Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  It is ironic that the main threat to the war on drugs has come, not from its resounding inability to tackle the demand for or supply of drugs, but rather, from another war on another abstraction. The war on terror shares with the war on drugs the promise of open-ended commitment and fuzzy parameters that provide little by which victory or defeat might be judged. Drug warriors concerned that the White House’s attention is being distracted by the threat posed by foreign terrorists will do all they can to ensure that drugs too are defined as a foreign terror threat. Improved counter-drug efforts, they say, contribute to improved security against other threats. A slight decline in drug use is taken as evidence that government policies are finally working. A slight increase is taken to mean that not enough is being done. Both scenarios demand more funding. The war on drugs has become a war without end.

  PART TWO

  Supply and the Third World

  5

  Smugglers

  Who give the guns, who give the crack?

  No one to take the blame

  And a who import the guns and cocaine

  And a who inoculate the ghetto youths brain?

  An mobilize dem inna this bloodsport game

  Say if you want to be rich, you haffi kill Shane

  And wicked enough to kill him mother Miss Jane

  Mek dem say you a di wickedest man pon the lane

  And if you want yu respect fi long like a train

  Well you better make shot fall like a rain

  Yu haffi put one foot pon them Concord plane

  Hey, you better sell twenty kilo cocaine.

  Bounty Killer, ‘Down in the Ghetto’

  In 2006, 492 metric tons of cocaine were impounded by law enforcement around the world. This was the second highest total ever seized after the 588 metric tons seized in 2004, which was in turn the fifth consecutive record-setting bust.1 If supply-side interdiction isn’t working, it’s clearly not for want of trying. Yet the United Nations says that the profit margin on sales of illegal drugs is so inflated that the authorities would have to intercept 75 per cent of the cocaine produced to have any serious impact on the viability of the illegal drugs business. Despite years of eye-wateringly large interdictions, current efforts intercept no more than 40 per cent of cocaine shipments.2

  Sir Keith Morris was the UK’s ambassador to Colombia between 1990 and 1994, and his experience of the war on drugs as it has been conducted on Colombian soil has made him a trenchant critic of the very idea that supplies of cocaine can be effectively disrupted. Reflecting on the cocaine wars that gripped Colombia during his term, Sir Keith told me that ‘the war on drugs briefings that the Americans were pumping out were basically “My God, we’ve got to go on…” It’s a classic law enforcement thing around the world. They’re always winning battles but losing the war, and needing more resources. When I discovered that HM Customs and Excise, God bless their cotton socks, had calculated that they were getting 9 per cent of the cocaine or the heroin coming into the country. 9 per cent? Why 9 per cent? You begin to realize that these things are so fictitious, in a way.’

  This is not to belittle the notable impact that some multinational operations have had on the cocaine business. Operation Purple was launched by the DEA to coordinate seizures of potassium permanganate, a widely used disinfecting agent which is also one of the precursor chemicals used in the manufacture of cocaine. The operation was effective in drying up supplies from Europe and the United States, but a lack of international cooperation has stymied a water-tight prohibition. Almost half of potassium permanganate shipments are destined for Asian and African countries that do not participate in Operation Purple. Once docked, these shipments can be diverted to Venezuela or Ecuador, where the lists of controlled substances are much shorter, and then smuggled into Colombia.3

  A British cocaine wholesaler told a Home Office prison survey that, prior to his arrest, he was buying and selling 60 kilograms of cocaine a week. He would buy from Colombian suppliers in Spain for £18,000 a kilo, and sell in the United Kingdom for £22,000 a kilo. Once broken down into grams for retail sale, that kilo would most likely have netted him £50,000, but, like most importers, he preferred to sell in bulk. His consignment would then pass through several pairs of hands, with the profit being distributed along the way. The difference between the wholesale and retail price of cocaine in the UK is about the same as that of most legal agricultural crops. The trickiest part of the smuggling operation, and hence the most profitable, is getting it into the European Union in the first place. It accounts for the largest part of the 15,800 per cent mark-up in price enjoyed by a gram of cocaine between the laboratory in Colombia and its retail sale in the UK. By way of comparison, the difference in the price of coffee beans between source and sale is just 223 per cent.4

