in, there are thousands of homes just above the surface of the water; and when it rolls out, the wooden seaside shacks look like dancing storks. This odd convergence of nature and culture has made these houses the ideal stations from which small amounts of illegal cargo can be shipped north on a nightly basis. The hundreds of brushwood-covered islands scattered just off the coast are infested with caleteros: people paid to collect small packages containing a few dozen kilograms and gather them until there is a decent quantity, never more than three tonnes, that can be picked up by a volador continuing on to Panama or Mexico. By no means all, and likely only a fraction, of the families in the southern shantytowns work, voluntarily or at gunpoint, by providing feeder services to the collection points; but for those fighting in the war on drugs, these distinctive residential areas have become synonymous with the cocaine trade.

  Yet it is not what is actually being done, but what it looks like that is the central problem in the modern-day war on drugs. A large part of the economic growth promised by Plan Colombia is based on the concept of an impending tourism boom in this exotic and colourful yet largely uncharted land. Colombia, the idea goes, will be restored, and presented to the world with a new image in which wars, guerrillas, massacres, death squads, kidnappings, and even poverty are history. If only the country dares to embrace free trade fully, the logic holds, both foreign investments and tourists will be drawn here in droves. The only problem is all the visible misery caused by the cocaine trade, and that has to be eradicated. Cities such as Buenaventura not only need a fresh new image, but new inhabitants as well. People that are, in the words of the drug police, less ‘crazy’.

  After the paramilitary takeover, the government, military, and municipality have started construction on ‘the new Buenaventura’, based on the Western ideal of the southern European seafront boardwalk. Rather than channelling resources into schools, health care, and security for long-time residents, a mega-project with the intention of pleasing the rest of the world has gotten underway; the original inhabitants of Buenaventura will, according to the urban plan, be relocated and their homes razed, in the hope that in a few years’ time one of the most notorious cities in the world will attract sophisticated tourists who will stroll along the seafront, among chic hotels and cafés, with lattes and frozen yoghurts in hand.

  This will be painful for the thousands of families who will have to see their homes bulldozed, but the project itself would not be completely unreasonable if there were a potential customer base. However, Buenaventura has none of the attributes that attract the more picky travelers from the wealthy corners of the world, in their pursuit for postcard-perfect tropical experiences — no white sandy beaches, no crystal-clear waters, no steady sunshine. Here it rains every day, and the port, which is the focal point of the city, gives the entire island an implacably industrial feel. If the city has anything to offer the global leisure industry at all, it would be its distinctive social life and culture, its people.

  But the Europeanisation of Colombia’s African roots is already underway, and the war on cocaine has become an effective tool to bring about the city’s new face. Sections of the boardwalk are under construction, and a number of cafés have been decorated in the style that the owners believe the wealthy of the world expect. But most places have already been abandoned for lack of patrons. Today Roxette blasts from a deserted concrete desert and Marlboro and Absolut memorabilia dangle in empty bars, while the remaining wooden shanties vibrate with their own rhythms and neighbourhood parties. According to Aida Orobio, a nun from the Buenaventura Diocese, the transformation is typical: the city’s most basic problem is, she says, not drug trafficking, but the fact that the state stubbornly insists on investing in everyone except the people who reside here.

  But as always in Colombia, there is a parallel story on another level, one that is both related to and separate from drugs. The vast majority of the unfathomable tonnes of cocaine passing through this little town of 300,000 inhabitants every year does not go out through the roughened hands of fishermen from los esteros, but in containers via the main harbour: in coffee sacks, boxes of tuna, bags of sugar, crates of bananas, and loads of timber. And at every level, from loaders and unloaders to customs chiefs and city councilors, there are people working under contract with the mafia. The fact that the Coast Guard and the narcotics police put such emphasis on these marginalised residential areas and their canoe trafficking cannot be explained in terms of quantities of powder; it is due to something else. In the earliest years of the war on drugs — during the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations — elimination was the main objective, with the support of bans, and this was validated on a global scale at United Nations conventions. Eradication was key. Yet since then the lack of results has forced Washington to lower its expectations, and elimination is no longer the goal. Instead, what is essential to the DEA and White House today is which kind of powers are strengthened and which weakened by the drug industry. The new goal is merely to make sure that the amount of drug production going on is not so prodigious that it becomes ‘a threat to national security’.


  But just what qualifies as a threat of this kind is determined by the United States and is interpreted in completely different ways throughout Latin America. In Bolivia the democratically elected government is, according to the DEA, a threat to Bolivian national security, whereas in Colombia the democratically elected government maintains Colombian national security, despite the fact that both governments have ruled over national institutions and authorities that played key roles in streamlining cocaine production in the 2000s. In Buenaventura’s case, drug ambitions and priorities are both closely related to the new emphasis on the function of drug trafficking in society, and what the city has been through recently is, in many ways, a consequence of this emphasis.

  When in the 1990s the guerrillas strengthened their positions in this strategic city — Buenaventura is in the province of Valle del Cauca, just two hours from the sugar and cocaine metropolis of Cali — the elite classes throughout the entire region began to smell a rat. Paramilitaries were in full bloom in other parts of the country, and as the guerrillas made advances in the largest port off the Pacific Coast, the need for a counterattack grew. Various stakeholders financed the AUC’s arrival in the city; landed proprietors, drug lords, sugar magnates, and a whole range of industrial sectors with interests in Buenaventura’s harbour entered into an alliance with the provincial political clans and unscrupulous military officers, and the first of several purges were carried out during the early years of the new millennium. One of Carlos Castaño’s brothers in arms from Urabá — Ever Veloza, alias H.H. — took it upon himself to make changes in the balance of power in Buenaventura, and seven years later, after he had demobilised his private armies, he would confess to having ordered the killing of over 1000 people in the city between 2000 and 2001 — and that the murders had been carried out ‘in cooperation with representatives of the state’. Since then several mass graves have been discovered, confirming Veloza’s version of the story. The authors of Parapolítica, the investigation that includes the most extensive analysis of the connection between the private armies and the state apparatus, maintain that ‘the establishment of the AUC in the central parts of Valle del Cauca went hand in hand with a weak police response, which for the most part accepted the actions’.