Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  WHEN CÉSAR GAVIRIA became head of state in 1990, after Galán’s assassination and young Juan Manuel’s plea for him to ‘save Colombia’, the new president looked north and said a prayer: ‘The demand for drugs is what fuels the drug industry. If the US and the industrialised nations of the world do not find a way to reduce consumption, we will never solve this problem. It doesn’t matter how much we fight, how many lives we lose, how many sacrifices we make — the problem will always remain. The industrialised world has to find a way to reduce the demand for narcotics.’

  Exactly 20 years later María Jimena Duzán — who was in the 1980s a journalist for El Espectador, the paper whose office was bombed by Escobar — sits among bookshelves in her home in Bogotá. She says that Gaviria’s wishes have not been granted, but also that he was wrong. Or at least halfway wrong. ‘Demand isn’t the reason for our problems. The fact that millions of gringos and Europeans consume cocaine doesn’t explain why almost all of it is produced here. Why not in Ecuador or Venezuela? Argentina or Brazil? Colombia’s problem is that the inhabitants in half of the country have been used to living outside the law. What needs to be done here is for the state to show its presence in all those left-behind areas — and not just militarily. Most people growing coca in our jungles have never seen anything of the state except its army.’

  María Jimena Duzán’s home was blown up in 1982, and her sister — a young documentary-filmmaker on the verge of revealing liaisons between the cartels and the state — was murdered in 1990. Duzán’s adult life coincides time-wise with the country’s cocaine drama, and now she sits here in denim and grey boots, surrounded by books on a topic she is familiar with: war. Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter’s The Iran Contra Connection. Norman Mailer’s Why Are We at War? And her own, a classic in its own right — Death Beat: a Colombian journalist’s life inside the cocaine wars.

  ‘The progression of the cocaine mafia here is completely logical,’ Duzán says. ‘The first generation tries to gain control over the state with weapons and fails. The second generation doesn’t make the same mistake and works in a more civilian way. What’s unique about Colombia is that we now have a third generation, which has practically taken over. Pablo Escobar never succeeded in his political ambitions, though several of his relatives and allies are in positions of power today.’

  María Jimena Duzán has followed the growing impact of cocaine on the nation, and the world, for the past 35 years, and is today one of the country’s most influential authors and journalists. Her analysis about what happened in the past, what is happening now, and what will happen in the future is both positive and negative: her negative perspective applies to Colombia, her positive one to the rest of the world. Behind the country’s polished façade of an exuberant economy, a strong military, a reduction in violence, and a thriving tourism industry lurks a populist dynamic that in some ways resembles that in Italy — a nation whose authoritarian structures have been impressively updated. Just as Italy’s political culture has been ‘mediatised’, María Jimena Duzán believes Colombia’s has been ‘narcotised’, which has resulted in incalculably negative consequences for democracy: ‘The alliances between large landowners and the drug mafia have been legitimised. That’s what’s happened.’

  All the millions that have been pouring in from cocaine since the 1990s were welcomed with open arms by those rural clans whose power was threatened by the 1991 constitution. When Colombia adopted this statute, a key tenet was the rights of minorities to traditionally inhabited areas, and the nation was hailed the world over for having created a genuinely multicultural state where indigenous peoples and blacks, after 180 years of institutionalised racism, were guaranteed ownership rights in specific territories. But these areas were often in remote and isolated parts of the country — exactly the kind of land that would prove attractive to drug traffic in the coming years — and it was these vast virgin areas that the nation’s agrarian elites had long since used however they saw fit, employing a supply of conveniently poor and drifting peasants as day labour in a semi-feudal system. What was new about the constitution, Duzán says, was that it not only gave displaced ethnicities nominal rights to land, but also that it created a new legal order — completely new institutions — intended to implement gradual landownership reforms throughout the country. And this is where it went too far. The elite revolted. And cocaine became their weapon.

