ZeroZeroZero (12 page)

“One of my most loyal customers just got back from the United States. He says blow there’s 30 percent.”

“Thirty percent?”

“Yeah, the active ingredient is 30 percent. But I say it’s a load of crock. I know places in Paris where it’s 5 percent. And in Italy some pushers sell balls of coke where the active ingredient’s practically nonexistent. But they’re real cheats.”

Over the years I’ve seen just about everything there is to see in drug distribution. In Europe the average ranges from 25 percent to 43 percent; some countries come in lower, Denmark at 18 percent and England and Wales at 20. But these figures could change at any time.

The cut is where the real money is made, because it’s the cut that makes a line of coke precious, and it’s the cut that ruins nostrils. In London some bourgeois pushers hide quality coke in garages to put on the market when drug seizures make for a shortage of goods and as a consequence everybody starts cutting it, lowering the quality. At that point you can sell the really good stuff for four times as much. In an economy in which supply and demand fluctuate so rapidly, the cut becomes the discriminating factor. The distributor can cut it, with the approval of the Mafia family. The base is allowed to cut only in extreme cases, and only with the authorization of the distributer. The pusher who cuts is a dead pusher.

 • • • 

“I took some courses; I crashed one of those clinics where people who want to quit are bullied with statistics, like 25 percent of heart attacks
in people between the ages of eighteen and forty-five are caused by my product. If you ask me, these courses spew a lot of bullshit. But I did learn something. It acts on your neurons, makes your nervous system go haywire, and over time it damages it. In other words, it pisses your brain away. And that’s not all: It’s dangerous for your heart too; all it needs is an extra chaser to make it collapse, and if the product’s washed down with a Long Island or a Negroni or a Jack Daniel’s, or accompanied by little blue pills, well, then it’s like stepping on the gas on a curve. You also have to consider that cocaine is a vasoconstrictor; it constricts your blood vessels, anesthetizes you. All these effects happen pretty much right away, depending on how you do it: If you shoot up, it starts taking effect before you even realize it; if you smoke crack or freebase, it’s a little slower but still really fast; and if you snort, it hits you a second later.”

I ask him about the good moments.

“The good moments? It wakes you up right away, raises your attention level, gives you energy, you’re less tired, you don’t even feel the need to sleep, eat, or drink. But that’s not all: It improves your sense of self, you feel happy, you want to do things, you’re euphoric, and any pain you might have disappears. And you lose your inhibitions, so it ups your sex drive, makes you more daring. And what’s more, coke doesn’t make you feel like a drug addict. A cocaine addict’s nothing like a heroin addict. People who snort cocaine are users, not junkies. They satisfy a need and then get on with life.”

But then he starts right in on the bad moments.

