Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (5 page)

The fact that the
marimba
boom had its origins in the aristocracy made it, in some absurd way, the ‘nice guys’ bonanza — as opposed to the coca boom, run by Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel, with its roots in a much rougher, urban middle class.
Los marimberos
already had the power Escobar and his men had to gain by murdering those in their way, and today Colombian literature and folk music is replete with depictions, often satirical, of the cultural contrasts between
marimberos
and
coqueros
. One of the nation’s most famous television celebrities, who had connections to both worlds, wrote about this contrast when she recounted meeting the Dávilas — one of the largest landowning families on the coast, who had control during the cannabis boom and were also, incidentally, close friends with Colombia’s beloved president Alfonso López Michelsen. She wrote:

Unlike the coca guys, who are, with few exceptions, like the Ochoas, poor or lower middle class, the Dávila family is an integral part of the coastal aristocracy.
Los coqueros
are short and ugly, whereas the cannabis kings are tall and handsome. A number of women from the Dávila family have married powerful men, such as President López Pumarejo; President Turbay’s son; and Julio Mario Santo Domingo, the wealthiest man in Colombia.

Another aristocratic element inherent in the green bonanza was impunity. Colombia was and is a place where anything can be bought, and as long as you have the right name, the right skin colour, and a solid bank account, there is little to fear — at least from the authorities. With their strong ties in patriarchal and feudal tradition, and a cultural perception that they were out of reach of the law, the regions involved in the
marimba
boom did at times foster extreme, sometimes reckless, arrogance in young white men from wealthy families. Among
los marimberos
, this reckless abandon — combined with the intoxicating feeling of riding the wave of the boom — became a sort of brazen disregard, which at times even extended across national boundaries. Juan Miguel Retal, a young man from Santa Marta’s upper class, flew his DC-6 loaded with marijuana to Jetmore, Kansas, where he landed on a five-kilometre stretch after his partner blocked off road traffic by staging fake truck accidents at both ends. Retal was arrested and his bail set at one million US dollars, but he just paid up and flew home to Santa Marta, laughing all the way.

As early as 1978, however, the
marimba
bonanza was beginning to subside, once again along the lines of what would later become a pattern. The United States had discovered connections between marijuana smugglers and Julio C
é
sar Turbay, López Michelsen’s successor as Colombian president, and in an effort to redeem the Colombian government’s credibility after the White House started questioning its anti-drug ambitions, Turbay stepped up military efforts significantly. He launched a drug-eradication campaign, and marijuana crops were destroyed, processing plants bombed, and export boats and aircraft seized. Meanwhile, US domestic cultivation was quickly gaining momentum, as new and more resistant strains of cannabis were being developed. A variety called sinsemilla spread quickly in the United States, since it could be grown just about anywhere, including in small spaces such as balconies, and cultivation manuals soon became widely available. With the coinciding of these events, the Colombian marijuana business lost profits.

But by now, canny drug entrepreneurs were already aware of the fatal side of Colombia. The
marimba
bonanza had uncovered a complete and, for their purposes, very expedient system: a finely woven fabric of poverty, racism, impunity, corruption, and petty drug lords that, when combined with the strategic geographical location, was perfect for the production of illegal goods. Colombia, it transpired, was skilful at adapting quietly to whatever whimsical impulse came from the apparently insatiable drug markets up north. During the
marimba
rush, smugglers had begun weighing, rather than counting, the dollars. Moreover, the emergence of a new army of vigilant drug pioneers, all with noses for profit, coincided with an equally new drug that was just starting to become fashionable in wealthy living rooms around the world. It was the 1980s, a decade characterised by prosperity and yuppiedom, and in the coming years, one product, one city, and one man would come into global focus, and the nation of Colombia — and the rest of the world — would never be the same again.

