Scribe Publications
COCAÍNA
Magnus Linton is a Swedish writer whose work tackles controversial social, political, and ethical topics. He is the author of several acclaimed non-fiction books, including The Vegans (2000), a provocative account of the ethics of eating meat that turned then Swedish prime minister Göran Persson into a ‘semi-vegetarian’; Americanos (2005), a pioneering masterpiece exploring the rise of neo-socialism in Latin America; and The Hated (2012), which examines the emergence of the new radical right in Europe. Cocaína was first published in Swedish in 2010 and was nominated for the August Prize, Sweden’s most important literary award. Magnus lives in Stockholm and Bogotá with his family.
John Eason is an American translator and educator based in Stockholm. He holds a PhD in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin, where he has taught Scandinavian literature and Swedish. John has also been a guest lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia 3056
Email: [email protected]
First published in Swedish by Atlas Bokförlag in 2010
First published in English by Scribe 2013
Published by agreement with the Kontext Agency
Copyright © Magnus Linton 2010, 2013
Translation copyright © John Eason 2013
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
While every care has been taken to trace and acknowledge copyright, we tender apologies for any accidental infringement where copyright has proved untraceable and we welcome information that would redress the situation.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Linton, Magnus, author.
Cocaína: a book on those who make it / Magnus Linton; translated by John Eason.
9781922072238 (e-book.)
1. Cocaine industry. 2. Drug traffic. 3. Drug control. 4. Drugs of abuse.
Other Authors/Contributors: Eason, John, translator.
363.45
scribepublications.com.au
To Sid and Elina
CONTENTS
Preface
1 Cocaturismo: Medellín as heaven
2 Green Gold: the carousel of war
3 Pablo’s Party: the State gets cancer
4 The War on Drugs: from Nixon to Obama
5 Mañana: the future of the powder
Notes on Sources
References
Acknowledgements
PREFACE
ON THE EVENING of 18 August 1989, I was in a taxi in Bogotá, on the way to meet a friend. The car was cruising down the colonial quarter, dodging potholes, but it was not until the headlights swept across the road as we crossed Avenida Jiménez that I was able to get a good look, and I realised the city centre was dead. No one was hanging out by the statue in the park; no one but los gamines, street kids, sitting around like lifeless shadows with their noses stuck in bags, inhaling glue in an effort to numb their bodies against the impending cold of the night.
‘¡Mataron a Galán! Galán’s been murdered,’ said the driver.
Luis Carlos Galán was a liberal left-wing politician running for president in the upcoming 1990 election, and he had been the clear frontrunner. He had promised to reform Colombia’s backward landownership structure, but first and foremost he had attacked the way the elite was protecting a man who would go down in history as one of the most bloodstained mobsters of all times: the ‘King of Cocaine’, Pablo Escobar Gaviria.
We continued across the city. I wanted to keep talking about the murder, but the driver just shrugged his shoulders and dropped his head in what I would later recognise as a very common Colombian gesture. At the same time he uttered two words, a phrase that I would one day come to understand as a verbal accompaniment to the gesture. When poor Colombians say lo mataron — literally ‘they murdered him’, but meant more in the sense of ‘he was murdered’ so as to avoid the agent — they make a dismissive gesture in which the neck muscles relax, causing the head to drop. The motion signifies that the topic is closed for discussion; that you have touched on an issue foreigners seem unable to understand: the fact that almost everyone in Colombia has a friend or relative who has been murdered. A child. A parent. A friend. A sibling. It is a collective experience.
But in this case, the comment was not made in relation to a family member but about a presumptive president. Consequently, in this context the words and the gesture took on a less personal, more public meaning. It quite simply established the fact that what had happened was not at all unexpected, as in this country most big conflicts end in not just one murder but several.
When I continued to question the driver about what he thought had happened, he only ever answered me with those same two words, and at my destination I silently handed him a roll of pesos and got out of the car. He drove off, but his stiff answer had left me hanging with all my naïve questions about the elusive agents of Colombia. ‘Lo mataron.’
ONE DAY IN the 1990s, I went along with a Colombian friend, Alfonso, to buy a gram of perico — cocaine — in western Bogotá. It was a typical middle-class neighbourhood, where families in some of the two-storey houses had tiendas: little kiosk-like shops in a front room on the ground floor, where they sold cigarettes and staple foods. We entered one of them, and Alfonso asked the young man sorting through packets of gum behind the counter if the ‘philosopher’ was home.
The guy nodded in the affirmative. ‘Sí. In the bedroom upstairs.’
The question was superfluous, as Alfonso well knew, since the philosopher was paraplegic and could not leave the house. But Colombians are the politest people in the world, and an aspect of their good behaviour is to never take anything for granted.
As we entered the living quarters I winced when I saw who was sitting there, but Alfonso quietly assured me that everything was okay. Four policemen were chatting around the dinner table, feasting on a chicken, and the philosopher’s wife was joking with the uniformed men in a familiar way while she assisted the maid to serve them.