  The same Home Office survey of cocaine smugglers and wholesalers found that attempts to disrupt the supply of cocaine into the UK have had an impact on local markets and local prices, but not at a national level, and not enough to deter dealers or importers. A major importer told the survey that he had used drug ‘mules’ to import cocaine from the Caribbean; he estimated that one in four of his couriers would not get through customs. An international haulier who had been importing cocaine into the UK by road estimated that four out of ten of his consignments did not get through, but despite losing half of his merchandise, he was still able to keep a healthy balance sheet.5

  Most of those without a drug problem don’t find it hard to get into the cocaine trade once they know a dealer, and are able to rise through the ranks once they have proven themselves to be honest and reliable.6 The more dealers, the more competition, which keeps prices down. The majority of dealers consider the risk of arrest to be low and the threat of imprisonment not a serious deterrent, but a low-risk occupational hazard. If they are arrested and convicted, they hand the business to a colleague while they serve their term. The only real threat comes when the police take action to seize the dealer’s assets.

  Importing drugs is always likely to be monopolized by those with ties to countries where drugs can be bought cheaply. Until recently, Jamaican groups were most prominent in importing cocaine, cooking it into crack, and then distributing it around the UK, because Jamaica is an ideal transit point for cocaine bound for Europe from Colombia. But as more Europeans have developed a taste for cocaine, and more cocaine comes into the EU through Spanish and Dutch ports, there have been opportunities for other nationalities to become involved. Four out of every ten drug dealers in British prisons were born outside the UK, and they hail from any one of thirty-four countries.7

  Up to 250 tons of cocaine enters the European Union every year. Some European wholesalers get their cocaine directly from Central American and Caribbean suppliers, and work in concert with Colombian and local traffickers to bring it home. Most of it is hidden aboard large container ships that ply the sea lanes between the Caribbean and Spain and Portugal. As the European market for cocaine has burgeoned in recent years, pressure on one link in the supply chain has sent Colombian smugglers scrambling for suitable entrepôts. These days, a third of Europe’s cocaine comes via West African countries such as Ghana, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau.8 From West Africa cocaine can be flown to clandestine landing strips in Spain or Portugal, or smuggled aboard commercial shipping containers bound for Barcelona, Rotterdam or Antwerp. In many West African countries cocaine seizures have gone up six-fold in as many years. In Tema, Ghana, half a ton of cocaine was seized in January 2004; another half-ton load was seized in the capital, Accra, in November 2005 and 1.9 tons was seized off the Ghanaian coast in May 2006. Ghanaian police also recorded the continent’s biggest ever cocaine bust that year, arresting the Ghanaian and Nigerian drivers of a van loaded with two tons of the drug concealed in boxes of fish. A ton was seized in Kenya in late 2004, three tons were seized off Cape Verde in February 2006 and in June of the same year, more than 14 tons of a mixture of cocaine and white cement was seized in Lagos, Nigeria.9 African seizures stil
l account for less than 1 per cent of global cocaine seizures, which suggests that only a tiny proportion of the cocaine transiting the African continent is actually intercepted.10 Karen Tandy, the former head of the DEA, has said that ‘Africa will become, in terms of a drugs hot-bed, one of our worst nightmares if we do not get ahead of that curve now.’11 Intent on doing just that, in 2007 the UK led eight European nations in setting up a Maritime Analysis Operations Centre, a task force of navy, police and customs officials to target cocaine traffic from Africa.

  ‘Among the destitute locals are scores of wealthy, gaudy Colombian drug barons in their immodest cars, flaunting their hi-tech luxury lifestyle, with beautiful women on their arms,’ wrote a journalist in the Observer.12 He went on to describe how ‘the seizure of West Africa by Colombian and other drug cartels has happened with lightning speed’. This po-faced depiction of hapless Africans at the behest of unscrupulous drugs traffickers was reiterated by the Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonio Maria Costa. ‘In the nineteenth century, Europe’s hunger for slaves devastated West Africa. Two hundred years later, its growing appetite for cocaine could do the same. When I went to Guinea-Bissau, the drug wealth was everywhere. From the air, you can see that the Spanish hacienda villas and the obligatory black four-wheel-drives are everywhere, with the obligatory scantily clad girl, James Bond style. There were certain hotels I was advised not to stay in.’13 Few locals have been privy to the view from the air that so appalled the head of the UNODC. But I would venture that many of them would regard it as an improvement on what their country looked like before the arrival of the drug barons. The average income in Guinea-Bissau is $600 a year. The barons’ development plan for Guinea-Bissau may not tally with that of the United Nations, but which is more likely to alleviate the poverty its people live in?

