Why do illegal activities find such a firm footing in Colombia? Poverty, inequality and corruption go some way to explaining Colombia’s high rates of law-breaking, but none is unique to Colombia. So what is? A satisfactory answer can be had only by looking at the country’s past. The Spanish colonists found vast, fertile lands in the north-western corner of South America, whose native population was small even before the arrival of European diseases. The Spanish found manual labour undignified, so they imported African slaves. But with so much of the country still unsettled, it was relatively easy for Africans and indentured indigenous labourers to run away and found their own settlements far from the reach of the Europeans. In Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude the tax-collecting corregidor is universally despised when he arrives in the imaginary town of Macondo. Its people had built the town without help from the state, so why should taxes be paid to it? For the people of Macondo, the government was a distant authority, its laws a game to be negotiated rather than an authority to be respected. It is a sentiment that many rural Colombians would endorse today.
Even before the Europeans came to Colombia, the north-western corner of the continent was one of the few with no central government and no empire. Mexico had its Aztecs and Mayas, Peru had its Incas, the southern cone its Guaranís, but the chichas of Colombia were a collection of chiefdoms, constantly warring with one another, and perennially divided. Colombian infighting is partly explicable by geography. The Andes divides into three huge mountain ranges at Colombia’s southern border, from where they run north to the Caribbean Sea. The mountains have long hindered communications and trade within and beyond Colombia’s borders. They also create great varieties of climate, from the valley savannah to deserts and high mountain plains, which support such a wide range of crops that until the twentieth century most cities didn’t need to engage in trade with neighbouring cities because everything they needed could be grown locally.
So Colombia won its independence from Spain as a nation of regions, over which the state found it hard to impose its laws. The government has always had to negotiate with powerful regional elites. Until the 1920s, Colombia exported less than any other Latin American nation; since state coffers were dependent on taxes on trade, the central government was one of the poorest in Latin America. The capital that the Spanish settlers founded at Santa Fe de Bogotá has grown dramatically since the 1950s, but until that decade the city housed a much smaller proportion of the nation’s people than other Latin American capitals. Go south or east from Bogotá and you soon find towns where roads, hospitals, schools and police stations have never existed (until recently, the same could be said for parts of Bogotá itself).
David Hutchinson is a British banker who was kidnapped by FARC guerrillas in 2002. He spent a year living in the forgotten hinterland of the country. ‘We sit here in the middle of Bogotá and we can’t see the FARC or the kidnap victims, but if you’re out there in the hills, you can see the lights of Bogotá. You know where your house is, and what your people are doing. Your family can’t see you but you can see them, so it’s like a one-way mirror. Behind the mirror is over half the territory of Colombia, where the state can’t see anything. Nobody ever saw us, and that’s not at night. That’s during the daytime. We walked over the Andes for day after day. No aeroplane came, no satellite saw us, nobody came and killed us. Nothing at all.’
For the government truly to exert its sovereignty throughout its territory, it would have to develop the many parts of Colombia where there are no viable concerns save the production of oxygen. Instead, the vacuum has been filled by private armies of paramilitaries (who collaborate with whoever makes up the local elite), or guerrillas (who do not). The remote areas these illegal armed groups run are often well suited to cocaine production, as well as gun-running, emerald smuggling and the massacre of obstructive miners and farmers. For many local honchos, accommodating paramilitary death squads and drug traffickers has been an acceptable price to pay for the pacification of the countryside and access to its goldmines, oilfields, forests and pastures.
