Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  The canoe is floating in a pool of blood, but the fish still is not onboard. It starts to thunder. Nearby, all around the circle of canoes, other fish are being hauled in. The water turns red.

  Leo pulls his ‘dog’ up into the canoe little by little. First he pulls the sword over the edge, and along with it a third of the fish’s body, and balances it on the rim before moving back a few metres in the canoe. He grabs hold of the fin with both arms and then rolls the whole fish onboard.

  There are no sharp parts on the fish. The skin is smooth, and the sail-like fin is large and black but soft, like the bellows of an accordion. The body, although lifeless, is still warm. It takes up the entire floor of the canoe, but before Leo can even get it properly situated, another of his buoys starts to spin. Some water squirts up, a new missile is launched from the bottom, and the whole procedure is repeated.

  Half an hour later, it is 9.00 p.m. The sky is dark. It is going to rain again. By now the canoe is so heavy and low in the water that only a mere decimetre keeps it from filling up and sinking. Leo says that he has to hurry, as there is a place in the village where people will buy the catch, but the later he gets there, the less he will be offered. ‘Vamos.’

  He paddles away from his friends, but halfway back to shore a cargo ship full of felled rainforest crosses his path. No other boats are in sight. The high-grade timber is being dragged behind the boat like a bundle of gold ingots, making a long, yellow trail of woodchips in the water. Leo signals to the captain to slow down. The boat is headed for Buenaventura, and if he can sell his fish directly to the crew he will get an even better price than if he is the first one back to the village. Plus he will not have to carry it.

  They agree to buy it. From the boat’s gunwale, a seaman lowers a large meat hook three metres down to Leo’s little dugout and picks up the marlin like they are a couple of slaughtered pigs. Once he has pulled them up, he lowers 40,000 pesos, 22 USD, in a plastic bag.

  The boat chugs along on its way. Leo drops a gob of spit into the water and points with his thumb towards the boat and the glimmering timber. ‘Illegal,’ he says. ‘Everything’s illegal around here.’

  In a way it sounds as though he’s trying to comfort himself for not having received his ‘miracle catch’ again today. It is as if he wants to say that at least his livelihood is honest, compared with all the other boats going up and down this coast. He goes on to tell other stories about cocaine and people in the village as if to prove that sudden wealth does not guarantee eternal happiness. Today Iván is a laughing-stock, Leopoldo is increasingly ostracised by people in town the more money he rakes in, and it is the same with the others. Except for Lucho. He is doing well.

  The canoe is still half full of bloody sludge, and Leo sits and starts bailing again. His grumbling comes across a bit like sour grapes, but there is a very serious background to everything he says: Chocó has changed completely. Many people would go so far as to say it has been ruined, but it has nothing to do with the occasional white catch making the fishermen rich overnight or turning them into alcoholics. It is because of the arrival of production facilities here — both plantations and labs. That is entirely new. Trafficking by boat has been around since the days of Pablo Escobar, though on a smaller scale, but now the entire malignant social and political cancer that spread warfare to the poorest corners of Colombia has taken root here as well. Just eight years ago there were no plantations in Chocó at all. Today, they are everywhere.

  Chocó is the latest chapter in the story of how most of the cocaine production in the world — from cultivation to processing and exportation — came to be concentrated in one specific nation, but it begins in the province that has played a greater role than any other in the production of and battle against cocaine: Putumayo. And the story has several layers: about how a war over drugs became a war financed by drugs, about how the cultivation of coca became the guerrillas’ most effective weapon, about why the US war on drugs failed, and finally, about how the white powder fuelled one of the worst refugee disasters of all time.

