Just 24 hours after the interview was published, the seemingly endless dark forces of Colombian society — those who had killed Gaitán, assassinated the justices at the Palace of Justice, and killed 3000 representatives of the Unión Patriótica — had descended upon the park located directly across the street from where Virginia was staying. The investigator for the US government had discovered several suspicious men lurking around her building, and because they knew she could be killed at any moment, they decided to fly her out of the country. Neither the United States nor Colombia wanted to have yet another drug-related scandal on its hands that could be directly traced to the state apparatus. Before Vallejo had given her account against Santofimio, two other people had done the same; both were now dead.
She took her place in the caravan of vehicles and was driven to the airport. A car equipped with machine guns led the procession through the city, snaking its way in Bogotá’s smoggy morning traffic. Once there, she marched right up into the DEA’s specially chartered plane in her usual elegant way, in the presence of a throng of security personnel, and nine hours later, following a stopover at Guantanamo, they landed in what would be her new land of exile. Ironically, it was the very place where the now 30-year-plus modern cocaine drama had begun: Miami, Florida.
Carlos Lehder had by now already been in prison for several decades, and Norman Key — just 120 kilometres out from Miami, in the Caribbean — was in other people’s hands. It was somewhat typical, even telling perhaps, that the little plane Virginia was flown in took almost the same route that so many young men of the cartel had made use of to become immensely wealthy: from central Colombia, via Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, around Cuba, over the Bahamas, and landing in Miami.
Virginia had never taken part in any illegal activity, but she could not bring herself to despise Escobar completely, however much she wanted to. He had a double nature; her head was spinning now as she considered her adventures with him and how all of these disparate images could come together in a book. Hundreds of films, books, documentaries, and television programs had already been made about the mafia honcho she had once loved, but to her they had all been too cliché. In her mind the little man with the soothing voice, the occasionally sensitive guy who treaded a fine line between monster and hero, had never been accurately portrayed. She felt that her depiction of him would be better — a picture of both sides of the man. She also wanted to draw attention to the tumours within the Colombian state.
In October 2007 Alberto Santofimio was sentenced to 24 years in prison for instigating the assassination of Galán, with Escobar’s help. To the despair of Virginia and the Galán family, the higher courts acquitted him just one year later. Some of the testimonies were not credible, according to the court. The case was still being deliberated in the early 2010s, though showing signs — like most other major political assassination cases since cocaine began to reign — that the country would end up with yet another huge scar. In Colombia it is very hard to prove things. No one is credible. And often the truth comes at much too high a price. Twenty years was not enough time to clarify much more than that the head of the National Intelligence Service had most likely been involved. Virginia was disgusted by the terrible chain of events in her country and had started to feel contempt for her homeland, although her personal story was also replete with paradoxes.
Virginia Vallejo’s account of one of the most notorious criminals in the world was released by a major publishing company the year after she landed in Miami, and the title reflected the paradoxical obscurities, demonstrating that not only did Escobar, Colombia, and the never-ending cocaine drama have two sides, but also that the author might herself. At least when it came to her romance with Escobar.
The book was a bestseller, but came at the cost of the loss of her homeland. It was called Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar.
THE WAR ON DRUGS
from Nixon to Obama
‘Everyone here is a whore to statistics. We’re fighting over criminals.’
— GUSTAVO GUEVARA, GOVERNMENT PROSECUTOR
HEAVILY ARMED HELICOPTERS carrying 30 soldiers plus a prosecutor advance rapidly over Colombia’s hilly green landscape. Operation Third Star has begun. Major Quiroga and his men have been allocated a Black Hawk and two Bell 212s. The aircraft are now crossing over the mountains that conceal many of the cocinas in the nation, though exactly how many is anyone’s guess.
‘That’s coca,’ says Juan Carlos Rivera, one of the soldiers, gesturing with his gun to one of the light-green slopes, which quickly passes by below. He only wants to point it out. It is not just any poor man’s cultivation plot they are looking for today, but a cocina, a lab where highly concentrated cocaine is produced — the final export product, known as cocaine hydrochloride (HCl).
‘Worst-case scenario, there will be people at the target site who are armed and will open fire.’ Rivera seems somewhat concerned about how the day’s mission will go, but then lowers his sunglasses and gazes out into the distance.
This is the front line of the war on drugs. Around 165 tonnes of cocaine are seized every year in Colombia, more than in any other country, and every year the narcotics squad and the DEA destroy more than 2000 labs. Today’s military target — if it is found — has, like almost everything else, come to police attention by way of a well-paid tip-off, and the DEA and military intelligence have concluded that the information is probably correct. The lab was reported with coordinates provided: it is located within a radius of one kilometre from the little village of Mulatos Arriba, in the municipality of Sansón. According to the informant, the lab is quite large, with 40 employees. Guerrillas are not on site at the moment, but the outfit has its own security force of eight guards.
Operation commander Major Quiroga clears his throat. ‘The lab we’re targeting today has people working on the premises right now. We’ll be there in half an hour.’