Colombia has been plagued by violence since its inception. Because the state was always weak, Colombia’s Liberal and Conservative Parties became the principal sources of authority, patronage and protection. Both parties mobilized all classes, and once in power catered only to their own. This pragmatic clientelism goes a long way to explain the conflicts of today. Prudence dictates that people try to get along with whoever is in charge, regardless of ideology, be it the FARC, the army or the paramilitaries.28
I asked Congressman Luis Almario Rojas about his day-to-day life in the department of Caquetá. ‘The state has a presence in Caquetá, but people who work in local government have to put up with constant harassment from the guerrillas, and fire-fights between them and the paramilitaries as they struggle for territory. In 1995, the guerrillas created an underground Bolivarian political project, and they told the Mayor [of Florencia, the departmental capital] that anyone who didn’t join them would have to leave town. That lost them a lot of support from the local people, and made for problems with both the Liberal Party under the Turbay family, and the Conservatives, under me. The leader of the Turbays was killed, and since then the guerrillas have tried to kill me more than ten times. It’s a miracle that I’ve survived for this long. The paramilitaries and the drug traffickers have money down here, but they don’t have any political power. That may change, as people say that they financed some politicians’ electoral campaigns, in return for being allowed to do business.’
Laws passed in Bogotá don’t carry much weight in places like Caquetá. Of course, lip service is paid to the law, but there is a huge gap between the formal rules laid out in the Constitution, and the informal web of money and power by which the country is actually run. Irrespective of the illegal drugs industry, Colombia has yet to build a society in which all its people can depend on the rule of law. The vitality of the guerrilla insurgency, paramilitarism and the cocaine business rests upon this fundamental disdain for the law.
‘We saw Pablo Escobar gunned down on television,’ US Republican Congressman Dan Burton said in an address he made to a congressional committee in 2002. ‘Everybody applauded and said “that’s the end of the Medellín cartel”. But it wasn’t the end. When they kill one, there are ten or twenty or fifty waiting to take his place. You know why? Because there’s so much money to be made. We go into drug eradication and we go into rehabilitation and we go into education, and the drug problem continues to increase, and it continues to cost us not billions of dollars, but trillions. Trillions!’29
One of the traffickers waiting to step into Pablo Escobar’s shoes was Juan Carlos Ramirez Abadia, alias ‘Chupeta’ (Lollipop). Reading the details of his career and eventual arrest, you can’t help commiserating with exasperated Americans such as Bruce Willis and Dan Burton. Chupeta got his start in the cocaine business in 1985, while working as a jockey riding paso fino horses for the heads of the Cali cartel, Miguel and Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela. By the time he was arrested in Brazil in August 2007, he had risen to become one of the leading members of the Norte del Valle cartel, with a personal fortune (probably under-) estimated at £900 million. Crucially, when the police arrested Chupeta, they also confiscated his laptop, which provided them with a remarkably clear picture of a contemporary large-scale cocaine-smuggling operation. Once the cocaine left Chupeta’s jungle laboratories, it was taken to the coast under the protection of Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) paramilitaries and loaded on to boats that carried an average of ten tons of cocaine per trip. The year 2004 was Chupeta’s most successful: he exported 122 tons of cocaine, which means that he controlled a fifth of the Colombian cocaine business. Chupeta employed 400 people, often exporting in concert with family members or paramilitary chiefs such as Ramón Isaza, tellingly also known as ‘Medio Tiempo’ (Part-time). Chupeta cleared an average of £35 million in profits a month.
It has been estimated that Colo
mbian cocaine cartels spend £50 million on bribes to officials each year.30 The reach of Chupeta’s bribes was quite amazing. Since the police relied on the Agustín Codazzi Geographic Institute for the maps they needed to raid Chupeta’s jungle labs and stashes, Chupeta paid one of the Institute’s functionaries £2,000 a month to be kept informed of any police enquiries.31 He paid £2,500 a month to a mobile phone company engineer to let him know when his calls were being traced or intercepted. He typically paid £7,700 every time he needed to have a police roadblock lifted to allow his cocaine consignments to pass through. Once his merchandise was at sea, he had the benefit of dozens of maps showing the coordinates of the Navy vessels sent to intercept his shipments, secured thanks to a £35,000 bribe of a naval officer. In the run-up to Christmas 2004, Chupeta spent £1.4 million on presents, including gifts ‘for our friends in the intelligence services’. No one seemed able to resist his bribes. ‘Payment for dropping a news item and handing over video footage,’ reads one entry in his computer records. He paid a district attorney £13,000 to drop a case against him, and £7,700 to a prison service functionary to have one of his friends transferred to another prison. When he needed to change his identity, he paid an official at his local registry office £78,000. Dozens of soldiers and sailors, senior officers and judges took his bribes, and one hundred state employees received regular monthly payments for their collusion in the smooth running of his business.
