Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  The estimations I used about the number of remaining FARC soldiers were published in the Nuevo Arco Iris report ¿En qué está la Guerra? The exact number of paramilitaries who were demobilised during the demobilisation program, which ran between 2004 and 2006, was 31,689, according to MAPP/OEA, which oversaw the process. However, the OEA never estimated the number of soldiers organised into paramilitary groups before the process started, and in view of the number of registered weapons recovered, the number of paramilitaries bearing arms could not have exceeded 17,000. The other more than 14,000 ‘soldiers’ were actually, according to Nuevo Arco Iris (the organisation that has undertaken the most accurate examination of this process) people who never carried arms, and who joined or were recruited right before demobilisation with an eye to being able to reap the benefits offered by the program. The book Y se Refundó la Patria, which takes an in-depth look at this problem and how, according to the Nuevo Arco Iris researchers, the paramilitary process paved the way for the mafia’s takeover of governmental institutions at the local and regional level, was published in 2010. Statistics on what percentage of the paramilitary group’s financial resources derived from coca production (70 per cent) are well known in Colombia and may be found, for example, in Alfredo Rangel’s (et al.) La Batalla Perdida Contra Las Drogas. Several paramilitary leaders have also confirmed this information. Rangel’s quote in the same section is from the same book.

  Regional security policy concerns that arose, and still exist, throughout northern South America as a result of the Colombian attack on the FARC camps in Ecuador were too recent to have made it into print in book form when I wrote this text, but they received extensive media coverage in all the affected countries between 2008 and 2010. The quote from Hugo Chávez concerning the demands placed on UN troops in Colombia was published in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo on 7 December 2009.

  I wrote the section on the expansion of coca fields along the San Juan River after a trip through the region in May 2009. The name ‘El Caraño’ is a pseudonym, as are the names of the majority of the interviewees (see the note about the use of italics at the beginning of this section). Passages and conclusions about what it’s like to work as a domestic servant and its correlations to racism, serfdom, adoption, et cetera, are based on interviews and research conducted on the adoption industry in Colombia for other works of mine, not yet published. Daniel Samper’s column on falsos positivos was published in El Tiempo, 17 January 2010. The story of the young boys from Soacha and the quote from the shopkeeper were published by a team of special investigative reporters under the title ‘Así Se Tejió la Trampa de los Falsos Positivos’ in El Tiempo, 24 May 2009. Philip Alston’s statements have been documented in a number of publications, including the UN ‘Declaración del Profesor Philip Alston, Relator Especial de las Naciones Unidas para las Ejecuciones Aarbitraries’, 18 June 2009. See also the article ‘UN Expert Voices Concern Over Murders Committed by Colombian Security Forces’ (UN News Service, 18 June 2009). A number of documentaries on this topic, such as Falsos Positivos by Italian journalists Simone Bruno and Dado Carillo, have also been produced.

  Sections of the reportage dealing with the environmental consequences of coca production are partly based on the government campaign Shared Responsibility and criticism of it, such as Germán Andrés Quimbayo Ruiz’s essay ‘¿Quién está Destruyendo el Ambiente? Coca, fumigación, ganadería y palma africana en Colombia’ (Razón Publica, 4 May 2009). I also used Tom Feiling’s book The Candy Machine for this section, as it includes interesting information on the ecological impact of cocaine.

  3 Pablo’s Party: the State gets cancer

  This part of the text, more an essay than reportage, is a chronicle based on several trips, but above all on a number of oral and written accounts. Pablo Escobar’s fate is a fascinating story, but it has already been written about extensively, and thus was a topic I was initially hesitant about devoting an entire chapter to. Ultimately, however, I decided to include it, as it provides a very useful prism through which to understand the emergence of the new Colombia. Integral parts of the story, such as Escobar’s life at Nápoles, his time in La Catedral, the DEA’s under-the-table games, the attacks on Avianca and El Espectador, the assassination of Galán, the final days of Escobar’s life, and so on, have already been documented in several books, such as Alonso Salazar’s La Parábola de Pablo and Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo, as well as in hundreds of articles published after the murder. In the passages about Escobar’s life and death I have basically just followed the accepted version of the story, as it has been told many times before. However, one book in particular — James Mollison and Rainbow Nelson’s impressive The Memory of Pablo Escobar — has been more essential than other sources for this chapter.

