Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  Yet if the DEA, the Colombian press and government are to be believed, the FARC also own cocaine laboratories, trade processed cocaine for weapons and have been running drugs into the United States.53 Since 2002, the DEA has indicted sixty-three members of the FARC on cocaine trafficking charges, and in 2006 it indicted a further fifty members, charging them with importing cocaine worth $25 billion into the United States.54 The security forces believe that some of the larger Mexican cartels get over half of the cocaine they ship to the United States from the FARC directly or through intermediaries.55

  Most observers, however, regard trafficking and foreign sales—the most profitable rungs of the cocaine production ladder—as being beyond the FARC’s reach. They are more interested in protecting coca fields and trafficking routes, and using intimidation and violence to control people and institutions. Many of the smuggling corridors running east through the department of Casanare to the border with Venezuela, and onward to the European market, lie in FARC hands. Many of those running west to the Pacific port of Buenaventura and the North American market are in the hands of the paramilitaries. Both the FARC and their paramilitary rivals have become more involved in protection and control for fear of the power that dominance would give to the other. When the southern department of Putumayo came to replace the eastern department of Guaviare as Colombia’s biggest coca-growing region, the paramilitaries followed the business, knowing that otherwise it would be entirely controlled by the FARC.

  Cocaine has become currency for both the FARC and the AUC. An M-60 machine gun can be had for 10 kg of coca paste, or £6,000. The same corridors that carry cocaine down from the mountains to the ports are also used to carry arms to the guerrillas and paramilitaries battling for control of the trade. In 2005, Honduran authorities found a cache of Indonesian weaponry due to be smuggled to FARC operatives on the border with Brazil, and then onwards to the fronts in the south of Colombia where the fighting is fiercest.56

  The cocaine business has allowed the FARC to become a self-sufficient, well-equipped army. But it has also kept the guerrillas on a permanent war footing and put their relations with the people they profess to defend under enormous strain. These days FARC policy runs in tandem not with poor farmers or cocaleros, but with the demands of a war economy. Indigenous communities in the resguardos (reservations) of Cauca complain that FARC units force them to grow coca. Farmers growing coca in areas controlled by paramilitaries are considered to be military targets by the guerrillas. Support for the FARC has fallen away as their terrorism targets even the most menial state officials, and FARC kidnappers target the middle class. ‘The term “terrorist” was not foisted on the FARC by the Americans,’ says Joaquín Villalobos. ‘The FARC earned it by killing innocent civilians. The FARC are as hated as the paramilitaries, as proven by the millions who marched in protest at the FARC in February and March 2008. No Latin American government has ever been able to mobilize so many people against an insurgency. Usually it was the insurgents marching in the streets against the government.’57

  But Villalobos has also said that none of this should detract from the FARC’s fundamentally political purpose. He describes their involvement in the cocaine trade as ‘a structural consequence of the Colombian conflict, one which has also contaminated the paramilitaries and much of Colombia’s political class’. The simple bitter truth is that only illegal armies can control such a huge, lucrative business. In these circumstances, any organized political violence, whatever its intentions, ends up being corrupted by criminal violence.58 By one account, the FARC make £10 million a year from taxes on legal businesses.59

  Had Plan Colombia been able to put an end to coca production, it would also have dried up much of the pool from which the FARC sustains itself. Aerial fumigation of the coca fields has failed to do that, so the next best option is to drive the FARC from the coca fields. Plan Colombia insists on a southern push against the FARC, but even if it succeeds, it will still leave coca cultivation intact. There is no evidence that coca fields controlled by paramilitaries are any easier to destroy than those controlled by the FARC. More importantly, neither the failed fumigation strategy nor the southern push does anything to tackle cocaine production, most of which is not controlled by the FARC but the Mafia. They and their allies among Colombia’s politicians, paramilitaries and army have escaped the attention of the architects of Plan Colombia. Both the United States’ own agencies and the United Nations have consistently reported that the paramilitaries are far more deeply involved than the FARC in producing and shipping cocaine. In the latest chapter in the long-running struggle between foreign banana companies and their workers, the American banana-growing firm Chiquita Brands International was found to have paid paramilitaries $1.7 million for their help in putting down banana workers’ unions on the Gulf of Urabá between 1997 and 2004.60 Chiquita’s banana transport ships have also been found to have been used to smuggle cocaine into Europe. More than a ton of cocaine was seized from seven Chiquita ships in 1997, though this was attributed to lax Colombian security rather than to Chiquita itself.

