Cornucopia

by John Francis Kinsella

  *

  The idea of Central America excited Kennedy’s imagination. He remembered his discovery of the Caribbean more than fifteen years earlier and despite its disastrous end the experience had been filled with adventure.

  In 2000 Kennedy had left Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast of Colombia on a journey to the south, deep into the country’s isolated jungle regions bordering Ecuador. He remembered the Lear Jet as it climbed over the Andean cordilleras stretching out before him, then the vast jungle regions that covered the major part of the country, the home of the Farc guerillas and Pablo Escobar’s successors.

  Kennedy recalled the intense feeling of isolation and distance from the rest of the world on his arrival at what he had been led to believe was a coffee plantation: which it was, but not only. The people he met were different, rugged and hard, wild looking Indians, and Europeans, most of whom bore no much more than the thinnest veneer of civilisation.

  The hacienda was magnificent, as in a Western he remembered, though more exotic, green and without the dust. There were horses and what looked like cowboys, though he saw few cattle. To his consternation many of the men carried arms.

  That first evening they ate a parilla of beef chuletas to the buzz of insects flittering in the lighting over the tables set out before the grand house. He remembered Delrios, Dan Oberman and their pilot Peter Davy, as well as the omnipresent army officers in battledress. Delrios had informed Kennedy that an early visit to the coffee plantations had been organised for the next day where an army operation had been planned in the nearby jungle to close down an illegal coca paste factory. He had reassured Kennedy there was not the slightest danger.

  Kennedy wondered why the army should be employed to close down a factory, confused by the meaning of coca: was it another version of cocoa, a chocolate drink, or coke as in Coke Cola? In any case why should it be illegal. Not wanting to appear stupid he kept his questions to himself and nodded his agreement to Delrios, who snapped out orders in Spanish to one of his subalterns for the next day’s operation.

  They set out for the coffee plantations, at six thirty in morning, which lay on the surrounding hills. These turned out to be disappointing and of only mild interest to Kennedy once he had seen the plantations were nothing more than endless rows of uninteresting green bushes, with the berries ripening on their small branches. It was too early to be up for the likes of inspecting berries on coffee bushes. The essential was that he had seen them and could be considered an expert back in Ireland.

  In the not too far distance he saw the mist clinging to the mountains and the canopy of the dense jungle that stretched out like a green carpet before his eyes. The view looked menacing as he imagined his helicopter crashing down into the endless jungle. He was no longer sure that his presence was all that important for the army operation. He had no choice as he was quickly driven to the airstrip and put aboard an army helicopter. They flew low over the jungle and thirty minutes later they circled and landed in a clearing, where they joined a small army unit ready to leave for the jungle factory.

  From there they set out in Jeeps over a muddy laterite trail to a meeting point about an hour’s drive away in the jungle covered hills where they met up with a larger group. There he was introduced to an officer who explained in rapid Spanish to his guide the outline of the operation.

  Kennedy was uneasy when he saw how heavily armed the men were, and could not help noting their tightly clenched jaws, it was clearly not going to be the kind of rabbit shoot he was used to.

  Dimly he began to understand that he was about to witness a military operation against an illegal drug factory, but was confused by the roles of Delrios and Ortega, which seemed vaguely ambiguous. The army was in effect protecting their interests against encroachment by right wing independent paramilitary groups that fought both the Farc and sometimes the government.

  It was a complex arrangement with the territory divided into a mosaic of rival interests, where the army, whilst looking after its own business activities, tried to maintain a certain status quo between the warring factions.

  The English spoken by the officer in charge and the guide was difficult to follow. Kennedy wished that that Oberman or Davy had remained with him. What at first glance had seemed to be an interesting outing was beginning to take on an alarming air. The other two men had left that morning on a trip up to Barranquilla and back, to deliver some important packages for Delrios and pick up communications equipment that had just arrived from Panama.

  They continued a short distance by jeep over the slippery trail to a clearing where they proceeded on foot. They followed heavily armed soldiers who advanced cautiously towards the site of the suspected narcotics factory.

  Kennedy remembered the sudden stutter of automatic rifle fire. The soldiers ducked and Kennedy dived into the rain sodden undergrowth and mud. Then the silence, the acrid blue smoke from the gunfire rising in the damp air. The soldiers cautiously continued their advance towards the jungle factory. Kennedy picked himself up brushing the mud and damp leaves from his clothes, his heart beating at a speed he had never before experienced.

  The makeshift camp was abandoned, as such camps usually were, a couple of hours or even less before the arrival of the military. Cooking fires were still smoking. The rifle fire had been simply a tactic to frighten those who may have remained in the camp.

  He discovered a motley collection of makeshift huts constructed from branches and rough planks, covered with corrugated iron roofs and palm fronds. In a sump dug into the earth coca paste was in preparation and the crude tools necessary lay where they had been precipitously abandoned.

