Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  The fact is, Jay Bergman says, that during the past two years, the price of cocaine has been going up and the quality down, and not just in the United States, but in Europe as well. This has also occurred during a time in which global demand has gone up in general; today there’s a surge in demand in Europe and an explosion of new markets in Asia, Australia, and Latin America. According to Bergman, these trends show that there’s now a shortage of supply, which means that the DEA and the Colombian government have been able to successfully slow down production. ‘The aggressive policy of herbicide spraying and manual eradication have been so effective that it has made it impossible for traffickers to meet the global demand. That’s a huge success because if it was up to Colombian traffickers, they would meet that demand. But this isn’t just a Colombian issue, it’s a South American one.’

  Jay Bergman draws out his last words, and for good reason. His office is in Colombia — the United States’ last ally in an increasingly revolutionary Latin America — and the statistics pointing towards success apply only to this country. As soon as production and cultivation decreased in Colombia, it increased in Peru and Bolivia, and the reduction in consumption discernible in the United States in recent years has been abundantly offset by an increase in the demand for cocaine in Europe — especially in England, Spain, and Italy. Thus, today’s calls of victory from the Colombian government and military quickly fall on deaf ears as soon as the issue is viewed from a global perspective.

  The problem that the DEA and Colombia will have to deal with in the future is that the other Andean countries have developed different views of the cocaine puzzle than the United States. For Bolivia and Venezuela respectively, there is no question that the white powder is causing addiction and severe suffering, but for the leaders of these countries the problem — measured in addicts — is by no means as dramatic as it is to the United States or the United Nations. Apart from any ideological divide between these nations and the United States, the global aspects of the problem are difficult to address as long as the enormous demand in the West prevails.

  But the DEA’s problems are even worse than that. The institution that Jay Bergman represents is not, according to the neo-revolutionary analyses, primarily an anti-drug agency with an interest in fighting narcotics, but an organisation whose main purpose is to look after the interests of Washington in Latin America, which they do using cocaine as a pretext. The United States’ history of working with or against drugs, depending on their strategic needs, is well documented — the Iran–Contra affair, the collaboration with Manuel Noriega, and the alliance with the drug mafia during the pursuit of Escobar. In 2008, with this history as a backdrop, the DEA was forced to pull out of Bolivia after Morales’ government claimed to have evidence that Bergman’s colleagues had participated in right-wing plots to overthrow the socialist government, and in Venezuela the situation is even tenser, ever since George W. Bush declared the war on drugs synonymous with the war on terror.

  Jay Bergman sighs. He does not deny that the DEA has become plagued with a number of emblematic ‘corruption scandals’, but he does believe that times have changed. He says he can guarantee that the organisation is ‘clean’ today, and insists that the Colombian state — notorious for human-rights offences — is increasingly able to rid itself of corruption and abuse thanks to the American aid they have received over the years. ‘There’s a catharsis going on here right now,’ he says, recognising that there are so many scandals going on at once that he can hardly keep track of them all: the para-political scandal, falsos positivos, criminal acts of the secret service, and so on. But Bergman’s point is that they are no longer swept under the rug, that they’re being taken seriously, adjudicated. ‘Today, we’re watching Colombia moving itself out of the hell it was going through in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, when the country was being terrorised, in every sense of the word, by the devastation of drug trafficking. What we see is certainly a corruption phase, but this is a healthy phase. Many people here see all of these scandals as a bad thing, but I see it as a cathartic moment. It’s a natural progression and evolution as this country tries to get itself out of a very dark place.’

  The development that today’s Latin American politicians see as the worst-case scenario for the 2010s — that the demand for cocaine and the contra war on production are slowly perpetuating a large-scale regional war — is one Jay Bergman sees, if the hypothesis holds water, not as the fault of Colombia but of the revolutionaries. Ripping the problem out by the roots is, according to him, an ongoing job, and it is therefore a historic tragedy that just when the strategy instigated by Nixon and Reagan is starting to show results in the Andes, Colombia’s neighbours have governments that try to absolve themselves of responsibility by placing all the blame on demand.

  ‘The old days are becoming the new days,’ says Bergman, referring to an ever-increasing amount of production gradually being relocated to the socialist country of Bolivia, which, according to the DEA, is also the mafia’s reinvented free zone. The ‘old days’ are the 1980s, when the global boom got underway. At that time almost all coca fields were in Bolivia and Peru, and the coca paste was flown to southern Colombia for processing, after which the powder was distributed to the rest of the world via the criminal networks of the Medellín and Cali Cartels. However, when the war on drugs intensified in Bolivia and Peru — a process the farmers read in imperialist terms, and which later brought the revolutionary coca grower Evo Morales to power — the majority of fields were established in Colombia, which became the centre for both cultivation and processing in the late 1990s. According to Bergman, production is now emigrating south again, since the climate has tightened in Colombia and loosened in Bolivia. But all this, he says, is happening with one major difference. ‘The labs in Bolivia today are run by Colombians, not Bolivians. It’s Colombians working in the labs, doing quality control, and taking care of oversight, et cetera.’