  This begs the question why there isn’t a war on narco-paramilitaries. US policy towards Colombia is marked by two contradictory trends. Although Colombia gets much less attention from the United States press and politicians than it did in the late 1990s, the size and purpose of the military aid provided are expanding rapidly. The question of just how much impact the Plan has had on the price, purity and availability of cocaine has been neatly side-stepped. Since, in truth, most of that impact has been absorbed by the drugs trade, the Americans have redefined just what it was they set out to do in Colombia. In a Miami Herald op-ed of April 2006, Nicholas Burns, then number three at the State Department, asserted that ‘the United States’ investment in Colombia is paying off. Colombia is clearly a better place than it was before we embarked on our joint undertaking to win Colombia back from the criminal gangs that were destroying the country.’ Kevin Higgins, the military adviser at the US Embassy, also seemed happier talking about Plan Colombia’s impact on the FARC than its impact on the cocaine trade. ‘Kidnappings are down from 3,500 in 2001 to 180 in 2007. In 2001, the FARC attacked 120 towns, but so far this year only four towns have been attacked,’ he told me.

  The United States’ support for the Colombian government in its struggle with rural guerrillas is not new. They supported Bogotá through much of the Cold War period, when communism was supposedly seeping into the Americans’ backyard, starting with Plan Lazo, a military offensive against the FARC, launched in 1964. Sir Keith Morris watched the drug war escalate from the British Embassy in Bogotá. ‘In 1989, when the Cold War came to an end, the different US agencies were fighting for budgets, and they suddenly became interested in the drug war. The Pentagon and the CIA moved into the drugs field, which had always been the DEA’s remit. In my time, twelve different US agencies started running anti-narcotics programmes, until Mr Osama bin Laden came along and gave them something rather more urgent to do.’ The war on drugs has become entwined with broader aims, one of which is to keep a heavy lid on a simmering conflict, another of which is to keep the US military in the style to which it has grown accustomed.

  Alberto Rueda, one-time consultant to the Colombian Ministry of Defence, told me what he remembers of American thinking before 9/11. ‘In 1999, the Pentagon was talking about the American arms industry being in crisis. Clinton pushed through the biggest defence budget the country had seen since the days of Ronald Reagan. It was an enormous budget, and Plan Colombia was part of it.’ Stipulating that only US defence contractors could supply the equipment needed to beef up the Colombian army ensured that 70 per cent of the budget for Plan Colombia never left the United States.61 It was a much-needed shot in the arm to the big arms suppliers. ‘The defence lobby is superlatively important to the politics of the United States,’ Rueda went on. ‘Any contract worth upwards of $100 million is worth fighting for, so of course they want to maintain their Colombian contract. Colombia has be
come an unofficial US military air base.’

  After 9/11, Congress passed legislation which allowed anti-drug budgets to be used for anti-terrorist operations in Colombia. So when the Colombian government’s peace talks with the FARC collapsed in February 2002, army generals in Colombia and the United States were given the green light for the Americans to beef up Colombia’s armed forces in preparation for a final showdown with the FARC. The Americans appear torn between their belated recognition of the extent to which poverty and instability in Latin America impact on life in the United States, and their instinct for military solutions to social problems. In 2003, the Organization of American States redefined the concept of national security to mean ‘human security’, to which poverty, gang violence, terrorism and natural disasters could all be considered threats, and in defence of which the US military can legitimately argue for intervention. As one US soldier put it, ‘when the best tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail’.

  The Colombian government’s defenders in Washington and London admit that terrible abuses have been committed against the population in the name of maintaining the status quo, but argue that those responsible have usually been illegal paramilitaries. Now that the Americans are building up the Colombian army and the paramilitaries are being reined in, the army is committing more of those abuses.

