Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  Yet both cartels had one foot in the past and another in the future, oscillating between ancestral and consumerist in their ostentatious displays of power. They indulged in the landowners’ traditional love of paso fino horses and stud farms, but they also employed narquitectos to design their homes. Squandering money on fripperies, while seeking the blessing of the Catholic Church, was common to many Colombians who felt both ambitious and excluded. The money was wasted if it wasn’t on display for all to see. The cartels were incredibly violent, not just because they had empires to defend, but because violence had become a way of announcing their arrival as new members of the elite.

  Watching the way in which the Medellín cartel was brought down, the Cali cartel learnt not to take on the forces of the state. The whistle was also blown, though not for long, on the traffickers’ funding of political candidates, a practice that had long been suspected, but which came to light only after Ernesto Samper was elected president in 1994. The pressure that the United States put on Samper after he was found to have received payments from the Cali cartel culminated in the United States’ decertification of Colombia as a willing partner in their war on drugs. Samper could not afford to see his country classified as a narco-state; he pushed through a constitutional amendment that once again authorized the extradition of traffickers to stand trial in the United States.

  After a concerted campaign led by the Americans, most of the first generation of Colombian capos had either been jailed or killed by 1997. But the cocaine business rebounded. ‘Those who took over weren’t going to advertise themselves,’ Keith Morris told me. ‘Nor were they going to try to build huge organizations, because they knew that that was very dangerous. There’s been a lot of talk about the Norte del Valle cartel, but I think that’s a hang-over. In general, there has been a multiplicity of small enterprises, run by people without any track record, which has made it much more difficult to tackle the top end of the business.’ The 200 cartelitos, or mini-cartels, that run the cocaine business today have learnt to outsource operations to sub-contractors who have little knowledge of the rest of the organization. Breaking the monopoly held first by the Medellín cartel and then by the Cali cartel has also allowed Colombia’s guerrillas and paramilitaries to become more closely involved in the cocaine business. Some traffickers have drawn closer to the paramilitaries, but others have no political affiliations. All too aware of the risk run by being flashy or defiant, the current generation of cocaine traffickers has adapted to survive. In doing so, they have become almost invisible.

  Ordinary Colombians’ attitudes to cocaine are contradictory. There have been plenty of laws passed to combat the drugs trade in Colombia, and yet there has never been a thorough debate about the drugs trade in the national Congress.35 The government talks about how the trade funds the FARC guerrillas, but the endless public information announcements on Colombian television make little mention of the involvement of paramilitaries and politicians in the cocaine business. Colombians see cocaine as a dangerous drug when it is smoked as basuco (a crude by-product of coca paste, similar to crack) by homeless street children, but not when consumed in powder form by prominent newspaper editors. In this sense, perceptions of the drug differ little from those prevailing in London. Certain drug users should be punished and the FARC must be defeated, but few seem to realize just how intractable the cocaine trade has become.

  Considering that Colombia is a leading producer of cocaine, marijuana and, until recently, heroin, and that the laws governing drug consumption are as selectively enforced as the rest of Colombia’s laws, it comes as a surprise to find how few Colombians actually use drugs. Just 1.5 per cent of them have tried cocaine, largely because it’s still too expensive for most of them, but also because it is widely regarded as a rich man’s drug, strictly for export to the fantasy lands of Europe and the United States. For those left out of the fantasy, there are local hallucinogens, marijuana, legal prescription pills and basuco. About 5 per cent of Colombians use legal tranquillizers, sedatives and amphetamines, which is about the same proportion that use marijuana, the main difference being that two thirds of users of legal drugs are women. The most popular drug among young people in Medellín is Rohypnol, which is said to assuage the feelings of guilt that follow acts of violence, and is used by novices to ward off doubt and stiffen resolve. But Colombia’s drug of choice is alcohol. Ninety per cent of Colombians have tried it, and 20 per cent of them are thought to be alcoholics.36

  How much of a problem need the cocaine business be in Colombia, now that those engaged in it have learnt to stay ‘under the radar’? In the 1980s, many Colombians regarded cocaine as a problem only for Americans, and as such, just deserts for a country that paid peanuts for legitimate Colombian exports. Proceeds from the cocaine trade buffered Colombia’s economy from the worst of the external debt crisis that afflicted many Latin American countries in the 1980s. For the middle class at least, wages kept steady and living standards rose. The cocaine trade has also acted as an escape valve, absorbing some of the manpower left idle by the collapse of the coffee economy. Little wonder then, that plenty of city dwellers were initially happy to turn a blind eye to the traffickers.

  In the course of a conversation with Nicolas, a former FARC guerrilla, I asked him how he thought most Colombians felt about the cocaine business today. ‘People in Colombia have got used to the drugs business. They don’t openly criticize it, firstly for fear of the war lords, but secondly because unconsciously people know that narco-traffic plays a part in all aspects of economic life in Colombia. This is a subsistence economy, but even countries like Argentina and Brazil, which have some technology and benefit from more favourable trade treaties, don’t have economies as strong as ours, because behind the legal economy, we have narco-traffic.’