  I met a Cuban-American called Juan Pablo by chance while having a late-night drink in a cheap bar in the old part of Bogotá. When I told him that I was keen to talk to those with first-hand experience of the cocaine business, he gave me an indulgent wink, and pulled up a chair. ‘The factory is usually out in the suburbs,’ he told me. ‘It’s a sweathouse, eight or ten people just sitting at tables and cutting up coke that’s come in directly from the farms and the labs in the provinces. When I was last there $100 got you about 100 grams, and it’s 95 per cent pure.’ Juan Pablo then told me how he went about smuggling the cocaine back to the United States. ‘You make it about grape-size. Compact it as much as possible. Then you coat it with wax, wrap it two or three times in the plastic, dip it in the wax again, wrap it in the plastic again. You don’t want it breaking open. That’s trouble. Three and a half ounces is about 15 grapes. Then you swallow them. Don’t fly out of Colombia in any way, shape or form. I took the land border to Venezuela, and from there I flew to Guatemala. Eat guava seeds. They make you constipated. You don’t want to be shitting on the plane. Every time I stopped, I shit, washed the grapes, took off the outer layer and replaced that. Then I swallowed them again, and flew to the United States. That’s the nerve-racking one. Going through customs, you’ve just got to wholeheartedly believe that you’re not doing anything wrong. If you’re not doing anything wrong, people don’t think you’re doing anything wrong. So you make yourself the typical asshole American. “Fucking foreigners, I can’t believe their customs. I had this bad thing happen to me, but now I’m home, thank God.” You know, acting friendly. They search your luggage. “Oh sure, I understand, you’re just doing your job.” And you get through. Then you really shit yourself, which comes out good anyway, because you know that you just pulled off something fucking major. I can buy a kilo here in Bogotá for 1.5 million pesos, which is $700. That’s probably $20,000 profit if you take it to the States, but that’s when it gets dangerous. The key is not to get greedy. Swallowing 100 grapes is going to hurt, and there’s a lot more chance that they’ll rupture, but twelve grapes is just not that much to have in your stomach. Miami, South Beach, I sold it for about $50 to $70 a gram. That’s a really nice little profit.’

  Juan Pablo was a lone drugs ‘mule’. Most mules work for the smaller drug-smuggling operations, and are driven by cash not glory. Thirty tons of cocaine is thought to enter Europe on commercial flights every year. HM Revenue & Customs and the Ghanaian authorities set up Operation Westbridge in November 2006 to catch drug smugglers who were using Accra as a gateway to the UK. It covered the installation of surveillance equipment, X-ray machines, swab tests and urine tests. In November 2007, two teenagers were seized with nearly four kilos of cocaine ingested in around sixteen condoms, en route for London Gatwick. The boys, one aged sixteen and the other nineteen, were from Lithuanian families living in south London. As many as sixty mules are thought to arrive in Britain from West Africa every week; in 2007, a single flight from Ghana to Amsterdam was found to be carrying thirty-two drugs mules.

  Since November 2006, Westbridge has seized 356 kg of cocaine, 2,275 kg of cannabis and 1.3 kg of heroin. These operations make good copy for press releases, but they are short-term measures. As soon as the British police left Accra airport, the traffickers were able to bribe the baggage handlers to take bags past the scanning machines and straight on to the planes bound for Europe. ‘We don’t have sniffer dogs. We don’t have enough scanners. It’s all about profiling and gathering intelligence and we need the British to attain that, not just temporary assistance,’ a Ghanaian customs officer said.

  Westbridge followed the lead of Operation Airbridge, a UK—Jamaican initiative launched in 2002 to catch mules before they boarded planes from Jamaica. Airbridge was set up after police at London’s Heathrow Airport found that 25 per cent of passengers arriving from Jamaica were carrying cocaine. Most mules are recruited from the poorest neighbourhoods of Kingston and the city’s ‘dungles’ (rubbish dumps and empty plots of land squatted by recent migrants from the countryside). Muling is also fuelled by the fact that a lot of Jamaicans who work for Colombian smugglers are paid in cocaine: since there is only a small local market for cocaine, it makes good commercial sense to pay a mule to carry the cocaine to New York or London, where there are Jamaicans willing to sell it and locals willing to buy it.