  ‘Basically, the problem here is that the national government doesn’t govern the entire country. We are still in the process of building a state. Large parts of the country are in the hands of regional elites, who see no reason to abide by the law the way that people in the cities have to. Outside the urban areas is a wild Colombia — feudal, archaic, and reactionary — and it’s in those milieus all sorts of armed groups are thriving. The guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug mafia — they all live in the past. As if the state doesn’t exist. The greatest challenge for Colombian democracy is to overcome this. To become a real state. The 1991 constitution was a first step and it saved many lives, but it threatens a certain type of power that is traditionally strong here — the power of the extreme right and the guerrillas. It benefits civilians, not armed groups. It supports people who obey the law. Since the neo-rightists came to power, the constitution has been their worst enemy, and politics just strives to undermine it.’

  But as usual in Colombia it is much more complicated — or tragic — than that. One progressive objective that the ‘world’s most modern constitution’ had was to decentralise politics: to give more power and autonomy to villages, municipalities, and regions. The problem was that this was planned without consideration for the archaic power structures that essentially govern the rural parts of Colombia. Loaded with economic and social strength, large landowners were thus given carte blanche to establish their own political parties in line with their own interests, and after the guerrillas’ earlier half-hearted attempt to civilise themselves by launching a political party was quashed by private armies acting in alliance with the regular military — 3000 elected socialists were executed in the course of just one decade — the way was paved for what was to come: the auctioning off of local and regional political platforms to the highest bidder. The state’s inability to prevent guerrilla attacks on landowners’ property made the rural oligarchy increasingly reliant on drug trafficking, not just to fund local armies but also to establish political parties. This was what, by the end of the first decade of the 2000s, became known throughout the world as ‘the paramilitary political scandal’: a third of the Congress, the majority supporting the government, were funded by drug money. And it soon became apparent that most major elite political groups — not just the rural reactionaries, but many urban liberals as well — had been using drug money in their fight against the FARC.

  In June 2010 Juan Manuel Santos — minister of defence in the Uribe administration, responsible for the attack on Ecuador, and a son of the largest media mogul in the country — was elected president. ‘What has happened in Colombia over the past 20 years,’ says Duzán, ‘is that all the major political groups have been united by a common enemy: the FARC. Their frustration over their inability to wipe out this guerrilla plague has led to a tacit agreement to combat the FARC with all the means at their joint disposal. New political classes and parties have been born in this way, and the two old parties have been imbued with the same objective — and they have all entered into different alliances with the drug mafia in order to achieve their goals. This is the political concept about which no one speaks openly, but which today is the root of the efforts of people like Álvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos: to defeat the FARC by whatever means possible. And the immense problem we now have to handle is the fact that large portions of today’s political establishment have grown together with the dark forces of the drug trade.’

  The paramilitary political scandal revealed patterns resembling a huge
conspiracy. From above, the White House had showered the government with financial support in the name of the war on drugs, and from below that same government had grown strong thanks to political interests with deep roots in the drug trade. As a result, Colombian right-wing populism — an inverted version of the Venezuelan Chavismo — is today one of Latin America’s most stable political forces.

  María Jimena Duzán sighs. ‘The guerrillas demolish, destroy, and murder. The mafia buys. Eighty per cent of congressmen own land, and most often large estates. No one cares about the fact that many of them have built their power by exporting cocaine — no one gives a damn about that. And for them, the important thing is that the government helps them in their struggle for landownership.’

  That is the Colombian part of the story. As for the future for the rest of the world, she is more optimistic. María Jimena Duzán adheres to the common argument in today’s Colombian drug debate, that legalising cocaine would be the best thing for this country — although not necessarily for others — but she also says that this is a utopian idea, and therefore pointless to discuss. There are simply too many forces working against it. Mainly economic ones: all of Switzerland, she says, would collapse, as well as large parts of the US financial sector, where much of the drug money ends up. An equally important factor in legalisation being a non-starter is that global drug-policy collaboration is regulated in UN conventions, and those are not based on reason and science but on dogma — sometimes Marxist, sometimes religious. The growing choir of liberal and secular voices in some parts of the West now calling for decriminalisation cannot change the fact that prohibition is strongly supported in every other corner of the world: China, the United States, Japan, the Arab world, Russia, Africa, the Nordic countries, and Eastern Europe; all but a few EU and Latin American countries are against it.