  Between 1987 and 1995, the sums entering the Colombian economy every year thanks to the cocaine trade were thought to oscillate between £588 million and £1.2 billion, which is about 50 per cent of the total sum invested in Colombia by foreign companies every year.37 This would suggest that cocaine has become a mainstay of the Colombian economy, but in fact, even in the boom days of the late 1980s, income from drug sales was thought to be equivalent to just 5 per cent of Colombia’s GDP, and had fallen to 2.3 per cent by 1998.38 Whatever its legal status, cocaine is essentially a cheap agricultural commodity, and like many other cheap commodities produced for export, 75 per cent of the profits from cocaine production are invested abroad.39 After all, illegal businesspeople invest their money with the same rationale as their legal counterparts, and the United States generally offers better returns on investments than does Colombia.

  Cocaine is much cheaper and of much higher quality than it was when the war on drugs was launched.40 As a result, proceeds from the drugs trade as a proportion of Colombian, Peruvian or Bolivian GDP are considerably lower than they were in the 1980s. Once the US dollar’s fall in value is factored into the equation, the real fall in the value of the cocaine market to Latin American wholesalers is about 90 per cent. Just 1 per cent of the retail price of cocaine in the US goes to the coca farmer in Colombia. Four per cent goes to its cocaine producers and 20 per cent goes to its smugglers. The real winners are the distributors in the countries where cocaine is retailed, generally the United States or Europe.41 Seventy-five per cent of the retail price of cocaine never leaves the country in which it was realized.

  The little money that does make it back to Colombia has a destabilizing effect. Local economies become dependent on the fortunes of gangsters: Cali and Medellín both went into recession when their cartels were dismantled. Colombia imports more than it needs, because imports are a good way to launder ill-gotten gains. This undermines domestic producers who can’t compete with cheap imports. The flow of dollars into the country also keeps the Colombian peso artificially high, which makes Colombian exports more expensive. Colombia has enormous tourist potential, but it remains unrealized because most governments advise their citizens against going
there. The violence also puts off investors and has spurred the flight of domestic capital from Colombia to Miami. Moreover, Colombians who choose not to follow their money north have to spend vast amounts of money on private security, partly because the law is so ineffectual, and partly because the cocaine business is so violent.

  Whatever economic benefits the cocaine business might bring to Colombia are outweighed by the deficits. It is all the more surprising then that although the Colombian government is committed to the fumigation of the coca fields, it seems less than willing to break the links between cocaine dollars and the legal economy. So-called San Andresito shopping complexes flourish in every Colombian city, selling contraband, paying no taxes, and often laundering millions of dollars derived from cocaine sales. Stories of how drugs money has been washed through legal businesses like Gino Pascalli, a big Colombian clothing company, and conglomerates like Grajales, the Sindicato Añtioqueno and Grupo Aval have made waves in the Colombian press. Yet the traffickers’ infiltration of Colombia’s financial system, banks and construction business has gone largely unchallenged. Proceeds from drug trafficking are often invested in real estate, yet the Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes (the Colombian version of the DEA) is grossly underfunded, and functions at best as an incompetent estate agency. It took the DNE ten years to confiscate properties belonging to Pablo Escobar.

  One of the first signs that there might be an ulterior motive to Plan Colombia has been the US State Department officials’ glassy-eyed refusal to admit that they are failing to tackle coca production. ‘For the first time in twenty years, we are on a path to realize dramatic reductions in cocaine production in Colombia, and a reduction in the world’s supply of cocaine,’ insisted the United States drug tsar John Walters in June 2004. ‘This will contribute substantially to achieving the administration’s goal of reducing US cocaine consumption by 25 per cent by 2006. The challenge before us is to stay the course.’42 ‘If support for fumigation collapse, and if we stopped spraying, cultivation would go up to 600,000 hectares, and we’d see a real worldwide problem,’ fumigation pilot Lucho Salamanca told me. The governments of Colombia and the United States insist that without this aggressive law enforcement, demand for cocaine would explode. But this way of thinking side-steps the fact that world demand for cocaine is satisfied by about 200,000 hectares of coca, and has been, with little variation, since the late 1970s, in spite of the huge sums spent spraying the coca fields.43 Coca cultivation has been unaffected by the fumigation programme. In response, the White House has done its level best to make sure that its fumigation programme is unaffected by coca cultivation.

  Faced with uncomfortable facts, the governments of Colombia and the United States have found common cause in invoking a secular evil, intent on sabotaging what would otherwise be effective, rational policies. The term ‘narco-guerrilla’ was first coined by US ambassador to Colombia, Lewis Tambs. This elision of terms suits Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velez, who would like the defeat of the FARC to be his legacy. ‘With the FARC, the plan is to defeat them militarily, and then negotiate,’ Vice-President Francisco Santos told me. ‘But to do that you have to take away their main source of income, which is drugs traffic. It is part of the same fight.’

