Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (4 page)

Cocaine had begun to make its comeback on the global scene in 1969 with the film
Easy Rider,
in which Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda are seen stuffing the powder into the gas tanks of their motorcycles. It was the final year of the revolutionary 1960s — a decade dominated by marijuana and LSD — and cocaine was still a drug about which the general public knew very little. This played into the screenwriter’s decision to choose it; cannabis was too run-of-the-mill and heroin too dangerous. Cocaine, however, had all the right connotations: it was new, exotic, and fun.

But cocaine had yet another quality that paved the way for its eventual impact on Western cultures. While loss of control and wild hallucinations were the goals of drug users in bohemian, avant-garde circles, cocaine offered the complete opposite; it sharpened the mind, and thus came to appeal to an entirely different class of people. In an article featured in
Time
, cocaine was called ‘the drug of choice for perhaps millions of solid, conventional, and often upwardly mobile citizens’. Unlike marijuana or LSD, cocaine wasn’t linked to any sort of rebellious political movement or associated with bloody syringes, and the fact that it was too expensive for the average person contributed to its high-class status. Cocaine was the perfect drug for people who hated junkies, as Tom Feiling and several historians have noted, and as late as 1975 cocaine addiction was not widely recognised.

Yet by the 1970s cocaine was becoming a pervasive plague on contemporary society, which would not only reconfigure popular culture and generate millions of addicts, but would also — and above all else — destroy democracy in a number of already impoverished countries. Three distinct patterns, which to this day continue to characterise the world’s escalating and increasingly bloody cocaine war, were by this time already on their way to becoming firmly established: demand would not subside; the United States’ war on drugs would expand, eventually alongside the war on terror; and both the production of cocaine and the fight against it would be concentrated in one place: Colombia.

ONE OF THE
most beautiful natural wonders in the Andes is a snow-clad pyramid right in the Caribbean. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta range is home to the world’s highest coastal mountain, and the massif’s peaks stretch 5800 metres into the sky a mere 45 kilometres away from the coconut palms on the sun-drenched Caribbean beaches. If you had the ability to travel back in time and climbed the massif with a pair of long-range binoculars, you would find yourself geographically situated in the middle of the most tragic, 30-year-long cocaine drama — with an incredible view.

Directly north and not too far away is Miami: where a war broke out between Cuban and Colombian gangsters in the late 1970s for control over the main entryway to the once booming US cocaine market, as immortalised in the Brian De Palma film
Scarface
.

In the west, much closer, is Panama City: bombed by US president George Bush senior in 1989 after the country’s leader, CIA agent and cocaine trafficker Manuel Noriega, went from being an asset to a burden with respect to US interests in Panama.

A little north of the Panama Canal, near the Colombian drug-smuggling island of San Andrés, is Nicaragua: the centre of the 1986 Iran
–
Contra affair, during which the United States paid 48 million USD to the Contras, a terrorist organisation whose war against the left-wing Sandinistas was financed — along with support from the United States — by cocaine trafficking.

Further north is Mexico: a nation currently on the verge of collapse, with over 22,000 drug-related murders reported between 2007 and 2010, as a result of the mafia gaining control over the drug routes between Colombia and the United States following the dismantling of the Medellín and Cali Cartels.

In the east, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, is the beginning of the 354-kilometre jungle border with Venezuela: the socialist nation that, in the space of just a few years, has become one of the world’s most important routes for cocaine trafficking. According to the United Nations, 40 per cent of all cocaine smuggled from the northern Andes to Europe today passes through Venezuela.

South of the snow-capped peaks is the hub itself: Colombia, the heart of the global cocaine market, the source of the millions of packages of powder shipped out on a daily basis to all corners of the globe. This is the chaotic country where the assassination of Pablo Escobar in 1993 gave rise to even worse monsters —paramilitary right-wing terrorists who, backed by drug money, were able to interfere with a third of the seats in the nation’s congress during the 2000s.

But the most interesting thing about the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is that this is where the story began. In recent decades Colombia has produced the lion’s share of all the cocaine consumed in the world, and the mystery is how this came to be. Technically speaking, cocaine can be grown and processed in some 30 countries around the world; over time, however, the vast majority of cultivation and production came to be concentrated in this nation. Today Colombia is the only nation where all three of the most sought-after recreational drugs — cocaine, heroin, and marijuana — are produced in large quantities, and in no other country has illegal drug production had such dramatic consequences. Being the world’s largest supplier of cocaine has significantly altered the nation in many ways: from transforming legal institutions, to sparking major changes in the value system of the inhabitants, to dictating the financial terms of the country, and to making armed conflict a permanent fixture of society. Not least, drugs have come to play an increasingly pivotal role in Colombian politics.

Most climates are represented in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, from icy glaciers to sunny beaches, and the lower regions are covered by thick rainforest and arid deserts inhabited by ancient indigenous tribes. The place has always been an isolated entity — culturally and geologically an island of sorts, albeit on solid ground — which, like many other parts of Colombia, has over the years been difficult to access for authorities and invaders alike.

In the northwestern-most corners of South America, there was — unlike in the places today known as Peru, Bolivia, or Mexico — no dominant Inca or Aztec empire whose leaders and structures of power could be conquered and used by the Spanish. Rather, in Colombia there were hundreds of small, separate indigenous tribes, each with their own culture, language, economy, and history. The Spaniards found a solution to their frustration over their inability to dominate the disparate tribes by importing slaves from Africa. However, given the rough terrain of Colombia, which consists of three mountain ranges and long coasts on both oceans — not to mention that half the country is covered in jungle — many slaves were able to escape, hide, and ultimately establish their own small, autonomous communities far from any central governing body.