THE CITY OF
Medellín stretches across a green valley, from the point where the western and central mountain ranges converge into a massive arrow pointing towards the Caribbean. A ring of mountains encircles the city’s downtown skyscrapers, and in the north and the west shantytowns dot the hillsides like scattered shards of broken tiles. The metropolitan area of El Poblado, one of the districts in the south, has a great deal in common with the nicer parts of Los Angeles: SUVs cruise down city blocks lined with lustrous buildings, culminating in a commercial maze of banks, boutiques, and restaurants. Streams of water ripple through the neighbourhood, and here and there coconut trees provide passers-by with just the right amount of shade from the eternally beating sun. Paul Thoreson, a 33-year-old American of Norwegian decent from Seattle, came here by sheer coincidence six years ago and thought he had encountered a sort of heaven: ‘The ideal climate, hot girls, and a fantastic nightlife. I love it.’

The lower part of El Poblado is covered with Blockbusters and McDonald’s, whereas the streets a bit further up the hill offer a more refined European selection of wine shops, coffee bars, and Italian bakeries. At the end of one of these streets, embedded in the aroma of roasted coffee and freshly baked muffins, is Paul Thoreson’s Casa Kiwi, the first hostel opened in El Poblado.

While brushing his ponytail to the side, Paul explains that he no longer accepts guests who do cocaine in front of the cleaning staff: ‘Everything got out of hand very quickly. We had to kick out a bunch of people after I found out what they were doing. Guests were starting to deal drugs and a lot of them stayed for several months.’ People simply liked the city too much and started looking for a way to make money, but they didn’t want to teach English. A deal was made with some Colombian guy who sold cheap coke, says Thoreson, and these long-term guests would buy a large amount and divvy it up. ‘They’d sell it to people staying at the hostel and make a killing. It was totally crazy. Cocaine is just so unbelievably cheap here. But now I’ve woken up to it.’

Casa Kiwi opened five years ago, and with all the chatter about Medellín on blogs and Facebook, things have grown by leaps and bounds. Thoreson has already built a number of extensions onto Casa Kiwi, and today, in this part of the city, it is just one of many hostels acting as a budget mini-oasis in this sea of green opulence. The investment climate is ‘fantastic’, and Casa Kiwi found itself with no vacancies after it had been in operation a mere six weeks. And so it continued; the money just kept rolling in. Today, Thoreson is a millionaire. ‘I can’t complain.’

One of the hostel employees comes upstairs and asks ‘Don Paul’ if he can take a call, which he declines. From the small terrace he glances over his creation. Below, a thin guy in a Che Guevara sweatshirt is updating a website with photos from this morning’s party, while some men with waxed surfboards wander in, and flyers advertising the night’s attractions are scattered everywhere.

To Thoreson, the trick to sustaining his thriving business is to make sure that drug use at the hostel does not get out of control. At Casa Kiwi there is no concrete bunker and no open dealing, and there are explicit warnings on the hostel’s website under the heading ‘Thinking of Using Cocaine in Colombia?’ Everything is aimed at encouraging visitors ‘to behave’: to indulge in whatever pleasures they like but without overdoing it and, above all, not openly. Acting responsibly is what it’s all about.

‘A lot of the younger guys are just out for drugs. That’s all, really. They think it’s cool to come and do coke in the city of Pablo Escobar, and there was certainly a lot of this going on when we first opened and were known for our parties. But this sort of behaviour makes for a bad atmosphere and fills the place with negative energy. When a lot of people are doing drugs, you can cut the tension with a knife. It’s incredibly intense. In the early days, I thought parties were good for business, which of course is true to a certain extent: when people are enjoying themselves and having a good time, they spend money. So I was really open-minded in the beginning, but in the grand scheme of things it just means trouble. It becomes a downward spiral.’

The maturing process that Casa Kiwi has undergone shows in microcosm what the entire city of Medellín has experienced, going back to when it was notorious as ‘the murder capital of the world’. Drug dealing is no less common today than it ever was. Crime networks are just as strong in the present as in the past, and Medellín’s role as the hub of global drug traffic is no less pronounced now than in the days of the Cartel. The difference today is that nothing is done out in the open. All that has been taken care of. Escobar’s successors are smarter, shrewder businessmen who realise that there is nothing worse for business, and in particular for illegal business, than violence, war, fighting, and media attention. In the 1990s cocaine production doubled in Colombia, but after this Medellín scored praise in headlines around the world for having transformed itself from the ‘city of murder’ to the ‘city of the future’.