  Leo lets the waves sweep the canoe to shore. It is 10.00 p.m., and he is back on land. His daily work is done, and now he will see what is on television. Have a beer and a chinwag. Not very different from what he would have been doing had he been a millionaire. And when he turns his dugout upside down and the last of the bloody water gushes out, he says two sentences, and it’s not clear whether he is alluding to his catch that day or to his life in general, but either way they presuppose that he and his family can go on living here. Which applies to fewer and fewer people. Because the problem with the arrival of all facets of the drug complex is that the profits are now individualised while the costs are collective. What comes in the wake of this industry, people have learned, is always violence, war, guerrillas, corruption, massacres, and environmental degradation, and the price tag ends up pretty much even for the Leos and Luchos of society — even though these days it is mostly the Luchos, the guys with the motorboats, who stand to reap the benefits of the floating drums in the sea. The long collective tradition in Chocó has been cut short, and today the only thing that is divvied out in equal amounts is misery.

  What Leo says is that until he gets his miracle catch, he will just try to ‘stand aside’. To think of his family’s interests, not those of society. ‘I’m doing alright. As long as I can fish.’

  THREE MONKEYS ARE playing in the mango trees when Edgar starts the lawn trimmer, which causes a steel-blue smoke cloud to shoot out of the engine. His son quickly puts away his toy cars and his daughter hides behind an oil drum. Dad is off to work.

  ‘I have nine bags today. That’ll make 300 grams.’

  He straddles the mound of coca leaves as he runs his trimmer in them. The machine causes the leaves to spin as it chops them to tiny shreds, and in just a quarter of an hour the pile has shrunk to less than half its size. You don’t have to shred the leaves, but shredding saves space as it cuts down on the amount of air in the raw material.

  The lab is just a stone’s throw away from the shack Edgar and his family live in, and consists of a simple wooden floor, seven by seven metres, built on stakes and covered with a thin tin roof to keep out the tropical rain. In addition, there are four rusty oil drums, six cans of fuel, three plastic barrels, two bags of cement, a small bag of fertiliser, and some buckets with all the other necessities: sulfuric acid, sodium hydroxide, and potassium permanganate. On one side is the corrugated-iron chute, the most defining feature of a lab.

  There is now a 111-kilogram pile of raw material on the floor, like a heap of freshly cut grass, waiting to be processed and become the most sought-after powder in the world.

  ‘That’ll do it,’ Edgar says. ‘Now it will all go into one barrel instead of three. That means less fuel, less cement, and fewer chemicals. Two-thirds less. That saves money.’

  It is 7.00 a.m., and Edgar is just one of the hundreds of thousands of coca farmers on the slopes of the Andes who has started up his shearing machine. In the Colombian southern provinces this morning, like all mornings, small motors buzz in the hands of illiterate family men and women who wear themselves ragged in an effort to respond to an ever-growing global need. Demand in the United States has stabilised or even decreased in recent years, while the opposite is occurring in Europe, Australia, parts of Asia, Africa, and, not least, in the most well-developed Latin American countries — Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, and Colombia — where demand has been rapidly increasing over the last decade.

  Edgar picks up a leaf missed by the shearer and holds it reverently, like a priceless stamp, between his thumb and forefinger before slowly folding it and snapping it in two. ‘This is a good leaf, ripe. It should feel like paper. If it’s soft like cloth it’s been harvested too early, and the paste won’t harden as it should. No one buys a bad product. One time I couldn’t get it to harden and had to throw all of it out. It was a financial d
isaster for my family, because I still had to pay all the farmers I’d bought the leaves from, and then I’d also spent a lot of money on chemicals and fuel. But if you just have ripe leaves from the beginning, you can hardly mess it up. It’s a simple process.’

  Edgar turns the mythical leaves of the coca bush into coca paste: the first and most labour-intensive, but least profitable, link in the cocaine chain. He sells the paste to local buyers, who are under the wing of either the guerrillas or paramilitary groups, and who in turn take it to the more sophisticated labs — cocinas, usually strategically located adjacent to the points of exit — where the final stage of production takes place. After that, the cartels take over transporting la mercancía, ‘the goods’ — the only term used here — to modern-day mafias, who distribute it to old and new markets.

