Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  When a multinational oil company agrees to invest in Colombia, it signs a security contract with the Colombian army, which undertakes to defend the company’s operations from attack by the guerrillas. This has led to army collusion with paramilitaries to assassinate local trade union leaders, who are often assumed to be in cahoots with the insurgents. The Drummond Coal Company has been sued by the union that represents workers at its Colombian mines for conspiring with paramilitary groups to destroy the union.5 Lawsuits have also been brought against Exxon, BP, Texaco, Occidental Petroleum and Conquistador Mines for their relationships with paramilitaries. The United States’ publicly stated intention of tackling cocaine production at source has become a savvy façade for more primordial concerns: supporting governments that are ‘ready to do business’ and undermining their challengers; addressing America’s need for cheap and reliable supplies of oil and protecting the considerable investments American companies have made in the region.

  This is not to say that the war on drugs is disingenuous. America remains susceptible to irrational fears unbecoming such a powerful nation. The domino theory, according to which every Third World nation that aspired to some measure of autonomy was to be forced into submission before they fell to Soviet expansionism, informs America’s anti-drugs policies too. Wasn’t the United States once ‘under siege from crack’? The paranoid fear of the Soviet Union that kept Americans onside during the Cold War seeped into their fear of America on drugs, and now their fear of Islamic terror. Once stoked, irrational fears can be manipulated to secure public support for policies that only sustain the original fear. However, the day-to-day work of US agencies prosecuting the war on drugs in Latin America is more prosaic, and more revealing, than the rhetoric of the country’s politicians would suggest.

  Faced with a case of high-level drug corruption in Latin America, the DEA will often find itself in conflict with the US State Department. Drug enforcement agents might want to arrest a high-ranking government minister who has been found to be colluding with cocaine traffickers, but the State Department may not want to destabilize a friendly government.6 A federal inquiry into high-ranking PRI politicians in Mexico was halted, according to retired DEA agents Phil Jordan and Hector Berrellez, in the months leading up to the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement.7 The Guatemalan military is deeply involved in cocaine trafficking, but its officers are to all intents and purposes beyond prosecution, and have been since they secured the United States’ backing to fight a dirty war against the country’s communists. During the Cold War, more than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed in what became Central America’s bloodiest twentieth-century conflict. But Marilyn McAfee, Bill Clinton’s ambassador in Guatemala City, had bigger things to worry about than her host government’s drugs trafficking, notably ongoing peace talks with the Guatemalan military. ‘I am concerned over the potential decline in our relationship with the military,’ she wrote to her superiors in 1994. ‘The bottom line is we must carefully consider each of our actions toward the Guatemalan military, not only for how it plays in Washington, but for how it impacts here.’ A couple of months later, Epaminondas González Dubón, Guatemala’s most senior judge, was assassinated for ordering the extradition to the United States of Lieutenant Carlos Ochoa on charges of cocaine smuggling.

  Since the murder of González Dubón, the DEA has been all but impotent in Guatemala. Guatemalans use the DEA to settle scores, traffickers use the agency to get one over the competition, and politicians pander to it in order to keep money from the United States’ anti-drugs budget flowing. Colombian smugglers looking for a first stop on the route north to Mexico know that the impunity enjoyed by the Guatemalan military makes its officers perfect partners in crime. As a result, three quarters of the cocaine consumed in the United States is said to pass through Guatemala.8

