I asked the military adviser Kevin Higgins why eradication has had so little impact. ‘There was a time when we said “well, this is the hectarage, this is world demand, this is how much cocaine can be made.” But we had sprayed so much, and interdicted so much, that it seemed that there was some kind of warehousing system in Mexico or the States in anticipation of lean periods. Cocaine has a long shelf life. We don’t have a good picture of what is going on there.’ Than Christie, the coca eradication policy officer at the US Embassy in Bogotá, seemed equally stumped for an explanation. ‘Maybe the laboratories are getting more efficient. Maybe they are using varieties of coca that produce more alkaloid. We’re improving what we know about coca cultivation and farmer behaviour, but we are starting from a huge void of information.’
The United States and the United Nations don’t really know how much coca is being grown in Colombia. Figures are slippery, partly because the entire cocaine economy is by its very nature hidden from scrutiny, and partly because governments and the United Nations make lowball estimates of cocaine production in order to make their war on drugs look like it is going somewhere. ‘It’s science fiction,’ the estimable Colombian economist Francisco Thoumi, author of Illegal Drugs, Society and Economy in the Andes (2003) told me when I met him in Bogotá. ‘In each of the past six years, Colombia has eradicated more coca than was thought to exist. By rights we should say that Colombia doesn’t produce cocaine any more.’
In 2002 the United States Senate Appropriations Committee reported that Plan Colombia had ‘fallen far short of expectations. Neither the Colombian government nor other international donors have lived up to their financial commitments, and the amount of coca and poppy under cultivation has increased. In addition, peace negotiations have collapsed, the armed conflict has intensified, and the country is preparing for a wider war which few observers believe can be won on the battlefield.’14
So why has fumigation failed? After all, fumigation of Colombia’s marijuana fields proved very effective in the early 1980s (at least in the sense that cultivation was displaced from Colombia to the United States and Mexico). More recently, Lucho Salamanca and his colleagues in the fumigation programme successfully eradicated Colombia’s opium crop. But coca has proven to be a very different beast. The coca bush is as fecund as it is hardy. It can grow for up to forty years in even the poorest soils and it has few natural predators, perhaps because the plant evolved its cocaine content precisely in order to ward them off.
But it is the Colombian farmer, rather than his crop, that accounts for the tenacity of coca cultivation. ‘If the coca plants have been fumigated, the farmer will get a group of fifteen or so people together, and the next day they’ll go out and cut off all the branches, right back to the trunk,’ Belica explained. ‘They’ll grow back lovely. The chemicals only affect the leaves and the branches, not the root.’ By pruning their bushes or washing the herbicide off the leaves, in 2004 three quarters of coca farmers saved their crops from the effects of aerial spraying.15 Those that didn’t move quickly enough invariably planted new bushes. For every hectare lost, the cocalero will replant two hectares: the first to recover his losses and repay the Mafioso who financed him, and the second to generate an income for himself.16
The fumigation strategy also seems to have failed because aerial spraying has simply reinforced Colombian farmers’ reliance on coca, exacerbating the very problem it was supposed to solve. The short-term impact has been to raise prices paid for coca leaf, and reduce competition from the farmers of neighbouring regions. Coca cultivation collapses in some parts of the country, only to take off in other parts—what policy wonks call ‘the balloon effect’, much as squeezing a balloon only displaces the air inside to the other half of the balloon. Displacement looks good—the area under coca cultivation in Colombia in 2005 was 47 per cent lower than it had been in 2000—but appearances were deceptive: the shortfall was compensated for by an 11 per cent increase in cultivation in Peru and a 74 per cent increase in Bolivia. I asked Luis Almario Rojas, member of Congress for the eastern department of Caquetá, why coca growing in his region was so resistant to fumigation. His answer was a stark one. ‘There’s no other way of making a living. We had 150,000 hectares under coca in Caquetá in 1996, and thanks to the balloon effect, today we still have 150,000 hectares.’
