Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  The ‘actions’, which were carried out in the 2000s and continue to this day, often took place in los esteros of Buenaventura. The wooden hovels and their inhabitants were synonymous, in the eyes of the elite and paramilitary groups, with guerrilla-controlled territory — an assessment that has sometimes been correct, but many times hasn’t. Over time the idea took root that a sustainable guerrilla remediation of the city could not be achieved with anything less than an elimination of the cultural traditions and housing conditions that were perceived to be an essential part of the social ‘water’ in which the guerrilla swam. War between the FARC and paramilitary groups raged in the neighbourhoods until the latter eventually proved victorious, after which the plan for ‘the new Buenaventura’, with its clean seafront instead of ‘crazy’ neighbourhoods, was presented. The fact that several districts in los esteros were controlled and often terrorised by urban branches of the FARC was nothing new, but after thousands of innocent people were murdered before the eyes of a passive army and police force, distrust developed between the people and the state — a distrust which has remained the hallmark of the city ever since. And the seafront, which has only just begun to be built, has become a highly charged political symbol of white against black in Buenaventura. A symbol of the future against the past. Drugs flow as effortlessly through the harbour as through los esteros, but the government and the DEA view drug trafficking as more of a hazard to society when it moves through the poor area, with its dirty waters and seeming chaos, than when it has to do with corporate boardrooms and the main harbour. And for the FARC, it is becoming easier and easier to convince the city’s Afro-Colombian majority that the focus of the war on drugs is not primarily on the flow of drugs, but on what kind of people are involved in it.

  IT IS 10.00 a.m., and a great deal of commerce is taking place down by the piers when the Coast Guard pulls up beside two abandoned boats, each loaded with three large plastic oil drums. In a sea of chatter, quantities of goods both large and small are being bought and sold on the nearby boats, but these two have suddenly been abandoned. No one wants to take responsibility for them.

  Quite undramatically, Captain Picón’s subordinates simply loosen the punts before the merchants’ trained eyes, making no other seizures, and tow them behind their patrol boat towards a little island in the bay, which functions as one of many military bases.

  ‘See here,’ says Picón, once the six drums have been rolled out into a large hangar. He points to a semicircular incision at the bottom of each large drum. Nothing can be seen from a distance, but if you look closely it’s obvious that someone has cut out a sort of a lid in the hard blue plastic and then glued it back in. This, he says, is what they always look like. Picón’s staff break open lid after lid and start to pull out tightly packed rectangles of cardboard, all carefully taped and labeled either ‘Scrooge McDuck’ or ‘Batman’.

  ‘This means that the goods originate from two different labs,’ says Picón. ‘McDuck is one producer, Batman another. They are like logos for the cartels. Had the packages been sent unmarked, absolute chaos would ensue once everything arrived in Panama. Distributors and producers always double-check with each other just to make sure they know whose goods have arrived. So the labels are essential.’

  Kilo after kilo is arranged in endless rows on the shiny concrete floor, like dominos, while technicians, chemists, prosecutors, and more police officers arrive. In the retail sector cocaine is dealt in grams, though here a kilo is the smallest denomination. A soldier in a blue uniform, crawling on all fours, numbers each brick with a squeaky felt-tip marker, and after a couple of hours of tedious work he scribbles out digits on the last three Batman packages: 390, 391, 392. ‘Phew.’

  The chemist takes out a scalpel; he cuts open a dozen or so arbitrarily selected packages and digs a bit with a spoon into the crosshatched surface of the densely packed powder. He sprinkles a few drops of solution in a couple of places, which stain like piss marks in the snow. ‘Cocaine,’ he verifies.

  ‘And the quality?’ asks Picón. ‘Good or junk?’

  ‘Puro,’ says the chemist.

  Then something strange happens. Signs, banners, and pennants are dragged into the hangar. They bear large coats of arms, that of the Coast Guard and of the security police (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, DAS). A makeshift stage is quickly constructed behind the orderly rows of packages. ‘A little more to the right … there. That’s good,’ says a police officer.

  The empty plastic drums are arranged in a small pyramid, under a banner reading, ‘We are quick and transparent in our efforts to make peace and a better future along the coasts of our fatherland — The Army.’ The DAS emblems surround the whole display, but as it turns out, the most important thing is not that the DAS, the Coast Guard, or the army has acted, but that the local and regional entities, Puesto Operativo Buenaventura and Seccional Valle del Cauca, have made the confiscation. Yet as the cameras are hauled out and the seizure of the 392 kilos is about to be documented for the media and officials, one police officer nudges his colleague, telling him to stop: ‘It doesn’t look big enough. Thin the rows out a bit, so it looks like there’s more.’

  The packets are reconfigured, an additional half-metre or so created between each row, and when the new arrangement is complete the plastic-coated cardboard packages glisten like gold ingots throughout the entire hangar. With machine guns in hand, platoon soldiers line up in front of the placards and banners so that the picture can finally be taken.

