Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  The net kept widening: before long, more than sixty of Alvaro Uribe Velez’s supporters in Congress were under investigation for collusion with paramilitaries. In 1987, when Pablo Escobar was busily trying to turn Colombia into a narco-state, a scandal broke when it was revealed that one in ten members of Congress had links to traffickers.72 Today, it is thought that at least a third of the present Congress won their seats after making deals with paramilitaries and/or cocaine traffickers. In February 2007, Jorge Noguera, the former head of the DAS intelligence service, was arrested, accused of allowing paramilitaries to penetrate the service.73 Then Foreign Secretary Maria Consuelo Araujo resigned, as it transpired that her brother was one of the imprisoned senators, her father was on trial for kidnapping and murdering indigenous leaders, and her cousin stood accused of winning a provincial governorship by intimidating voters with paramilitary violence.

  It seems inconceivable that President Alvaro Uribe Velez, a key ally in the international war on drugs, was not aware of the relationship between his congressional supporters and cocaine-trafficking paramilitaries. But then, the President has long been suspected of ties to the cocaine business himself. His brother Santiago has been investigated on charges of cocaine trafficking, and has been associated with a paramilitary group known as the Twelve Apostles.74 José Ortulio Gaviria, a nephew of Pablo Escobar, is one of the president’s closest advisers. Alvaro Uribe Velez has brushed off all such talk as rumours and happenstance. What should we make, then, of a list of Colombian drug traffickers published by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency in 1991, in which one Alvaro Uribe Velez figures at number 82, described as ‘a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar’ and ‘dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín cartel at high government levels’?75

  The rhetoric of the war on drugs might suggest that the president should be extradited to Miami (many years ago, his father was due to be extradited, but was ordered to be released by the governor of Antioquia’s office).76 But the reality is that Uribe Velez’s shady past suits Washington because it makes him a hostage to American bidding in a region in which they have lost much of their ability to influence events. As if cognizant of this unwritten pact, President Uribe Velez has been jailing and extraditing cocaine-trafficking former AUC members in unprecedented numbers. In May 2008, Uribe Velez extradited fourteen top paramilitaries to the United States to stand trial on charges of cocaine trafficking. Uribe Velez wanted to show Democrats in Washington that he meant what he said about breaking all links with paramilitaries who continue to murder trade unionists and other left-wingers. Democratic Congressional leaders and their trade union allies have cited those murders as grounds for holding back on a free-trade agreement with Colombia. But the extradition also served another purpose: to remove the most important witnesses in any future investigation of the president’s dealings with Colombia’s most notorious paramilitaries and cocaine traffickers.77

  Uribe Velez’s volte-face may well backfire on him yet. ‘When Salvatore Mancuso sees that they are closing the doors that might have allowed him to be sentenced under the Justice and Peace laws, and then the pressure from the Americans, who know that he is Colombia’s biggest capo, he’s going to try to defend himself, and start talking about his alliances with President Uribe,’ former cocaine trafficker Fabio Ochoa Vasco told a reporter from Semana magazine. ‘All the AUC commanders that sat down at the negotiating table that first week know the truth. They know that to get where they are, they put down more than $10 million. Sooner or later somebody is going to spill the beans, because they feel betrayed by the government.’78

  Even if the AUC can be successfully dismantled without leaving the government’s drug war credentials in tatters, it is unclear what difference the demobilization of Colombia’s paramilitary armies will make to cocaine trafficking in Colombia. Many paramilitaries sold the ‘franchises’ for their private armies to drugs traffickers before they turned themselves in.79 In towns in Putumayo, the drug lords of Cali are back. They walk the streets guarded by ‘demobilized’ paramilitaries, impassively greeting those they meet and imposing prices for the purchase of coca base. As Diego Vecino, paramilitary commander of the Héroes de los Montes de Maria has said, ‘The AUC is finished as a registered trademark. But paramilitarism goes on.’80

  For most of the 1980s, Medellín was the most violent city in the world. Just as Eskimos are said to have forty words for snow, so the young sicarios of Medellín have thirty-seven words for a gun. They call it tola, fierro, pepazo, pepinos, gaga, niño, tartamuda, changón, trabuco, balín, metra, or tote. They have seventy-three words for death, forty-two words for violence and twenty-four words for a bullet. Though Catholic in name, their religion is one of ‘warriors, not apostles’ it supplies not a code by which to live, but a talisman to protect them from the consequences of the crimes they commit.81

  People have been coming to Medellín since the 1960s. Displaced by the violence in the countryside, the first arrivals built squatter settlements, warrens of steep stairways up the hillsides, and pirated their water and electricity. Today, residents of the comunas make up half of Medellín’s population. Until 2003, police and soldiers dared not enter the comunas except in large numbers, so the residents grew accustomed to living under the control of street gangs, some of which were involved in organized crime. During the 1990s, as the effort to take down Pablo Escobar loosened the drug lords’ grip on the comunas, the gang structure was taken over by the urban appendages of the guerrilla insurgency. These urban militia were soon challenged by the AUC. Flush with drug money and backed by the security forces, AUC units under the command of the renowned cocaine trafficker Diego Fernando Murillo Bejarano, better known as Don Berna, waged intense fire-fights in the neighbourhoods’ lanes and alleys. Hundreds of people were executed on suspicion of collaborating with the other side, and the city’s murder rate soared to nearly 200 per 100,000, numbers not seen since the last days of the Medellín cartel. By 2002, the paramilitaries had ejected the urban militia, taken over the gangs, and restored the police presence in the comunas. ‘Don Berna does not control Medellín. He only controls criminality in Medellín,’ said the writer and secretary of the city’s government, Alonso Salazar. More than three quarters of Medellín’s poor neighbourhoods were said to be under the control of Don Berna.82

  Talks with the paramilitaries of Medellín were going nowhere when in November 2003 Don Berna unexpectedly announced the demobilization of his unit of the AUC, the Cacique Nutibara Bloc. In a gesture of extravagant goodwill, 868 purported members of the Bloc turned in less than half as many weapons, and were duly processed under the Justice and Peace laws. It would be the first of a long series of paramilitary demobilization ceremonies that took place throughout Colombia over the next two and a half years, in which surprisingly large numbers of criminals claimed to be paramilitaries, and handed in surprisingly small numbers of weapons. None the less, the civilian population welcomed the lull that followed. For many, it was a relief to have to pay extortion money to only one group, and to be free of the threat of retribution for helping ‘the other side’.

  When I was in Bogotá in September 2007, Don Berna was in the Itagüí prison south of Medellín, accused of ordering the killing of a state legislator. But he still controlled the gangs in Medellín’s comunas. Young men in plain-clothes kept quiet watch, though they no longer put up roadblocks and were more discreet in their killings. In 2008, the DEA discovered new evidence that Don Berna, the ‘Pacifier of Medellín’, was still sending cocaine to the United States, in violation of the Justice and Peace law. The US Embassy brought renewed pressure to extradite him, which President Uribe Velez found impossible to resist. Since Don Berna boarded his plane to Miami, the absence of both the capo and a well-established police presence has touched off another struggle for control of Medellín’s ever buoyant cocaine business.

  One night in Bogotá, I watched a television news story about a Russian serial killer who had murdered forty-six people. That
same day, a demobilized paramilitary had confessed to killing 2,000 people, but no mention was made of him. Instead, the newsreader brought news from Montería of a government programme to teach demobilized paramilitaries how to use computers, part of their reinserción into the mainstream of Colombian life. This was followed by news that the singer Marilyn Manson, who was due to play a concert in Bogotá later that month, would have to fly out of the city the same night he played. The hoteliers of Bogotá found his pop videos offensive and were refusing to put him up for the night.