‘Good evening; good evening.’ We greeted everyone as we circumnavigated the party and scuttled up a flight of stairs.
The bedridden philosopher, whose lifeless limbs were covered by a heavy layer of blankets, was flipping through the afternoon-television soap operas. He was somewhere between 60 and 70. Alfonso asked him how he was doing, and he responded with a wisecrack before asking, ‘How many?’
Alfonso held up his index finger.
The philosopher pulled a white envelope out from behind a burgundy silk pillow, placed it on the blanket before him, and accepted the cash.
We went downstairs and made another lap around the officers, wishing them bon appétit. ‘Gracias,’ they said in unison.
IN SPRING 2007 I had a temporary job with a Swedish aid organisation in Bogotá. We had arranged, along with other non-government organisations, a lobbying meeting with one of the most powerful diplomats in the country: Adrianus Koetsenruijter, the head of the European Commission delegation to Colombia.
The purpose of the meeting was to find out the European Union’s opinio
n on the human-rights situation in the country. New statistics indicated that the number of displaced people in ‘the world’s longest ongoing armed conflict’ was rapidly approaching four million, and everyone was aware that the cocaine industry had become the primary driving force behind the war. Broadly speaking, the guerrillas controlled the coca-growing peasants, the paramilitary groups controlled the higher levels of cocaine production, and the government waged war on the guerrillas (with support from the US military) under the banner of ‘the war on drugs’; it was a strange triangle of combat, in which all the weapons were financed by some facet of cocaine production.
Koetsenruijter was in high spirits. He was about to resign and was pleased to be doing so, as a new job awaited him in another part of the world. We happened to catch him during some downtime, when he felt he could relax and speak off the record. He said it would be refreshing not to have to put on diplomatic airs anymore. But to be on the safe side, he requested that our conversation go no further, and we nodded in agreement.
He spoke from the heart. In his opinion, the sitting right-wing government had been good for Colombian society in many ways: cities were safer, people were more inclined to report attacks by armed groups, and there was even a left-wing party in Congress whose representatives could speak out without fear of being murdered. Yet when asked the key question — whether this progress was sustainable — he gave a deep sigh. ‘No.’
And then he said something I have often heard from people in Colombia, but never from a top-ranking EU official. ‘Legalisation. There’s no other option. I don’t know a single person in any high-ranking political post any longer who isn’t in favour of legalising drugs. But that, of course, is politically impossible.’
WHAT THESE ANECDOTES illustrate is that every story about Colombia — and especially about cocaine — is complex or multifaceted. Just when you think an issue has been resolved, a more sophisticated layer emerges. And this continues until everything is so vague and all those involved seem so evasive that the only clear fact is that nothing is as it seems to be.
More than two decades have passed since that cold evening of Galán’s assassination, and it is with mixed emotions I now present a book that’s a bit of a failure. More than a decade ago I promised myself I’d one day write a book on Colombia in which the words ‘cocaine’ and ‘violence’ would be absent. This truly unique place is not just one of the most notorious countries in the world; it is also one of the most beautiful. My love of Colombians and the country’s stunning cultural richness has grown every year since my first trip in 1989, and this passion made me want to write a book about the other Colombia. I felt the country deserved it. Of course, it would not be a superficial work that avoided the social and political problems, but rather one that focused on tales other than the same old stories of Colombia as a place of drugs and violence, and nothing more.
In February 2007 I received a grant that made it possible for me to move to Bogotá and start this project. I began to compile amazing stories of Colombian adventures: such as the story of revolutionary newborn Julio, adopted by a Swedish couple, who searched high and low for his family roots on the outskirts of Cali; the tale of the historic city of Cartagena, and its metamorphosis from a dreary port to a hotspot perfectly designed to cater for all of the new global elite’s preferences; the account of young pregnant guerrilla fighter Andrea, and her desperate attempts to keep her baby despite the guerrillas’ instructions to abort it; and the story of beauty queen Ximena and her unsuccessful attempts to become the first Miss Colombia not to have had plastic surgery.
The problem with this project, though, was that while the stories were certainly fascinating, it seemed that no matter where I turned, what I did, or which story I stumbled upon, everything always seemed to lead back to one thing. There was no way of getting around it: the presence of cocaine in modern Colombia was simply far too pervasive to be ignored, at least by a journalist whose main interest is politics. Histories and accounts of Cali, Cartagena, the guerrillas, and the beauty industry, like most issues in the nation, were too interwoven with the cocaine industry and its influence on all aspects of Colombian society to dismiss. Cocaine takes precedence over everything. And it links most things together.
So I soon realised it was essential to revise the project. I decided that the work, contrary to my original intention, must centre on cocaine, its history, and its consequences. I abandoned my first idea and have consequently written a book exclusively about Colombia and cocaine. In many ways it is a tragic turn of events — though I think an inevitable one.