But Quiroga is overly optimistic. The whole morning was a washout, a storm keeping them from setting out at the appointed time, and it is already 2.00 p.m. By 5.00 p.m. it will start to get dark, so if the lab has not been discovered by 3.00 p.m. they will have to pack it in for the day. If that happens, not only will they have missed out on a major bust, but they will also have revealed to the lab owner that the police are on his tracks, which will simply make him pack everything and set up business elsewhere. ‘Today, there are labs that only operate three or four months in any one place before moving,’ says Quiroga. ‘That way, they avoid discovery and losing their investments.’
Running a HCL lab is both simple and complex. Provided that there is access to coca paste and all the necessary chemicals, no more than an elementary infrastructure is needed: a filtering table, a press, a generator, and a few microwave ovens. Plus labour. The latter is easy to find, as unemployed people looking for work are everywhere, and the equipment can be purchased hassle-free from any local hardware store. The problem is logistics. Practically, a HCL lab should be close to the coast, by the Caribbean or the Pacific, to export the drugs cheaply; but the exportation of the final product is relatively simple compared to the import of chemicals. The average lab produces almost two tonnes of cocaine a month, and the only thing limiting their capacity is their ability to obtain the necessary quantities of paste and chemicals. The ratio of coca paste to the final product is almost one to one — 1.2 kilograms of refined paste, base, is needed to make one kilogram of cocaine — whereas for the chemicals, the ratio is ten to one: in order to produce a tonne of cocaine in a month, an excellent transportation system is needed, efficient enough to bring in almost ten tonnes of chemicals each month without arousing suspicion.
‘The people who run this lab,’ explains Quiroga, ‘were organised into paramilitary groups three years ago and joined the government’s demobilisation program, but then opted out to form new criminal groups.’
Belts of machine-gun bullets lie on the helicopter’s
floor like writhing boa constrictors, and the pilot suddenly gets the order to circle. At a low altitude the three helicopters fly around an ordinary house on a ridge, surrounded by pastures and livestock.
‘We’re there,’ says Juan Carlos Rivera.
As the helicopters descend, a herd of cows and three horses runs off in a panic. A cloud of terror descends over the mountain as all remaining livestock flee the scene, and when the platoon lands, rotor blades rip branches and leaves from trees in a furious whirlwind. No one is around. Major Quiroga’s men disperse on foot, and once the helicopters ascend again to survey the surroundings, peace is restored in the area. There is no counterattack.
‘This is what usually happens,’ says Quiroga. ‘The sound of the engine scares off the workers. They just run away. The guards, too.’
And so the search begins. It is 2.30 p.m. No one knows the exact location of the lab, just that it is somewhere in the vicinity. That is, if the intelligence is correct.
Inside the house there is hot food on the kitchen table, and next to the plates sits a deck of cards, which has been dealt. Toys are strewn along the foot of the stairs.
Ten minutes later, los cambuches, the shelters where the lowest-ranking workers sleep, are discovered. Poorly concealed blue oilcans and chemical drums, scattered in ravines across the ridge, prove that the intelligence was correct. But, increasingly bewildered and sweaty with exhaustion, anti-drug soldiers keep searching for the target, to no avail.
Time is flying. It’s getting late, and there is still no lab in sight.
WHILE THE EXACT year to which the start of the war on cocaine can be traced varies depending on perspective, it is clearly associated with two very decisive years: 1989 and 2001, the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11.
When in 1972 Richard Nixon appointed the Shafer Commission to assess the consequences of US drug policy, the findings indicated that there was no link between cannabis and other criminality. It also concluded that alcohol was more dangerous than marijuana and that personal use of the latter ought to be decriminalised as soon as possible. Nixon, a devout Christian with a furious temper, was livid when the commission presented what he felt were ‘anti-American’ conclusions, and he lashed out by voicing one of his many deep-rooted beliefs: ‘Every one of the bastards that are out for legalising marijuana is Jewish.’
After the Shafer Commission reported, the White House acted in opposition to its recommendations. Just ten years subsequent to this, the US fight against cannabis would not only launch the global war on drugs, but also, paradoxically, the cocaine industry — which, in the coming years, would itself become the primary US target.
The story is complicated and contradictory. Sometimes this proclaimed ‘war’ has followed shifts in military threats; at times it is coloured by religious paranoia; often it is rooted in genuine fear of widespread social misery. But mostly, and sometimes quite unintentionally, it is the result of political strategies that have very little to do with its expressed goal of fighting drugs.
When Bill Clinton and then Colombian president Andrés Pastrana negotiated Plan Colombia in 1998, they agreed that the fight against guerrillas and the fight against drugs were two completely different battles. The FARC, of course, had become dependent on various layers of the drug trade — as had many other aspects of society — but the historical development of the guerrillas had nothing to do with drugs; or, as Pastrana expressed it, ‘Colombia is fighting two totally different wars: one as a result of an attack from the drug industry on the state and the entire world, the other an attack on the guerrillas, whose principles are based on the belief that society is unjustly organised, corrupt, and only benefits the privileged.’