  According to the DEA, Colombian traffickers are moving large parts of their criminal infrastructures down to Bolivia, and there is a substantial migration of people from Colombia to Bolivia in order to carry out illegal business. But the old days won’t become the new days in the sense that they will bring products to Colombia for export anymore. The vast number of Colombians who are migrating to Bolivia will process cocaine and export the high-quality product directly from there. It doesn’t make sense, says Bergman, to bring paste up here anymore. ‘I mean, considering all the policy, army, navy, air force, and everything you have to deal with in Colombia, why would you? It’s so much better to just produce it down there and bring it straight out on the international markets.’

  Another of the DEA’s causes for concern is Venezuela. Under Hugo Chávez, the most important oil state in Latin America also became a key player in the cocaine drama. According to the CIA, more than a third of all the cocaine that now leaves Colombia exits through Venezuela — data that Chávez’s government dismissed as a rigging of a future invasion, based on ‘the well known pattern from Iraq’ and its non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

  The third displacement, which, according to the DEA, will play a key role in the cocaine landscape of the future, is over the control of new markets. The European, Asian, Australian, and Latin American markets have all been experiencing periods of rapid growth, while the US market seems to have passed its peak, as methamphetamines are taking over. At the dawn of the new millennium the Mexican cartels took over the US market following the fall of the Medellín and Cali cartels, and in the 2010s a key concern is how these criminal Mexican monsters will behave when other markets grow at a faster rate than that of the United States.

  ‘What’s really happening now is that the Mexicans are beginning to dominate not just the American distribution market but the global distribution market,’ says Bergman. And if they manage to dominate all the distribution markets, they will be calling the shots and, in the end, also gain power over production. Durin
g the era of the Medellín and Cali cartels the DEA used to say that these organisations had control ‘from the farm to the arm’, an expression that refers to heroin, but the principle is the same with cocaine; someone had a linear organisation that owns the distribution in the United States and Europe, the transportation system, and the production. Bergman compares it with the ‘Detroit model’: the ones who own the production — General Motors and Ford — are in charge of everything. That’s why a source country such as Colombia has always been so important. But in the new world it’s the other way around; it’s the distributor that’s in charge. ‘Like Walmart,’ says Bergman. ‘Now it’s Walmart who dictates to Colgate, “this is the price we want per unit, this is when we want it; this is how much we want and this is what we’re willing to pay for it.” And it’s this position the Mexicans today are reaching.’

  But no large-scale war is expected between the Colombian and Mexican mafias. In terms of drug criminality, Colombia is 20 years ahead of Mexico, and the cartels’ war on the state that is tearing Mexican democracy apart is long since history in Colombia. These kinds of wars cannot be won. In Colombia production could be rendered more effective after Escobar’s death thanks to the decentralisation of the mafia (the birth of mini-cartels) and the flexibility of the process (mobile labs and smaller units), but first and foremost it was the result of the mafia’s adoption of a new strategy: to work with the state, rather than against it. And this model remains in force to this day. The mafia created its own political parties, its own mayors, governors, senators, secretaries, and prosecutors, and integrated their illegal operations with legitimate industries in a way that gave birth to a variety of large companies, which the state has been subsidising ever since.

  Until now deliveries to Europe, long since the fastest-growing market, have been managed by the drug-production emperors of Colombia, but after the historic crackdown on the ’Ndrangheta, the future for the Colombian–European connections is unclear. ‘The Colombians,’ says Bergman, ‘gave up the American market for a number of reasons: to avoid extradition, to avoid prosecution, et cetera, and they already had the European market. At the time, when our focus was elsewhere, the mafia here already knew that the European market was going to be a money-maker. Mexicans never forced the Colombians from the US market; they left voluntarily.’

  Outside Bergman’s office the sun is refracted on the façade of every glass building in the metropolis of ten million, a city that became known in the 1980s as ‘the global capital of cocaine’, something it has in many ways continued to be through elegant mutations across the decades. Both Medellín and Bogotá have undergone so many impressive facelifts since the turn of the millennium that there is not a media outlet in the world that hasn’t reported on the story of these urban metamorphoses. Carl Bildt, Sweden’s minister of foreign affairs, was just one of the many European leaders to sing the praises of president Uribe in 2006, commenting on how Uribe, with a ‘firm hand’, had eliminated squalor and corruption:

  I remember years ago when Bogotá was seen as so crime-infested and dangerous that one could hardly enter the terminal in the airport when one needed to change planes in the city. That’s all gone. Today, charming Bogotá is one of the safest and cleanest cities of Latin America … This is all associated with the efforts done to combat the drug trade that previously risked totally destroying the country. A program of spraying coca plantations from the air that was once rather controversial has evidently started to be successful.