  ‘We waited far too long. It’s too late now.’

  Her argument is in line with what Mario Vargas Llosa writes in his essay ‘The Other State’, in which he suggests that drug-funded criminality is the ‘greatest threat to Latin American democracies’ today, and asks how most governments can continue to support the idea that drugs must be illegal, despite the overwhelming amount of research suggesting the contrary. The answer is, he writes, that politicians the world over in the 1970s and 1980s really did think — in contrast to their views on alcohol and tobacco — that they could not only combat the problem but actually obliterate it. That belief has since been abandoned by most analysts, but if a phenomenon is to be legalised it must be done relatively soon after the illegal markets have begun to expand; otherwise it will be impossible, since an ever-swelling bureaucracy with growing interests in keeping the phenomenon illegal will become too strong. According to Vargas Llosa, this is exactly what has happened with drugs: ‘The biggest obstacle today is that all those institutions and individuals who are making a living on the repression of drugs are all fighting — which is completely logical — tooth and nail to defend their livelihood.’

  María Jimena Duzán agrees, but thinks, like most other Latin American politicians — the Christian right being the exception — that there is now a window of opportunity for a new policy, one that defends neither legalisation nor the war on drugs, but constitutes a humanisation of the fight. Pragmatism. Change.

  After the three former presidents sounded the alarm on the consequences of the war on drugs, US Congress appointed another commission whose sole objective is to recommend a new policy to President Obama — and thus to the world. The conclusions are still to be presented, but the investigators started off by listing a collection of facts that can be read as heralding either success or disaster: today five per cent of the world’s population lives in the United States, but 17.2 per cent of the world’s consumers of illegal drugs; 100 per cent of all cocaine and 90 per cent of all heroin consumed in the United States is produced in the Andes, mostly in Colombia. In the transit countries — Haiti, Ecuador, Jamaica, and Venezuela, but especially Mexico and Central America — drug trafficking is the economic backbone of organised crime, which threatens legal systems, political institutions, and the security of citizens. A war is currently being fought between the Mexican cartels and the nation’s security forces, the former overseeing the wholesale market for all the cocaine sold in the United States today. Drug-related violence has escalated dramatically since president Felipe Calderón launched the nation’s military-led war on drugs in 2006. Over 90 per cent of all the weapons used in drug-related killings come from the United States. Between 1980 and 2008 the United States spent 11.3 billion USD on the war on drugs in Latin America, but during this same period the number of life-long abusers of cannabis, cocaine, and heroin has been steadily on the rise; over the past 30 years the total number of hardcore addicts across these three drugs has doubled.

  María Jimena Duzán welcomes new perspectives on the topic, but does not think that either the number of murders in Latin America or the number of addicts in the United States will compel Washington to reconsider its former policy in earnest. There is, however, something she thinks will finally have an effect on Washington: the migration of the brutal phenomenon that so many of the books on her bookshelves deal with — war. ‘That’s what has arrived in their country. War. It sounds cynical, but I think it’s good that the war has reached the US. Today the entire Texas border is a war zone. People are being killed left and right. Drug violence has finally crossed the border, which has made the US wake up. The cost of this has also become evident there. That’s why new ideas are beginning to take root in Washington. They’re not changing their way of thinking because of the number of addicts, but because of the changed security situation. It’s a good start. I’m optimistic now. Very.’