  I had been surprised to see ‘Bogotá Sin Indiferencia’ (Bogotá Without Indifference) plastered on the city’s billboards. It was the new slogan of the mayor’s office. If bogotanos are indifferent to life in the capital, it is because so many of them have been uprooted from their places of origin. Over the past ten years, a combination of paramilitary terror campaigns and fire-fights between the army, paramilitaries and the guerrillas has forced 3 million Colombians to flee their villages for the vagaries of city life. Only Sudan has a bigger population of internally displaced people than Colombia. Far from home, many of these families become isolated and individualistic, with scant regard for the community they live in. Colombia’s ‘violontology’ specialists say that theirs is a nation of weak groups and strong individuals—or apparently strong individuals: millions of Colombians suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and being a victim of FARC violence seems to be a prerequisite for any prospective government minister.

  The only way to survive in such a violent, lawless place is by staying on the side of those apparently strong individuals. When Pablo Escobar was threatened with extradition to the United States, he went on a bombing spree and the threat was soon dropped. It was eventually restored, but Escobar’s defiance chimed with the many Colombians who believe that might can only be met with might. People of all classes have suffered at the hands of the country’s traffickers, urban militia, FARC kidnappers and paramilitaries, organizations that owe some or all of their power to the cocaine trade. The most desperate victims are those who have had to flee their homes in the countryside, often with no more than the clothes on their backs. Yet the plight of the displaced is roundly ignored by most Colombians. People have vengeance in mind, even if the talk is of respect, order and legality. Cocaine has paid for everyone to enjoy the fruits of violence. It has reduced the hide-bound elite of a staunchly traditionalist society to the status of ordinary men and women. The poor are no longer cowed by the elite, but neither has been able to affect any meaningful political or economic reforms to their country. In this climate of frustration and mistrust, cocaine has shown the poor that violence can be an effective weapon. It has democratized violence.

  Supporters of Plan Colombia argue that the billions of dollars of US military aid have improved the Colombian army’s fighting capacity. The FARC have been rolled back into the jungle and up the mountains; Colombians can once again travel between the main cities of the country without fear of kidnap, and the return of foreign investment has cheered the Bogotá stock market. In 2006, Alvaro Uribe Velez was re-elected to the presidency with 53 per cent of the popular vote (notwithstanding the fact that only 54 per cent of the electorate felt inspired to vote at all). Uribe Velez says that if Colombia didn’t have drugs, it wouldn’t have terrorists and has reaffirmed his commitment to fighting the Americans’ war on drugs.83 There is certainly a war on coca growers, the FARC and the drugs mules. But this is far from being a war on drugs. If the Colombian government was serious about tackling the cocaine trade, the Ministry of Agriculture would tackle the land reform issue, instead of chasing Colombian coca farmers around the country in fumigation planes. When the coca fields are sprayed, cultivation just moves on. Of course the coca fields finance the guerrillas, but Colombia had trafficking routes and mafiosi long before it had coca fields. The cocaine traffickers are unaffected by the fumigation programme. Even without the coca fields, the Colombian Mafia would source coca paste elsewhere and produce cocaine in the Colombian jungle, as it did in the 1980s. But Plan Colombia makes no mention of the big traffickers, and they aren’t going to be brought to justice as long as they can buy politicians. That so few of the structural problems driving coca cultivation have been addressed suggests that, despite the rhetoric, drugs traffic per se is not seen as a big problem in Colombia.

  The ills afflicting Colombia did not begin with the advent of the cocaine trade, yet the lack of effective solutions offered to date has made the drugs trade (and the violence, corruption and impunity it has fostered) wholly sustainable. The cocaine business has funded illegal armed groups to both left and right. By sustaining the paramilitarization of Colombian society, the cocaine trade has put paid to local democracy, civil society and any prospect of negotiations with the guerrillas. It has paid for a buy-out of what was a peasant economy, leading to a concentration of land in the hands of a few capos, which has only aggravated the agrarian crisis. Its financial reach and the impunity that it enjoys have undermined the authority and credibility of the law. It has also corrupted the political ideals of the FARC. Worse still, it has given AUC paramilitaries the financial muscle to corrupt thousands of politicians across the country, with the apparent complicity of the Colombian government, as well as its allies in the United States and the United Kingdom. The Colombian government’s campaign to get western cocaine consumers to ‘share responsibility’ for the cocaine trade looks simplistic at best, duplicitous at worst.