  In order to enhance the historical account and my analyses, and to set the scenes, I also drew from Virginia Vallejo’s Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar, Orlando Fals Borda’s (et al.) La Violencia en Colombia, Mauricio Aranguen Molina’s Mi Confesión: Carlos Castaño revela sus secretos, Gerardo Reyes’ Nuestro Hombre en la DEA, Germán Castro Caycedo’s En Secreto, Ana Carrigan’s The Palace of Justice: a Colombian tragedy (published in English in 1993 and translated into Spanish with a new preface in 2009), Natalia Morales and Santiago La Rotta’s Los Pepes: desde Pablo Escobar hasta Don Berna, Macaco y Don Mario, Alfredo Rangel’s (et al.) Qué, Cómo y Cuándo Negociar con las Farc, Arturo Alape’s El Bogotazo: memorias del olvido and Tirofijo, Luis Cañón’s El Patrón: vida y muerte de Pablo Escobar, and Nicolas Entel’s documentary Sins of My Father.

  In 2009 and 2010 I spent time in Barrio Pablo Escobar, Hacienda Nápoles (today a museum and zoo, with remnants of Escobar’s empire), Escobar’s grave in southern Medellín, the location of La Catedral, the Monaco building, the house where Pablo was killed in 1993, and a number of other buildings in Medellín that were damaged in explosions following the terror attacks during the cocaine war.

  The following people, with whom I conducted interviews, have been integral to this work: Alonso Salazár, mayor of Medellín and Escobar’s biographer; Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogotá and presidential candidate in the 2010 election; Carlos Lozano, editor-in-chief of Voz; Carlos Vidales, historian and former member of the M-19; Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá; Fabio Castillo, investigative reporter at El Espectador in the 1980s; Gloria Cuartas, former mayor of Apartadó; Jorge Parra, Barrio Escobar resident; Juan Manuel Galán, son of Luis Carlos Galán (murdered under Escobar’s order in 1989); Pablo Escobar’s son Juan Pablo Escobar (today Sebastián Marroquín); Maria-Etelvina Restrepo, visitor of Pablo Escobar’s grave; Rodrigo Lara Restrepo, son of justice minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla (murdered under Escobar’s order in 1984); Ruben Darío Yepes, priest at the church built at La Catedral; Sandra Hincupié, visitor of Pablo Escobar’s grave.

  I reconstructed the scenes from Hacienda Nápoles with reference to books by Vallejo and Salazar, relics and archival material collected at present-day Nápoles, and Entel’s documentary. I based my sketches of various guerrilla movements on Steven Dudley’s Walking Ghosts (FARC), Leon Valencia’s Mis Años de Guerra (ELN), Ana Carrigan’s El Palacio de Justicia: una tragedia colombiana (M-19), and Alvaro Villarraga and Nelson Plaza’s Para Reconstruir los Sueños: una historia del EPL (EPL). The latest report on the dramatic events at the Palace of Justice in November 1985 — Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad sobre los Hechos del Palacio de Justicia — is available for download at www.ictj.org.

  Among the works on which I based my account of the atmosphere and course of events in Bogotá in 1948 are Miguel Torres’ El Crimen del Siglo, Arturo Alape’s El Bogotazo, and Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo, while I wrote the passages on the culture and aesthetics of murder with the help of Orlando Fals Borda’s (et al.) classic La Violencia en Colombia. The scenes, and the depiction of the various characters in the criminal brotherhood that Virginia Vallejo was introduced to at Nápoles in the early 1980
s, are based on Salazar’s La Parábola de Pablo. I based my description of Fidel Castaño’s transformation to a Colombian Rambo on information in Dudley’s Walking Ghosts and in Carlos Castaño’s autobiography. Virginia Vallejo’s description of the general perception of cocaine in the early 1980s as relatively harmless comes from an interview with Vallejo on the talk show Maria Elvira Live on 6 May 2009, broadcast by the Miami-based television station Mega TV. The quote from Guillermo Cano is from Fabio Castillo’s Riders of Cocaine.

  For the section on Isaac Guttnan and el sicariato I have used information from Fabio Castillo’s book Riders of Cocaine and Diana Grajales’ essay ‘Genealogia de las Bandas’. Victor Gaviria’s documentary Rodrigo D: no futuro offers, for those primarily interested in the ‘no futuro culture’, a good but disturbing depiction of the phenomenon, as does his sequel La Vendedora de Rosas and Alonso Salazar’s legendary book No Nacimos Pa’semilla: la cultura de las bandas juveniles en Medellín. The scene about the Galán family the day Luis Carlos Galán was assassinated was described to me by Juan Manuel Galán. I based other sections in the same passage on Maria Jimena Duzán’s Crónicas que Matan. The section on Nadaismo is based on information from Salazar’s biography on Escobar and Bowden’s Killing Pablo.