But not long after that, during a meeting in Washington, Pastrana changed his stance and suddenly came out on the side of what would later be called the ‘narcotisation’ of the Colombian conflict — that is, the idea that drug trafficking is the only real problem hampering Colombia today. ‘The only peace agreement that both myself and the Colombian people are willing to accept is one that is built on strengthening our ability to eradicate the cocaine production in Colombia,’ he announced.
This was a dramatic shift. Before Plan Colombia, every Colombian president going back to the 1960s had been elected on promises of negotiating peace for the country, and although Pastrana had tried harder to reach a compromise with the FARC than most previous heads of state, his turnabout marked the beginning of the end of all negotiations. From this point on, all major problems in Colombian society were explained in terms of cocaine. The successive governments saw injustices, corruption, violence, impunity, and every other problem as stemming from the same source, and thus it was thought these problems could automatically be solved if only the country could do away with narcotics.
After the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, the FARC and the ELN were branded as terrorist organisations; and with George W. Bush now in the White House, not only were Colombia’s two domestic wars united, but the war on drugs was also made synonymous with the US war on terror. Washington’s official policy under Clinton had focused on the fight against the Colombian ‘narco democracy’, but under Bush this morphed into a fight against Colombian ‘narco terrorism’. Clinton’s policy had mostly concentrated on what had transpired in the aftermath of Pablo Escobar’s assassination — how the cartels had cosied up to politicians and the military, a process that culminated in the revelation that the Colombian president from 1994 to 1998, Ernesto Samper, had accepted campaign funding from the Cali Cartel. From 2001 on, the policy line disregarded that side of the problem and focused exclusively on the guerrillas.
For the new president of the country, the right-wing populist Álvaro Uribe, the war on terror was a gift from the gods. He came to power in 2002, with the promise not to negotiate with the guerrillas but to crush them with military force, and to do this he needed money. It was thought that both drugs and terror could be eliminated by doing away with the incarnation of these two evils: the FARC.
Plan Colombia became the military and judicial framework for this operation. On the geopolitical map, Colombia was looking more and more like Afghanistan all the time. Money was pouring in from Washington, where an increasing number of Colombian domestic policies were being decided, and the nation’s armed forces were growing so fast that it would soon be the greatest military power in Latin America, and the world’s third-largest recipient of US military support (after Israel and Egypt). The FARC, whose practices are now rejected by nearly all Colombians but whose original demands were supported by most, had been effectively debunked as a guerrilla movement. By the mid 2000s they were being presented to the rest of the world as something even worse than a terrorist organisation: from this point on, the Colombian government, the United States, and much of the European Union would regard them as nothing short of a drug mafia.
Uribe’s strategy, the process of acquiring money under the banner of fighting drugs and using it in anti-guerrilla warfare, had a number of consequences with which Colombia continues to struggle — or in which it takes delight, depending on the perspective. These new resources during the first decade of the 2000s enabled the government to go after guerrilla strongholds more effectively, and not only did they succeed in freeing some of those who had been kidnapped by the FARC — one of the most famous being the French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt — and assassinating a number of feared guerrilla leaders, but they also succeeded in regaining power in many parts of the country previously under rebel control (a prime example was Putumayo). By the early 2010s the FARC was politically unfocused and militarily weaker throughout the country than it had been for a long time. Today the FARC may have — though statistics vary — only 10,000 soldiers left in the ranks.
During the first decade of the new millennium, many of the paramilitaries — the illegal death squads in the anti-guerrilla war, formed under the leadership of Fidel
and Carlos Castaño — were also demobilised. This controversial program, which ran from 2004 to 2006, was criticised: not only because it allowed mass murderers, responsible for the deaths of thousands, to go free after serving just seven years in prison if they cooperated with the courts, but also because it ignored the pervasive social problems, which were the primary driving force behind the war. The program appealed to many of the destitute and the young homeless masses in rural areas, as it offered them education, financial support, and housing assistance. Consequently, thousands of teenagers who had never joined any armed group started to collect old weapons and head to the registration offices to enroll. By the time the program ended, over 30,000 people had ‘demobilised’ themselves; that was twice the number of paramilitaries there had been when the program started. And many of the ‘real’ soldiers simply turned over their weapons, gratefully accepted financial support, and promised to begin pursuing normal, everyday civilian lives, only to go back on their word and to join one of the many new criminal groups that were established in the wake of the demobilisation program.
The strange thing was that, despite the successful fight against the guerrillas and the demobilisation of the paramilitaries, the cocaine industry carried on as usual. Although the FARC — the group that, according to the Colombian and US governments, was nothing but a drug-dealing organisation — was now half its original size, drug trafficking continued. Moreover, even though the AUC, 70 per cent of whose funding stemmed from drug activity, no longer existed, global demand was still being satisfied. A remark by a frustrated Alfredo Rangel, co-editor of the book Narcotráfico en Colombia, sums up this development: ‘This plague has a very unique quality: it is one that is constantly mutating, and not only does it persevere after every attempt to eliminate it, but comes back even stronger as a result of each and every strategy used to combat it.’
Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It Page 18