  Coca was cultivated by poor farmers and the leaves were harvested by Indians, transported by foot in plastic sacks to the factories where it was transformed into a crude paste. The process was simple; the coca leaves were dried and immersed in a mixture of sulphuric acid and kerosene. The mixture was left to macerate for some hours and then filtered and dried into a paste which could then be transported to laboratories in the north of the country.

  The army officer explained through a translator for the benefit of Kennedy that the jungle factory would be burnt and all the material destroyed. Kennedy nodded seriously wondering whether the whole operation had not been set up for his sole benefit.

  Colombian Army drug trafficker’s jungle factory

  Another factory would appear in a day or two and business would continue as usual once the military returned to their base.

  Informants were everywhere, brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends, both sides exchanging information on operations planned by the authorities. It was a game of hide and seek, where the parties pretended not to know where the other was.

  The Colombian armed forces were too small and lacked mobility as well as the means to carry out an effective combat against the narco-industry mercenaries.

  The hacienda was situated amongst the vast coffee plantations that covered the nearby hills and plantations surrounded by dense jungle and mountains, in a region only accessible by air, or a long and difficult journey overland. The plantation and its airstrip were also collection points for unrefined cocaine from the surrounding region, where coca growers cultivated and harvested their crop of coca leaves and transformed it into paste before transporting it north.

  Police and officials were willing accomplices to the drug traffickers and the drug barons, who continued to operate with impunity throughout Central America and Mexico up to the US border region. Corruption was rampant at all levels in Latin American countries where the traffic of narcotics was aided and abetted at all levels of society.

  The coffee plantations were controlled by the Farc and coffee used as a cover for the much more profitable cultivation of coca, the profits of which were used for the purchase of arms and other materials in the futile struggle against the central government in Bogota.

  In 2000, the plantations Ortega controlled were an important exporter of Colombian coffee to international markets. Th
ey were just one of the many covers for his multiple illegal business activities, which included money laundering on behalf of the Farc.

  The production of coca paste in the mountains of southern Colombia by the Farc and their supporters was worth many hundreds of millions of dollars and Ortega’s role was to legitimise the enormous wealth for the guerrillas.

  Police, army, political parties and drug cartels were intertwined in a complex tangle of conflicting relationships. The civil authorities needed the money to fight drugs, but also accepted money from the drug cartels to fund election campaigns and buy arms to fight the guerrillas.

  The Colombian authorities accepted the billions of dollars in aid from the US government, in their fight against narcotics and their never ending struggle against the Farc and other opposition movements.

  Cocaine commenced its long journey from the mountains in the extreme south of the country to the Caribbean coast in the north. The paste was refined into the finished product in laboratories in Barranquilla and other coastal cities ready for export. From the cities of Barranquilla on the coast, or Santa Marta at the foot of Pico Cristobal Colon overlooking the southern flank of the Caribbean, the cocaine was shipped by sea to North America via the Caribbean islands or by land across Central America and Mexico.

  CARTAGENA – COLOMBIA

  Barton was enchanted by Cartagena, the city was everything and more than he had expected. He had seen no signs of a war torn country terrorized by the Farc and racked by narco trafficking gangsters, whose combined deeds had so recently supplied the international media with many blood curdling headlines. At least he had not seen anything … yet.

  After three months in Colombia he had started to feel at home and his Spanish was improving by the day. Lola had change his life and her country was a land of immense opportunities. To start with he would buy a piece of land near Barichara and build a home with the help of Alfonso, his new architect friend.

  London seemed far away and the UK, seen from Colombia, conjured up a strange image in his mind: one that he remembered from a television series he had watched as a child, that of Patrick McGoohan as ‘The Prisoner’ set on an imaginary twee English island, where the underclass was unseeable, which was certainly not the case in today’s Britain, at least beyond Knightsbridge and Chelsea, where the poor thronged.

  The politically correct establishment had allowed the millions of additional poor from the third world, to pile into an already overcrowded island. BBC India pontificated, preached the good word, and as a reward splashed out extravagant salaries to news readers and weather forecasters, cramming the upper echelons with political appointees, offering the grassroot masses footy and Topgear.

  Nothing had changed since 2007, as for France, a country he had got to know and in spite of its faults appreciate; it was ruled by gauchist ‘bobos’ equally as obsessed by the politically correct and governed by Hollande, a lame duck scribbler.

  Democracy in Great Britain and France had in the relatively recent history been paper thin. Two World Wars and the dismantlement of their respective colonial empires had brought a greater distribution of political power. Equality was however an illusion. For those who liked to pretended otherwise, a trip to the poorer immigrant districts of London, or Paris, should have been, if visitors cared to open their eyes and minds, an enlightening experience.

  Colombia could, to a certain degree be excused for its inequalities, which were everywhere, even after five centuries of metissage the country was still dominated by its hidalgos and their kind. The same went for numerous other countries in the New World, including the US. In South Africa, the abolition of apartheid had changed little in the distribution of land and wealth, whilst the Indian Subcontinent was a world of poverty, caste and division. Equality could not be decreed. Hadn’t Tocqueville written the Revolution was a thing of the bourgeoisie?