  ‘Good, very good,’ says Picón.

  The notion that more is better, and that it is absolutely essential the quantity looks greater than it is, is so self-evident to Picón that he does not understand why a question would even arise. But why was the whole capture at the pier so straightforward? Why didn’t they do some intelligence work on the two boats when they realised they were carrying cocaine, so the perpetrators could have been caught? Why didn’t they try to find out exactly what was going on, to reveal the entire chain? And why was it so important for the local police entities to front for the photos?

  Captain Picón looks uncomfortable, and his response is difficult to interpret. ‘That’s not how we work.’

  ON THE OTHER side of the harbour, in an office where files and toy cars are jumbled together on bookshelves, is a man who is in a better position to answer such questions.

  ‘Whore-mongering. Excuse the expression, but that’s what it boils down to.’

  Gustavo Guevara, whose life is in constant danger, is the region’s most senior government prosecutor, and of all the words passing through his mouth on a daily basis, ‘problem’ is the most frequent. He has worked in the court system for 20 years and apologises for his disillusioned tone, but says that it is difficult to remain cheerful after so many years in the field.

  ‘Of course it would be more desirable to have better policing. More reconnaissance, to search for links, to see what supplies are being used, which people are involved, where they’re going, where they’re leaving the goods, to clear things up — to get at the root of the problem. But that seldom happens. Because here in Colombia, what it all amounts to is ‘el positivo’. It’s terrible. When a confiscation is made, it’s all about the media. It’s about taking the credit fast; taking a good picture with law enforcement in front of whatever happens to have been confiscated, notifying the officials that you’ve been diligent. Window dressing.’

  Gustavo Guevara has a dimple in his chin and a gap between his two front teeth, and he is wearing a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The stacks of papers on his desk are all about drug smuggling, and after clarifying that what he is expressing is his own personal opinion, nothing necessarily supported by the state prosecution office, he explains that the prioritising of quantity over quality is due to ‘the damned statistics’: ‘We’re all whores to the system. It’s pathetic. Different divisions within institutions are all figh
ting over criminals. If it’s proven that someone who is arrested comes from another region, the police authorities in that province demand that the person be registered as having been arrested in their district. That way they can take credit for a positivo. I detest that term most strongly. But the performance of every police officer and soldier is measured according to statistics. I am a prosecutor and, thankfully, am assessed according to other standards; it’s more serious at our level.’

  Few people have seen as much of the ins and outs of drug smuggling and the war on drugs as Gustavo Guevara, and he says that it is difficult to have a clear idea of what should be done after so many young people have been put behind bars, so many hundreds of tonnes have been confiscated, and so many new military and police resources have been acquired — without any fundamental change having occurred.

  ‘When we ask for a 100 police officers, they send 300. But with poverty as bad as it is here, it doesn’t make any difference, because people will do anything for money. No one is afraid of winding up in prison. Many see it as a place where you can at least get fed and clothed. They think they’ll either succeed and get rich or they’ll get caught by the police, but at least then they’ll get something to eat and have a roof over their head. There are no jobs here. People are desperate,’ says Guevara.

  ‘Those operating the boats are usually paid half their cut before the trip and then the remainder after, but the latter rarely ever materialises; they are taken in by us, arrested by police in Panama, attacked by the guerrillas or a paramilitary group. Or go missing at sea. They’re taking an enormous risk. We have no idea how many people have gone under. The kids just disappear. The attackers cut up the bodies and throw the parts overboard, where they immediately become fish food. The sea devours everything, even boats.’

  Another of the many problems Guevara brings up concerns the flow of resources, especially know-how, from the government to the mafia. The latest innovation used to escape the Coast Guard is the so-called semi-submarine, a small homemade craft that can travel a few metres below the surface. It is typically made out of old hulls and other marine debris. A trip to Panama on a volador takes eight hours; by semi-submarine, up to a week.

  ‘It’s like being in a prison cell in the middle of the ocean. Some have made it all the way to Mexico. For over a week you’re in a rickety little craft under the surface of the water. You’re going to the bathroom there, eating there, never knowing if you’re going in the right direction, and risking getting pulled off course by a strong current. It’s sheer insanity. We’ve seized 12 of them. But what’s most tragic is that it’s always our own people who make the semi-subs. Three former officers from the fleet had made the last one we took in, and they’ve all worked for us. Most semi-subs are made by soldiers who’ve learned boat-building at the expense of the state and then afterwards sold their skills to the drug dealers.’

  Opposite Guevara’s office is La Estación, the city’s only luxury hotel and the place where people dispatched by the war on drugs stay, along with everyone else in the aid industry that claims to want only the best for Buenaventura. In addition to the DEA and USAID, there are members of the European Union, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Fortunate locals who have found work at the hotel have succeeded in the laborious task of learning how to pronounce all the complicated abbreviations while serving muesli, yoghurt, and eggs sunny side up every morning. Giant palm leaves sway gently by the pool, and black hands tend to brooms and white hands to silverware, as two enormous vessels leave Buenaventura and slowly move out towards the Pacific horizon. One is steel blue, the other mustard yellow. Each has its own checkered heap of containers.

