Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (15 page)

Muñoz — as he later explained in court — asked another sergeant, Sandro Pérez, to help him improve his platoon’s statistics, whereupon his colleague, who was working in military intelligence at the time, offered the following: ‘If you want, I can get you people you can report as having been killed in combat.’ Each person would come with a price tag of a million pesos, 500 USD, and, according to Muñoz, the brigade’s colonel, Gabriel Rincón Amado, approved the deal. A network was established whereby a shopkeeper in Soacha was to be the main recruiter of young men. Through the shop, a rumour was circulated that jobs were available and that there was money to be made in Ocaña, a community located close to the border with Venezuela, and, after being offered free bus rides there, a number of unemployed young men living in Soacha, including Jonathan Orlando Soto, 17, and Julio César Meza, 24, took the bait.

On 25 January 2008 the two young men left Soacha and, two days later, the army’s 15th brigade was able to report that two guerrilla warriors had been killed in combat.
A sum
of 2.2 million pesos
was paid
for Soto and Meza, plus expenditures for their bus tickets, and the evening on which they were killed and their bodies sold, the murderers toasted each other with glasses of rum at a bar in Ocaña. The money used in the transaction originated partially from the military budget, but also from individual soldiers and officers who took the initiative to pool their own pesos towards purchasing both the bodies and the weapons needed to pass the dead men off as fallen guerrilla soldiers. As the shopkeeper, Alexander Carretero, later explained in the investigation: ‘The troops took it as a duty to collect money for bodies. Officers and soldiers contributed out of their own pockets.’ After the men’s deaths,
Colonel
Rincón
Amado
made another order from the
shop-owner
in
Soacha
.

In 2009, when Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, investigated the full extent of the scandal, he claimed to find no evidence that the government should have known anything about such a practice, but that the killings had been carried out in a ‘more or less systematic fashion’ and that ‘significant elements within the military’ were involved. He also said that he found the media-coined term ‘
falsos positivos
’ misleading because the euphemism gave a false impression of a practice that could be better described as the ‘cold-blooded, premeditated murder of innocent civilians for profit’; the victims the military had passed off as ‘dangerous terrorists’ included disabled teenagers. A vast number of the bodies presented as killed in combat were photographed wearing newly ironed uniforms and boots several sizes too large. Moreover, in some pictures men known to have been left-handed were shown holding weapons that had been tucked into their right hands. Worse still, according to Alston, was the fact that the survivors or relatives who attempted to report the incidents and to testify were subjected to ‘systematic military persecution’, and that the unraveling of the alliances between the military and hit men in Soacha, which had become the centre of the scandal, were just ‘the tip of the iceberg’. These structures could be found all over the country and, according to Alston, one mother’s testimony of what had happened was typical: after her son had been killed, his brother, the second-eldest son, began inquiring into what had happened, and a couple months later he was also found dead. Soon after, the mother began to receive death threats.

In the wake of the scandal the government discharged 27 officers — including three generals and 11 colonels — and a number of arrests were made. However, a year later the majority of the detainees were released because no charges had yet been pressed. It was said that there were ‘legal difficulties of a technical nature’. By the early 2010s it looked as if yet another unresolved scandal would be added to Colombia’s already long history of military impunity for human-rights violations. Under the headline ‘Legalized Barbarianism’, Daniel Samper wrote in
El Tiempo
, the largest newspaper in the country, that the worst part was not that cold-blooded murders were being committed to improve statistics, but that this sort of crime was on its way to becoming legalised:

The accused didn’t escape from prison or hide from the authorities — they were able to march right out through the main entrance, the door for legal disputes that have been resolved. It is the combination of this judicial ingenuity and its far-reaching consequences that nurtures one of the most feared monsters in Colombia: state-sanctioned impunity.

IN EL CARAÑO,
the village where Graciano and the others live, it is now Sunday evening, and both young and old alike are able to forget about the
falsos positivos
and the impending herbicide spraying. It is the weekend. Men toast to each other, while women pray. A girl plays with her laser pointer, aiming it at the anus of a stray dog, and laughs so loudly that she is heard inside the church just as the priest takes to the pulpit.

‘Forgive us our sins.’

The congregation consists almost exclusively of women and children, and along the main drag in the village — a kilometre-long mud bank — the thumping beat of Latino music blares from the open doors and windows of the wooden houses, while the brown water of the San Juan runs past tranquilly. The river gleams. Reflections from television sets and illuminated decorations give a lustre, which didn’t exist a few years ago, to the humble homes in the village, and many shacks have a satellite dish attached to them and a booming stereo inside. Young men strut around in jeans with silver dragon ornaments, and every young girl, even the two-year-olds, has a beautiful beaded hairdo, not unlike a wedding cake, atop her head. Everything smells nice. Showered bodies. Catholic Sunday.

Tied and resting along the riverbed are the families’ canoes, with recently installed motors; by the houses, fuel-operated generators give life to the sorts of things no one could have dreamed about before the arrival of coca: freezers, sound systems, karaoke machines. Everyone — children, parents, and senior citizens — is in a good mood, joking and dancing.

‘But it will be over soon. People look happy now, but they actually live in fear of that moment. The end.’

Mass is over now, and the priest sighs inside his little house, situated behind the simple concrete structure that is the church. Along the San Juan and its tributaries hundreds of villages are populated with indigenous peoples or Afro-Colombians, and what the priest calls ‘the slavery of coca’ is spreading like a capitalist cancer, with El Caraño just one of many examples. This is a boom, and everyone is making the most of the good days while they last. According to the priest, the very fact that Andrea maintains that coca has liberated her from slavery is reflective of the tendency to be shortsighted, itself a distinctive Colombian trait.

