Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  He organises the rest of the chemicals and declares that he just cannot understand how there can be such high demand for what he produces. ‘No one here uses cocaine. Those of us who work with the stuff are all too aware of just how deadly the chemicals are that go into making the powder. We’re already suffering the extreme physical effects from having to stand in these vapours every day, and then to go home at the end of the day and inhale it in a concentrated form would be unthinkable. This is dangerous stuff. You can get totally hooked. If I see a child using drugs I say something, but not if I see an adult. That’s their responsibility. As for me, I’ve never tried it. I would never do it. I know what it consists of. Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.’

  César stirs the pot of leaves with a big branch and begins to tell his own story. He came here in search of gold at 13, from Pizarro, a village by the coast, after the death of his father. Like many others here, César’s father’s death was brought about by a palo, a tree trunk, which, word has it, fell on him while he was working out in the forest one day. But in Chocó, everyone knows that when someone is said to have died from a palo what they actually mean is that the person was murdered for a reason too dangerous to inquire about. Consequently, it is easiest for everyone to agree that the death was an unfortunate accident caused by a falling tree and not question the matter further. César, his mother, and his siblings all saw the body, which had been dragged up the stairs and left on their doorstep. He had a long machete wound from one of his ears all the way down to his Adam’s apple, but no one dared to discuss why. There are nine siblings in the family, who today are scattered all over the country. César and Andrea take care of his sick mother, and the lion’s share of the income they bring in goes towards the treatments she needs for her rheumatism.

  ‘There’s something really strange about all this,’ César suddenly blurts out. He is not talking about his parents any longer, but about the guerrilla-controlled cocaine economy in which he is involved. Although the United States is where most of the consumers are, he says, it never seems as though any of the people he refers to as ‘them’ are punished. The punishment always seems to befall those he refers to as ‘us’. ‘Almost everything we produce goes there, and that’s where all the money ends up. But the gringos never get caught. Never. You see the stories on TV, and it’s always a Mexican, Colombian, Brazilian, or Puerto Rican in the hands of the police. That strikes me as very odd. We all know the buyers are in the US. That’s where the money is. The banks. Celebrities. Everything. I really just don’t understand. Why is it like that?’

  Andrea whistles to signal that the meal is ready. It is chicken and rice. Plastic bowls are passed around, and Solin dries his green-stained hands on his t-shirt and scoffs down his food, while the wind outside causes the tarp on the roof to rustle. César goes silent. They eat sitting on the ground. Solin has listened to César’s speculations, but he claims that no one who lives along the river is afraid of going to prison for anything to do with coca; they worry instead about being subjected to something much worse. César nods slowly in agreement. The drumstick between his teeth moves back and forth as he chews. Andrea pours brown juice out of a bucket in a way that conveys the topic of conversation is not to her liking. But Solin carries on, and utters the two words of which all destitute Colombians are most afraid these days, whether they live in the countryside or in the urban favelas. Actually, it is not so much the words they fear, but rather what they are terrified of becoming.

  ‘Falsos positivos.’

  OF ALL THE scandals to have rocked Colombia over the years, nothing can compare to what is known as falsos positivos, false positives. The phenomenon is complicated and horrifying, and occupies what Colombian author Daniel Samper has called a unique place in the history of the nation: ‘In the specifically Colombian chamber of horrors — which expands daily, with new atrocities committed by the drug industry, the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, criminal gangs or our own military, the false positives are in a league of their own.’

  The story, which is far from over, is a gruesome response to how poverty and corruption feed into the demand for results, which became increasingly important in Colombia in the first decade of the new millennium. Measuring, calculating, keeping records, and publicising successful military accomplishments in the fight against guerrillas and drugs became a central component of the war in itself, and it produced a completely new trend in violence, built on the fact that such a large percentage of the population consists of homeless people no one cares much about. Numbers that created an image of victory — weakened guerrillas, demobilised paramilitaries, and reduced coca fields — were transformed under Uribe’s administration into strategic hard currency in the struggle for voter sympathies and increased financial support from the United States. Statistics, whether accurate or manipulated, became more important than truth, since a national sentiment of success and good results is crucial for each and every political scheme. The objective was to validate the government’s promise to destroy guerrilla forces once and for all. Fatalities became the currency of war, and everyone from generals to corporals was forced to keep track of how many guerrilla corpses their troops were able to generate.

  On 10 February 2004, a street vendor named Edwin Arias was reported missing in Sincelejo, a city near the Caribbean coast, along with three other young men: Luis Campo, José Peréz, and Alberto Arias. Two days later, on 12 February, all four were reported as having been killed in a conflict the military claimed had broken out between themselves and the guerrillas near the Panama border. However, as time went by a number of unanswered questions arose. Edwin Arias had already been reported dead once before, and then, just as now, as a guerrilla soldier who had lost his life in armed combat. Moreover, the helicopter that supposedly flew the four bodies back to the camp had been on another assignment that day.