  The US government has shown itself to be happy to facilitate drugs traffickers when they share the Americans’ broader foreign policy goals. Former DEA agent Celerino Castillo III has written that ‘we spent billions trying to beat down an ideology in Central America, while the cartels rented nations as transit routes’.9 Of course, there are limits to American indulgence of drug trafficking: the case of Manuel Noriega, the military dictator who ruled Panama between 1983 and 1989, shows what US agencies are prepared to do when anti-communist allies in Central America overstep the mark. Noriega had been trafficking drugs, and working for the CIA, since the late 1960s. The United States’ security agencies had long overlooked Noriega’s cocaine trafficking for the Medellín cartel because of the strategic role the Panamanian played in supporting the Contras in Nicaragua. But when Noriega took a hard line in negotiations with the Americans over the future of the Panama Canal, the CIA dropped him as an asset, and the White House decided to depose him. George Bush Sr, who as director of the CIA had paid Noriega $100,000 for services rendered in 1976, launched Operation Just Cause, and bombed Panama City in 1989.10 Once in court, Noriega’s lawyers tried to subpoena evidence that proved that their client had smuggled cocaine to fund the Contras in Nicaragua and that he had done so with the approval of the CIA. But the Americans outfoxed them. Citing reasons of national security, they made sure that the jury never got to see the relevant documents. Noriega’s defence collapsed, and he was sentenced to serve forty years behind bars.

  Carlos Lehder, one of Colombia’s pioneering cocaine smugglers, amassed a personal fortune of £1.25 billion, but he made the same mistake of going political with the Americans. Lehder is currently contesting his prison sentence, alleging that the US authorities agreed to reduce his term in return for his testimony at the trial of Manuel Noriega. It has been suggested that the Americans reneged on this agreement because Lehder is privy to intimate details of the Contras’ cocaine-smuggling operations that would incriminate the CIA.

  Even when cocaine traffickers’ operations have no bearing on the State Department’s wider interests, the CIA has negotiated reduced sentences with Colombian drugs traffickers in exchange for the delivery of large sums of money to the United States government. As cocaine trafficker Fabio Ochoa pointed out, much of this money ends up funding paramilitarism in Colombia. Ochoa alleges that he was extradited to the United States shortly after he refused to give £15 million to the paramilitaries.

  Even when the DEA is able to work without political interference from the State Department, the CIA or the FBI, it often finds that it doesn’t have sufficient sway with its hosts to do the job it came to do. A DEA agent described his relationship with his counterpart in the Mexican Federal Judicial Police to Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance, on condition that his anonymity was preserved, and what he said is worth quoting at length. ‘When a new comandante arrives in town at the beginning of a new presidential term, he has a couple of incentives to cooperate with the DEA. First, he needs the DEA most then. Usually his predecessor will leave nothing but an empty filing cabinet, if that. So he relies on the DEA to find out who is who and what is what. Second, he has an interest in cracking down hard soon after his arrival to show who’s in charge. Thus, during the first year or so, the DEA will get excellent cooperation from him. Some time during the first year, the traffickers will try to cut deals with the comandante to buy protection. So the comandante starts receiving offers: a car, an apartment, a house, women, and so on. He and the chosen traffickers will reach an understanding, usually involving a retainer. The traffickers understand that if they do anything stupid, the police will have to act. But there is also an understanding that the comandante will not pursue them too hard. He will stall and find ways to avoid cooperating with the DEA, and eventually the DEA agent will get the message. During the next three years, the DEA agent will get great cooperation in any operations not involving one of the comandante’s special relationships. In his last year or two, however, cooperation can really go downhill. Everyone is trying to make a killing before he leaves office. By that point, there is almost nothing the DEA can do. Probably 75 per cent of
DEA—Federale relationships fit this model. Is this “corruption”? By US standards, sure, although the US has lots of corruption itself. But in Latin America, that’s just the way the system works. Every cop goes along with it or he’s out.’11

  In Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Belize, Jamaica, Ecuador, Paraguay, Panama and the Bahamas—all, bar the last four, drug-producing countries—those charged with waging the war on drugs find themselves dependent on those corrupted by drugs money. All over Central and South America, drug corruption is widespread at all levels, and has been for years. In Ecuador, judges reportedly bid between themselves to hear drug cases, because they offer such lucrative opportunities for the stuffing of pockets. In Haiti, cocaine has utterly corrupted the upper echelons of former president Jean Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas party, including senators, senior police officials and (naturally) the head of the anti-drugs police. Aristide was overthrown in a military coup led by generals, many trained by the CIA, who once in power went deeper still into the pockets of the cocaine traffickers. This is unsurprising, as after the collapse of its coffee business and the evaporation of its offshore assembly plants, Haiti’s top sources of foreign exchange today are whatever money Haitians abroad are able to send home, foreign aid and the drugs trade.12