“If you do it a lot, you heart goes crazy, you have panic attacks, it’s easy to get depressed, you become irascible for no reason, even paranoid at times. Since you don’t sleep or eat much, you tend to lose weight. If you snort a lot for several years, you risk fucking up your nostrils. I know people who had to get their nasal septum redone because they snorted so much. I also know people who died: One dose too many and you have a heart attack. It’s common knowledge, after all; it’s not like I discovered hot water or something, but when I heard them say that if
you use my product you can’t get it up anymore, I was, I mean, it’s not like I have that sort of problem, but a good chunk of my customers come to me precisely for this reason, and they all keep coming back; they’re really charged up, they tell me they fuck for hours, they have orgasms that electrify them from their heads to their toes, they do things they’d only ever seen in porn movies, things they’d never even dreamed of doing—a whole tribe of horny customers who, before they met me, would come after two minutes, and now they’re really having a grand time. I had to understand, but it’s not like I could ask them flat out, guys don’t talk willingly about certain things, and so I asked a woman friend of mine, she’s real tough and asks me for a bit of blow every now and then, but only because she’s finishing up med school and has to study all night, because she works as a cashier during the day to pay the tuition. With me she calls herself Butterfly, because she has a butterfly tattoo on one cheek; I asked her to show it to me, because I didn’t believe her, but she always refused. The fact remains that we agree to meet at the usual place, and as usual, she’s all elusive because she has a million things to do, but I stop her, ask her how things are going with her boyfriend, and then I wink, I feel like an idiot, but I don’t know how else to broach the subject, and luckily she understands and asks me how come I want to know, what’s it to me? I tell her I’m just curious, that she’s important to me, her pleasure’s important, and I wink again when I say pleasure, but this time I feel less idiotic, like I’ve gotten her attention. What’s on your mind? she says, and at that point I tell her the situation, that I heard it said that my product isn’t so good for those kinds of things, and so I’m conducting a sort of market survey, that’s all. And she does something real strange: She takes my hand and drags me to a bar, orders a couple of beers, and lights a cigarette. The bartender sees her and tries to tell her she can’t smoke, but she tells him not to bust her balls, so he retreats behind the counter and goes back to serving cappuccino. And she tells me about her boyfriend: At first it was really fabulous, so good it was almost scary, he’d have these amazing erections, Guinness world book of records, sex that would make the
Italian Stallion jealous—but then it was all over. His dick, she says, is as flaccid as a sausage left to boil too long; it takes hours for him to get hard, and if she tries to touch him, it’s like he doesn’t even feel it; it’s like the heat’s gone and his blood vessels are pumping ice water. He’s superdepressed about it; all he does is apologize; he can’t even masturbate when he’s alone. So now he’s taking Viagra, a small dose at first, just twenty-five milligrams, then he upped it to a hundred, but it’s no good; he still only gets half hard, and he can’t come. There’s just no way to make him come, and it’s painful, all that built-up energy that can’t explode, it hurts like hell, and fucking for hours, waiting for him to finally blow, isn’t exactly fun for her either. He’s being treated by an andrologist, he confessed to using my product, and the doctor didn’t bat an eye; he said lots of people come to him with the same problem, and the only solution is to ditch my product, but it’s not easy. Butterfly talks freely, and I start putting the pieces together, and I realize I’m raising an army of sexually depressed men who just keep upping their doses on the remote chance they’ll get hard. Fuck, I wanted to shout, if it weren’t such an inappropriate thing to say right then. And then Butterfly tells me that women use it too, for the same reason, because it gets you aroused, really revved up, but from the point of view of sex it’s a disaster, because one of the product’s side effects is that it’s also an excellent anesthetic; it’s one thing if you rub a bit on your wisdom tooth that’s coming in, but if you stop reaching orgasm, which is already difficult enough under normal circumstances, well, that’s a whole different story. Not to mention, Butterfly continues, the things you do and then regret, like that time her boyfriend confessed to her that he was a bit too high one evening and ended up with a trans, that he’d always fantasized about it but never had the courage to do it. The courage? I say, and Butterfly nods, then after a minute of silence I ask her if she’ll let me see her tattoo this time, and she smiles and stands between the tables, unbuttons her pants, and lowers her underwear. What can I say? She wasn’t lying.

“I didn’t stop walking, elbowing my way among those men dressed according to the latest dictates of business fashion, and I didn’t stop my targets from coming to see me, but I didn’t stop learning what’s behind my product either; I see new faces, and the old ones fade away and get lost, who knows where. It’s a shitty job.”

A shitty job that he knows how to do. He talks about it as if he has already weighed the pros and cons of his profession in his head and has decided to keep the cons to himself. Paranoia, for instance. There are pushers who change cell phones and SIM cards once a week. All it takes is one customer to be a little careless and you’re screwed. There are pushers who live like cloistered nuns: no contact with the outside world except when absolutely necessary, and a drastic reduction of one’s private life. Girlfriends are particularly dangerous; they can easily guess what your day job is and can easily take revenge by telling someone about it. Some pushers are even more angsted: They spend their free time erasing all traces of themselves—no credit cards or bank accounts, no ATM cards, and never a signature on a piece of paper. Angst and paranoia. Some pushers, in order to quell the anxiety, do the same blow they push, but only end up feeding their angst. And there are pushers, like the one I’m sitting with, who sound like stockbrokers: “I sell Ferraris, not economy cars. You crash sooner in an economy car; in a Ferrari you last a little longer.”

There are street pushers who can earn $5,000 a month, and even get a bonus if they sell well. But bourgeois pushers can earn up to $25,000, $40,000 a month.

