Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  THE CITY OF Medellín stretches across a green valley, from the point where the western and central mountain ranges converge into a massive arrow pointing towards the Caribbean. A ring of mountains encircles the city’s downtown skyscrapers, and in the north and the west shantytowns dot the hillsides like scattered shards of broken tiles. The metropolitan area of El Poblado, one of the districts in the south, has a great deal in common with the nicer parts of Los Angeles: SUVs cruise down city blocks lined with lustrous buildings, culminating in a commercial maze of banks, boutiques, and restaurants. Streams of water ripple through the neighbourhood, and here and there coconut trees provide passers-by with just the right amount of shade from the eternally beating sun. Paul Thoreson, a 33-year-old American of Norwegian decent from Seattle, came here by sheer coincidence six years ago and thought he had encountered a sort of heaven: ‘The ideal climate, hot girls, and a fantastic nightlife. I love it.’

  The lower part of El Poblado is covered with Blockbusters and McDonald’s, whereas the streets a bit further up the hill offer a more refined European selection of wine shops, coffee bars, and Italian bakeries. At the end of one of these streets, embedded in the aroma of roasted coffee and freshly baked muffins, is Paul Thoreson’s Casa Kiwi, the first hostel opened in El Poblado.

  While brushing his ponytail to the side, Paul explains that he no longer accepts guests who do cocaine in front of the cleaning staff: ‘Everything got out of hand very quickly. We had to kick out a bunch of people after I found out what they were doing. Guests were starting to deal drugs and a lot of them stayed for several months.’ People simply liked the city too much and started looking for a way to make money, but they didn’t want to teach English. A deal was made with some Colombian guy who sold cheap coke, says Thoreson, and these long-term guests would buy a large amount and divvy it up. ‘They’d sell it to people staying at the hostel and make a killing. It was totally crazy. Cocaine is just so unbelievably cheap here. But now I’ve woken up to it.’

  Casa Kiwi opened five years ago, and with all the chatter about Medellín on blogs and Facebook, things have grown by leaps and bounds. Thoreson has already built a number of extensions onto Casa Kiwi, and today, in this part of the city, it is just one of many hostels acting as a budget mini-oasis in this sea of green opulence. The investment climate is ‘fantastic’, and Casa Kiwi found itself with no vacancies after it had been in operation a mere six weeks. And so it continued; the money just kept rolling in. Today, Thoreson is a millionaire. ‘I can’t complain.’

  One of the hostel employees comes upstairs and asks ‘Don Paul’ if he can take a call, which he declines. From the small terrace he glances over his creation. Below, a thin guy in a Che Guevara sweatshirt is updating a website with photos from this morning’s party, while some men with waxed surfboards wander in, and flyers advertising the night’s attractions are scattered everywhere.

  To Thoreson, the trick to sustaining his thriving business is to make sure that drug use at the hostel does not get out of control. At Casa Kiwi there is no concrete bunker and no open dealing, and there are explicit warnings on the hostel’s website under the heading ‘Thinking of Using Cocaine in Colombia?’ Everything is aimed at encouraging visitors ‘to behave’: to indulge in whatever pleasures they like but without overdoing it and, above all, not openly. Acting responsibly is what it’s all about.

  ‘A lot of the younger guys are just out for drugs. That’s all, really. They think it’s cool to come and do coke in the city of Pablo Escobar, and there was certainly a lot of this going on when we first opened and were known for our parties. But this sort of behaviour makes for a bad atmosphere and fills the place with negative energy. When a lot of people are doing drugs, you can cut the tension with a knife. It’s incredibly intense. In the early days, I thought parties were good for business, which of course is true to a certain extent: when people are enjoying themselves and having a good time, they spend money. So I was really open-minded in the beginning, but in the grand scheme of things it just means trouble. It becomes a downward spiral.’

  The maturing process that Casa Kiwi has undergone shows in microcosm what the entire city of Medellín has experienced, going back to when it was notorious as ‘the murder capital of the world’. Drug dealing is no less common today than it ever was. Crime networks are just as strong in the present as in the past, and Medellín’s role as the hub of global drug traffic is no less pronounced now than in the days of the Cartel. The difference today is that nothing is done out in the open. All that has been taken care of. Escobar’s successors are smarter, shrewder businessmen who realise that there is nothing worse for business, and in particular for illegal business, than violence, war, fighting, and media attention. In the 1990s cocaine production doubled in Colombia, but after this Medellín scored praise in headlines around the world for having transformed itself from the ‘city of murder’ to the ‘city of the future’.

  And it wasn’t a lie. In 1991, when it was at its worst, Medellín had a rate of 381 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, a figure that by 2007 had decreased to 26 — comparable to the rates in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. The Washington Post called it ‘The Medellín Miracle’, while The New York Times ran the headline ‘A Drug-Runners’ Stronghold Finds a New Life’, and Newsweek reported ‘Good Times in Medellín’.