  That same year, in 2006, Colombia produced 545 tonnes of cocaine, six times as much as during Escobar’s time, and the nation’s share of global cocaine production rose from 12 to 62 per cent during the same period (1993–2006). How could Bogotá and Colombia be so loved as a large-scale producer, but so feared and despised as a small-scale producer? And how could Carl Bildt describe a 600 per cent rise in drug trafficking as an evident success in the fight against drug trafficking?

  The answer is that a great deal of time has passed since the DEA, the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, the Colombian and Mexican police forces, and other institutions stopped fighting drugs and crime and chose instead to fight the aesthetics of drug criminality. Nothing is about narcotics anymore; everything is about appearance — how it is done, who does it, how they do it, and by what means. Or as Jay Bergman puts it: the ‘holistic policy’ for the DEA and the war on drugs is, nowadays, just to make sure that the money generated by drug production ‘doesn’t become a threat to national security in countries like Colombia’.

  He stresses the word ‘manner’ when talking about how things are done, and says that when it’s down to a level where everything is only a matter of law enforcement and not of national security, the DEA’s job will be done. The struggle today, he says, is to get it down to a level that is ‘manageable, perhaps even acceptable’.

  A ‘manageable level’ is thus no longer measured in terms of drugs or crime, but violence; when drug criminality is handled by respected businessmen instead of by guerrillas and street gangs, and so generates selective but not organised violence, the war on drugs has achieved its goal. No other country in the world has seen its narcotics criminality mutate so smoothly according to this principle as Colombia in the 2000s. The guerrillas have been repelled, paramilitary organisations have been demobilised, urban violence has decreased dramatically, and foreign capital has poured in, while cocaine production has only continued. And when it recently came out that several members of Congress had been elected on political platforms financed by the drug mafia, the DEA, along with a large number of US and EU political establishments, also read that as positive: the nation is going through a healthy purge, a catharsis.

  In light of this — the fact that the amount of violence, not the amount of drugs, is the deciding factor — it might seem that legalisation ought to be more of a standard-bearer for the global war on drugs than one would guess at first glance, but such is not the case. Jay Bergman maintains that he is an ‘absolute opponent’ of legalising drugs, even cannabis, and he cringes when the report by the three former presidents and the current decriminalisation moves in Mexico, Argentina, and several US states enter into the discussion. And of course he welcomes Colombia’s new criminalisation of the personal dose. ‘I’ve been doing this for so long, so it’s hard for me to have an objective opinion, but let me just say this: I have a 13-year-old son, and I’m really happy I don’t have to explain to him why it’s bad — I just tell him that it’s bad and, by the way, illegal. Trust me, I like having that helping me when I’m trying to guide my son through life and help him not to ruin his future,’ says Bergman. ‘I’m not so concerned about decriminalisation itself; I’m more concerned about legitimatising. By decriminalising it you’re legitimatising it, making people think it’s not harmful.’

  The endless corridors of the US embassy branch out into an expansive maze. Outside all the security barriers, hundreds of Colombians line up in a curling queue with forms carefully filled out by hand, in the hope of obtaining a visa to the promised land in the north. Jay Bergman prepares to return to his computer, which, over the past 30 years, has been at the helm of much of the work that has resulted in hundreds of dissolved criminal networks, thousands of arrests, and the confiscation of hundreds of thousands of kilos of cocaine, but that, at the same time, has succeeded only marginally, if at all, in altering global demand and production. Yet this latter idea is a fallacy, according to Bergman. The ever-increasing number of academics, intellectuals, and politicians who are calling the war on drugs ‘a fiasco’ are ignoring the good work it has done. Certainly, the goal set by the United Nations in 1998 — that the world would be drug-free by 2008 — is easy to scoff at, but according to Bergman, had it not been for the work carried out by the DEA, the United Nations, and the police forces of the affected countries, the global misery caused by drugs would have been many times worse than it is today. ‘But will there ever be zero coca? No
.’

  The cocaine exporters of tomorrow — Colombia remains a main source for the foreseeable future — will, in other words, not only need to decentralise more and cease using violence, but also to carefully embed all drug activity in legal business operations. The Mexican mafia’s violent large-scale model will most likely collapse at some point during the 2010s, just as the great Medellín and Cali cartels did in the 1990s, and once Bergman and his men have killed off Loco Barrera and the others he refers to as ‘dead men walking’, the decentralised landscapes of modern drug trafficking will be colonised by the white knights of tomorrow.

  ‘The smartest people are those who stay under the radar. People moving ten kilos a month to Japan at 100,000 dollars a kilo,’ says Bergman. If you buy it here, he goes on, nodding towards the outside, for 2000 dollars, and spend another 15,000 to move it to Japan — and you have a route into the country — you still make almost a million dollars every month. ‘That’s more than Cuchillo makes!’ he concludes. ‘Because at the end of the day he has to pay all his people, pay for his weapons, et cetera. While you live as a comfortable businessperson in the nicest neighbourhood in Bogotá. So I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of small-scale Colombian drug traffickers staying well under the radar screen making fortunes.’