  Since the war on drugs has escalated and large plantations are no longer possible in the region, the entire hierarchy is based on this network, which consists of thousands of small contributors. But even though Edgar and his colleagues’ grunt-work is absolutely essential if everything is going to work, the financial allocation of the narcotics pyramid is brutal. Less than one per cent of the going street price ends up in the pockets of the coca farmers. Four per cent goes to the groups involved in the fine processing of the powder and 20 per cent goes to the smugglers, while those who benefit most are the people who control sales in the United States and European markets. This is also where most of the money laundering takes place: 75 per cent of the enormous earnings generated by cocaine trafficking remains in the country where the end product is sold.

  It requires 1.2 grams of coca paste to produce one gram of pure cocaine and, according to current street rates in Europe and the United States, Edgar’s little daily harvest is worth around 21,000 USD. His own earnings after two days’ work — when leaves, fuel, and chemicals have been paid for — is 50,000 pesos (27 USD). About 1.50 USD per hour. But he is satisfied. ‘Yes, very. It’s four times more than I get for other crops. No product brings in a profit like coca. Sometimes the authorities show up, gather us villagers around, and try to convince us that there are other crops that are more profitable, but it’s not true. If I grow pineapples or yuccas there’s never anyone who wants to buy them. Coca paste, on the other hand, I can get rid of in five minutes.’

  This is Putumayo, the epicentre of the shady side of contemporary cocaine history. The remote province, which until the 1980s was an almost entirely uninhabited jungle region, attracted residents thanks to the coca boom; but during the first decade of the 2000s it became the foremost military target of the US-led war on drugs. In the years prior the new millennium nearly half of all the coca plantations in the country were here, which explains why the province became a strategic target for the largest-ever coca-eradication campaign: Plan Colombia, a US-led attempt to eliminate all coca plantations in Putumayo within a five-year period through herbicide spraying.

  BANANA LEAVES ARE brushing against the tin roof of the lab when Ester, a slight woman in large boots, comes up lugging a huge sack — about 20 kilos, she guesses. She is the fifth person so far who has come to sell coca leaves to Edgar. He takes it, weighs it, and promises to pay her once he has sold the paste.

  The green leaves rustle like dollars bills as he pours the contents of her sack out onto the wooden floor. Eight years ago, when the American and Colombian armies began herbicide spraying in Putumayo, he and the others signed a contract promising to give up growing coca. But contracts, agreements, forms, and signatures are every bit as watertight for the bureaucrats in the capital city as they are vague concepts for the illiterate farmers whose lives are caught up in an economy founded on nothing but loyalty to whoever happens to have the weapons at any given time. Edgar and his family — his wife Nelcy and their four children — sold a bull in 2007 so that they could invest in the DMG, a money-laundering pyramid scheme that was enormously popular at the time, causing quite a stir in the district for several years before collapsing. Everyone lost money. So now they consider it God’s blessing that they can grow the only crop that can make up for the loss and turn a quick profit.

  The physical consequences of the worldwide demand for cocaine are felt all the way down to the bottom of the cocaine hierarchy. There is barely enough time to produce a few kilos of cocaine paste before the global drug trade swoops down over the Andean countryside like an octopus, with its ominous, illegal tentacles sucking up the fruit of the farmers’ labour in exchange for little but fast cash.

  Edgar starts up his shearing machine again. ‘Es lo mismo acá. Coca is synonymous with money here.’

  His story, like the whole region’s, is a circular chronicle reflecting both the successes and failures associated with the war on drugs, and it shows just how integrated cocaine production has become with other, more general problems plaguing Colombia today: rural poverty, armed conflict, absence of government, and most importantly, coca as an ‘economic mattress’.

  In the 1980s Colombia was where cocaine was refined from the coca paste imported from Bolivia and Peru. But by the 1990s, after eradication campaigns had taken effect in those countries, the number of plantations in Colombia increased rapidly. The ‘balloon effect’ — as long as there is demand, you can put the squeeze on any region because there will always be new ones — gave birth to new cultivation regions, such as Putumayo, a jungle area where a waning oil boom had suddenly left workers unemployed and unable to provide for their families.