  8

  Globalization

  In reading the history of nations, we find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

  C. Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and

  the Madness of Crowds, 18521

  Since the first Gulf War of 1991, the United States has moved to lessen its reliance on supplies of oil from the Middle East. Today, it gets more of its oil from Latin America than it does from the Middle East. But dependence on Latin American oil has brought its own problems. Its biggest Latin American supplier is Venezuela, but Venezuelan oil is in the hands of Hugo Chávez and his country’s national oil company, which limits the Americans’ scope for influence. Ecuador terminated a contract with the Occidental Petroleum Corporation of Los Angeles in 2006, thereby returning the right to exploit its reserves, thought to be worth $1 billion, to its state oil company. Brazil and Mexico also have nationalist policies governing their oil wealth, which limit the extent to which foreign companies can exploit their oil. So it should come as no surprise to find that since 2000, the Latin American presidential candidates keenest to invite investment from foreign oil companies have also been those that have received the keenest support of the United States. The first is Alan García of Peru, and the second is Alvaro Uribe Velez of Colombia.

  Colombia has had to offer good incentives to the foreign oil companies because getting at Colombian oil is a risky business. Only a hundred years ago, Colombia’s oil bubbled from the ground untapped; barrels of oil were carried to the coastal ports on the backs of mules, and oil workers had to watch for the arrows of resentful Indians. Today, Colombia is the seventh biggest supplier of oil to the United States and were it not for the FARC guerrillas, it would be among the most exciting sources of future oil reserves. The FARC’s presence in remote parts of Colombia means that 80 per cent of the country has yet to be surveyed for potential oil reserves. Most of the existing oil infrastructure is in the north-east of the country, but there too foreign oil companies’ pipelines are regularly sabotaged by the guerrillas, and their executives threatened with kidnap a
nd extortion. ‘Clearly we have an energy threat,’ Congressman Mark Souder said in 2002. ‘Colombia is either our seventh or eighth largest supplier of oil. Our economy depends on that. We already have instability in the Middle East. We have more compelling reasons to be involved in Colombia than almost anywhere else in the world.’2

  The American army is thinking along similar lines, as Geoff Foreman, a Special Forces sergeant stationed in Colombia made clear in an interview he gave to oil policy researcher Daniel Scott-Lea in 2005. ‘We never mentioned the words “coca” or “narco-trafficker” in our training. The objective of our operations was not to help the Colombians, but the Americans who pay taxes for the investment made in Colombia. The objective continues to be oil. Look where American forces are: Iraq, Afghanistan, Indochina, the Caspian Sea, Colombia, all places where we expect to find oil reserves.’3 Stan Goff, another Special Forces trainer stationed in Colombia, confided to writer Doug Stokes that ‘the American public was being told, if they were being told anything at all, that this was counter-narcotics training. The training I conducted was anything but that. It was pretty much updated, Vietnam-style counter-insurgency doctrine. We were advised to refer to it as counter-narcotics training, should anyone ask, but the only thing we talked about with the actual leaders of the training units was the guerrillas.’4 Trace the principal battlelines on a map, and it becomes clear that the fiercest fighting between the army, the paramilitaries and the guerrillas is not for control of the drugs business, but of the areas in which Colombia’s oil and mineral wealth is concentrated. Much is made of the guerrillas’ dependence on the drugs trade, but when taken together, the FARC and the ELN (National Liberation Army, the second of Colombia’s two guerrilla armies) actually make more money from the oil business.