  The army is full of earnest young Colombians determined to rescue their country’s tarnished reputation, but their valiance is all too often skewed by their officers’ murderous hatred of communists, or by plain corruption. In 2007, there were nineteen cases of possible extra-judicial executions committed by the 15th Mobile Brigade alone. In 2008, Sergeant Alexander Rodríguez of the 15th Mobile Brigade told the Colombian weekly Semana that ‘at the beginning of November 2007, Sergeant Ordóñez went around getting 20,000 pesos from each soldier, to pay for the pistol that they had planted on the guy they’d shot. Ordóñez said to them “if you pay up, well and good, if not, we’ll leave it at that, but I’ll give five days off to anyone who does”.’62

  When the cartelitos fight one another, rogue elements of the army, local politicians and paramilitaries will often take the side of whoever happens to pay better. In Guaitarilla in the south-western department of Nariño, the army wiped out an entire unit of the anti-narcotics police in 2004, supposedly because they mistook them for FARC guerrillas, but actually because the army was working for one of the small cartels. As coca cultivation and cocaine production have moved into the south-western departments of Nariño, Valle and Cauca, the Third Brigade of the army has been corrupted by Diego Montoya of the Norte del Valle cartel. Whatever the size of the bone ‘Don Diego’ tossed to the brigade’s commanding officers, it must have been sufficiently succulent for them to ignore the $5 million bounty on the don’s head. The same might be surmised from the case of Colonel Bayron Carvajal of the High Mountain Brigade, whose connivance has ensured that the trafficking corridor between Norte del Valle and the port of Buenaventura stays in Diego Montoya’s hands. The High Mountain Brigade has received training from the British Ministry of Defence, supposedly to improve their human rights record.63

  Paramilitarism is the Janus face of the Colombian army: it grows stronger when the army hierarchy sees government policy towards the guerrilla insurgency as tremulous or irresolute. Like Colombia’s Mafia and guerrillas, its private armies pre-date the arrival of the cocaine trade. Cattle-ranching families have long hired gunmen to defend their herds against rustlers, and their paso fino horses against extortionists. Before the cocaine trade took off, the FARC financed itself by kidnapping wealthy cattle-ranchers for ransom. In the mid-1980s, the FARC started kidnapping cocaine traffickers too, so landowners and traffickers organized ‘self-defence forces’, well-funded private armies that could count on the backing of the Colombian army. The AUC (United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia) was a loose confederation of these private armies that united around a programme of weeding out those they considered FARC sympathizers, which effectively meant anyone critical of the government, including communists, trade unionists, students and journalists. AUC paramilitaries also took a crypto-fascistic line on ‘undesirables’ such as drug users, petty thieves and street children.

  Within two years of its formation in 1997, the AUC was an aggressive, fully fledged army, largely financed by cocaine traffickers. It went on the offensive against the guerrillas, and took control of most of the north of the country, at a terrible cost in human life and livelihoods. Like the Mafia, the AUC is part of a long tradition of private violence and ancestral conflicts, many of which go back to the birth of the Colombian nation in the early nineteenth century.64 AUC members might venerate the Virgin Mary, but their sense of justice extends no further than vengeance. As the writer Gilles Lipotevsky has observed, ‘it takes excessive pain, blood and flesh to abide by the code of vengeance’. In towns like Sincelejo in the northern department of Sucre, locals talk of narco-paramili-polismo: rule by an alliance of cocaine traffickers, paramilitaries and politicians.65 In 2005, the remains of 500 victims of a local paramilitary boss known as ‘Cadena’ (Chain) were disinterred. Sincelejo had once been the centre of vibrant farmers’ groups and community associations, but most of their leaders are now dead. ‘There is no civil society here,’ said a survivor.

  Because the Colombian government shares the paramilitaries’ hatred of the FARC, it turned a blind eye to the AUC’s second motive, which was to get rich quick. AUC leader Carlos Castaño revealed that three quarters of the AUC’s funds came from the production and trafficking of cocaine. Like the guerrillas, the paramilitaries went through bitter internal struggles over their relationship to the cocaine business. Castaño made his fortune working with the Norte del Valle cartel, but he was first and foremost an anti-communist, who saw the cocaine business as a means to a political end. When the AUC struck a deal with the government, by which the paramilitaries would leave the fighting to the regular armed forces, its political task was complete, and Castaño’s card was marked. He was killed shortly afterwards by his brother Vicente.