  Edwin Arias was just one of the first falsos positivos in what would later become a wave of mass killings, resulting in the execution of nearly 2000 boys — all civilians, most of them destitute and homeless — whose bodies were viewed as attractive merchandise in an increasingly gruesome business practice spreading throughout the nation, the sole purpose of which was to improve statistics. In Colombia, a country with an already long-standing tradition of creative criminality, taking dead bodies, dressing them up as guerrilla warriors, and registering them as slain rebels was a practice that soon gained a life of its own, since everyone working in the military stood to benefit from the operation: in exchange for guerrilla corpses, low-ranking soldiers were compensated with days off and other benefits, while middle-ranked officers in command were given promotions according to their results, and those highest in the hierarchy, the generals, could provide the national Congress, government, and the general public with an image of the war as being won.

  But when ready cash began to be factored in, state terrorism exploded and the practice became more organised. In 2008, Soacha — a huge working-class suburb in southern Bogotá — became the scene of one of the most telling events of the entire scandal, after sergeant John Jairo Muñoz of the 15th brigade received repeated complaints from superiors that his platoon was underperforming.

  Muñoz — as he later explained in court — asked another sergeant, Sandro Pérez, to help him improve his platoon’s statistics, whereupon his colleague, who was working in military intelligence at the time, offered the following: ‘If you want, I can get you people you can report as having been killed in combat.’ Each person would come with a price tag of a million pesos, 500 USD, and, according to Muñoz, the brigade’s colonel, Gabriel Rincón Amado, approved the deal. A network was established whereby a shopkeeper in Soacha was to be the main recruiter of young men. Through the shop, a rumour was circulated that jobs were available and that there was money to be made in Ocaña, a community located close to the border with Venezuela, and, after being offered free bus rides there, a number of unemployed young men living in Soacha, includ
ing Jonathan Orlando Soto, 17, and Julio César Meza, 24, took the bait.

  On 25 January 2008 the two young men left Soacha and, two days later, the army’s 15th brigade was able to report that two guerrilla warriors had been killed in combat. A sum of 2.2 million pesos was paid for Soto and Meza, plus expenditures for their bus tickets, and the evening on which they were killed and their bodies sold, the murderers toasted each other with glasses of rum at a bar in Ocaña. The money used in the transaction originated partially from the military budget, but also from individual soldiers and officers who took the initiative to pool their own pesos towards purchasing both the bodies and the weapons needed to pass the dead men off as fallen guerrilla soldiers. As the shopkeeper, Alexander Carretero, later explained in the investigation: ‘The troops took it as a duty to collect money for bodies. Officers and soldiers contributed out of their own pockets.’ After the men’s deaths, Colonel Rincón Amado made another order from the shop-owner in Soacha.

  In 2009, when Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, investigated the full extent of the scandal, he claimed to find no evidence that the government should have known anything about such a practice, but that the killings had been carried out in a ‘more or less systematic fashion’ and that ‘significant elements within the military’ were involved. He also said that he found the media-coined term ‘falsos positivos’ misleading because the euphemism gave a false impression of a practice that could be better described as the ‘cold-blooded, premeditated murder of innocent civilians for profit’; the victims the military had passed off as ‘dangerous terrorists’ included disabled teenagers. A vast number of the bodies presented as killed in combat were photographed wearing newly ironed uniforms and boots several sizes too large. Moreover, in some pictures men known to have been left-handed were shown holding weapons that had been tucked into their right hands. Worse still, according to Alston, was the fact that the survivors or relatives who attempted to report the incidents and to testify were subjected to ‘systematic military persecution’, and that the unraveling of the alliances between the military and hit men in Soacha, which had become the centre of the scandal, were just ‘the tip of the iceberg’. These structures could be found all over the country and, according to Alston, one mother’s testimony of what had happened was typical: after her son had been killed, his brother, the second-eldest son, began inquiring into what had happened, and a couple months later he was also found dead. Soon after, the mother began to receive death threats.

  In the wake of the scandal the government discharged 27 officers — including three generals and 11 colonels — and a number of arrests were made. However, a year later the majority of the detainees were released because no charges had yet been pressed. It was said that there were ‘legal difficulties of a technical nature’. By the early 2010s it looked as if yet another unresolved scandal would be added to Colombia’s already long history of military impunity for human-rights violations. Under the headline ‘Legalized Barbarianism’, Daniel Samper wrote in El Tiempo, the largest newspaper in the country, that the worst part was not that cold-blooded murders were being committed to improve statistics, but that this sort of crime was on its way to becoming legalised:

  The accused didn’t escape from prison or hide from the authorities — they were able to march right out through the main entrance, the door for legal disputes that have been resolved. It is the combination of this judicial ingenuity and its far-reaching consequences that nurtures one of the most feared monsters in Colombia: state-sanctioned impunity.

  IN EL CARAÑO, the village where Graciano and the others live, it is now Sunday evening, and both young and old alike are able to forget about the falsos positivos and the impending herbicide spraying. It is the weekend. Men toast to each other, while women pray. A girl plays with her laser pointer, aiming it at the anus of a stray dog, and laughs so loudly that she is heard inside the church just as the priest takes to the pulpit.

  ‘Forgive us our sins.’