The long-term impact of fumigating the coca fields has been to drive Colombian coca farmers further down the Amazon and Orinoco rivers, and into the jungles bordering Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela. Alberto Rueda was working for the Colombian Ministry of National Defence when Plan Colombia was foisted on an unsuspecting public in 2000, and resigned in protest shortly afterwards. ‘People talk about GM coca, but the resilience of coca has nothing to do with genetic improvements. It’s just better techniques, more harvests, and cutting back or washing the plants after they’ve been sprayed. But to the United States none of this matters. They just want a budget and a military presence. The Colombians are afraid of aggravating the United States, and the rest of the world is asleep when it comes to drug policy.’
Military advisor Kevin Higgins has a long-term view of the problem. ‘I have sat on hilltops with DEA agents, and they’ve said that this thing will always adapt, and pop up somewhere else. But that is not a signal for us to stop or give up. Colombia is not coca-free, but that doesn’t mean that what we do is a failure. As the Army gets more control over the territory, it will make things more difficult for cocaine producers.’ The authorities are certainly destroying more cocaine laboratories than ever: they claim to have put 200 out of use in 2006.17 On the day that I met him, Kevin told me that he and his colleagues in the Colombian anti-narcotics police had just busted a lab in the eastern department of Vichada with a ton and a half of cocaine ready to be shipped. ‘It’s good to have busted it here, because tracking it down and interdicting it in smaller quantities in the States would be costly. The trade is too lucrative to obliterate. The trade will morph. We just have to make it as difficult as possible for them.’
Making things difficult for cocaine producers sounds laudable, but it is hardly a sustainable anti-drugs policy, and does nothing to address the destructive consequences of the illegal trade in cocaine. Cocaine base is usually made by the same cocaleros who grow the leaves. The base is then turned into cocaine in laboratories, which are run by the Mafia and are usually hidden deep in the jungle. Gato, an informants handler with the Colombian anti-narcotics police agreed that most of the foot soldiers of the Colombian cocaine trade make little money. ‘The guys working in those jungle labs get paid fifty pence or so per kilo, which is nothing, but if unemployment is high even that sum seems good to them. Those responsible for stashing the product, the ones working in transport and security get paid better. A packer, for instance, might get £500 for a couple of weeks work. But even the bosses aren’t always rich. They have a lot of outgoings, and if coca paste runs short, or they run out of chemicals, or the lab is raided, his finances are fucked. So if his boss only pays him £400, a packer has reason to be dissatisfied, which is when he might come to us. We had a call a few weeks ago from a guy in Tumaco who was ready to come in and tell us about the lab where he had been working, but his bosses killed him a couple of days later.’
Meanwhile, the 2.5 million litres of glyphosate that were sprayed over Colombia between 1992 and 1998, and the millions more that have been sprayed since then have had deleterious effects on the countryside. ‘The wind picks up the chemicals and they go everywhere, so a lot of the maize, yucca and plantain turn sickly too,’ Belica told me. ‘The poison gets into the water, so a lot of people get ill. You get headaches and colic. It gets into your blood.’ As of 2005, there have been 8,000 health-related complaints from people living in areas that have been sprayed with glyphosate.18
The United States government initially pooh-poohed these complaints, even accusing its critics of being in the pay of the cocaine traffickers. Eventually, it agreed to commission a study from the Organization of Americ
an States, which concluded that aerial fumigation did no harm to human health or the environment.19 Critics then countered that the study wasn’t valid because half the data used was supplied by Monsanto, which produces the herbicide, and that the OAS was a puppet of the United States anyway. ‘Most of the people I know have left,’ Belica told me. ‘Some left because of the fumigation, others because of the army. If the army runs into coca pickers in the fields they’ll grab them and beat them up. The army doesn’t see us as human beings. They just see us all as guerrillas. Sometimes they’ll kill a cocalero, dress him up in a guerrilla fighter’s uniform, and make out he was in the FARC.’
Plan Colombia has few supporters among Colombia’s neighbours either. As cocaleros are driven from the countryside, the United Nations has warned Ecuador and Peru to expect an influx of 30,000 refugees from Colombia. FARC guerrillas have criticized Ecuador’s government for allowing the United States to despatch their crop-dusting planes from the airbase at Manta, and have threatened to strike targets in Ecuador in retaliation. The Brazilian government is worried that the chemicals sprayed from planes in Colombia will poison the Amazon and that the fumigation programme will eventually drive the cocaine trade into the Brazilian rainforest. The Venezuelans feel threatened by the military muscle being flexed by the Americans, and now by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez himself.