  Medellín’s new and improved reputation as a safe, secure city continued to dominate in the media until one of the biggest political scandals in Latin American history broke: the revelation that the principles upon which this newfound virtue were based were not those of basic peace and safety, as widely reported, but rather were firmly rooted in drug money and terror, as in the days of Pablo Escobar. Or, as academic Forrest Hylton later wrote in his essay ‘Extreme Makeover — Medellín in the New Millennium’: ‘Terror was the core of “pacification” after 2000, effecting reforms needed for Medellín’s makeover into a paradise for tourists and investors. This is civilisation as barbarism. As the exhumation of mass graves attests, even the dead are not safe.’

  This is a long, violent, and complicated story. The truth was kept under wraps for many years, until in 2009 undercurrents of the drug industry, which were still very much intact, rose to the surface again. Poverty and violence were reunited — as they had been so many times before in Colombian history — and the result was bloodshed. But all this happened in an underworld conveniently removed from the happy minds of the young people at Pit Stop, Casa Kiwi, or any of the other oases in Medellín.

  THE SHOTS CAME moments after Diego left the house. There were seven. Lina ran into the street in nothing but a towel and a chemise, only to discover the body of the man with whom she had spent her 26 years on earth. He was lying in a pool of blood outside the door. She fainted. He had been shot four times in the head and three in the stomach. Little plastic-like clumps of brain matter were stuck in his hair.

  ‘This was five months and nine days ago.’ Lina Cuevas sits beside a decorated Christmas tree in Comuna 13, one of the most notorious parts of Medellín. She has been counting the days since the incident. Although Lina is 26 she does not look a day over 18, and while she recaps her story she twists her hair into a ponytail behind a round but thin face. She is in control of her emotions, and not the least bit surprised about what happened: ‘They’re fighting over how to divide up Medellín between them.’

  Diego was Lina’s brother and just one of many young men who had lost their lives in recent fighting over hubs of drug activity. Medellín, Cali, and Bogotá are not just financial metropolises and indispensable centres of money laundering, arms trading, and everything else to do with the global export of cocaine; they are also growing markets in their own right. While the powder much coveted in the United States and Europe has never been especially popular in Colombia, this is fast changing. With tourism on the rise, the foreign-aid sector growing, an increasing number of business investments from abroad, and the growth of lang
uage schools, awareness of American and European tastes in recreational drugs has also expanded. Domestic demand has begun to boom.

  Diego worked for an organisation that controlled drug trading in a neighbourhood of Medellín, and was just one of the many to fall prey, according to a pattern of violence that has become a nationwide trend. When one armed group reigns over a territory everything is calm, and people for the most part are happy and content. It does not usually matter, at least to the poor, whether the guerrillas, a paramilitary group, or the government is in control, as long as there is peace and stability. The real chaos begins when fighting breaks out over territories, and killing ensues on a large scale.

  It is the same with drugs. Routes, labs, growing regions, and shops are all relatively calm, and usually completely undetectable, as long as one drug lord and his military apparatus have control. But as soon as he is caught or killed, all hell breaks loose, as previously peaceful areas are quickly transformed into the worst war zones imaginable. Poverty is so widespread throughout the entire cocaine region, from Bolivia to Peru, Colombia, Central America, Mexico, and Venezuela, that when any link in the chain is broken there are always thousands of candidates ready to replace it. Some of the violence generated by the cocaine industry has to do with the murdering of police, prosecutors, politicians, journalists, and others who stand in the way of the mafia and their financial interests, but the vast majority of those dying in drug-related violence are poor young men battling over rank within their own criminal hierarchies.

  Since the death of Escobar, Medellín’s criminal elements had been kept in check by Diego Murillo, aka Don Berna, El Patrón’s one-time partner who then allied himself with the Colombian military and the United States in the war against the Medellín Cartel. As long as he ruled the city’s criminal network with an iron fist, everything was calm. Berna’s philosophy was quite simple: don’t rock the boat. The criminal world soon became the lubricant for the law-abiding one, and because it strengthened the already existing power structures, it was allowed to carry on without obstruction. Between 1998 and 2002, with the help of the military, Don Berna succeeded in purging Medellín of all guerrilla groups, a process that resulted in a temporary spike in the murder rate — in 2001 the city once again reported unparalleled statistics, with 220 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. However, when the last urban strongholds of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the FARC) were dealt the final deathblow, peace prevailed. Shortly thereafter Don Berna consolidated his rule over the 200 crime gangs in town, totaling 8000 young people. Homicide rates dropped dramatically. As long as law enforcement kept out of drug matters — along with any number of other, more sophisticated illegal activities associated with his criminal syndicate — Berna was more than willing to cooperate with the government in its efforts to combat common revolutionaries, as well as street crime such as robbery, car theft, rape, riots, and other atrocities committed against the general public.

  It looked as though Medellín was finally entering a golden age. The price tag, however, was not just the death of the guerrillas, but also of thousands of innocent people. Human-rights organisations reported finding large numbers of bodies in the shantytowns, and Don Berna would later explain that this was the unfortunate price of having to re-create the ‘necessary climate [for] investment returns, particularly foreign, which is fundamental if we do not want to be left behind by the engine of globalisation’.

