Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  Darkness falls over the demonstrators. Even though the goal of the protest is doomed to failure, everyone is upbeat. Chaos and warfare have not caused Colombians to lose their sophisticated sense of humour. With polite irony, typical for the country, Daniel Pacheco asks the protesters to show some unreturned respect by not smoking pot right in front of the police and the Congress. They comply, but laugh. The lighted neoclassical façade on the south side of the square looks like a giant glowing grill illuminating the crowd, as Daniel Pacheco picks up a thread from one of his columns:

  Do you understand why they forbid us from using mind-altering drugs? Why there are people who want to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry and adopt children? Who deny women the right to abortion? Why it is called unpatriotic to choose not to bear arms? Why people are denied the right to die with dignity? Why certain people want to forbid things that have nothing to do with them? Neither do I.

  Pacheco encourages everyone to hold up a ‘dose of personality’. It can be anything that has contributed joy and fulfillment to one’s life: books, CDs, joints, mountain-climbing equipment, sex toys, Bibles, partners, guitars. In his thick glasses Pacheco resembles a young Gabriel García Márquez, and it was here exactly six decades ago that Castro, Márquez, and Gaítan all took part in the street demonstrations that ended in Gaítan’s assassination, launching what remains to this day the world’s longest ongoing civil conflict.

  Ivonne stands eye to eye with Simón Bolívar. Her curly hair flies around in the breeze. Melissa stands by her side. What is interesting about all the talk on narcotics in one of the largest drug-producing nations in the world is that the phenomenon of abuse is rarely, if ever, mentioned. Almost never. But this is certainly not because there are no addicts in Colombia; just a stone’s throw away a whole community of poor people in one of the most miserable ghettos in the city are completely hooked on basuco, a simplified version of crack. And in order to cope with the cold nights, the city’s hordes of street kids are every evening numbing their brains by sniffing glue. Ivonne, mother of two, used harder drugs than cannabis during her student days. But her family and neighbourhood smoothly prevented her from letting her life go down the drain. And that’s a type of secure environment many — very many — people lack.

  She looks thoughtful and her face breaks into a pensive expression momentarily as she thinks about the drug problem in relation to class and social environments. Is the reason why hardly anyone in progressive Colombia is against legalisation because the educated middle and upper classes are mainly the ones committed to the debate and politically active? Are the people who raise their voices also the ones who have a social safety net? ‘I don’t think so,’ she finally says. ‘When we think about legalisation in Colombia, what we are really thinking about is getting rid of the mafia. Nothing else. The war is what matters here. I’m not thinking about misery or abuse, but about something completely different: an opportunity. Peace and liberation for this country.’

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  I HAVE ATTEMPTED to write a book on one of the world’s most complex societies that is both readable and accessible. In doing so I have chosen to work without footnotes, with all the pros and cons such an approach entails. However, this section contains additional commentary, along with a list of my sources, which will allow the reader to see which accounts and facts the analyses are based on.

  To report in Colombia means acting in extremely sensitive, conflict-ridden environments, particularly in rural areas. A reporter who doesn’t take the necessary precautions or is careless with information can cause fatal consequences for individuals, or even trigger social and political dynamics that may end up in massive internal displacement. Consequently, in some cases names have been changed to protect identities. In two instances I have also changed the name of the location. In the notes on the following pages, all pseudonyms are italicised. Alfonso, in the preface, goes by a different name in real life, too.

  These notes are also intended as tips for further reading for those who wish to learn more about cocaine and Colombia’s incredible history, which I hope this book will inspire them to do. Publishers and years of publication for the books I have used are included in the bibliography. Tips on further reading on Latin America in general, and Colombia in particular, may be found on my website: www.magnuslinton.com.

  The greatest challenge with regard to sources when writing about coca and the distribution of cocaine, as well as the successes and failures of the war on drugs, is deciding which statistics to use. Two major institutions that follow these developments — the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC, and the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, or ONDCP — present such drastically conflicting figures that the discrepancy between them reveals just how difficult it is to assess illegal activity. For instance, according to UNODC there were 181,600 hectares of cultivated coca in the Andes in 2007, while according to ONDCP there were 232,000 hectares. According to UNODC 99,000 of those hectares were in Colombia, while according to ONDCP Colombia had 167,000 hectares of cultivated coca — almost twice as much. UN statistics show a 25 per cent decrease in the total amount of land worldwide on which coca was grown between 1990 and 2006, while the US agency shows an increase, claiming that in 2007 more hectares were used for coca cultivation globally than ever before. If you factor cocaine production into the equation, the situation becomes even more confusing; according to UNODC, in 2007 a total of 902 tonnes of cocaine was produced in the world, while ONDCP, which reported 50,000 more cultivated hectares that same year, claimed that only 785 tonnes were produced — that is, nearly 15 per cent less.