  Descriptions of the arrival of Delta Force, the actions of Los Pepes, Escobar’s final birthday, connections between the Reconnaissance Commando and US elite forces, president Gaviria’s juggling in order to allow foreign troops into the country, the murders of Moncada and Galeano, Pablo’s contacts with his family, Joe Toft’s doubts, the details of the final days of the hunt for Escobar, et cetera, all come from Cañón’s El Patrón, Bowden’s Killing Pablo, Salazar’s La Parábola de Pablo, and Morales and La Rotta’s Los Pepes (information pertaining to Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela’s agreement for payment following Escobar’s death is from Bowden, as well as several details from the scene prior to the shooting). Carlos Castaño’s statement, that it is essential those killings the state cannot take care of be carried out by someone else, comes from his autobiography.

  The arrest of General Maza Márquez in August 2009 was a shock to the entire country and was reported by all Colombian news media. I took the quote from former president César Gaviria, in which he states that the money for the war on drugs should be invested in other methods, from the report Drugs and Democracy: toward a paradigm shift. Details of the final scene with Virginia Vallejo are from her book Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar.

  A major problem that comes from writing about Pablo Escobar in the wake of events, taking information from second- and third-hand sources, is that after so many years the myth has taken on a life of its own. Many of the people who were in the inner circles had good reasons to lie, keep quiet, exaggerate, understate, or cut down enemies in the carousel of moral corruption and defilement that continued after his death. In December 2009, when I interviewed Pablo Escobar’s son Juan Pablo (today Sebastián Marroquín), he stated — without denying that his father was one of worst mass-murderers in history — that ‘no one who has ever written about him [Pablo Escobar] has even come close to depicting the person he really was’. I drew many facts for the second half of the chapter from James Mollison and Rainbow Nelson’s well-researched and visually stimulating work The Memory of Escobar, because it was published in 2007 and thus has a healthy distance from the events; moreover, because a great deal rests on the statements of individuals who were once involved, and they are now older and many no longer have anything to gain or lose from the truth. The quotes on p. 119 (on legalisation) and p. 134 (Gustavo Gaviria) are from the same book.

  4 The War on Drugs: from Nixon to Obama

  The two operations that I attended in this chapter were carried out by the Colombian anti-narcotics police and the Coast Guard in March 2009 and April 2009. That same year I also spent time in the city of Buenaventura, as well as the urban and suburban districts of La Playita, Alfonso López, Lleras, Punta Del Este, and Firme. I interviewed the following people: Aida Orobio, nun, Buenaventura Diocese; Borman García Aguilar, sergeant, anti-narcotics police; David Cifuentes, soldier, anti-narcotics police; Edwaer Picón, captain, Coast Guard; Gabriel Rojas Vallona, prosecutor; Gustavo Guevara, prosecutor; Hector Correa, colonel, anti-narcotics police; Jay Bergman, regional DEA head; John Sanchez, soldier, anti-narcotics police; Juan Carlos Rivero, sergeant, anti-narcotics police; Juan Quiroga, major, anti-narcotics police; and Óscar Naranjo, national police chief.

  Most of the information about and descriptions of logistics and the running of an HCl laboratory was given to me by Jay Bergman, who I interviewed in June and December 2009, and Leo, an itinerant proletarian working in the drug trade whose fate I have followed since 2007. I took Richard Nixon’s statement pertaining to the Shafer Commission, as well as calculations on how US yearly investments in the war on drugs grew from 16 million to 18 billion USD, from Tom Feiling’s The Candy Machine. Dick Cheney’s efforts in establishing the term ‘narcoterrorism’ in US geopolitical policy, and Bill Wagner’s work in Latin America during the Cold War, are covered in several books, including Jonathan Marshall and Peter Dale Scott’s Cocaine Politics: drugs, armies, and the CIA in Central America and Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo. A more detailed account of how the European Union turned out to be peripheral, in comparison with the United States, during the initial phase of Plan Colombia may be found in Marco Palacio’s Plan Colombia: ¿anti-drogas o contrainsurgencia?, from which I also took the two quotations by Andrés Pastrana.

  Adriana Rossi’s thesis on the impact of the contra war on production, and information on CIA involvement in cocaine smuggling during the first decade of the new millennium, were published in a special feature issue in the South American edition of Le Monde Diplomatíque called ‘Crisis, Crimen Organizado y Gobernabilidad’ (April 2009). In February 2007 the same newspaper published a similar dossier under the title ‘Narcotráfico versus Democracia’, but with more focus on drugs and the war on drugs as a threat to democracy. Jay Bergman’s rejection of the idea that the Colombian police force lacks a real interest in stopping drug production comes from my interview with him in June 2009. Cuchillo’s power over the Colombian military in the eastern part of the country was a recurring scandal in 2008, and has been featured in publications such as El Tiempo (6 November 2008). The information on how the mafia in Putumayo offered payment to the military comes from Garry Leech’s Beyond Bogotá: diary of a drug war journalist in Colombia.

