Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (36 page)

1 Cocaturismo: Medellín as heaven

All interviews used in this chapter were conducted in Medellín in November 2008, May 2009, and November 2009, during my visits to the districts of San Javier (Comuna 13), Moravia, Barrio Pablo Escobar, El Pablado, and Barrio Antioquia; the nightclubs Karma, Tutaina, Tuturama, Blue, Kukaramakara, PH, Fase II, White, Mangos, and Carnival; and the hostels Casa Kiwi, The Pit Stop Hostel, and The Tiger Paw. I conducted interviews with the following people:
Alonso
, assassin; Antonio Jaramillo, executive manager of Corporación Región; César Álvarez, taxi driver; Deyner, resident of Comuna 13; Diana Barajas, sociologist at Instituto Popular de Capacitación; Dioselina Vasco, resident of Comuna 13, mother whose five sons were killed;
Lucy
, Irish backpacker; Felipe Palau, director of the Fuerza Joven program of Medellín;
Håkan
, Swedish backpacker; Javier, resident of Barrio Antioquia;
Lina Cuevas
, victim of violence and resident of Comuna 13; Lourdes Duarte, resident of Moravia; Maria Herlinda Arias, resident of Moravia; Max Yuri, sociologist; Olga Lucía Perez, resident of Comuna 13; Pablo Emilio Angarita, political scientist; Paul Thoreson, proprietor, Casa Kiwi;
Greg
, Canadian backpacker.

In addition to some 30 news reports from the Colombian daily newspapers
El Colombiano
,
El Espectador
, and
El Tiempo
, I used the following printed sources in those passages of the text that deal with Medellín during the first decade of the new millennium: Forrest Hylton’s ‘Extreme Makeover — Medellín in the New Millennium’ (in the anthology
Evil Paradises
), Diana Grajales’
Genealogia de las Bandas
(Universidad de Antioquia), Claudia López’s ‘La Ruta de la Expansión Paramilitar y la Transformación Política de Antioquia’ (in the anthology
Parapolítica
), and the Amnesty report
The Paramilitaries in Medellín
, as well as the following reports: Jonathan Franklin’s ‘The World’s First Cocaine Bar’ (
The Guardian
, 29 August 2009), Anthony Faiola’s ‘Sustaining the Medellín Miracle’ (
The Washington Post
, 11 July 2008), Malcolm Beith’s ‘Good Times in Medellín: a city tainted by violence is experiencing a renaissance’ (
Newsweek
, 5 June 2004), Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s ‘Cocaína y Turismo’ (
El Espectador
, 4 April 2008), Alice O’Keeffe’s ‘Colombia: progress at a price’ (
New Statesman
, 23 April 2007), and Daniel Kurtz-Phelan’s ‘Colombia’s City On a Hill: Medellín goes from murder capital to model city’ (
Newsweek
, 10 November 2007). I obtained official city murder statistics from Medicina Legal, the Colombian agency dealing with forensic pathology.

For the historical exposé I used David T. Courtwright’s
Forces of Habit: drugs and the making of the modern world
; Richard Davenport-Hines’
The Pursuit of Oblivion: a global history of narcotics, 1500–2000
; Paul Gootenberg’s
Andean Cocaine: the making of a global drug
; and Tom Feiling’s
The Candy Machine: how cocaine took over the world
.

The passages on the rise and fall of the
marimba
bonanza stem predominantly from Francisco Thoumis’
Illegal Drugs in Colombia: from illegal economic boom to social crisis
, Fabio Castillo’s
Riders of Cocaine
, and Virginia Vallejo’s
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar
. The quote on pp. 28–29 is also from Vallejo’s book, but my translation is taken from the Spanish edition.

Sections pertaining to the time in which president Álvaro Uribe served as head of the Civil Aviation Authority and his possible collaboration with the mafia are based on information from Joseph Contreras’
Biografía No Autorizada de Álvaro Uribe Vélez
and article ‘Gaviria Contraataca y Uribe se va Contra Liberales’ (
Semana
, April 2008). The same story is also featured in Vallejo’s
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar
, in which Álvaro Uribe and Pablo Escobar are portrayed as close friends who were mutually dependent on each other’s services. The quote by Don Berna regarding the importance of keeping in step with globalisation originates from Hylton’s ‘Extreme Makeover’.

2 Green Gold: the carousel of war

The trips essential for this story took place in May 2007 (the Pacific Coast and the inland of Chocó), June 2007 (Atrato River from Quibdó, north to Río Arquía), December 2007 (Atrato River from Turbo, south to Riosucio), April 2008 (Tumaco, Nariño), May 2008 (San Andrés and Providencia, Caribbean), April 2009 (Buenaventura, the Pacific Coast), May 2009 (San Juan River from Bajo Calima to Istmina), June 2009 (Putumayo), and December 2009 (Golfo de Urabá and the Darien Gap, border to Panama). I interviewed the following people:
Andrea
, coca cultivator, San Juan River; Carlos Nuñez, social worker, Bogotá;
César
, coca cultivator, San Juan River; Claudia López, social scientist, Bogotá; Dora Rodríguez, internal refugee, Medellín;
Edgar
, small farmer, Putumayo; Edwaer Picón, coast-guard captain, Buenaventura;
Ester
, small farmer, Putumayo; Fabiola Rodríguez, mother of murdered son, Buenaventura; Francisco Thoumi, professor
of economics,
Bogotá;
Graciano
, coca cultivator, San Juan River; Gloria Zamudio, investor in the pyramid scheme DMG, Putumayo; Gustavo Guevara, prosecutor, Buenaventura; John Wayne, internal refugee, Chocó; José Mario Riascos, internal refugee, Buenaventura;
José
, small farmer, Putumayo; José-Eduard Pizo, priest, Soacha;
Iván
, fisherman, Chocó; Iván Torres, social worker, Bogotá; Jackson Chavarro, defender of the DMG pyramid scheme, Putumayo; Laura-Rosa Velez, internal refugee, Buenaventura;
Leo
, fisherman, Chocó; Leon Valencia, head of Nuevo Arco Iris, Bogotá; Leonarda Barco Riva, internal refugee, Buenaventura; Leonardo Correa, analyst, SIMCI/UNODC; Lucy Giraldo, social worker, Buenaventura; Luz-Dary Santiesteban, internal refugee, Buenaventura; Maria Cuevas, shopkeeper, Soacha; Mauricio Romero, conflict scholar, Bogotá; Melba Canga, mother of murdered son, Buenaventura; Nancy Sanchez, coordinator, Minga;
Nelcy
, small farmer, Putumayo; Rae Anne Lafrenz, Project Counselling Service coordinator, Bogotá;
Rodrigo
, son of murdered father, Buenaventura;
Solin
, coca chemist, San Juan River; Ted Legget, researcher, UNODC.

I obtained statistics on cocaine flows through Chocó from the Coast Guard and the regional public prosecutor’s office, and the information dealing with general, global developments in cocaine consumption is from the most recent UNODC annual report. The historical account of Chocó is based on, among other sources, Orlando Fals Borda’s (et al.)
La Violencia en Colombia
, Garry Leech’s
Beyond Bogotá: diary of a drug war journalist in Colombia
, and Carlos Rosero and Tatiana Roa Avendaño’s
Llenando Tanques, Vaciando Territorio
. The background on the social situation in Buenaventura incorporates information from the Roman Catholic Dioceses of Buenaventura and Misión de Apoyo al Proceso de Paz de la Organización de los Estados Americanos (MAPP/OEA). Pozón is not the village’s real name.

In addition to the interviews, I based the section on Putumayo on, first and foremost, Oscar Jansson’s PhD dissertation ‘The Cursed Leaf: an anthropology of the political economy of cocaine production in southern Colombia’, Cruz Elena Flórez’s
Órdenes Sociales en el Putumayo Antes y Después Del Plan Colombia
, Marco Palacios’
Plan Colombia: ¿anti-drogas o contrainsurgencia?
, and Mauricio Romero’s
Paramilitares y Autodefensas
. Jansson, above all, forms the basis of the section on the guerrillas’ and paramilitaries’ respective economic relations with the coca cultivators, the ‘culture’ that emerged in the province during the boom, and the Medellín Cartel’s connection to armed groups in the region. The quote by William S. Burroughs also comes from Jansson. His work also helped me greatly with the passages in which I describe the hierarchy in the Colombian cocaine economy, as well as information on the fighting and large number of hectares in El Azul and El Tigre. I extracted statistics on herbicide spraying, the number of cultivated hectares, the number of eliminated hectares, the successes and failures of Plan Colombia, the extent of support from the United States at various times, et cetera, from Cruz Elena Flórez’s report and annual UNODC publications. Information and help for analysis on the guerrillas’ description of the farmers as victims, and on the private armies’ description of entrepreneurs as victims, also comes from
Palacios
, as does the discussion on the relative lull in conflict between La Violencia and the cocaine boom (1955–1985).