  MELISSA AND HER mother are standing by the statue of Simón Bolívar when Daniel Pacheco, one of the instigators of the protest and a columnist for El Espectador, begins to speak. The crowd draws in closer. Pigeons scatter. Cops look on. Five centuries have passed since the Spaniards were first introduced to the coca leaf, and it’s been 150 years since Albert Niemann revealed the chemical formula for what would, in the 20th century, spawn the white gold that would forever affect medicine, psychology, literature, addiction, the film industry, the White House, and Latin America.

  ‘Hola,’ says Pacheco to his listeners.

  He has curly hair, and his eyes peer out through a pair of big glasses as he gazes over the urban heart of the country — where Melissa Álvarez was born in 1991, during the raging cocaine war, right between the assassination of Luis Carlos Galán in 1989 and the killing of Pablo Escobar in 1993. She is the same age as the constitution, the ‘secular and anti-authoritarian’ document the Christian right successfully disarmed with the help of cocaine and the war on it in the 2000s. But what has played out over the last two drug-filled decades since the constitution was written has more concrete than theoretical consequences; guerrilla resources increased tenfold and, with the state as the instrument, the elite struck back with paramilitary death squads, who have now killed over 40,000 people — more than the Chilean and Argentinean dictatorships combined.

  All of this has happened while the global demand for cocaine has increased, and so it will most likely continue. No one — not even the DEA, the United Nations, the European Union, or Washington — seems to think any longer that demand can be controlled; so how will it all end? Is it true, as Alfredo Rangel suggests, that legalisation is the least detrimental alternative? Or is the opposite true, as Jay Bergman argues: that it is a good thing that so much has been invested in maintaining prohibition, and that, if the DEA and the other institutions fighting drugs could get just a little more funding, order could soon be restored in Colombia, Mexico, the rest of Latin America, and the world? Or is it as María Jimena Duzán says, when she claims that both the war on drugs and legalisation are naïve schemes that will soon be scrapped in favour of a global policy in which selective decriminalisation goes hand-in-hand with effective
prevention and much better methods of crime fighting?

  Perhaps it doesn’t matter. At least as far as cocaine is concerned. Research into the history of drugs and addiction shows that laws play an insignificant role in how drug-related problems evolve, and that other things are far more decisive in shaping the patterns of drug use and abuse: the economy, migration, knowledge, poverty, or trends. And, not least, the invention of new drugs. Cocaine is in many important ways an outdated drug — requiring cultivation, a special climate, and expensive logistics, with a high that is appealing but in no way unique. In Misha Glenny’s book McMafia Sandro Calvani, former director of the UN anti-drug agency in both Bolivia and Colombia, prophesises the future of drug-related organised crime and sees cocaine playing a starring role — as the loser. Calvani ascertains that ‘cocaine has no future’ because drug users can easily get rid of the yoke of today’s traffickers thanks to chemical developments and free markets. ‘Wherever amphetamines and synthetic drugs have arrived onto the market, they replace everything — cocaine, heroin, the lot,’ Calvani states. ‘It works fast and doesn’t involve the paraphernalia of injecting or sniffing. A much better kind of drug. More dangerous, but it works. Here, it has already started in Medellín. So the future is in the new drugs. The market will change and determine this. They don’t need the narco-traffickers. The future will be completely different.’

  The problem for Colombia is that the white powder didn’t give rise to the country’s injustices and war; it just multiplied them. In other words, the end of cocaine will not solve the problems either, but only reduce them. Colombia is not dependent on cocaine, but cocaine is dependent on Colombia. The global drug industry relies on conflict, poverty, ineffectual government, police forces for sale, and criminal know-how, all of which has put Colombia on a carousel of evil: the narcotics industry is here because the armed groups are here, and the armed groups are here because the narcotics industry is here. And so it goes, round and round. Francisco Thoumi, the leading drug scholar in the country, thinks that there is only one way to put the brakes on: ‘What has to be legalised is Colombia, not cocaine.’ But that’s easier said than done.