Partly to placate those critics, the Colombian government has expanded programmes in which coca bushes are eradicated by hand. Police, army and demobilized combatants have been sent into coca-growing communities to pull up coca bushes under the slogan ‘Everybody Against Coca’, much as Nancy Reagan once urged America to ‘Just Say No’ to drugs. Plan Colombia has also started financing programmes that encourage the cultivation of alternative crops. War-weary commentators say that this programme of crop substitution is going very well: plenty of coffee bushes have been pulled up, and plenty of coca bushes have been planted. Alternative development programmes have been haphazardly planned and slow to arrive, but more importantly, the sums the Colombian government has invested in alternative development, relative to the hectares of coca sown, are among the paltriest of any of the Andean countries where coca is grown.20 Aid of £500,000 to the remote, long-neglected, underpopulated interior of Colombia is nothing compared to the £25 million that cocaine traffickers are prepared to invest in the coca crop of departments like Putumayo.
What most advocates of coca eradication fail to realize is that coca cultivation arrived in Colombia just as its farmers were looking for ways out of a profound crisis. Since the 1940s, Colombia’s campesinos (peasant farmers) have responded to the chronic shortage of farmland by moving east on to the plains that run for hundreds of miles to the frontier with Venezuela and Brazil, or south towards the border with Peru and Ecuador. Once they found virgin land, these colonists would clear and farm it until its soils were exhausted. They would then sell up, more often than not to a cattle rancher, and move further into the jungle. As a result of this makeshift pattern of land clearance, much of Colombia’s hinterland is without roads, almost half the rural population has no access to running water, and only one in ten country-dwellers has access to a sewer.21
The crisis in the Colombian countryside is rarely discussed in the press, perhaps because in the last thirty years Colombia’s population has gone from being 70 per cent rural to 70 per cent urban. But it is the key driver of coca cultivation and it’s getting worse. In 1990, Colombia’s food imports were worth just 6 per cent of the country’s GDP. Ten years later, this had risen to 46 per cent. Subsidies for Colombia’s small farmers, which have long been available to farmers in the United States, are being eliminated to encourage the switch to large-scale production of export crops like African palm, pineapples and cocoa. ‘It’s difficult to get our legal produce to market because of the state of the roads, and the prices you get for them are really low,’ Belica told me. ‘We’ve always grown rice, yucca, maize and plantain. They give us enough to eat, but we need money to buy things like soap and clothes.’ A farmer from Monterrey, in the northern department of Sucre, did the sums. ‘Getting a sack of potatoes to market will cost a farmer between 3,000 and 5,000 pesos, and it will sell for between 10,000 and 12,000 pesos, depending on demand. Meanwhile, coca is a lot easier to sow and process, and doesn’t need transporting because the traffickers come to the village to buy it. They pay 1,500,000 pesos for a kilo of coca paste.’22
Coca growers survive because there is a global demand for their crop, which is more than can be said for farmers of yucca, plantain and rubber, which are also plentiful and cheap, but increasingly imported. Higher coffee prices would reinvigorate Colombia’s coffee farming sector and provide legal work for poor farmers, but no one is lobbying for higher coffee prices. In fact, the United States’ Congress was instrumental in tearing up the International Coffee Pricing Agreement, which led to prices falling by almost two thirds between 1997 and 2000.23
A second, fundamental driver of rural impoverishment is that by and large Colombian farmers don’t own the land they work on. Sixty per cent of Colombia’s productive land is owned by just half a per cent of its people. In departments like Antioquia, Córdoba and Sucre, which are blessed with fertile flood plains by the rivers that run off the Andes, a huge amount of land is given over to cattle ranches. These benefit big landowners but supply little in the way of food or employment. This system of often unproductive latifundios (estates) has long proved resistant to change. Efforts towards a land reform programme were made in the 1960s, but all they achieved were some big irrigation projects in the north, and some resettlement programmes to areas that are today controlled by FARC guerrillas. The owners of the latifundios are increasingly likely to be paramilitary bosses, wealthy drugs traffickers, or both.24
‘The European Union says that there should be investment instead of fumigation, which is a good idea, but they’ve done nothing,’ Caquetá Congressman Luis Almario Rojas told me. ‘They don’t want to get involved in Plan Colombia, so they bow to the United States. Plan Colombia has financed some micro-budget projects, but they only employ 100 or so people. What we need here are funds to generate energy and build infrastructure. But who would invest in Caquetá? There is no business culture and people are worried about being kidnapped by the FARC.’ A USAID study concluded that it was impossible to assist most coca-growers in rural Putumayo because of the security situation, the poor soil, and the region’s isolation from markets.25 Unsurprisingly, the study was hushed up by the US State Department shortly after being published in 2001. ‘The root of the problem,’ Luis Almario Rojas told me, ‘is that there is no infrastructure for a legal local economy. If it existed, the campesinos would drop the illegal cultivation straight away. The farmers have become slaves of the Mafia. They’re only getting $50 for a kilo of coca leaves. It’s the traffickers of Colombia, Mexico and the United States that are making the money.’
