The Power Of The Dog (95 page)

They took one of those helicopters from Cartagena down to the town of Puerto Asís on the Putumayo River, hard by the border with Ecuador. Art wandered down to the river, a muddy brown ribbon running through the intense, almost suffocating green of the jungle, and stood above a rickety dock, where long, narrow canoes—the principal means of transportation in an area with few roads—are loaded with plantains and bundles of firewood. Javier, his escort, a young soldier of the Twenty-fourth Brigade, hustled down the bank to get him. Christ, Art thought, the kid can’t be more than sixteen years old.

“You can’t cross the river,” Javier told him.

Art wasn’t thinking of going across, but he asked, “Why not?”

Javier pointed across the river to the southern bank. “That’s Puerto Vega. FARC owns it.”

It was clear that Javier was anxious to get away from the riverbank, so Art walked back with him to “safe” territory. The government controls Puerto Asís and the north bank of the river around the town, but just west of here, even on the north side, is the FARC-controlled town of Puerto Caicedo.

But Puerto Asís is AUC country.

Art knows all about the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia. The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia was started by the old MAS cocaine lord Fidel Cardona, aka Rambo. Cardona used to operate a right-wing death squad from his Las Tangas ranch in northern Colombia, back in the days when everything was fat and happy in the Medellín cartel. Then Cardona turned against Pablo Escobar and helped the CIA track him down, a deed for which all his cocaine crimes were forgiven. Cardona took his shiny new soul and went into “politics” full-time.

AUC used to operate just in the northern part of the country; its move into the Putumayo district is a recent development. But when it came in, it came in strong, and Art sees evidence of that everywhere.

He saw the right-wing paramilitaries all over Puerto Asís—with their camouflage fatigues and red berets, cruising in pickup trucks, stopping peasants and searching them or just brandishing their M-16s and machetes.

Sending a message to the campesinos, Art thought: This is AUC turf and we can do what we want with you.

Javier was hustling him to a convoy of army vehicles on the main street. Art could see John Hobbs standing by one of the jeeps, tapping his foot impatiently. We need a military escort to go out into the countryside, Art thought.

“We need to hurry, Señor,” Javier said.

“Sure,” Art said. “I just need something to drink.”

The heat was oppressive. Art’s shirt was already soaked with sweat. The soldier led him to a little street-side stand where Art got two cans of warm Coke, one for himself and one for the soldier. The stand’s owner, an old lady, asked him something in a rapid local dialect that Art didn’t understand.

“She wants to know how you want to pay,” Javier explained. “In cash or cocaine?”

“What?”

Cocaine is like money here, the soldier explained. The locals carry little bags of powder the way you would carry change. Most people pay with cocaine. Buying a soda with cocaine, Art thought as he pulled some rumpled, wet bills from his pocket. Coke for Coke—yeah, we’re winning the War on Drugs here.

He handed the soldier one of the sodas and then joined the tour.

Now he stands in a ruined coca field and rubs the surface of a leaf with his thumb. It’s sticky, and he turns to the Monsanto representative who’s hovering around him like a mosquito and asks, “Are you mixing Cosmo-Flux with the Roundup?”

Roundup Ultra is the trade name for the defoliant glyphosate, which the Colombian army, with American advisers, sprays from low-flying airplanes protected by helicopter cover.

The more things change, Art thinks … first Vietnam, then Sinaloa, now Putumayo.

“Well, yes, it makes it stick to the plants better,” the Monsanto rep says.

“Yeah, but it also increases the toxic risk to people, isn’t that right?”

“Well—in large amounts, maybe,” the flack says. “But we’re using small dosages of Roundup here, and the Cosmo-Flux makes the small amount a lot more effective. A lot more bang for your buck.”

“What amounts are they using here?”

The Monsanto guy doesn’t know, but Art won’t quit until he gets the answer. He holds the whole junket up while they stop one of the pilots, open up his tank and find out. After tenacious questioning and some browbeating of the guys who load the tanks, Art finds that they’re using five liters per acre. The Monsanto literature recommends a liter per acre as the maximum safe dosage.

“Five times the safe dosage?” Art asks John Hobbs. “Five times?”

“We’ll look into it,” Hobbs says.

The man has aged. I guess I have, too, Art thinks, but Hobbs looks ancient. His white hair is finer, his skin almost translucent, his blue eyes still sharp even though it’s plain that they can see the approach of sunset. And he’s wearing a jacket, even though they’re in the jungle and it’s sweltering. He’s perpetually cold, Art thinks, in the way that only the old and the dying are.

“No,” Art says. “I’ll look into it. Five times the recommended dose of glyphosate, and you’re mixing in Cosmo-Flux? What are you trying to poison here, a crop or a whole environment?”

Because he has his suspicions that he’s not looking at ground zero in the War on Drugs so much as he’s looking at ground zero in the war against Communist guerrillas—who live, hide and fight in the jungle.

So if you defoliate the jungle …

As his hosts show him their “successes,” thousands of acres of wilted coca plants, Art peppers them with endless aggravating questions: Does it kill just coca, or does it poison other crops as well? Does it kill food crops—beans, bananas, maize, yucca? No? Well, what am I looking at in that field? It looks like it was maize to me. Isn’t corn the mainstay of the local diet? What do they eat after their food crops are destroyed?