‘People here are obsessed with money now. It’s toxic. They work round the clock up there and care about nothing else. The women are there because everybody needs to be fed: once harvesting begins, they sleep in the labs for weeks on end. And down here the children wander about totally unsupervised. The church has become the daycare centre. The nuclear family is crumbling, and the men would rather drink and smoke than attend mass. Violence will break out soon, and then everybody will have to run away. Everybody here has their bags packed.’

The history of El Caraño, and its current volatile state, is the same as that of the vast majority of other villages along Colombia’s Pacific coast. Ten years ago farmers in the community staked everything on
borojó
, a fruit popular in Chocó but nowhere else, and of the 25 tonnes produced in the village weekly, only three would be sold. There was no market. The fruit rotted in mass amounts, while misery spread because there was no money being generated for the local economy. But one day a couple of foreign
señores
— who no one in El Caraño knew at all — paid a visit to the village and held a meeting with the inhabitants, offering them coca seeds free of charge. It was a scheme by which the foreigners would provide the seeds and the farmers would tend the crops; they would cooperate. Profits would be split 50-50. Disillusioned by the
borojó
failure, many seized the opportunity. Some farmers declined the offer, but then changed their minds once they saw their neighbours starting to renovate their houses and hang up their satellite dishes.

Yet it was not long before the all-too-familiar tendency towards violence resurfaced and left its unmistakable mark. One day, two new
señores
turned up and explained that the first men who had come were, in fact,
paracos
, paramilitaries, and the town was on the verge of entering into an alliance with guerrilla enemies. The farmers who feared the two FARC messengers stopped growing coca immediately, whereas others chose to carry on in the hope that everything would work out in the end. A few months later, however, the guerrillas arrived in earnest and explained that it was now time for the villagers to choose a side once and for all; all the
paracos
and farmers who chose to remain part of the alliance with rebel enemies were killed. Battles broke out in many of the villages along the river. The guerrillas gained control over the region and have kept it ever since.

‘Now they rule everything.’

Like everyone else in the village, the priest only ever refers to the guerrillas as ‘them’. In the Colombian countryside, nothing can ever really be called by its exact name; in the same way that Edgar talks about ‘the law’ in Putumayo, the inhabitants of El Caraño talk about ‘them’, though all are alluding to the same thing: the armed group in power at the moment. The FARC have an agreement with everyone working in the chain: those selling fuel and chemicals, those purchasing the paste, those who own
las cocinas
— and, most importantly, the farmers. For the villagers, everything runs much more smoothly when one armed organisation oversees all of it, in contrast to the sort of conflicts that precede any such takeover, which bring with them the worst sort of violence and human displacement. Afterwards everything is relatively calm; that is, until the day when the planes come. And it is because of this day that everyone has his or her bags packed.

‘People have completely stopped cultivating other crops,’ the priest states. ‘In the past, every family set aside part of their plot for growing rice, corn, and other things for household use, but now it’s just coca. And what are the farmers supposed to do once their fields get sprayed? After all, you can’t eat coca.’

Out on the river three canoes, filled to capacity with fuel drums and bags of cement, travel along upstream, while a much faster motorboat, part of international medical organisation Doctors Without Borders, zigzags between them on its way south. Remote thunderstorms light up the jungle, and the tops of palm trees stiffen and become illuminated against the white explosions in the sky. In conjunction with the coca boom, chemical sheds turned up in all of the villages along the river, and these are the only places that are open on Sundays. They look like well-supplied hardware stores, shiny, bright, and always stocked with clean bags, cans, bottles, and tools, standing in sharp contrast to the otherwise disorderly villages.

The scent of rain fills the air. In a doorway, the silhouettes of two large sets of hips are swaying to the beat of salsa music, but the priest just looks on in misery. ‘What the state should be responsible for today has fallen into the hands of the guerrillas and charity organisations. There isn’t a single Colombian nurse here, and hardly any doctors. Everything to do with civilian life is controlled by foreign NGOs: Lutheran Help, Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF. And guerrillas are in charge of coca production. It’s all very sad.’

RELYING ON HIS
arms, both stretched straight out for balance, Graciano attempts to cross the terracotta-coloured creek on a log that serves as a small bridge. All of a sudden he starts to lose his balance, but finally manages to jump the remaining metres, with only one foot slipping down to splash in the water.

It is Monday afternoon. Crescendos of birdsong stream out of the remains of a lush and vibrant rainforest like melodies from a music box, and everything is dry for a change. The sun beats down on a patchwork quilt of carved-out, clear-felled land, and standing on a slope in the middle of a coca field are the charred remains of a felled tree.

‘These are almost ready to be harvested.’ He runs his hand through the ripened leaves in a few of the bushes. A couple of hundred metres separates them from Graciano’s own field and lab.

In a month’s time, the family will begin harvesting. Today he will just tend to his
viveros
, small flowerbeds from which the new seedlings will later be separated and planted out in the fields. His purple gabardine pants flap in the breeze and his straw hat sits on the back of his head as he takes the final steps up to his property.

‘Look over there,’ he says pointing with his machete.

There are several cleared hectares on the other side of the valley, but the lime-green coca bushes that usually cover the clear-cut areas are missing. Everything is brown and grey. Burnt.

‘That family cleared their land but couldn’t afford to grow anything. It’s very common here for people to run out of money halfway through the process. The land just lies there dead. It’s a terrible shame.’

For every gram of cocaine consumed four square metres of rainforest have to be cut down, and because the farmers are pushed deeper and deeper into the jungle, they have to make do with land that is increasingly less suited for coca, and thus end up using even more pesticides. About 550 kilos of weed-killer, fertiliser, fuel, ammonia, cement, and sulfuric acid go into transforming one hectare of coca into paste, and around 154,000 tonnes of chemical waste a year are dumped into some of the world’s most diverse ecological systems, often in nature reserves and national parks.