  For Colombia, the fluctuations in statistics in recent years have been extreme. In 2007 there was, according to the UN office, a dramatic increase in the number of hectares used for coca cultivation, compared with 2006 (the figure rose from 78,000 to 99,000); the following year a nearly equal reduction was reported (from 99,000 to 81,000), while the US stats showed an increase for both years. According to the latest UN figures on Colombia, the total amount of pure cocaine produced decreased from 545 tonnes in 2007 to 390 tonnes in 2008, while production in both Bolivia and Peru increased. I’ve chosen to use the United Nations’ statistics since UNODC openly reports the methodology they use in their assessments, which includes satellite photography, whereas ONDCP doesn’t.

  However, I encourage the reader to take all statistics in this regard with a grain of salt. As explained by the expert Francisco Thoumi and as shown in the chapter ‘Green Gold’, the reporting of figures is highly politicised. The majority of coca farmers I spent time with camouflage their coca plants among other crops so that the plants won’t be detected in satellite images. Another problem with obtaining reliable statistics on the actual spread of coca cultivation is that much of the land that has been heavily cultivated in Colombia in recent years is in the rainforest provinces, which are nearly always cloudy, and this complicates satellite photography — so much so that, according to the UNODC research team in Colombia, it seriously affects the monitoring. However, an actual decline in production in Colombia, as reported in 2008, is plausible, given the United Nations also reports that 230,000 hectares of coca were destroyed (130,000 by herbicide spraying and 100,000 by manual elimination) in the same year, almost three times as much as the organisation had reported as having been cultivated.

  In light of the more than two decades of United Nations statistics, from 1990 to today, it can be concluded that the number of cultivated hectares — the total amount in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, after all the efforts of the war on drugs — has been reduced by 25 per cent, while production during the same time has increased by 28 per cent. More-potent plants, better processing techniques, and faster replanting following herbicide spraying are some of the reasons why the increased demand has been able to be satisfied. Dramatic fluctuations, particularly in Colombia, will most likely continue, and the statistic I report in this book, with
Colombia’s share of global production at around 60 per cent, is an average calculation for the most recent decade as a whole, based on the UN statistics.

  1 Cocaturismo: Medellín as heaven

  All interviews used in this chapter were conducted in Medellín in November 2008, May 2009, and November 2009, during my visits to the districts of San Javier (Comuna 13), Moravia, Barrio Pablo Escobar, El Pablado, and Barrio Antioquia; the nightclubs Karma, Tutaina, Tuturama, Blue, Kukaramakara, PH, Fase II, White, Mangos, and Carnival; and the hostels Casa Kiwi, The Pit Stop Hostel, and The Tiger Paw. I conducted interviews with the following people: Alonso, assassin; Antonio Jaramillo, executive manager of Corporación Región; César Álvarez, taxi driver; Deyner, resident of Comuna 13; Diana Barajas, sociologist at Instituto Popular de Capacitación; Dioselina Vasco, resident of Comuna 13, mother whose five sons were killed; Lucy, Irish backpacker; Felipe Palau, director of the Fuerza Joven program of Medellín; Håkan, Swedish backpacker; Javier, resident of Barrio Antioquia; Lina Cuevas, victim of violence and resident of Comuna 13; Lourdes Duarte, resident of Moravia; Maria Herlinda Arias, resident of Moravia; Max Yuri, sociologist; Olga Lucía Perez, resident of Comuna 13; Pablo Emilio Angarita, political scientist; Paul Thoreson, proprietor, Casa Kiwi; Greg, Canadian backpacker.