Because this isn’t Sinaloa, Art thinks. There aren’t any drug lords who own thousands of acres here. Most of the cocaine is grown by small campesinos, who plant an acre or two at most. FARC taxes them in its territory, AUC taxes them on the land it controls. Where the campesinos have it the worst, of course, is on territory that both sides actively claim—there they pay double the taxes on the cocaine they harvest.

As he watches the planes spray, he asks, How high are they flying? A hundred feet? Even Monsanto’s own specs say that spraying from anything higher than ten feet isn’t recommended. Doesn’t that increase the risk of drift onto other crops? There’s a stiff breeze today—aren’t your defoliants being blown all over the place?

“You’re way off base,” Hobbs tells him.

“Am I?” Art asks. “I want you to get a biochemist out here and test the water in a dozen village wells.”

He makes them take him to a refugee camp, where the campesinos have gone to flee the fumigation. It’s little more than a clearing in the jungle with hastily built cinder-block buildings and tin-roof shacks. He demands to be taken to the clinic, where a missionary doctor shows him the kids with exactly the symptoms he was afraid he’d see—chronic diarrhea, skin rashes, respiratory problems.

“One-point-seven billion dollars to poison kids?” Art asks Hobbs as they get back into the jeep.

“We’re in a war,” Hobbs says. “This is no time to go wobbly, Arthur. It’s your war, too. May I remind you that this is the cocaine that empowered such men as Adán Barerra? That money from this cocaine bought the bullets used at El Sauzal?”

I don’t need a reminder, Art thinks.

And who knows where Adán is now? Six months after the raid in Baja and the subsequent massacre at El Sauzal, Adán is still in the wind. The U.S. government put a $2 million reward on his head, but so far, no one has stepped forward to collect.

Who wants money you’d never live to collect?

An hour’s drive later they come to a village that’s totally abandoned. Not a person, a pig, a chicken, a dog.

Nothing.

All the huts look untouched, save for a larger building—the communal storage bin by the looks of it—which has been totally gutted with flame from the inside.

A ghost town.

“Where are the people?” Art asks Javier.

The boy shrugs.

Art asks the officer in charge.

“Disappeared,” he answers. “They must have run from FARC.”

“Run where?”

Now the officer shrugs.

They spend the night at a small army base north of town. After a dinner of steaks grilled over a petrol-fueled fire, Art excuses himself from the party to get a little sleep, then slips off to take a look around the base.

You’ve been on one fire-base, you’ve been on them all, Art thinks. They’re pretty much the same, Vietnam or Colombia—a clearing hacked out of the bush and leveled, then enclosed with barbed wire, then the perimeter around the base cleared to provide a field of fire.

This base is roughly bisected, Art finds out as he prowls around. Most of it is Twenty-fourth Brigade, but he comes to a gate that separates the main part of the base from what appears to be a section reserved for AUC.

He walks along the high barbed-wire fence and looks through.

It’s a training camp—Art can make out the shooting range and the straw dummies hanging from trees for hand-to-hand practice. They’re at it now, sneaking up behind the straw dummies with knives as if taking out enemy sentries.

Art watches for a while, then goes back to his quarters, a small room at the end of one of the barracks buildings, near the perimeter. The room has a window, open but screened with mosquito netting, a cot, a lamp run off the generator and, thankfully, an electric fan.

Art sits down on the cot and leans over. Sweat drips off his nose onto the concrete floor.

Jesus, Art thinks. Me and the AUC. We’re the same guy.

He lies down on the bed but can’t sleep.

It’s hours later when he hears a soft knock outside on the edge of the window. It’s the young soldier, Javier. Art goes to the window.

“What is it?”

“Would you come with me?’

“Where?”

“Would you come with me?” Javier repeats. “You asked where the people went?”

“Yeah?”

“Red Mist,” Javier says.

Art slips his shoes back on and climbs out through the window. He ducks low behind Javier and the two of them sneak along the perimeter, ducking the searchlight, until they come to a small gate. The guard sees Javier and lets them through. They belly-crawl across the fire range and into the bush. Art follows the kid along a narrow trail that leads down toward the river.

This is stupid, Art thinks. This is beyond stupid. Javier could be leading you into a trap. He can see the headlines now: DEA BOSS KIDNAPPED BY FARC. But he keeps following the kid. There’s something he has to find out.

A canoe is waiting on the riverbank.

Javier jumps in and beckons Art to do the same.

“We’re crossing the river?” Art asks.

Javier nods and waves for him to hurry.

Art gets in.

It takes only a few minutes for them to row across. They land the canoe, and Art helps Javier drag it onto the shore. When he straightens he sees four masked men with guns standing there.

“Take him,” Javier says.

“You little fuck,” Art says, but the men don’t grab him, just gesture for him to follow them west along the bank of the river. It’s a hard slog—he keeps tripping on branches and thick vines—but finally they arrive at a small clearing and there, under the moonlight, he sees where the people went.