  During the oil boom, foreign companies had made all the oil profits — with support from the Colombian government — and when it was over they pulled out without having made any lasting social investment. It was a well-known socioeconomic pattern: the resource was gone and the people living there were left destitute. The state, which had had very little legitimacy even before this happened, now had none at all, and the guerrillas had no trouble positioning themselves as a more credible authority in the region by offering protection for the desperate inhabitants in their newfound livelihood: coca farming.

  A rumour, that there was white gold to be found along the banks of the rivers marking the border to Ecuador, spread like wildfire to the neighbouring provinces, and in just 15 years the population of Putumayo tripled. Nelcy, Edgar’s wife, originally hails from the neighbouring province of Nariño, like most other inhabitants of the region. But there were no jobs at home, so in 1997 she and her oldest daughters became economic refugees in Putumayo, where they could raspar, pick coca leaves, to get by. Edgar is also from Nariño; he came here in 1996, with his brother and some friends. Before meeting Nelcy he also worked as a leaf-picker, but after the two joined forces they were able to purchase a couple hectares and start to cultivate for themselves. They soon had two children.

  Ester’s route to Putumayo was different, but no less typical. She and her six children immigrated from Huila, a province in the central mountain region, to southern Putumayo during the coca boom. Like other settlers, the family made their home deep in the jungle; however, when the oldest son turned 18 he was drafted into the army, a process that dragged the family into one of most classic recurrent problems plaguing rural Colombia. In the late 1990s Putumayo was under the control of the FARC, which made every family that ‘cooperated’ with the military a legitimate target for the guerrillas. Thousands of families in Colombia have seen loved ones punished, often murdered, by the rebels for this reason, and now it was Ester’s family’s turn. In what was almost a routine move for the guerrillas, the son who went off to serve in the armed forces was labelled a sapo — a snitch, an informant — and told that if he did not opt to return home immediately to join the guerrillas instead, his family would be murdered within 24 hours. Ester took the remaining children and they all managed to escape with the clothes on their backs, having to leave everything else behind: the house and land, animals, furniture, and toys. But she did not have the means to get very far; just to another corner of Putumayo, where they moved nex
t door to Edgar and his family and were once again able to carry on doing the only thing they knew how: growing coca.

  José, a man who has come to give Edgar a hand, arrived in 1981 and is now part of the whole mythical history surrounding Putumayo and the green gold. As early as 1952 author William S. Burroughs, then in Putumayo in search of yajé — one of the Beat generation’s psychoactive favorites — pointed out the eternal curse of the region in a letter to Allen Ginsberg. ‘As a matter of fact,’ Burroughs wrote in an attempt to describe the situation of a few farmers, the land in the Putumayo region ‘is poor and there is no way to get produce out’. José arrived here as a young settler, and says it was the very shortage of roads that determined how things turned out around here. When the farmers did successfully manage to produce a modest surplus of bananas, yuccas, corn, and other things, it just lay there and rotted, as there was no way for them to get the products out to customers. And since then, the combination of poor soil and lack of markets has come to characterise every geographical area of strategic interest to those in the cocaine industry.

  In the late 1970s, just as the marijuana boom was winding down and coca was taking off, settlers from the north came and introduced the wondrous crop that solved all problems at once: coca grows well in poor soil, yields four harvests a year, and most importantly, has a market in which the dealers will come right to the door to collect the product. It was not even necessary for the farmers to purchase seeds; they were simply given to them by these passing benefactors. In the desperate years, it was as if God had answered their prayers.

  Shortly thereafter, life in Putumayo was turned upside down. Money literally started pouring in. The enormous value placed on cocaine in recently globalised metropolitan areas had extreme consequences, of course, for the poor farmers’ understanding of the raw material, the leaves they were wading around in. Money generated from coca farming opened the floodgates for capital and for consumer goods, the likes of which none of the destitute inhabitants in the district had ever seen before. According to Swedish anthropologist Oscar Jansson, author of The Cursed Leaf, for the farmers it was as if dollar bills — or clothes, watches, tools, motorcycles, beer, television sets, alcohol, parties, music, and sheer joy — were growing on the very branches of their coca bushes: