Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  In the climate of self-censorship that these killings have created, anyone hoping that the truth might make the light of day would have been heartened by an advertisement which appeared in a Mexico City daily in May 2006. It described the Gulf cartel’s army of Zetas as ‘narco-kidnappers and murderers of women and children’, who had bought protection from agents in the Mexican Attorney-General’s office. Unfortunately, the only person with the money and the courage to place the ad was Edgar ‘La Barbie’ Valdez, the head of the Negros. To counter the terror tactics of the Zetas, the Sinaloa cartel had raised its own army, known as the Negros. They had responded in kind, bribing police and other public officials, killing those who would not be bought, and waging a bloody street war with the Zetas.

  Vicente Fox was succeeded to the Mexican presidency by Felipe Calderón in 2006. Just days after assuming the presidency, Calderón launched Operation Michoacán, despatching 6,500 soldiers and police to the central state of Michoacán to set up checkpoints, and execute search and arrest warrants of individuals linked to drug trafficking. Counter-drug operations have since been deployed in a further nine states, involving over 27,000 soldiers. From January to June 2007 they intercepted 928 tons of marijuana, over 5.5 tons of marijuana seeds, 192 kilos of opium gum and 3.6 tons of cocaine. They detained 10,000 people for drug crimes, including the leaders and operators of seven drug-trafficking organizations, seized money and arms, and eradicated 12,000 hectares of marijuana and 7,000 hectares of opium poppies. Drafting in soldiers to do the work of police officers was only supposed to be a temporary measure, but it has quickly taken on an air of permanence. Some legislators have even called for troops to be deployed to patrol the streets of Mexico City.

  Corrupt officers are purged, new forces are created, and cocaine’s kingpins are captured to be paraded before the cameras. Yet new traffickers and new organizations take the place of those killed or imprisoned, and the cartels’ power and reach only seem to increase. In a single week in May 2008, they killed a hundred people, including Mexico’s acting Chief of Police Edgar Millan Gomez, and the head of the federal police’s organized crime division, Roberto Velasco Bravo. Were they targeted because they were doing their jobs, or because they were allied with a rival cartel?28 Most journalists are too scared to even ask such a question. There is a growing sense of crisis in Mexico, as the solutions proffered seem to create new problems, without having the slightest impact on those they were designed to address. The cajoling and mollycoddling of the Mexican people into believing that victory is in sight is wearing thin. According to the Interior Ministry, public service announcements designed to combat drug trafficking and crime were broadcast on radio and television 732,000 times in just five months of 2007.

  As the pill gets bitterer, politicians on both sides of the border insist that the medicine must be working. ‘Why are we having all these homicides and all these crimes on the streets?’ President Fox once asked. ‘Because we’ve been winning the campaign. The more we destroy drug production and the more we catch drugs in transit, the more desperate the traffickers become and the more they challenge the authorities.’29 President Bush’s drug tsar, John Walters, made a similar claim about the rise in Mexico’s drug-related murders when he said that ‘unfortunately this is one of the possible signs of the efficacy of anti-drug efforts’.30

  What to do but continue as before? Drug policy officials in Washington are genuinely worried about the escalation of the violence in Mexico. On the one hand, they had high hopes that President Fox would make significant headway against police corruption and ineptitude, and were confident that jailing top traffickers would have a lasting impact on the drugs trade. On the other hand, they view corruption as endemic to Mexico. When asked what should be done now that the army has been shown to be incapable of defeating the cartels, many throw up their hands in resignation.

  Mexico’s inability to control the drugs trade is already affecting the south-western states of the United States. Arizona and New Mexico both declared states of emergency in 2005. According to drug tsar John Walters, ‘the killing of rival traffickers is already spilling across the border. Witnesses are being killed. We do not think the border is a shield.’31 Worse, officials in the United States aren’t immune to corruption either. Investigators have discovered that drug traffickers regularly pay off border authorities in exchange for the right to traffic drugs unmolested into the United States.32 FBI probes have found instances of corruption in the US border patrol, as in the case of a senior agent and his brother who accepted $1.5 million in exchange for allowing truckloads of marijuana to pass through checkpoints near Hebronville, Texas.33 Other undercover investigations by the FBI have revealed that US soldiers have conspired to traffic drugs through south-western states. One such probe nabbed thirteen current and former soldiers taking bribes in exchange for transporting cocaine between Texas and Oklahoma.34 An operation called ‘Lively Green’ indicted fifty current and former soldiers and police officers in Arizona who pleaded guilty to similar charges.35 The rewards on offer to those prepared to collude with the smugglers are sufficiently tempting to entice even the war on drugs’ most loyal foot soldiers.

  7

  ‘Cocaine is the Atomic Bomb of Latin America’1

  She winds you up and reels you in / she’s a sinner / take her in your arms and she’ll eat you up / you can’t love Caine / you can’t believe in Caine / you think that you have her under your thumb / but without her, you’re nothing / you just can’t love Caine / you can’t believe in Caine.

  Rubén Blades, ‘La Caína’2

  So much for trying to intercept cocaine shipments in transit. Anticipating the problems their law enforcement strategy was always likely to encounter in Mexico, the United States has spent most of the huge budget it has allocated to tackling the cocaine trade overseas in Colombia, as part of a determined effort to stop coca being turned into cocaine in the first place. ‘Cocaine production means destruction here in Colombia,’ Colombian Vice-President Francisco Santos assured me when I met him in Bogotá in October 2007. ‘You can travel over the department of Putumayo in a helicopter for half an hour and all you see is barren land, where fifteen years ago it was one of the most pristine jungles in the world. Europeans don’t like the moralistic perspective, so I hope the environmental one will have more of an impact on them,’ Santos went on. ‘You can’t change their mindsets, but you can give them something to think about when they are snorting coke.’

  ‘Shared Responsibility’ is the title of a campaign rolled out by the Colombian government, which is designed to appeal to the eco-consciences of Western cocaine consumers. The premise of ‘Shared Responsibility’ is irrefutable. Since Western consumers have largely deemed the poverty, violence and injustice that the cocaine trade generates either irrelevant or inevitable, perhaps they will be prepared to listen to the environmentalists’ perspective. Colombia covers a million square kilometres, which makes it the same size as California and Texas combined (or for Europeans, the same size as France and Spain combined). To evade detection, coca is grown in the most off-the-beaten-track parts of the country. As coca growers push further into the jungle, the soil quality gets worse, so growers use ten times more agrochemicals on their plots than do farmers raising legal crops in long-settled parts of the country. The average hectare of coca needs 550 kilos of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, gasoline, ammonia, cement and sulphuric acid to yield a crop and turn it into coca base (the first step in the process of making cocaine powder). That makes for 171,600 tons of chemical waste a year, dumped in the most remote parts of what is, after Brazil, the most bio-diverse country on Earth.3 No other country has as many amphibians, or as many bird or frog species as Colombia. For each gram of cocaine produced, four square metres of tropical forest has to be cleared. Unfortunately, the Vice-President’s ‘Shared Responsibility’ programme is a case of closing the gate after the horse has bolted. Most of the environmental damage caused by coca cultivation has already been done. B
etween 2000 and 2001, 55,000 hectares of forests were cleared to plant coca. Between 2005 and 2006, however, just 8,332 hectares were deforested for the same purpose.4 After all, nobody enjoys clearing pristine rainforest. Most of the damage done to the Colombian rainforest today is the result not of coca cultivation, but of the fumigation of the coca crops with herbicides sprayed from American crop-duster planes.

  In March 2006, the actor Bruce Willis gave a pithy assessment of who he considered responsible for the drug problem facing his country. ‘The United States and everyone who cares about protecting the freedom that we have should do whatever it takes to end terrorism in the world. Not just in the Middle East. I’m talking also about going to Colombia and doing whatever it takes to end the cocaine trade. It’s killing this country and all the countries that coke goes into.’ Willis also gave vent to the frustration that many Americans feel at the failure to put an end to cocaine production at source. ‘If they weren’t making money on it, they would have stopped it. They could stop it in one day. These guys are growing it like it’s corn or tobacco. It is a billion-dollar industry and I think that’s a form of terrorism as well.’5

  The cocaine business has fomented mutual recrimination between Colombia and the United States. After I had heard some of Humberto’s stories from his time as a police officer with the Colombian anti-narcotics police in Bogotá, I told him about Willis’s remarks. He gave me a wry smile. ‘I was a policeman, and then a police captain for thirteen years. I lived in the States for two years, and I know that there isn’t a strong anti-consumption campaign in the US. When I was there cocaine was in every disco. You’d hear them sniffing away in the bathrooms. I got pulled over by the police a lot when I was in the States, and when I said that I was from Colombia, they wanted to see everything I had. They thought I was a trafficker. Me! I’ve still got shrapnel in me from injuries I picked up when I was with the anti-narcotics police.’

  Interestingly, Kevin Higgins, who works as a military adviser at the US Embassy in Bogotá, sees his role as one of stabilizing an ally beleaguered by its conflict with guerrilla insurgents, rather than of averting a threat to Americans. ‘To me, cocaine is a mission. It is part of FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] financing, and it is a security problem.’ Vice-President Francisco Santos agreed that cocaine had become much more than just a problem for the gringos. ‘The business finances the FARC guerrillas and the paramilitaries, so the survival of the Colombian state is at stake. In other countries it might be more manageable, but for us there is no option but to fight with all the tools and all the political will we can muster.’ Than Christie is the coca eradication policy officer at the US Embassy in Bogotá. He assured me that ‘the Colombians have a political will unlike any other country in the world. Every single day they have 6,500 people pulling up coca out in the fields. By comparison, on a good day, Peru has 150 people doing the same thing. There is a realization from the political class, the business sector, and the army that the drugs issue is Colombia’s biggest problem. The corruption of politicians, the lack of economic opportunity, and the lack of investment all stem from the drugs trade. It’s the main source of funding for the FARC, and if there were no FARC and there were no kidnappings, international business would be here. Colombians wouldn’t be sending all their capital abroad and their kids away to study. They would be investing back at home.’

  Every drugs policy official that I spoke to in Colombia was at pains to stress the guerrillas’ role in the cocaine trade. Since the Americans decreed that the FARC was ‘the third cartel’ and that the Colombian army lacked the strength needed to meet the threat they posed, an aid package was agreed on to wrest control of coca-growing regions from the guerrillas. In 2000, Bill Clinton gave his blessing to Plan Colombia, which has funnelled more than $5 billion into the Colombian treasury, making Colombia the world’s third biggest recipient of US military aid after Israel and Egypt. Every day for the past eight years, the Colombian security forces have had $15 million to spend on weapons, helicopters, planes, boats, military training and intelligence-gathering, as well as the spraying of herbicides over two million hectares of Colombian land. The goal was to reduce Colombia’s cultivation, processing and distribution of drugs by 50 per cent over the following six years.6

  When cocaine came back into fashion in the United States in the 1970s, most coca bushes were cultivated in Bolivia and Peru. After each harvest, the leaves would be picked and then flown north to be processed into cocaine in laboratories in Colombia. As the Americans’ eradication programmes took effect, and aerial surveillance made flying cargoes of coca leaves to Colombia riskier, coca cultivation also moved north. The traffickers moved down the Colombian tributaries of the River Amazon with their sacks of coca seeds, offering cheap credit to anyone who would grow coca for them. Belica is a cocalero (coca farmer) from a town called La Uribe, in the rural department of Meta. ‘I started picking coca when I was eleven,’ she told me. ‘Back in 1986, some men came to La Uribe with their families. They brought coca seeds, and they started planting them. The plants grew very well and we started picking the coca leaves for them. They would pay us with coca seeds, so 300 or so of us went off and planted our own coca bushes, and before long there were really big coca fields around La Uribe.’ In the late 1980s, more than half a million Colombians moved into the remote eastern plains, hoping to enjoy the fruit of the coca boom. Though the fumigation planes have driven coca cultivation and coca pickers from the east to the south and now the west of the country, Colombia still produces 70 per cent of the world’s coca leaves and has long been its biggest cocaine producer.7

  To make a kilo and a half of cocaine, a cocaine chemist needs a kilo and a half of coca base. To make a kilo and a half of coca base, a cocalero needs a ton of coca leaves.8 ‘You have to do it by the book, or you’ll end up with gum, which is completely useless,’ Belica explained. ‘First you chop up the leaves really well with a scythe, and put them in a tub. Add cement, ammonia, lime and a little bit of sulphuric acid. They’re all easy enough to get. Get in there with your big knee-high rubber boots, and keep stirring the mixture until it goes completely black. Then transfer it all to a big steel drum, and fill it halfway up with petrol. Give that a good stir, and then let it sit for forty-five minutes. Then pour the petrol into a plastic bucket, add water and some more sulphuric acid. Drain off the petrol again. Add a bit more water to the petrol, stir it slowly for another forty-five minutes, then leave it for thirty minutes. Once the petrol has risen to the top, pour that off, and put what you’re left with through a sieve. Then put it in a cloth and wring out the water. That’s what we call the flour—coca base.’

  By the 1990s, 80 per cent of the farmers of eastern departments like Vaupes, Meta and Guaviare were living off the coca business. More than half of them belonged to a floating population that with the vagaries of the coca harvests migrated across the vast jungle plains that run east from the Andes. Many local farmers didn’t bother growing food crops like yucca or maize any more. They had their vegetables flown in from other parts of the country while they enjoyed a coca bonanza, drinking and whoring their way through their newfound wealth. Initially, they worked for big coca plantation owners, who owned coca fields of anywhere between 40 and 150 hectares. Luis ‘Lucho’ Salamanca has been spraying herbicides on the coca fields of Colombia from a tiny Turbo-Thrush crop-dusting plane for the past fifteen years. ‘These days the number of large-scale coca fields is minimal, and that’s because of our aggressive tactics. We’ve been spraying 150,000 or so hectares a year, hitting three or more areas in the country simultaneously every day. There are seven planes spraying every day, and most fields get sprayed twice a year.’

  Fumigation might have put a stop to large-scale coca cultivation, but it has had less impact on small-scale cultivation. By 1998, total coca cultivation had mushroomed from 45,000 to 122,000 hectares. Figures from the United Nations Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) show that by the end of 2006, after six years of spraying herb
icide in the department of Nariño, during which time almost 220,000 hectares of coca had been fumigated, total coca cultivation in the department was actually up by 6,000 hectares.9 Despite sixteen years of ever more intense fumigation of coca fields from the air, Colombia produced 640 tons of cocaine in 2005.10 Combine that with Bolivian and Peruvian production, and total global cocaine output tops 932 tons, which is about the same as it was in 1995.11 Despite the failure to control the spread of coca, a White House report of 2001 asserted that attacking coca cultivation remained the most cost-effective way of reducing supplies of cocaine. ‘In an ideal world,’ the report said, ‘drugs would be intercepted at source, and none would be able to enter the distribution chain.’12

  And so an ideal world has trumped the real world. The United States government and the United Nations make wildly divergent estimates of Colombia’s coca crop, never more so than in 2006, when the Americans estimated that there were 157,000 hectares of coca being grown in Colombia, which was more than double the UN’s figure of 78,000 hectares.13 The Americans admit that their estimate ‘is subject to a 90 percent confidence interval of between 125,800 and 179,500 hectares’.