  In addition to some 30 news reports from the Colombian daily newspapers El Colombiano, El Espectador, and El Tiempo, I used the following printed sources in those passages of the text that deal with Medellín during the first decade of the new millennium: Forrest Hylton’s ‘Extreme Makeover — Medellín in the New Millennium’ (in the anthology Evil Paradises), Diana Grajales’ Genealogia de las Bandas (Universidad de Antioquia), Claudia López’s ‘La Ruta de la Expansión Paramilitar y la Transformación Política de Antioquia’ (in the anthology Parapolítica), and the Amnesty report The Paramilitaries in Medellín, as well as the following reports: Jonathan Franklin’s ‘The World’s First Cocaine Bar’ (The Guardian, 29 August 2009), Anthony Faiola’s ‘Sustaining the Medellín Miracle’ (The Washington Post, 11 July 2008), Malcolm Beith’s ‘Good Times in Medellín: a city tainted by violence is experiencing a renaissance’ (Newsweek, 5 June 2004), Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s ‘Cocaína y Turismo’ (El Espectador, 4 April 2008), Alice O’Keeffe’s ‘Colombia: progress at a price’ (New Statesman, 23 April 2007), and Daniel Kurtz-Phelan’s ‘Colombia’s City On a Hill: Medellín goes from murder capital to model city’ (Newsweek, 10 November 2007). I obtained official city murder statistics from Medicina Legal, the Colombian agency dealing with forensic pathology.

  For the historical exposé I used David T. Courtwright’s Forces of Habit: drugs and the making of the modern world; Richard Davenport-Hines’ The Pursuit of Oblivion: a global history of narcotics, 1500–2000; Paul Gootenberg’s Andean Cocaine: the making of a global drug; and Tom Feiling’s The Candy Machine: how cocaine took over the world.

  The passages on the rise and fall of the marimba bonanza stem predominantly from Francisco Thoumis’ Illegal Drugs in Colombia: from illegal economic boom to social crisis, Fabio Castillo’s Riders of Cocaine, and Virginia Vallejo’s Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar. The quote on pp. 28–29 is also from Vallejo’s book, but my translation is taken from the Spanish edition.

  Sections pertaining to the time in which president Álvaro Uribe served as head of the Civil Aviation Authority and his possible collaboration with the mafia are based on information from Joseph Contreras’ Biografía No Autorizada de Álvaro Uribe Vélez and article ‘Gaviria Contraataca y Uribe se va Contra Liberales’ (Semana, April 2008). The same story is also featured in Vallejo’s Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar, in which Álvaro Uribe and Pablo Escobar are portrayed as close friends who were mutually dependent on each other’s services. The quote by Don Berna regarding the importance of keeping in step with globalisation originates from Hylton’s ‘Extreme Makeover’.

  2 Green Gold: the carousel of war

  The trips essential for this story took place in May 2007 (the Pacific Coast and the inland of Chocó), June 2007 (Atrato River from Quibdó, north to Río Arquía), December 2007 (Atrato River from Turbo, south to Riosucio), April 2008 (Tumaco, Nariño), May 2008 (San Andrés and Providencia, Caribbean), April 2009 (Buenaventura, the Pacific Coast), May 2009 (San Juan River from Bajo Calima to Istmina), June 2009 (Putumayo), and December 2009 (Golfo de Urabá and the Darien Gap, border to Panama). I interviewed the following people: Andrea, coca cultivator, San Juan River; Carlos Nuñez, social worker, Bogotá; César, coca cultivator, San Juan River; Claudia López, social scientist, Bogotá; Dora Rodríguez, internal refugee, Medellín; Edgar, small farmer, Putumayo; Edwaer Picón, coast-guard captain, Buenaventura; Ester, small farmer, Putumayo; Fabiola Rodríguez, mother of murdered son, Buenaventura; Francisco Thoumi, professor of economics, Bogotá; Graciano, coca cultivator, San Juan River; Gloria Zamudio, investor in the pyramid scheme DMG, Putumayo; Gustavo Guevara, prosecutor, Buenaventura; John Wayne, internal refugee, Chocó; José Mario Riascos, internal refugee, Buenaventura; José, small farmer, Putumayo; José-Eduard Pizo, priest, Soacha; Iván, fisherman, Chocó; Iván Torres, social worker, Bogotá; Jackson Chavarro, defender of the DMG pyramid scheme, Putumayo; Laura-Rosa Velez, internal refugee, Buenaventura; Leo, fisherman, Chocó; Leon Valencia, head of Nuevo Arco Iris, Bogotá; Leonarda Barco Riva, internal refugee, Buenaventura; Leonardo Correa, analyst, SIMCI/UNODC; Lucy Giraldo, social worker, Buenaventura; Luz-Dary Santiesteban, internal refugee, Buenaventura; Maria Cuevas, shopkeeper, Soacha; Mauricio Romero, conflict scholar, Bogotá; Melba Canga, mother of murdered son, Buenaventura; Nancy Sanchez, coordinator, Minga; Nelcy, small farmer, Putumayo; Rae Anne Lafrenz, Project Counselling Service coordinator, Bogotá; Rodrigo, son of murdered father, Buenaventura; Solin, coca chemist, San Juan River; Ted Legget, researcher, UNODC.