Chupeta was also murderous. At the end of 2003, his arch-rival Victor Patiño Fomeque was extradited to the United States. As part of the plea-bargaining process, Patiño Fomeque told the DEA all he knew about Chupeta’s business. Over the eighteen months that followed, Chupeta had 150 people executed by any one of a team of 120 sicarios, who were paid a total of £779,000. The victims included thirty-five members of Patiño Fomeque’s family, as well as the lawyers, business associates and sicarios who worked for him.
Still more shocking is that for twenty-two years Chupeta successfully evaded arrest. The case against him was hampered by the authorities’ dependence on bribing informers, but even when they had him in their sights, their operations were constantly sabotaged by spies in the anti-narcotics police. It took a team of five ‘bribe-proof’ police officers a year to catch up with him. Once the police had arrested him and worked their way through his computer records, they found that Chupeta had laundered the proceeds of his cocaine smuggling through dozens of front companies. Once ‘clean’, the profits were invested in legal companies, including leading Colombian supermarkets and car dealerships, or simply paid into the accounts of prominent businessmen for safe-keeping. The police raided six huge stashes of cocaine in middle-class neighbourhoods of Cali, impounding £45 million in cash in the process. Three hundred of Chupeta’s properties and front companies, with a value of over £200 million, were identified and confiscated. All this was only possible because Chupeta kept such comprehensive computer records, and because the police happened to find his laptop. Even with such unprecedented access to his records, the police have yet to recover £200 million in cash, believed to be buried somewhere in the jungle. Congressman Dan Burton will be galled to know that Chupeta will inevitably have been replaced and that his business will be alive and well under the leadership of another capo.32
Mafia culture has deep roots in Colombia, which is unsurprising given the country’s long history of lawlessness. Mafia culture seems to thrive wherever the law is weak. In rural communities from Mexico to Pakistan, wherever the state is distant and strange, mafiosi are seen as protectors of the people and as dispensers of justice.33 When local people refer to the local capo as ‘an honourable man’, they pay tribute to his role as an even-handed defender of public order. The capo does this not by arresting or imprisoning wrong-doers, but by intimidating and, when necessary, killing them. Outsiders will fear him, and call him a Mafioso, but those under his control and protection do not use the word. To them, it suggests delinquency and disorder, which is the polar opposite of what a true capo brings to his community.
The Colombian Mafia grew rich on contraband, which has been an important source of income since the days when the country was part of the Spanish Empire. The city of Medellín was made notorious by Pablo Escobar, but even in the 1950s the city’s laboratories were producing heroin, morphine and cocaine to be smuggled across the Caribbean to Cuba, where it would be sold to American mobsters like Meyer Lansky. In those days, drug distribution in the United States was entirely controlled by Cubans, but after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the paisas (as natives of Medellín are called) moved the base of their operations from Havana to Miami, and from the late 1960s they came to control more of the distribution end too, muscling aside the Cubans, at times with great violence. More recently, the United States government has expressed fears that Cuba post-Castro might become a safe haven for drug traffickers. This seems a grim irony, since it was precisely Cuba’s status as a playground for the rich and criminal of the United States that made its people so ready to support Fidel Castro’s revolution. In publicly worrying about drug control in a future, presumably free-market Cuba, the United States implicitly acknowledges that the only government that has succeeded in quelling the smugglers, corrupters and gangsters that have become so powerful across the Caribbean since 1980 is the authoritarian one currently in power in Cuba.
