Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  Juan Manuel Galán runs his fingers through his shiny hair. He is still a young man, maintains a low-key image, and is anxious for his words to resonate. He has absolutely no sympathy for the FARC and is indifferent as to whether they are called guerrillas or terrorists, but does agree with the analysis that the war on drugs is driven by neo-colonial principles and is irrational in terms of its goals. ‘Prohibition has just turned 100 years old. I think that’s old enough. But if there isn’t a change in the UN conventions that regulate this issue internationally, nothing can be done. It’s a straitjacket preventing us from developing alternatives. The worst thing that can happen is that we legalise without having prepared ourselves with regard to care and prevention. Such a drastic step requires very developed treatment infrastructures, good state control over the substances, and serious prevention. On a global scale. I would like to see a UN convention on prevention and treatment. That would be a paradigm shift.’

  In the new global legalisation movement it’s possible — as touched upon earlier — to single out a few different perspectives: pragmatists, liberals, and what one could perhaps be called supporters of the normalisation theory. The first is the broadest category, gathering all sorts of people of various political persuasions together around the utilitarian belief that bans do more harm than good, while the second category consists of classic liberals and libertarian leftists, who claim that what individuals do with their own bodies should be a matter of personal choice. The third school of thought, often a combination of the first two, has been strengthened by the younger generation, who grew up exposed to a broader variety of drugs and have now entered into the debate with their own intellectual spokespeople. This category gained a new representative in 2009 with the publication of Tom Feiling’s book The Candy Machine: how cocaine took over the world.

  One overarching thesis is that cocaine, like many other drugs, is something of a hedonistic reality in postmodern societies and is now undergoing the same normalisation process as abortion, homosexuality, and atheism; that the laws dramatising the phenomenon at present will gradually be abandoned. Scandinavia is an odd fish in the global debate on drugs, with its secular political tradition but harsh drug laws, but in other parts of the world there is a strong connection between absolutist ideas on drugs and religion, and the critics believe that with increasing secularisation, the spread of democracy, the victory of the market economy, better education, and not the least the free flow of information, the legislative idiosyncrasies will eventually be pared down — similar to how many countries’ anti-abortion legislation has become outdated due to the global evolution of science, ethics, human rights, and availability of services.

  Another tenet of the normalisation thesis is that the dangers associated with the majority of drugs — cocaine and marijuana in particular — are grossly exaggerated, and that far too often throughout the 20th century these dangers were analysed in terms of apocalyptic scenarios, instead of within their social and economic context. It’s true that cocaine, unlike marijuana, can generate rapid addiction, but Tom Feiling refers to a wide range of research that arrives at one and the same conclusion: the absolute majority of those who use these drugs only do so for a short period of time and do not become abusers. The most common curve for those who use cocaine is the same as that for cannabis or alcohol: users engage intensively for a period, usually between three and six years, when they are relatively young, and as they get older, gain more life experience, and embrace a more mature lifestyle, they quit or reduce their use on their own initiative. However, the fact that more people use drugs responsibly than not does not mean that class, poverty, and psychology do not play major roles in the development of problematic drug behaviour; on the contrary. And, as with alcohol addiction, these are often the determining factors, not the drugs themselves. Feiling believes that these arguments will soon be more widely accepted, not least because the schoolteachers who will teach pupils about alcohol and narcotics in the future will often have had their own experiences with drugs:

  Hysterical claims about drug use have abounded since the Industrial Revolution, but a more sober assessment now seems possible. Most people don’t like most drugs. Most of those who try cocaine do not go on to use it heavily. They don’t even go on to use cannabis heavily.

  Another commonly held belief in relation to normalisation has to do with the psychological relationship between total abstinence and abuse. Various studies show that young people who do a lot drugs often develop low self-esteem, become stressed, and have difficulty forging genuine relationships, but less publicised results from similar studies show that young people who completely abstain from all forms of drugs are also often emotionally inhibited or socially incompetent. As Feiling argues, what applies to young people also seems to apply to adults: pleasure and satisfaction are associated with moderate use of drugs, and frustration and anxiety are associated with both abuse and total abstinence.

  Another idea in a similar vein is that the terror of increasing drug use is based primarily on religious or nationalistic apocalyptic paranoia, a kind of fear on the part of the authorities of the increasingly malleable nature of human beings and the endless relativism of modern man. When Mike Jay’s Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century was published in 2000, one of its themes was that religion, more than reason, has guided legislators’ efforts throughout the last two centuries to control the human quest for intoxication. Prohibitions against alcohol and other drugs have rarely been based on rational considerations, but have usually been coloured by moralistic crusades, or by the fear of cultural or ideological invasions from foreigners.

  For the advocates of evolutionary normalisation, Mike Jay’s comparisons with travelling — tripping, escape from the everyday, transcending — serve well as both a general analogy and a useful hint about the future:

  Drug policy may be an immovable object, but drug culture has become an irresistible force which shows every sign of becoming an enduring passion of the Western mind. Just as the pioneering journeys of nineteenth-century explorers have become today’s popular travel destinations, so the inner worlds first colonized in the nineteenth century are now visited by more people than ever before.