  I based my analyses of the people, government, racism, and development in Buenaventura on a number of interviews I conducted in the city during 2009 (see details above). An interesting documentary on the same subject is Los Pacificadores del Pacífico. Ever Veloza’s testimony on the arrival of the AUC in Buenaventura and its funding from ‘state representatives’ comes from ‘El Ventilador the HH’ (El Espectador, 6 September 2008). The website www.verdadabierta.com features a large number of documented confessions of paramilitary leaders. A more theoretical analysis of the FARC and the paramilitaries’ war over Buenaventura, and the role that conflict played in the people’s loss of trust in the state, may be found in Renata Moreno and Alvaro Guzman’s chapter ‘Autodefensas, Narcotráfico y Comportamiento Estatal en el Valle del Cauca, 1997–2005’ in Parapolítica.

  The progression pointing to increased production in Bolivia and increased trafficking through Venezuela is described in the 2009 UNODC World Drug Report, as well as statistics on the number of blown-up labs and sprayed hectares in the last decade. Evo Morales’ quote is from Noam Chomsky’s essay ‘Militarizing Latin America’, published on his website www.chomsky.info on 30 August 2009. An interesting analysis by Greg Grandin, author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the rise of the new imperialism, of how seven military bases contributed to increased tension in the region, was published in The Nation on 21 January 2010.

  5 Mañana: the future of the powder

  The main interviews in this ch
apter were conducted between 2008 and 2010, a period in which I was following in detail the left and liberals’ fight against right-wing efforts to dismantle the 1991 constitution, including the symbolic paragraph on ‘the personal dose’ (Case C-221, de la Corte Constitucional, 1994). Carlos Gaviria, leader of the social democratic party Polo Democrático and leftist presidential candidate in the 2006 election, was chief judge in the constitutional court in the 1990s and the intellectual architect of what became the national legislation on personal use. Audio of his defence of ‘the personal dose’, right before the government’s victory, is available under the heading ‘Ponencia the Carlos Gaviria I and II parte’ at Dosis de Personalidad (www.dosisdepersonalidad.com).

  I interviewed the following people: Aldo Lale-Demoz, director, UNODC Colombia; Alfredo Rangel, head of the think tank Seguridad y Democracia; Ariel Ávila, researcher, Nuevo Arco Iris; Carlos Gaviria, founder of the party Polo Democrático and former presidential candidate; Gustavo Duncan, political scientist; Ivonne Wilches, psychologist and activist for the personal dose; Jay Bergman, regional DEA head; Juan Manuel Galán, senator; Melissa Alvarez, activist for the personal dose; María Jimena Duzán, author; Piedad Córdoba, senator.

  Other information, analysis, and speculations in this chapter are based primarily on María Jimena Duzán’s Crónicas que Matan, Mike Jay’s Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century, Alfredo Rangel’s (et al.) books La Batalla Perdida Contra Las Drogas and Narcotráfico en Colombia, Tom Feiling’s The Candy Machine, Misha Glenny’s McMafia, and Gustavo Duncan’s Los Senores de la Guerra. Some dates on how the power behind drug trafficking became concentrated to Mexico, and the number of people employed by the Mexican cartels, was taken from a study featured in The Wall Street Journal (28 December 2008), and statistics on the increase in cocaine prices over the years are from the UN World Drug Report 2009. The report of the three former presidents, Drugs and Democracy, can be downloaded from the website for the American Commission on Drugs and Democracies (www.drogasedemocracia.org). A complete text of the RAND report Controlling Cocaine may be downloaded from their website (www.rand.org). Noam Chomsky’s commentary on the RAND report and his analysis of the drug war were presented at the seminar ‘The US War on Drugs in Latin America’ at MIT on 15 December 2009. A compilation of Chomsky’s ideas on cocaine production and its global contra war are available on a CD called An American Addiction: drugs, guerrillas, counterinsurgency. The section on ‘decertification’ and US economic sanctions on nations that deviate from the global prohibition policy is based on information from Feiling’s The Candy Machine. Swedish journalist Tomas Lappalainen’s ’Ndrangheta: en bok om maffian i Kalabrien deals with connections between the Italian and Colombian mafias and the role played by the former in the currently booming European market. The arrest of 320 mafiosi in different parts of the world, including the top level of the ’Ndrangheta, on 13 July 2010, was extensively covered in the international media. The consequences of this crackdown on cocaine distribution in Europe, however, are still uncertain.