  In cases such as that of the Luis García Meza regime which came to power in Bolivia in the ‘cocaine coup’ of 1980, the United States’ government has gone public with its protests, withdrawn its ambassador and shut down its DEA office, but this kind of zero tolerance is rare. Where it really matters, accommodation not confrontation is the norm. Ethan Nadelmann also interviewed a DEA agent who had worked in Paraguay and Panama, who told him that ‘you can’t dwell on drug involvement at the highest levels. There’s nothing you can do about it. If you do, you just get depressed.’13 So the focus turns to gathering intelligence, arresting drug mules, seizing vessels and airplanes transporting cocaine, and getting a few big traffickers extradited to the United States. Everything then, bar tackling the collusion and corruption on which cocaine trafficking depends.

  Brazil’s State Special Operations Battalion has a chant that goes: ‘interrogation is very simple: grab the favelado [shanty dweller] and beat him til it hurts / Interrogation is very simple: grab the favelado and beat him til he’s dead’. In June 2007, 1,350 police stormed the Alemão Complex favela (shanty town) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, killing nineteen people. There have been killings like these in Rio de Janeiro since the early 1990s: about 1,000 people are killed by the police in Rio every year.14 Typically, the authorities blame vigilantes or rogue off-duty police officers, or say that they happened in ‘confrontations’ between the police and drugs traffickers. But the events in Alemão Complex marked a new approach to law enforcement. This time the Brazilian police offered no excuses. They admitted killing traffickers, regardless of the law.

  The cocaine trade has drawn Brazilians into a real-life drama in which good purports to battle evil every day on the streets of Rio, a morality play every bit as captivating as the police footage of drug busts which held the attention of television viewers in the United States through much of the 1980s. Polls suggest that 85 per cent of the people of Rio approve of the police’s operations, and agree that they should be rolled out in other favelas. They approve of the coercive methods because they blame favelados for the drugs trade. What is the point, they ask, of extending education, jobs and basic services to delinquents and criminals, who only squander the opportunities they are given? So the criminalized remain on the margins, quite powerless, and hence all the more enthralled by the power conferred by a gun. Their destiny is prison, a violent death, or both.

  In fact, only 1 per cent of favela denizens work in the drugs business. Those that do invariably pay a high price for their involvement. Within two years of taking part in a study of young people working in the drugs trade in Rio, 46 of the 230 respondents were dead. The study had found that 60 per cent of them had got into the business before they turned fifteen. It is galling to think that the children of Brazil’s least powerful citizens should shoulder the opprobrium of an entire society, or be considered a threat to security, rather than deserving of it.

  In May 2007, while on a visit to the Farm of Hope drug rehabilitation centre near the Brazilian city of Aparecida, Pope Benedict railed against ‘the hedonism of modern life’ and warned the leaders of the cocaine cartels that they faced the wrath of God for what they were doing. Many of those who had gathered to hear the pontiff speak were recovering drug addicts, one of whom remarked that the Pope’s speech was all well and good, but it made no mention of the corruption that allows the cocaine business to flourish.15 The favelados’ murderous struggle over crumbs is widely perceived to be the epitome of organized crime, but those profiting from the cocaine trade are obviously not favela dwellers. Nine recent federal police operations and four recent parliamentary inquiries have found state officials to be involved in drug-running.16 But no matter: the police intelligence needed to penetrate the upper echelons of the drugs business is in short supply, as is the will to do so, and repression is easier to deploy than justice.