  The congregation consists almost exclusively of women and children, and along the main drag in the village — a kilometre-long mud bank — the thumping beat of Latino music blares from the open doors and windows of the wooden houses, while the brown water of the San Juan runs past tranquilly. The river gleams. Reflections from television sets and illuminated decorations give a lustre, which didn’t exist a few years ago, to the humble homes in the village, and many shacks have a satellite dish attached to them and a booming stereo inside. Young men strut around in jeans with silver dragon ornaments, and every young girl, even the two-year-olds, has a beautiful beaded hairdo, not unlike a wedding cake, atop her head. Everything smells nice. Showered bodies. Catholic Sunday.

  Tied and resting along the riverbed are the families’ canoes, with recently installed motors; by the houses, fuel-operated generators give life to the sorts of things no one could have dreamed about before the arrival of coca: freezers, sound systems, karaoke machines. Everyone — children, parents, and senior citizens — is in a good mood, joking and dancing.

  ‘But it will be over soon. People look happy now, but they actually live in fear of that moment. The end.’

  Mass is over now, and the priest sighs inside his little house, situated behind the simple concrete structure that is the church. Along the San Juan and its tributaries hundreds of villages are populated with indigenous peoples or Afro-Colombians, and what the priest calls ‘the slavery of coca’ is spreading like a capitalist cancer, with El Caraño just one of many examples. This is a boom, and everyone is making the most of the good days while they last. According to the priest, the very fact that Andrea maintains that coca has liberated her from slavery is reflective of the tendency to be shortsighted, itself a distinctive Colombian trait.

  ‘People here are obsessed with money now. It’s toxic. They work round the clock up there and care about nothing else. The women are there because everybody needs to be fed: once harvesting begins, they sleep in the labs for weeks on end. And down here the children wander about totally unsupervised. The church has become the daycare centre. The nuclear family is crumbling, and the men would rather drink and smoke than attend mass. Violence will break out soon, and then everybody will have to run away. Everybody here has their bags packed.’

  The history of El Caraño, and its current volatile state, is the same as that of the vast majority of other villages along Colombia’s Pacific coast. Ten years ago farmers in the community staked everything on borojó, a fruit popular in Chocó but nowhere else, and of the 25 tonnes produced in the village weekly, only three would be sold. There was no market. The fruit rotted in mass amounts, while misery spread because there was no money being generated for the local economy. But one day a couple of foreign señores — who no one in El Caraño knew at all — paid a visit to the village and held a meeting with the inhabitants, offering them coca seeds free of charge. It was a scheme by which the foreigners would provide the seeds and the farmers would tend the crops; they would cooperate. Profits would be split 50-50. Disillusioned by the borojó failure, many seized the opportunity. Some farmers declined the offer, but then changed their minds once they saw their neighbours starting to renovate their houses and hang up their satellite dishes.

  Yet it was not long before the all-too-familiar tendency towards violence resurfaced and left its unmistakable mark. One day, two new señores turned up and explained that the first men who had come were, in fact, paracos, paramilitaries, and the town was on the verge of entering into an alliance with guerrilla enemies. The farmers who feared the two FARC messengers stopped growing coca immediately, whereas others chose to carry on in the hope that everything would work out in the end. A few months later, however, the guerrillas arrived in earnest and explained that it was now time for the villagers to choose a side once and for all; all the paracos and farmers who chose to remain part of the alliance with rebel enemies were killed. Battles broke out in
many of the villages along the river. The guerrillas gained control over the region and have kept it ever since.

  ‘Now they rule everything.’

  Like everyone else in the village, the priest only ever refers to the guerrillas as ‘them’. In the Colombian countryside, nothing can ever really be called by its exact name; in the same way that Edgar talks about ‘the law’ in Putumayo, the inhabitants of El Caraño talk about ‘them’, though all are alluding to the same thing: the armed group in power at the moment. The FARC have an agreement with everyone working in the chain: those selling fuel and chemicals, those purchasing the paste, those who own las cocinas — and, most importantly, the farmers. For the villagers, everything runs much more smoothly when one armed organisation oversees all of it, in contrast to the sort of conflicts that precede any such takeover, which bring with them the worst sort of violence and human displacement. Afterwards everything is relatively calm; that is, until the day when the planes come. And it is because of this day that everyone has his or her bags packed.

  ‘People have completely stopped cultivating other crops,’ the priest states. ‘In the past, every family set aside part of their plot for growing rice, corn, and other things for household use, but now it’s just coca. And what are the farmers supposed to do once their fields get sprayed? After all, you can’t eat coca.’

  Out on the river three canoes, filled to capacity with fuel drums and bags of cement, travel along upstream, while a much faster motorboat, part of international medical organisation Doctors Without Borders, zigzags between them on its way south. Remote thunderstorms light up the jungle, and the tops of palm trees stiffen and become illuminated against the white explosions in the sky. In conjunction with the coca boom, chemical sheds turned up in all of the villages along the river, and these are the only places that are open on Sundays. They look like well-supplied hardware stores, shiny, bright, and always stocked with clean bags, cans, bottles, and tools, standing in sharp contrast to the otherwise disorderly villages.