THE PURPOSE OF this work is not, as some might expect, to offer a solution to the problems surrounding the cocaine industry, but instead to describe these problems. Rather than providing answers as to how all drug-related misery could be eliminated — if such a thing were even possible — my goal is to expose a highly complex global problem at the ground level: to offer detailed accounts, in-depth experiences, and rarely heard opinions from the country that has suffered more than any other as a result of the worldwide cocaine boom and the related war on drugs.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to see cocaine for sale at local supermarkets, but I wouldn’t want to live in a completely drug-free society either. It is my hope that this book will interest as well as provoke those who love drugs, those who hate them, and all in between.
The question that occurred to me in the taxi on that cold night of Galán’s murder — What is Colombia? — would compel me to live a quarter of my adult life in Bogotá. But it was only later I realised that being in Bogotá on that fateful evening meant I had ended up in the centre of a worldwide political drama; that cocaine was the very essence of a number of contemporary global conflicts and debates, a sort of surface-level descriptor of serious problems that would characterise the relationship between rich and poor continents in the years to come: the marginalisation of third-world farmers by free-market economics, the United States’ need to find a new menace in the post-Soviet era, the resurgence of populism in Latin America, postmodern society’s desperate effort to fill the existential gap left by the death of God, and so on.
This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of exactly what happened in the span of those 20 years, between 1989 and 2009. Using Colombia’s troubling experience as a prism, but hopefully without further victimising the country or its inhabitants, I have tried to point out some truly global stories about power and poverty in today’s world. I hope, of course, that the reader will find food for thought in them.
COCATURISMO
Medellín as heaven
‘I don’t take insults from anyone.
Everyone who has called me gay is dead, except my mother.’
— ALONSO, HIT MAN
AMONG A SEA of dancers Håkan, a young Swedish guy, towers over everyone else. After sticking his key in the three-gram bag he is holding and digging around a bit, he pulls up a small mound of snow-white powder that he holds up to his girlfriend, who snorts it with a quick nschh.
‘Clubbing here is just a liiiiiiittle bit better than at home.’ He licks off the powder that is stuck in the steel grooves of the key, paying no mind to the policemen, who have taken bribes in exchange for turning a blind eye to the goings-on inside the club. It is 4.00 a.m., and before the cocaine has even had time to kick in Håkan places a pill on his middle finger and shoves it into his girlfriend’s mouth, his arm outstretched. She swallows it with a gulp, licking his hand playfully in the process.
‘I love Colombian women. They’re real women. So fucking female.’
She is barely half his height and tries clinging to his neck, but he keeps pushing her off; he isn’t in the mood to make out. Eventually he grabs her behind, lifts her up off the floor, and sticks his tongue in her ear.
The club is in a hexagonal building in an industrial district. The pounding bass fills the room, where hundreds of dancers wearing sunglasse
s stomp away in the dark. ‘Alexi Delano deejayed here a while ago,’ Håkan says. ‘It was the best party I’ve been to. It was absolutely incredible. He’s Swedish, too.’
Swedish. He could just as well have been German, American, British, or Spanish. In fact, he could have been from almost any wealthy Western nation, for Håkan is just one of thousands in the latest crop of young globetrotters making their way to Medellín, the new mecca of drug tourism. The city that in the 1990s was known as ‘the murder capital of the world’ has since been transformed into an urban paradise where the sky’s the limit — at least, for those who have the money.
In El Poblado, an area of Medellín filled with tranquil shopping malls, sushi bars, and internet cafes, a new hostel has opened every other month for the last year. Economic globalisation has transformed the traditional backpacker into the flashpacker: a well-to-do traveller seeking a combination of comfort and adventure, reflecting the trend in tourism whereby travellers are more interested in themselves than in tourist attractions. For today’s young travellers, seeing the Amazon or Patagonia is nowhere near as thrilling as doing Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, or Medellín. Publishing powerhouses such as Lonely Planet now have more city guides than travel guides, as most traditional destinations have become so mainstream and consumerised that the so-called undiscovered places have to be sold in order to keep the money carousel going. Hanging out in, as opposed to visiting, the Third World is the new thing to do.
All this factors into the appeal and sudden success of Medellín. The city not only has superficial attributes and attractions — a perfect climate, good shopping, wild clubs, and hip people, all conveniently kept separate from violent gangs — but what makes Medellín truly special, and so attractive to the new travelling avant-garde, is something best described as an electrical charge in the air. A myth. In contrast to the tired old nostalgic stories of tango in Buenos Aires, of beaches in Rio de Janeiro, or of the revolution in Havana, Medellín has a more titillating product that, carefully packaged, can be sold with a great deal of success: cocaine. But cocaine packaged in such a way that the actual powder is just one aspect of the experience.
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