  In los esteros children jump around with crabs they have caught, dangling them like yoyos on strings, and at the mouth of the harbour a canoe chugs out to sea, carrying two men with fishing gear.

  ‘We never catch the people who own the goods,’ says Guevara. ‘The ones we catch are at the bottom of the ladder, kids who don’t even know who they work for. The trafficking will never end. The industry generates way too much money. The government’s strategy is to fight trafficking every way it can, and with Plan Colombia we’ve gotten a lot more funding, which helps; in the past, we hardly had any equipment at all. But every time we catch one person, ten others are brought in. We can keep on fighting this, but it’s a labour of Sisyphus. Something that makes money knows no end.’

  He runs his hand through his stiff hair and sighs. ‘I and everybody else who works here will retire, but boats will continue to depart from here, regardless, on a daily basis. One or two will be caught, and we’ll keep on filling up the prisons.’

  THE HOSES HANG like lianas down into the ravine. Their weapons rattling, Juan Carlos Rivera and his platoon stomp through rapids and waterfalls in the hope of arriving at their destination soon. But time is flying. The hoses just keep going. And going. No lab.

  ‘They’ve done a really great job of hiding it,’ says Rivera.

  Yet he is not worried. Hoses are the best indication of a lab, and now four pack-asses arrive down below, panting and bewildered after having been abandoned by their owners. Every day these animals lug cocaine all the way from the lab up to the gravel road, where it is transported elsewhere by car — in this case, Major Quiroga says, to Venezuela, the new transit hub for supplying powder to the expanding European market.

  In the past it was common just to load the cargo onto the back of a pickup truck and drive it to the nearest coast or airfield, but with the modernisation of the war on drugs the cartels have become more advanced, and today there is an entire industry based on illegal logistics: there are companies that specialise in purpose-built jeeps and trucks that can bring in several tonnes hidden in extra gas tanks or in the chassis. The hiding places are becoming more sophisticated every day, like the whole industry. When the fleet of vehicles belonging to drug baron Daniel ‘El Loco’ Barrera was seized some time ago, it was discovered that he had over a hundred trucks at his disposal, all especially constructed for the concealment of cocaine.

  ‘Phew. Finally.’

  After working their way down for an hour, Major Quiroga and his men have reached a pretty clearing in the jungle. The area hums with life. Water ripples. A streak of sun makes it through the thick rainforest and, like a mirage, the camouflaged lab appears at the bottom of the valley. Three separate wooden structures, linked together by short, narrow piers, rest on poles over a gold-coloured creek. All is quiet, until the platoon fills the area with shouts of joy.

  ‘Hijoepucha! ’ yells Rivera. ‘Damn, it’s big. One of the biggest I’ve ever seen.’

  The lab has no walls at all and just a black tarp covered with dried palm leaves for a roof. It is about 200 square metres in size. The building in the middle is filled with yellow plastic tanks, a dozen bathtub-like basins, and filtering tables with seating for 16 workers. On the other side of a long jetty is the drying room: eight microwave ovens, three drying lamps, and a long table, on which sits a white mound of about ten kilograms waiting to be packed into ‘condoms’, the rubber casings that are used to ensure a waterproof journey around the world.

  ‘Here are their stamps,’ puffs Rivera, as he eagerly holds up a pair of molded leaden weights. ‘Every cartel has its own trademark, and the workers stamp the emblem right into the cocaine when they press it. Here are the hydraulic presses. A normal lab has two. This one has four.’

  The individual supervising the work in every cocina, just as in the larger paste labs, is the chemist. It is he who draws up the schedule, keeps in touch with the outside world, and makes sure that none of the raw materials ever run out. And he is the only one who earns really good money; the others work for minimum wages.

  ‘Hurry up now,’ says Major Quiroga. ‘We’re losing daylight.’

  The pl
atoon troops disperse across the site like ants. A couple of men stick their knives into bags to take samples, while others keep a lookout. The officers supervise as four soldiers start wrapping explosive wire around the entire construction.

  ‘We gather our evidence very quickly,’ says Rivera. ‘Then we blow it up.’

  The high point of the day’s activities is drawing near. Exactly 40 years have passed since the war on drugs was first declared. At the turn of the new millennium, when socialists were coming to power in country after country in Latin America, the project became the very symbol of the constant need for North American imperialism to renew itself in order to continue its dominance over its old backyard neighbour. When the DEA and the UN produced reports in the early 2010s declaring that production was increasingly being moved to Bolivia, while Venezuela was becoming the new transit hub, the socialist administrations of Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez saw these documents as building up information to legitimise an invasion of the rebel states, with Colombia serving as a military base.