  By 2002, 400 Jamaican women were serving sentences in British prisons for bringing cocaine into the UK.14 I met Sharon at the Kingston office of Hibiscus, an organization set up to help drug mules serving sentences in foreign prisons, most of whom are poor women duped into carrying drugs by unscrupulous traffickers. ‘I was a business person, buying footwear and clothing to sell in the market,’ she told me. ‘I wanted to get more money to put into the business to buy things to sell. I borrowed some money from the small loans office to upgrade, but unfortunately, the bigger stores were selling clothes cheaper than we could sell, and I couldn’t make enough money to repay the loan. I had put my furniture and my TV up as collateral for the loan and the office was threatening to repossess them. Then a friend introduced me to a man who said that he could make me a loan to pay back the first. But I realized that he wasn’t a loans man. He was a drugs man. He said that if I made a trip to the UK I could make more than I needed. I said I didn’t want to take that chance. What if I go to prison? “No man,” he said. “You have a nice appearance. They won’t stop and check you.” He was offering me £2,500. We went to a hotel in the resort area, and I swallowed about fifty pellets, about 200 grams of cocaine. But at the airport in England they checked the entire flight. They made us do a urine test and then an X-ray, and I got caught. The judge gave me five years.’

  When a mule carries cocaine to Britain, she might expect to be home in a couple of weeks. But if she is arrested, her children can spend up to five years without their mother. The luckier ones will be brought up by friends or relatives, but many children have to fend for themselves as ‘barrel children’, dependent on the arrival of a barrel of goods from relatives overseas. Even if a drug mule evades detection, she faces other dangers: several cocaine couriers have died in London, af
ter being ripped off and killed by traffickers or overdosing on cocaine when the condoms they were carrying ruptured.

  ‘I got three years nine months in Cookham Prison in Kent, and me do half. One year, ten month and two week,’ a cocaine courier called Angela told me. ‘I went to prison and me seen nuff people who me know from Kingston. Me called the drug-men back in Kingston to tell them that they lock me up, and the person said “We don’t want to hear nothing from you. Your brother’s going to go down for this, and when you come over Jamaica, you’re going to go down for it too.” The thing that was puzzling me brain was me children, sweating that they was going to kill them off. Me come in to Cookham on suicide watch, but me get work folding and packing textiles, and me find meself start a get happy. Me get £18 a week, and me save and me send money back home to give me children. But when I called my mother a couple of months later she said, “It looks like the drugmen killed your brother Steve.” The year following, me return to Jamaica. Soon after, they light me house a fire. Me didn’t tarry, me just leave immediately, and ended up living in the burnt-down market by Harris Street. Me haffi wait til the people selling in the market pack up and gone by ten at night before me can go a bed and lay down. Me can’t have me children around me—me go a bed a night time, and me don’t know which part they are pon di road. Last week me look pon me mother and me say me sorry the judge never give me a bigger sentence, where me had somewhere comfortable to put down me head.’

  When the Colombian authorities cracked down on cocaine-smuggling through their seaports, traffickers started to move more cocaine through Venezuela to the Netherlands Antilles, a self-governing region of the Netherlands in the Caribbean whose people carry EU passports. In 2000, four tons of cocaine was seized at Amsterdam’s Schipol International Airport.15 The Dutch authorities responded to the increase in muling from the Antilles by implementing a novel strategy that they termed ‘100 per cent Control’. Passengers were subject to extensive searches; when cocaine was found, it was confiscated, and the mule had his or her passport confiscated for up to three years. They were then deported, but not arrested. The authorities reasoned that the threat of incarceration in a European prison would be scant deterrent to potential drug mules, most of whom are desperate for money. But by increasing the rate at which the authorities intercepted cocaine shipments, they could make smuggling unprofitable. In 2003, eighty couriers were thought to pass through Schipol airport every day, but by 2005, this had been cut to just ten a month.16