  The AUC was ready to demobilize. The battle to wrest control of the north of the country from the guerrillas had been won. In the course of the 1990s, AUC commanders and cocaine traffickers had acted as the advance guard for the return of the army and police to regions once held by the guerrillas. In the process, they had grown phenomenally rich, buying or stealing huge swathes of land in the Atlantic coast departments, the eastern plains that run to the border with Brazil and in the valley of the River Magdalena that flows from the Andes to the Caribbean Sea. A quarter of the agricultural land of Colombia is now thought to be in the hands of cocaine traffickers. Though valued at $2.4 billion, much of this land came cheap, because it had been controlled by guerrillas and only the cocaine barons had the private armies needed to resist extortion or kidnap by the FARC. This gargantuan land grab came at the expense of the peasant smallholders, who were expelled or reduced to penury, while much of the land they once owned today doubles as infrastructure for cocaine laboratories and landing strips.

  Former cocaine trafficker Fabio Ochoa Vasco was particularly well placed to witness just what this demobilization of the AUC would mean: he was with Colombia’s biggest cocaine trafficker at the time. ‘I was with Salvatore Mancuso on his “05” farm when these two guys from Medellín showed up. They proposed a peace process. The AUC were very happy with it, and started to get everyone together so that they’d vote for Alvaro Uribe. They explained that they’d made some space for anyone who had problems in the United States, and that if you were accused of being in the AUC, they’d save you.’66

  So former AUC heavyweights lent their support to Alvaro Uribe Velez’s bid for the presidency, and after the 2002 elections a new political map emerged. Uribe Velez got the presidency and the AUC got the Justice and Peace Law of 2005, by which paramilitary fighters were to be ‘reinserted’ into civilian life and left to enjoy the gains they’d made through theft, plunder and cocaine tr
afficking.67 Their senior commanders would have to do some jail time, but most of them would be free within five years. Many have already announced their intention to seek seats in Congress.

  In January 2007, Salvatore Mancuso, the de facto leader of the AUC following the death of Carlos Castaño, became the first senior paramilitary commander to confess to kidnappings and mass murder. Mancuso, who at the time of his arrest was thought to be exporting 10 tons of cocaine a month, confessed to only a fraction of his crimes and named only deceased collaborators, among them the head of the Army’s Fourth Brigade.68 Few of the victims of paramilitary violence are prepared to testify in court; even after demobilization, it is just too dangerous to do so. As a result, 90 per cent of the 30,000 ex-paramilitaries to have demobilized to date will escape all charges, and may even get to keep the land they stole.69 Nevertheless, some victims have testified to rape, torture and murder by paramilitaries. Maria Helena of Ituango, Antioquia, described how, at the age of fifteen, she was raped for over a week by seven paramilitaries, despite being eight months pregnant, while her boyfriend was tied to a tree. After testifying she asked, ‘what good will it do for me to have told you all this?’70

  It was a question on the lips of many Colombians as the Justice and Peace law was debated in Congress. But when first the Constitutional Court and then the Supreme Court challenged the terms of the peace deal with the paramilitaries, the government was forced to backtrack, and the demobilized paramilitary leaders gradually realized that the deal they had struck with the government would not be fully honoured. This did not bode well for Uribe Velez’s much-vaunted demobilization process. Evidence of the cosy alliance of cocaine traffickers and local politicians who backed the AUC and then negotiated their demobilization began to emerge in 2006, following the impounding of a laptop computer belonging to a senior paramilitary commander known as Jorge 40. His files contained records of the Ralito Accord, an agreement reached in 2001 between regional politicians and paramilitaries on the Atlantic Coast to preserve the paramilitary project even while officially demobilizing. The upshot of the accord was the assassination of 558 left-wing activists and trade unionists in the department of Atlantico between 2003 and 2005, and the systematic plundering of the department’s budget, which was either pocketed or went to finance future paramilitary operations.71