  Paradoxically, however, lawmakers today seem more concerned about protecting citizens from adventure-seeking trips ‘inward’ than to exotic foreign destinations that are far more dangerous to reach. Or, in the words of one of Feiling’s informants: ‘Who’s to say you can go up Mount Everest, but not have a line of charlie? It’s pushing at the boundaries of human experience, and who’s to restrain you from doing that?’

  Juan Manuel Galán rejects an incoming telephone call. Bodyguards circle around the restaurant he has chosen for lunch, and outside, congested traffic clogs the streets of Bogotá as he explains that for a long time these issues only applied to the wealthy nations of the world, but this is no longer the case. Globalisation has not only brought shantytowns to Europe; it has also brought an exclusive culture of recreational drug use to the developing world. One of the new realities Latin America faces is the fact that the dichotomy between countries of production and consumption is now a thing of the past; today Colombia is also a nation of consumption and the United States also one of production. North America is the biggest producer of cannabis in the world and South America is one of the new and emerging markets for cocaine consumption. Brazil, whose economy is experiencing a rapid boom, is today the biggest cocaine-consuming nation in the world after the United States, and Colombia’s sophisticated propensity for criminal activity has turned the country into both a world-leading producer of heroin and a rapidly growing manufacturer of synthetic drugs.

  In other words, it is chaos on the drug markets. The landscape is being renewed. But cocaine is still the primary generator of war and corruption, and Juan Manuel Galán thinks that Colombia, with its unique experience as the world’s main source of powder, possesses, as he writes in a new book, �
��the moral authority to propose legalisation to the world’. ‘The magnitude of the blood bath we’ve had to endure puts us in a unique position in the debate,’ he says. ‘No other country has come even close to our experience. If you look at the number of assassinated ministers, prosecutors, magistrates, journalists, politicians, policemen, and ordinary people, I think Colombia should be able to stand before the international community and say with a great deal of authority that this just isn’t working. We can’t go on like this. We have to do something different.’

  Today’s successful advocates of legalisation tend to forget — or ignore — one key issue, though. The report from the three former presidents was universally hailed in the American press and persuaded politicians, intellectuals, and officers to ‘come out’ as critics of the war on drugs, despite the fact that their logic was based on one obvious weakness: there is no counterfactual history. The notion that the war on drugs has been a failure is based on the premise that an alternative policy would have generated better results. But would it?

  ON MONDAY 8 FEBRUARY 2010, Jairo Villegas bid farewell to the free life. Not even 30, he was a young pilot with his entire life ahead of him when it became apparent that someone in the organisation was not to be trusted; information had leaked out from what he believed to be a completely safe network, one with an endless supply of cash that would continue to flow forever. But after just six years it had all come to an end.

  At a party in the early 2000s he had met Daniel ‘El Loco’ Barrera, one of the cocaine barons in Colombia, who informed him that he was in need of people who could fly goods from the eastern part of the country to Central America. Jairo did not have a pilot’s licence but was eager to obtain one, so when Loco Barrera offered to pay his way through pilot school on the condition that he would later return the favour by running ‘flour’ up north, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. He entered a program at a university, and a few years later took his final exam. Upon graduating, he took a job with a local airline in Villavicencio, the capital of Meta, the Texas of Colombia. But the position was just a stop — some practice — on his journey to the real work. In March 2004, Barrera notified him through a contact that the FARC had granted permission to use an airstrip in Puerto Alvira, a remote village in the south of the province.

  Jairo Villega’s first assignment as a part of the global drug industry was to fly half a tonne of cocaine from a hick town in Meta to a small place on the border with Venezuela. The product he was transporting was certainly cocaine, but the amount was small, as one of the objectives of the mission was to determine if Jairo could be trusted. Upon successful completion of the assignment, he could start to make all his sueños blanco, ‘white dreams’, come true. Sueños blancos was the pilot guild’s slang for cocaine runs: ‘white’ for the cargo and ‘dream’ for the sum pocketed if nothing went wrong: 500,000 USD.

  His first international run was in an old Cessna, to take off by the Venezuelan border. Jairo and a young man he had never met entered the sky with a full tank of gas, along with two extra cans of fuel and an unknown number of kilos of cocaine destined for Nicaragua. Not until they were in the cockpit did they receive their flight instructions, which were that they would neither be landing with the cocaine nor flying the plane back. It was a highly unusual procedure, but such was the assignment this time. They were to drop the cargo into the sea at specified coordinates near the town Puerto Cabezas, on the Nicaraguan Mosquito Coast, and continue on to Honduras, where they would land on a deserted highway, an isolated road leading out onto a thin peninsula. There they would abandon the plane and take a bus to Panama, where they could purchase airline tickets back to Colombia. They did exactly as instructed and everything went according to plan. Jairo was thrilled.