  Those tempted to think that Brazil’s favelados are dying to supply the cocaine habits of wealthy Westerners are mistaken. Increasingly, they’re dying to supply the cocaine habits of wealthy Brazilians. Brazil is today the world’s second-largest cocaine market after the United States. The long-standing division between the drug-producing countries of the South and the drug-consuming countries of the North has been blurred. Until recently, most Central and South American and Caribbean countries had low levels of cocaine use and abuse, but as cultures, populations and goods have become more mobile, borders of all kinds, including moral and cultural ones, have become harder to police.

  Wherever cocaine moves, consignments are used as payment in kind. Local middlemen have created markets for hard drugs in towns where such things were once regarded as being strictly for export. The Mexican city of Tijuana, which lies across the border from San Diego, California, has 100,000 methamphetamine addicts; far more than you’d expect to find in a city of 1.4 million.17 Mexico, Brazil and Argentina are all struggling to deal with growing numbers of cocaine users. The destitute have latched on to paco, which is made from leftovers from cocaine processing. There has also been an epidemic of crack use among the street children of Mexico City.

  But to adduce increases in rates of drug use in Mexico to poverty would be to miss the real changes afoot. Most street children get food and shelter from charities and NGOs. They make money in the informal economy, guarding market stalls, picking up rubbish to sell, unloading trucks and the like, and that money goes on crack. More important than poverty in driving the rise in cocaine consumption in Third World countries is the fragility of the family. As more women go out to work, many machista men respond to their partners’ newfound independence with violence. This leads to divorce and traumatizes children, who often flee the family home for a life on the street.18 Once there, many children find that drugs offer the only respite to be had. Alex Sanchez from Homies Unidos in Santa Cruz, California, told me what he found when he was deported from the United States to El Salvador. ‘Crack cocaine was not the drug of choice in Central America in ’94. It was glue-sniffing. But once people who knew how to cook up rock cocaine were deported from the US, they started making profit distributing it down there.’

  Since the late 1980s, cheap cocaine and heroin have fuelled a marked increase in drug use worldwide. Countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Thailand, Vietnam, Iran and India, where injection drug use was not common ten years ago, are now grappling with drug abuse on an even larger scale than that seen in European and American cities. Drug use made a comeback in China in the 1980s, prompting the Chinese government to announce a ‘People’s War on Drugs’ in 2005. In recent years, Chinese and US authorities have stepped up cooperation, and the DEA quietly opened an office in Beijing about five years ago. In May 2006, they decommissioned 135 kilos of cocaine, by far the largest
seizure of the drug ever made in China.

  As cocaine traffickers have come to exploit the expanding global market for their product, drug warriors, frustrated at their inability to stem the flow of drugs from Colombia, have put great store by freezing the traffickers’ assets. Few enterprises, legal or illegal, operate with such large and steady cashflows as the illegal drugs business. Prohibition Era mobster Meyer Lansky was famed for his skill in concealing the origin of the funds he used to buy real estate for the American Mafia. Latterday smugglers face the same challenge. In 1989, DEA agents working as part of Operation Polar Cap acted as distributors for the Medellín cartel so as to infiltrate the workings of the organization. This they did, but even the DEA didn’t know what to do with the $1.5 million in small denominations that they were handling every week.

  The easiest way to launder ill-gotten gains is to get the help of somebody working inside a financial institution. Bank employees can be coerced or bribed not to file the suspicious activity reports instituted to tackle money-laundering. In the United Kingdom, the most popular way of laundering cash is to make under-the-counter payments to an estate agent for the purchase of property, which can then be resold. Drug dealers also buy expensive cars, antiques and jewellery for cash, or buy holdings in companies in their accountants’ name. Restaurants are a good front for money-laundering because they are accustomed to taking in large amounts of cash, and it’s easy to overstate their takings or understate their costs. HM Revenue & Customs is not geared up to investigate over-reporting of taxable income, nor is it an offence to have unaccounted wealth.