In the 1970s, long before it started to make fortunes from cocaine, the Colombian Mafia got rich from la bonanza marimbera (the marijuana boom). The spur to growth was the pressure then US President Richard Nixon put on the Mexicans to spray herbicidal paraquat over the marijuana fields of Mexico. This pushed cultivation south: by the time the Mexican fumigation programme drew to a close, 75 per cent of the marijuana smoked in the United States was being grown on the north coast of Colombia.34
When demand for cocaine in the United States started to grow in the late 1970s, two cartels met it. The Medellín cartel was headed by Pablo Escobar, who was instrumental in bringing Mafia culture from the village to the comunas (shanty communities) of the city. Capos like Escobar took charge of communities that had until their arrival been completely lawless, imposing order and managing all types of criminal enterprise. Pablo Escobar built a neighbourhood for the poor of Medellín, which he named after himself, and football pitches for the children. On one occasion, he showered the residents of a poor neighbourhood in Medellín with dollar bills thrown from his helicopter. For many of the millions of Colombians of Escobar’s generation who had been uprooted from the countryside and transplanted to the comunas, the cocaine traffickers were their only guardians. They would cheer the capos as they railed against the indifference of the patrician elite that ruled the city, the corruption of the politicians and the duplicity of the gringos. Escobar is remembered with respect by many people in the comunas of Medellín. They leave his graveside clutching handfuls of earth, speaking of the ‘miracles’ Pablo performed for the city, and praying that he continue to protect the poor from heaven.
Escobar’s problems began when he tried to break the Mafioso mould and join the ranks of the Colombian elite. He was treated as an unwelcome step-child, and the patricians’ rejection of the rising narcobourgeoisie goes some way towards explaining why Escobar launched a wave of urban terrorism against them in the late 1980s. Escobar had shown that he could bribe his way through any Colombian court, so when the Americans started bringing pressure to bear, the government resolved to extradite him to stand trial in the United States. For Escobar, this was akin to excommunication. It provoked a bloody war between a Medellín cartel front organization called Los Extraditables (the Extraditables) and the Colombian army and police. Escobar made bombings and assassinations everyday occurrences, borrowing from the revenge tactics practised by the Sicilian Mafia, and the norms of Colombia’s long-running dirty war. In 1986, 3,500 people were killed in Medellín, a city with just two million inhabitants: that year, Colombia had the highest murder rate in the world. The Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla had championed the
extradition treaties, and he was the first senior politician to be killed by Escobar’s hitmen. In 1989, a sicario in the pay of Escobar killed Luis Carlos Galán, another tough opponent of the traffickers, who had been widely tipped to win the presidential elections. Under enormous pressure from the Extraditables’ bombing campaign, the Constitutional Court rejected the extradition treaty in 1991.
Sir Keith Morris, who was British ambassador to Colombia at the time of Pablo Escobar’s death in 1993, described the moment when he began to question his commitment to the war on drugs. ‘I started to have my doubts immediately after Escobar was killed, when the American machine went into briefing us that “We’ve got rid of Escobar, but just as much cocaine is coming out of Colombia, so let’s go on to Cali.” All these people had died, and Escobar had been killed, but if that effort hadn’t had any effect on the cocaine business, this suggested that it was all much more complicated.’ The tactics of the Cali cartel were a novel departure from the Mafia tradition upheld by the capos of Medellín. Under the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, the Cali cartel bought its way into the city’s banks, using its money to ingratiate itself into the local business community. Before long, everyone in Cali seemed to be working for the narcos. Lawyers, accountants and bankers handled their proceeds; others supplied their retail services, worked on their construction projects or farmed their land. This put the people of Cali in a strange position, at once sufficiently removed from cocaine trafficking to escape the disapprobation of the DEA, yet wholly dependent on the rise of cocaine’s buccaneering second generation of traffickers. Many caleños (as natives of Cali are known) approved of the Rodríguez Orejuelas’ enlightened patronage of their city. Of course the cartel meted out violence, but it was of a discreet, functional kind, dictated by their need to control an illegal business, with few of the gruesome decorative flourishes indulged in by the Medellín cartel.
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