  I obtained statistics on cocaine flows through Chocó from the Coast Guard and the regional public prosecutor’s office, and the information dealing with general, global developments in cocaine consumption is from the most recent UNODC annual report. The historical account of Chocó is based on, among other sources, Orlando Fals Borda’s (et al.) La Violencia en Colombia, Garry Leech’s Beyond Bogotá: diary of a drug war journalist in Colombia, and Carlos Rosero and Tatiana Roa Avendaño’s Llenando Tanques, Vaciando Territorio. The background on the social situation in Buenaventura incorporates information from the Roman Catholic Dioceses of Buenaventura and Misión de Apoyo al Proceso de Paz de la Organización de los Estados Americanos (MAPP/OEA). Pozón is not the village’s real name.

  In addition to the interviews, I based the section on Putumayo on, first and foremost, Oscar Jansson’s PhD dissertation ‘The Cursed Leaf: an anthropology of the political economy of cocaine production in southern Colombia’, Cruz Elena Flórez’s Órdenes Sociales en el Putumayo Antes y Después Del Plan Colombia, Marco Palacios’ Plan Colombia: ¿anti-drogas o contrainsurgencia?, and Mauricio Romero’s Paramilitares y Autodefensas. Jansson, above all, forms the basis of the section on the guerrillas’ and paramilitaries’ respective economic relations with the coca cultivators, the ‘culture’ that emerged in the province during the boom, and the Medellín Cartel’s connection to armed groups in the region. The quote by William S. Burroughs also comes from Jansson. His work also helped me greatly with the passages in which I describe the hierarchy in the Colombian cocaine economy, as well as information on the fighting and large number of hectares in El Azul and El Tigre. I extracted statistics on herbicide spraying, the number of cultivated hectares, the number of eliminated hectares, the successes and failures of Plan Colombia, the extent of support from the United States at various times, et cetera, from Cruz Elena Flórez’s report and annual UNODC publications. Information and help for analysis on the guerrillas’ description of the farmers as victims, and on the private armies’ description of entrepreneurs as victims, also comes from Palacios, as does the discussion on the relative lull in conflict between La Violencia and the cocaine boom (1955�
�1985).

  I wrote, but ended up not including in the final version, several pages on the 2008–2009 DMG pyramid scandal, a money-laundering scheme using Putumayo as its hub, which swindled hundreds of thousands of Colombians out of money and made headlines all over the world. That story is complex, but actually quite important for a more in-depth understanding of the development of the coca economy in Putumayo during the last decade. For readers wishing to learn more about this telling episode in Colombian history, I recommend Jineth Bedoya’s book La Pirámide de David Murcia and Mauricio Baena Velázquez’s Captadores de Ilusiones: damnificados de las pirámides.

  The information on how different sums of money are distributed to different levels of the cocaine hierarchy comes from my interview with Francisco Thoumi, Colombia’s foremost expert in criminal economy, as does the quote on the UN politicisation of statistics.

  The story of Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s assassination made headlines in the Americas in December 2009, and the statistics I used here were extracted from the story as published in The Wall Street Journal, 28 December 2009. The spread of coca fields in the country and the role this has played in the ecocidio is documented in many sources, and the information I used (in terms of the spread of coca, the richness of Colombia’s biodiversity, and information concerning the cost of manual elimination of coca plants versus herbicide spraying) come from the WOLA report A Failed Strategy: the spraying of illicit crops in Colombia (2008). I also used information on drug seizures, quality, rates, et cetera, from the 2008 and 2009 UNODC annual reports. Andean Cocaine by Paul Gootenberg offers a more academic in-depth explanation of the so-called balloon effect and its dynamics in the Andes.