  And so it continued for five more years, until that fateful Monday in 2010, when the organisation in which he was involved — the Pilot Cartel — was exposed, resulting in the arrest of Jairo and seven other pilots. They had 25 planes at their disposal, had flown six tonnes of ‘flour’ a week from laboratories in seven different Colombian provinces, and provided the link between the motherland of cocaine and the cartels in Mexico through a sophisticated network of routes, including runways in Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela. Instrumental to the success of this bust was the discovery of the bodies of four dead pilots, which had been brought to police attention: one airline captain who’d been murdered in Medellín three months prior; one who had been found in a plane that had recently crashed near the Dominican Republic; and two who had crashed the previous year, their plane, with 1.5 tonnes of cocaine on board, having run out of gas before it reached its destination in Guatemala. Each incident was yet another piece in the puzzle that the Colombian and Mexican drug squads, as well as American DEA agents, were working on together, and which eventually made it possible for them to carry out what the police later called ‘the biggest crackdown ever on the alliances between the Colombian and Mexican cartels’. Óscar Naranjo, head of Colombia’s national police, went even further when he declared that the operation ripped ‘the heart out of the cocaine industry’ and brought ‘organised drug criminality to the verge of extinction’.

  Similar proclamations had been heard from the police and the DEA ever since Pablo Escobar was killed, and as production had increased, so had statements concerning the impending death of the mafia — statements that had been made more frequently and with greater emphasis as the absence of success became clear. But perhaps the spring of 2010 would be the time in which the idea of ‘the lost war on drugs’ — a new mantra among liberals and leftists in Latin America and around the world — would be disproven. According to the police, over a thousand drug offenders had been arrested in the last seven years in Colombia alone, and of those, 350 were ‘high level’. This data could, on one hand, be interpreted as a frightening indication of how many ‘high level’ cocaine offenders there actually were or, on the other, that the police, despite all the criticism, were correct in their assessment that an eradication of sorts was imminent.

  There is one man, something of a legend, who is particularly pleased these days, as he is not only convinced of an eradication but has also been a spider himself in the web of information that has in recent years led to the arrest or death of a whole series of major drug sharks and kingpins: the regional head of the DEA. And, as it turns out, there are a lot of other things he is convinced about as well.

  THE US EMBASSY in Bogotá is a jumble of concrete blocks with roofs full of satellite dishes resembling Mickey Mouse ears. From time to time, black cars pass in and out through the openings of closely guarded barrages, which are made of cement, iron bars, and bulletproof glass, with some 50 metres between every layer so that if one gives way, the second will bear the brunt. This is, people working here proudly say, the second-largest US embassy in the world, after the US legation in Baghdad.

  Nestled in the middle of this secure construction is Jay Bergman, a sporty-looking man who launches straight into his primary message: ‘Those guys are dead men walking.’ He stutters slightly, but it’s not clear if this is due to a speech impediment or is just his way of adding emphasis. ‘I, I … give them one year.’

  The people Bergman refers to as ‘those guys’ are the successors of Pablo Escobar; besides Loco Barrera, he rattles off a handful of other names, some of which are Colombia’s most recent and notorious drug offenders, and he confidently reiterates his prediction that it will not be long before they are all dead. He seems totally certain.

  ‘If you look at how things developed after Escobar was killed, you will see that each successive generation of trafficking cartels has been less powerful than the previous one,’ says Bergman. ‘And this is thanks to better training, more resources, and better strategies that the Colombian government has been able to implement after military support from the United States. Each new generation has been less able to penetrate the go
vernment, undermine the political process, and maintain territorial control. But in terms of success, it’s all relative. I’m not saying that the total amount of drugs these groups are now sending out is any less than before, just that their ability to cause damage to society has been drastically reduced.’

  Another relative success he points out is that the shelf life of these groups has been shortened significantly, from as long as 15 years to something more like 15 months. ‘There is currently nobody on the Colombian top-ten list of drug traffickers who has any other option than to one, surrender; two, be arrested; or three, be killed in combat. People like Cuchillo, Loco Barrera, Comba: as I’ve just said, those guys are dead men walking.’

  Jay Bergman has been pursuing drug lords under the US flag for over 30 years, but because victory in the war on cocaine has been declared so many times, the only reaction such a claim receives in the Colombian press is scorn. Yet this time it seems as if there is more pointing towards an actual break in the trend than just political rhetoric. In its most recent report, the UN announced that coca cultivation has declined by 28 per cent in the last year, and that in Colombia only 390 tonnes of cocaine were produced, as compared with 545 tonnes the year before. When the Pilot Cartel was arrested, it was yet another in a long series of blows against both the Colombian and Mexican mafia and its offshoots around the world, and in July 2010 the Italian police made a historic raid and arrested 320 people from Calabrian mafia organisation the ’Ndrangheta, which had controlled a large part of the European cocaine market for a long time. So just when the international intelligentsia seemed to have agreed that the war on drugs was ‘an absolute failure’, in the words of Mario Vargas Llosa, both the United Nations and White House were presenting statistics suggesting that the strategy of cracking down hard on production had finally started to pay off.