  Diego Cuevas’ downfall was that Don Berna’s reign, like Escobar’s before it, came to an end. In an effort to demobilise the Colombian paramilitary groups, the government ran a demobilisation program in the 2000s. Berna, along with a number of other drug terrorists, decided to turn himself in, in exchange for a greatly reduced prison sentence for the mass murders he had committed. Most of the prisoners, including Berna, were able to continue their illegal business activities from prison — as Escobar had once done — so in May 2008 the government extradited 13 paramilitary leaders to the United States. One year later, a US court condemned Don Berna, the anti-communist who had brought peace to Medellín, to 31 years in prison, on a conviction for major drug offences.

  When Don Berna was sentenced in the United States, his mafia network, La Oficina de Envigado, began to crack. Mass confusion ensued, and new positions soon became available. No one was sure from whom to take orders, so paranoia and murder spread throughout the ranks of the drug industry. It became clear that one of the most lucrative cocaine infrastructures in the world, the portal to the Caribbean, was no longer the tight operation it had once been. No one was at the helm; everything was free for the taking. War became a fact, gang fights broke out, murder rates soared, and it was soon obvious that the ultimate guarantor of Medellín’s newfound security had not been the police or the military, but Don Berna himself. In 2009 alone there were a total of 2185 murders in Medellín, more than twice as many as in 2008, and in just about every case the killing could be traced back to drugs.

  Lina’s brother Diego was far down the ladder in terms of rank and suffered a fate similar to that of many others. His job, which he did on motorcycle, had simply been to collect the daily take at various sales points and deliver it to a certain man at a certain time — a task completely cut and dried. But when the gang’s leader was killed, fighting broke out among the middle ranks and the group Diego was working for split up, causing chaos. Which gang, which leader, was strongest? Who would come out on top? These are the issues most in the bottom ranks have to address; they have to quickly choose a new leader to support and work for, and then pray that they have made the right decision and that the group they abandoned does not have time to seek revenge before the new organisation has assured them of protection. And it was in this respect that Diego made a fatal error.

  Lina looks down. Her brother was not the only one she knew to pay with his life; two of her closest friends were also recently shot and killed. Though these two deaths were unrelated, both occurred on the same day. And six months earlier, just before her brother was killed, her boyfriend had been murdered. Before that, it was her uncle. ‘This sort of violence is completely new. I’d never been afraid prior to this. My daughter is seven years old, and in the days before all this happened I used to let her play outside. I would never let her do that today. Mama hasn’t left the house since Diego was killed. We’ll have to move. The fact that he was murdered right outside our front door isn’t just something you can shake off. You’re never able to forget what happened. As soon as you open the door, there it is again.’

  IN THE PLACE HÅKAN calls ‘the shopping centre’ — Barrio Antioquia, Medellín’s premier drug district — some 50,000-peso bills change eager hands in what looks like an ordinary office supplies store while people enjoy themselves outside. The area is aflutter with all sorts of activity. A happy mother stumbles while pushing her prattling daughter along in a pram. An old man cruises down the street on a bicycle, a box of popcorn balanced precariously on the handlebars. Small glasses of brandy pass from hand to hand between men sitting in plastic chairs that flank the sidewalk. Salsa music blasts from loudspeakers, and the smell of marijuana fills the air. It is Friday. People are laughing and having a good time. The most recent body has been removed and the sidewalk has been cleaned.

  Alonso, Javier, and Deyner have been saving up their money for a Llama Martial .38 Special revolver, though it is still unclear what the weapon will be used for. Perhaps for exacting revenge on the person who killed Javier’s brother here exactly six months ago. Maybe it will be used to carry out Alonso’s next murder assignment. Or perhaps Deyner will use it in his newly formed vigilante group, which tries to rid his neighbourhood of crime. Or maybe for all these things.

  Alonso, a hit man who is busy cleaning his glasses, steps off to the side a bit before he begins philosophising about his particular areas of expertise: murder and drugs. Mostly the former, through what is almost always a consequence of the latter. ‘Here the power isn’t
to the people, but to the drugs. They are what steer all decision-making, and ultimately reign supreme. All the wars and fighting between gangs, leaders, children, mafias, cities, neighbourhoods — everything is attributable to drugs. Cocaine is the main culprit, but marijuana also plays a role. Actually, it’s pretty much 50-50. The reason there’s so much violence at Barrio Antioquia is because historically it’s the part of the city with the most drug activity. Drugs are sold on absolutely every street corner. Literally in every nook and cranny.’

  Christmas decorations twinkle from a balcony across the street while scooters, taxis, and SUVs cruise by. Occasionally someone makes a mad dash between a car window and the front door of a building, but overall the drug activity is inconspicuous, lost in the pleasant, everyday bustle of the neighbourhood. Eighty per cent of the residents here make their living on drugs, and the remaining 20 per cent get by on remesas, remittances — money sent to them by family in the United States or Europe. Pharmacies, stationery shops, kiosks, and bars serve as facades for dealing, and the vast majority of those who purchase their drugs here know exactly which dealer they are looking for and what the going rate is at any given moment. All business is carried out in silence.

  Suddenly, two police motorcycles appear on the scene and park in the middle of the intersection. Alonso sniggers. ‘It’s a little lockdown, but it won’t last long.’