I wrote, but ended up not including in the final version, several pages on the 2008–2009 DMG pyramid scandal, a money-laundering scheme using Putumayo as its hub, which swindled hundreds of thousands of Colombians out of money and made headlines all over the world. That story is complex, but actually quite important for a more in-depth understanding of the development of the coca economy in Putumayo during the last decade. For readers wishing to learn more about this telling episode in Colombian history, I recommend Jineth Bedoya’s book
La Pirámide de David Murcia
and Mauricio Baena Velázquez’s
Captadores de Ilusiones: damnificados de las pirámides
.

The information on how different sums of money are distributed to different levels of the cocaine hierarchy comes from my interview with Francisco Thoumi, Colombia’s foremost expert in criminal economy, as does the quote on the UN politicisation of statistics.

The story of Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s assassination made headlines in the Americas in December 2009, and the statistics I used here were extracted from the story as published in
The Wall Street Journal
, 28 December 2009. The spread of coca fields in the country and the role this has played in the
ecocidio
is documented in many sources, and the information I used (in terms of the spread of coca, the richness of Colombia’s biodiversity, and information concerning the cost of manual elimination of coca plants versus herbicide spraying) come from the WOLA report
A Failed Strategy: the spraying of illicit crops in Colombia
(2008). I also used information on drug seizures, quality, rates, et cetera, from the 2008 and 2009 UNODC annual reports.
Andean Cocaine
by Paul Gootenberg offers a more academic in-depth explanation of the so-called balloon effect and its dynamics in the Andes.

The estimations I used about the number of remaining FARC soldiers were published in the Nuevo Arco Iris report
¿En qué está la Guerra?
The exact number of paramilitaries who were demobilised during the demobilisation program, which ran between 2004 and 2006, was 31,689, according to MAPP/OEA, which oversaw the process. However, the OEA never estimated the number of soldiers organised into paramilitary groups before the process started, and in view of the number of registered weapons recovered, the number of paramilitaries bearing arms could not have exceeded 17,000. The other more than 14,000 ‘soldiers’ were actually, according to Nuevo Arco Iris (the organisation that has undertaken the most accurate examination of this process) people who never carried arms, and who joined or were recruited right before demobilisation with an eye to being able to reap the benefits offered by the program. The book
Y se Refundó la Patria
, which takes an in-depth look at this problem and how, according to the Nuevo Arco Iris researchers, the paramilitary process paved the way for the mafia’s takeover of governmental institutions at the local and regional level, was published in 2010. Statistics on what percentage of the paramilitary group’s financial resources derived from coca production (70 per cent) are well known in Colombia and may be found, for example, in Alfredo Rangel’s (et al.)
La Batalla Perdida Contra Las Drogas
.
Several paramilitary leaders have also confirmed this information. Rangel’s quote in the same section is from the same book.

Regional security policy concerns that arose, and still exist, throughout northern South America as a result of the Colombian attack on the FARC camps in Ecuador were too recent to have made it into print in book form when I wrote this text, but they received extensive media coverage in all the affected countries between 2008 and 2010. The quote from Hugo Chávez concerning the demands placed on UN troops in Colombia was published in the Colombian newspaper
El Tiempo
on 7 December 2009.

I wrote the section on the expansion of coca fields along the San Juan River after a trip through the region in May 2009. The name ‘El Caraño’ is a pseudonym, as are the names of the majority of the interviewees (see the note about the use of italics at the beginning of this section). Passages and conclusions about what it’s like to work as a domestic servant and its correlations to racism, serfdom, adoption, et cetera, are based on interviews and research conducted on the adoption industry in Colombia for other works of mine, not yet published. Daniel Samper’s column on
falsos positivos
was published in
El Tiempo
, 17 January 2010. The story of the young boys from Soacha and the quote from the shopkeeper were published by a team of special investigative reporters under the title ‘Así Se Tejió la Trampa de los Falsos Positivos’ in
El Tiempo
, 24 May 2009. Philip Alston’s statements have been documented in a number of publications, including the UN ‘Declaración del Profesor Philip Alston, Relator Especial de las Naciones Unidas para las Ejecuciones Aarbitraries’, 18 June 2009. See also the article ‘UN Expert Voices Concern Over Murders Committed by Colombian Security Forces’ (
UN News Service
, 18 June 2009). A number of documentaries on this topic, such as
Falsos Positivos
by Italian journalists Simone Bruno and Dado Carillo, have also been produced.