  Colombia is the only large Latin American country that has never had a genuinely populist government. Once in power, such movements often prove to be financially disastrous, but at least they release some of the tensions that accumulate in societies as hierarchical as that of Colombia.44 This lack of popular representation grows more pressing as the population increases—it has gone from 28 million in 1988 to 44 million today.45 The FARC has been fighting the Colombian state with varying degrees of intensity since 1964. Theirs is a struggle for land, resources and power, fought to put an end to the impoverishment of the mass of the people and the political exclusion maintained by traditional political elites. But they have never secured widespread support. Joaquín Villalobos is a former Salvadorean guerrilla whose interpretation of the FARC has been widely quoted in the Colombian press. ‘Since they were born with territory, they grew up to become more like a peasant self-defence force than an insurgency with a vision of political power,’ he has said. ‘For decades the FARC were a guerrilla force that was militarily and politically lazy, undoubtedly the most conservative insurgency on the whole continent, which has grown old in the depths of the Colombian countryside.’

  What is the FARC’s relationship to the cocaine business? Its guerrillas are active in two thirds of Colombia’s coca-growing municipalities.46 But most FARC fronts are active in municipalities where coca isn’t even grown.47 The party line on relations with the cocaine business hasn’t changed since 1997: ‘Our principles insist that we reject drug traffickers, because they are incompatible with democracy and the well-being of the Colombian people, and because drug trafficking generates corruption, impunity, criminality, and social breakdown, all of which have a particularly severe effect on the young people of the world.’48 In 1978, when representatives from the Medellín cartel first travelled down the River Caguan, distributing sacks of coca seeds to poor farmers, the FARC was very much against the cultivation of coca. But theirs was an impoverished and militarily weak organization that was in no position to arrest such a powerful economic impulse.49 Besides, the guerrillas are pragmatists; as they saw it, their role was to defend campesinos from landowners hungry for their land. In time, they saw that by defending the livelihoods of the cocaleros from the government and the United States, they could win a new base of support. In turn, many coca farmers welcomed the FARC’s presence because coca-growing had brought plentiful violence, and the guerrillas imposed some order on the trade.

  In the 1980s, the guerrillas flirted with joining the political mainstream, creating a new political party with the Colombian Communist Party, which they called the Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union). At the same time, encouraged by their ability to kidnap and extort financing from landowners, the FARC also started building a fighting army. They moved into the regions where oil and mineral wealth or coca fields are concentrated, expelling what police presence they found, and dipping into municipal coffers. In response, local landowners turned to the Mafia for help in tackling the FARC.50 The feud between the Mafia and the guerrillas was further aggravated when Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, a major Medellín cartel trafficker, refused to pay taxes to the FARC. The guerrillas burnt down some of his cocaine laboratories and in retaliation, Rodríguez Gacha set about killing activists from the Unión Patriótica.

  The Colombian establishment was divided over how best to respond to the rise of the UP. For every Congressman who saw the party’s electoral success as a sign that the guerrillas’ insurgency might be coming to an end, there was an army general who saw the party as a Trojan horse, from which the FARC would eventually burst to take power. In October 1987, a shadowy alliance of politicians and cocaine traffickers had the UP’s presidential candidate Jaime Pardo Leal killed. When the Communist Party’s Bernardo Jaramillo ran for the presidency on a UP ticket in 1990, they had him killed too. In the same year they blew up a plane in mid-flight, killing Carlos Pizarro, a former M-19 guerrilla who was also running for the presidency.51 Nobody has ever been prosecuted for these murders, or for the killing of any of the 3,500 UP members that followed.

  The new Constitution of 1991 had brought left-wing insurgent groups into the fold of mainstream political life. The FARC too were invited to join the new Constituent Assembly, but the door was slammed shut when the armed forces, which certainly didn’t want the guerrillas to join the mainstream, bombed the FARC’s headquarters at the Casa Verde. The annihilation of the UP, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the FARC’s split with the Colombian Communist Party and the bombing of its HQ all bolstered the FARC’s military wing. With a negotiated settlement now more distant than ever, the guerrillas committed themselves to taking power by force of arms. To buy those arms they would need resources; their opening came in the mid-1990s, with the fall
of first the Medellín and then the Cali cartels. ‘These ageing Colombian insurgents found themselves living in the very areas that had the most coca production in the world,’ says Joaquín Villalobos. ‘Since even the CIA was getting involved in the business, they started financing themselves from the drugs trade, launching a new wave of violence as an army in the service of narco-traffic.’ As the FARC’s coffers swelled, their ranks began to grow. By the time Plan Colombia was launched in 2000, the guerrillas were 18,000 strong, making them the largest insurgent army in the world and a credible threat to the Colombian government.

  In 1997, the DEA had reported that there was little evidence that the FARC were producing or trafficking in cocaine.52 ‘I asked these guys on the border who was financing the replanting,’ Than Christie, coca eradication policy officer at the US Embassy in Bogotá, told me when I spoke to him in September 2007. ‘They said that the FARC were paying them, and to a certain extent, telling them what to grow. Basically the FARC are charging taxes on the cultivation of coca and the production of coca base. But for the most part it’s not FARC chemists who are turning the base into cocaine.’