The drug industry has undoubtedly been able to benefit from the persistent social and cultural aspects of this isolation, which has carried over to modern times. To this day decentralisation and diversification, for better or worse, are two of the nation’s most distinctive qualities, and they’ve shown to be sadly integral to the creation of settings ideal for a wide range of criminal activity.

Illegal drug production and trafficking began in earnest in Colombia in the mid-1960s, and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta was its first foothold. Yet it did not start with cocaine but with marijuana, which was not only the favourite drug of Colombians but also the preferred drug of Pablo Escobar. And then, as now, the driving force behind the rapid development of drug-producing structures was the never-ending demand for drugs in the United States.

During the 1960s, the explosion in demand for cannabis in the United States prompted a vast increase in the number of large marijuana plantations in Mexico and Jamaica. However, by the end of the decade the White House had implemented a sweeping anti-drug campaign; poisonous herbicides were sprayed over marijuana fields in Mexico, resulting in an urgent need for new growing regions — a void that Colombian farmers were more than happy to fill. Owing to its isolation, favourable climate, and relative proximity to the American market, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta provided a number of good reasons for US cannabis entrepreneurs to relocate their business. By the time herbicide spraying in Mexico was drawing to a close, 75 per cent of all the grass smoked in the United States was being cultivated along the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

In the early stages of this relocation, the American cannabis pioneers who visited the mountains assisted the poor farmers by providing them with seeds and other resources necessary for the initial cultivation. Yet after just a few years, Colombian upstarts were able to take control over the plantations and edge out the Americans in production and export. But
los gringos
, the Yanks, maintained control of the main market, the United States. In 1972 in Santa Marta, the city by the foot of the mountains, newspaper articles began circulating about strange men who had been boasting openly about the money they were earning from illegal marijuana sales. News of the lucrative green crop quickly spread, and by the end of the 1970s large marijuana fields had popped up all over the country. In whichever region this took place, two common features were present, and they would be crucial to the success of the next drug boom in Colombia: these regions were recently settled and they were out of the reach of governmental authorities.

The export organisations at the time, the precursors to the Medellín and Cali Cartels, were relatively simple in terms of composition. They consisted mainly of farmers — indigenous people, the descendents of slaves, or
mestizo
settlers in search of land — who tilled the soil for a local exporter, who often owned a few runways or a small port and had made an agreement with an importer on the other side of the Caribbean. Most growers around the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta already had roots in this area, and many opted to stop cultivating cannabis after a few lucrative harvests made it financially possible for them to return to legal agriculture without compromising their comfortable lifestyles. The marijuana rush,
la bonanza marimbera
, is today romanticised in Colombian folklore as a wild and carefree era — probably more because it stands in stark contrast to the violence that was to follow than because it was a particularly glorious period in itself.

The green boom differed from the white boom that was to come in one important cultural respect, which was integral to the fact that Colombia would become one of the most violent places in the world in the 1980s, and also probably contributed to the era’s rose-tinted reputation: it was aristocratic. The rural parts of Colombia, such as th
ose along the Caribbean coast, have always been essentially feudal, where landowners with deep pockets and cultural capital maintain a peaceful reign over the politicians and the economy, and control the peasants and the infrastructure. If these landowners were not mayors, governors, presidents, or any other sort of elected officials, they were the neighbours, cousins, business partners, or friends of those in
la clase política
, the political class, which has ruled the Colombian countryside with strategic violence for centuries. Soon after the profits from the cannabis boom started rolling in, the local ruling elite consolidated their control over drug activity, and the gap widened between the poor mountain farmers and those working in transport, trade, and export (
los marimberos
). In this environment, it stood to reason that influential landowning families — and often the young males, in this patriarchal hierarchy — gained control over the commerce. This dynamic, between an isolated and illiterate agrarian population and an elite class who had easy access to the coast and its infrastructure, either by owning it themselves or because they were able to bribe those who administrated it, was fundamental to the export success.

Initially, trafficking only involved small cargo boats and light aircrafts departing from docks and landing strips located on private estates. But as global demand increased, the need for new and more efficient departure routes arose. The cannabis lords invested in larger aircraft, DC-3s in particular, and made nightly departures from the commercial airport in Santa Marta. Air-traffic controllers, guards, and the management of the Colombian Civil Aviation Authority (CCAA) were bribed to ensure that the airport’s identity remained secret, instigating intentional ‘blackouts’ whenever planes carrying cannabis took off.

Ever since then, the position of director of the CCAA — a role that would prove even more crucial during the next boom period — has played a pivotal role in the nation’s drug trade; but it has often carried fatal consequences for the incumbent. The CCAA and its management have been a buzzing epicentre surrounded by murder and political scandals, and it is still the centre of attention for those attempting to shed light on the role that present-day politicians played in the drug trafficking of the past. Álvaro Uribe, the revered right-wing president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010, was director of the CCAA from 1980 to 1982, and, according to César Gaviria, president from 1990 to 1994, Uribe was forced to step down for having turned a blind eye to the actions of his closest subordinate: a politician and civil servant by the name of César Villegas, who had collaborated with the mafia for many years, making airports available to emerging cocaine cartels. It is Uribe’s word against others about his role in past narcotics transactions, but regardless of the truth in his particular case, the drug lords’ way of dealing with the Civil Aviation Authority speaks volumes about how the
marimba
bonanza was the launching pad for a corrupt political culture that would soon become permanent reality — a milieu of nepotism and a system in which landowners, politicians, director-generals, and drug dealers spun an increasingly large, entangled, and bloodstained web.