The cocaine business is clearly more slippery than the policy wonks care to admit. If the lizard’s head is said to be the cocaine consumers of Europe and the United States, one of its many tails is the Colombian coca farmer. You can cut it off as many times as you like, but it will always grow back. Former president Ernesto Samper gave the green light to Colombia’s first fumigation programme, but he has since come to see the futility of trying to stem the supply of cocaine at source. ‘We get 20 per cent of the profits and 100 per cent of the notoriety. We destroy the plots of our own peasants to satisfy electoral aspirations in the United States, and we pay for this with the corruption of our institutions and our armed forces. Within a few years, the only vestige of this debate will be the Marlboro marijuana cigarettes that we’ll be importing by the million. And why not? We’ve been importing all kinds of dangerous substances: Agent Orange, pesticides that damage the ecological balance. Why don’t we start thinking about importing another one in a few years time: marijuana? Everything seems to indicate that marijuana that comes from there isn’t as harmful as marijuana that
comes from here.’26
Virgilio Barco Vargas, who was Colombia’s president between 1986 and 1990, claimed that drug trafficking was responsible for the majority of human rights abuses in the country, that it threatened democracy and national security, encouraged paramilitary groups and networks of paid killers and distorted the economy. His administration even contracted a firm of image consultants to show the world the high price Colombia paid for supplying the cocaine trade. That Colombia should be ripped to shreds by hypocritical Anglo-Saxons, flip-flopping between indulgence and self-reproach, seemed to be a tragedy that Colombia would have to bear alone. Responsibility for the chaos lies abroad, Colombia’s politicians said, and no significant change could be made until the outside world changed.
Change came when the Americans started pumping cash into the Colombian treasury. But the idea that the myriad problems Colombia faces have been caused by the international cocaine trade is at best a half-truth. Even in 1989, when the ‘cocaine wars’ between traffickers and police were at their height, perhaps 200 people were killed and 800 injured in terrorist attacks carried out by Pablo Escobar’s organization.27 Almost three quarters of the 5,700 political killings committed that year were the responsibility of the Colombian army and police, often using resources supplied specifically for counter-drug operations.
It is a well-kept secret in Colombia that coca can grow in at least thirty countries. In the days before cocaine was prohibited, the biggest exporters of coca were the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. Before the United Nations banned coca and cocaine, Colombia didn’t export significant quantities of either. The demand for cocaine cannot explain why its main suppliers should be Colombians. Once an easy-to-grow crop is made illegal, cultivation is bound to concentrate in countries where it is easiest to do illegal things. Thereafter, illegal drug cultivation might exacerbate existing problems, but it doesn’t explain them. Colombia is the only country in the world that produces cocaine, marijuana and heroin, and its proclivity to illegality isn’t confined to the drugs trade. Colombia is the world’s biggest producer of counterfeit US dollars. It has more sicarios (hit men) than any other country, and until Mexico took its place, saw more kidnappings. It has more landmines, exports more prostitutes, arms more children, and displaces more civilians through violence than any other Latin American country. Illegality is rampant in Colombia, yet the Colombian government chooses to blame Western drug consumers for the cocaine business.
Cocaine Nation Page 20