And it wasn’t a lie. In 1991, when it was at its worst, Medellín had a rate of 381 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, a figure that by 2007 had decreased to 26 — comparable to the rates in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
The Washington Post
called it ‘The Medellín Miracle’, while
The New York Times
ran the headline ‘A Drug-Runners’ Stronghold Finds a New Life’, and
Newsweek
reported ‘Good Times in Medellín’.

Medellín’s new and improved reputation as a safe, secure city continued to dominate in the media until one of the biggest political scandals in Latin American history broke: the revelation that the principles upon which this newfound virtue were based were not those of basic peace and safety, as widely reported, but rather were firmly rooted in drug money and terror, as in the days of Pablo Escobar. Or, as academic Forrest Hylton later wrote in his essay ‘Extreme Makeover — Medellín in the New Millennium’: ‘Terror was the core of “pacification” after 2000, effecting reforms needed for Medellín’s makeover into a paradise for tourists and investors. This is civilisation as barbarism. As the exhumation of mass graves attests, even the dead are not safe.’

This is a long, violent, and complicated story. The truth was kept under wraps for many years, until in 2009 undercurrents of the drug industry, which were still very much intact, rose to the surface again. Poverty and violence were reunited — as they had been so many times before in Colombian history — and the result was bloodshed. But all this happened in an underworld conveniently removed from the happy minds of the young people at Pit Stop, Casa Kiwi, or any of the other oases in Medellín.

THE SHOTS CAME
moments after Diego left the house. There were seven. Lina ran into the street in nothing but a towel and a chemise, only to discover the body of the man with whom she had spent her 26 years on earth. He was lying in a pool of blood outside the door. She fainted. He had been shot four times in the head and three in the stomach. Little plastic-like clumps of brain matter were stuck in his hair.

‘This was five months and nine days ago.’ Lina Cuevas sits beside a decorated Christmas tree in Comuna 13, one of the most notorious parts of Medellín. She has been counting the days since the incident. Although Lina is 26 she does not look a day over 18, and while she recaps her story she twists her hair into a ponytail behind a round but thin face. She is in control of her emotions, and not the least bit surprised about what happened: ‘They’re fighting over how to divide up Medellín between them.’

Diego was Lina’s brother and just one of many young men who had lost their lives in recent fighting over hubs of drug activity. Medellín, Cali, and Bogotá are not just financial metropolises and indispensable centres of money laundering, arms trading, and everything else to do with the global export of cocaine; they are also growing markets in their own right. While the powder much coveted in the United States and Europe has never been especially popular in Colombia, this is fast changing. With tourism on the rise, the foreign-aid sector growing, an increasing number of business investments from abroad, and the growth of language schools, awareness of American and European tastes in recreational drugs has also expanded. Domestic demand has begun to boom.

Diego worked for an organisation that controlled drug trading in a neighbourhood of Medellín, and was just one of the many to fall prey, according to a pattern of violence that has become a nationwide trend. When one armed group reigns over a territory everything is calm, and people for the most part are happy and content. It does not usually matter, at least to the poor, whether the guerrillas, a paramilitary group, or the government is in control, as long as there is peace and stability. The real chaos begins when fighting breaks out over territories, and killing ensues on a large scale.

It is the same with drugs. Routes, labs, growing regions, and shops are all relatively calm, and usually completely undetectable, as long as one drug lord and his military apparatus have control. But as soon as he is caught or killed, all hell breaks loose, as previously peaceful areas are quickly transformed into the worst war zones imaginable. Poverty is so widespread throughout the entire cocaine region, from Bolivia to Peru, Colombia, Central America, Mexico, and Venezuela, that when any link in the chain is broken there are always thousands of candidates ready to replace it. Some of the violence generated by the cocaine industry has to do with the murdering of police, prosecutors, politicians, journalists, and others who stand in the way of the mafia and their financial interests, but the vast majority of those dying in drug-related violence are poor young men battling over rank within their own criminal hierarchies.