“The problem’s not the amount of money you earn, though; it’s that any other job seems impossible, because it would feel like a waste of time. You earn more just by brushing someone’s hands than you would working for months and months, no matter what sort of job it is. And knowing that you’ll be arrested isn’t enough to make you change professions. Even if I were offered a job where I could earn as much as I do now, I don’t think I’d take it, because it would undoubtedly take up
more of my time. The same is true for those poor souls who deal on the streets. They’d have to put in a lot more time to earn the same amount of money.”

I looked at him and asked if he could confirm a sensation I had while listening to his stories, which was that he despises his clients.

“Yes. I liked them at first, because they gave me what I needed. But over time you look at them and you begin to understand. You realize that you could be one of them. You see yourself from the outside, and you’re repulsed. I dislike my clients because they remind me too much of myself, or what I would become if I decided to enjoy myself more. And not only does the idea repulse me, it scares me.”

Evolutionary transformation is fueled by vacuums. The story of drug trafficking in Colombia is one of vacuums, transformations, and capitalism.

Today what was once a vacuum is swarming, like a plot of ground under the entomologist’s lens. Swarming with hundreds of microcartels. Armed organizations that give themselves names that sound like local sports teams. Communist guerrillas who increasingly play the paradoxical role of large landowners, of plantation and production managers. Each one develops his own specialty, carves out his own slice of the action: production, distribution, transportation. Each one defends his own little corner of jungle, mountain, coast, or border. It’s all disconnected, parceled out, ground up. Today the doses of territory, and the spread of power and alliances, for which blood still flows, seem infinitesimal compared to the heyday of the big cartels.

But if the Colombia of drug trafficking today seems like the land of the Lilliputians to Gulliver, the problem is partly in the eye of the beholder. Or in his mind, rather; in his memory. Eyes see what they expect to see, or they gather in the remains. What they see is based on
what they no longer see. So if there aren’t any more big showdowns or massacres, if cartels no longer carry out attacks on presidential candidates or no longer finance presidential elections, if Colombia is no longer a narco-state, and if the big players are all dead or sentenced to life in the United States, you might think the war has been won. Well, maybe not completely won, but at least well on the way to victory.

Or your gaze might get stuck in the past: Since “cocaine” and “Colombia” are still synonymous—a denomination of origin as inherent as Scotch whiskey or Russian caviar—the imagination continues to picture Colombian drug lords as the most powerful, the richest, the most terrifying in the world. But no regular person knows the names of the big traffickers anymore, or of the major organizations operating in Colombia. And yet, despite decades spent battling the Colombian narcos, the market share the country has lost is much less than one might expect in this era of global commerce. This apparent paradox makes it extremely difficult to grasp the current reality, to see its actual dimensions.

The alleged Lilliputians are no longer the absolute lords of cocaine, but it’s calculated that Colombia continues to produce around 60 percent of the cocaine consumed worldwide. And coca plants continue to take root in every cultivatable clod of Colombian soil.

How can this be? What does it mean?

The first answer is elementary, the basic principle of capitalism. If demand holds, if, in fact, it continues to grow, it would be absurd to cut off the supply, or even to reduce it significantly.

The second answer is that the decline of the Colombian cartels corresponded to the rise of the Mexican cartels and of all the new, powerful players in the criminal economy. Today the Sinaloa cartel directs the cultivation and production of coca plants, cocaine paste, and cocaine in Colombia just as multinational corporations direct the cultivation and processing of fruit.

But all this does not fully explain what happened in Colombia. It’s important to understand, though. Important because Colombia
represents a matrix of the criminal economy, and its transformations reveal the full adaptive capacity of a system that has one fixed constant: white powder. Men die, armies disintegrate, but coke remains. This, in short, is the story of Colombia.

 • • • 

In the beginning there was Pablo, Pablo Escobar. Before Pablo, the drug trade was on the rise in Colombia, with its ideal conditions for producing, storing, and transporting cocaine. But it was in the hands of “coke cowboys,” who were too weak to impose their own rules and too scattered geographically to impose the law of the strongest. There was a vacuum, and Pablo filled it right away. The first evolutionary step in Colombian drug trafficking began with this ambitious young man, who was determined to become so rich that he’d have more influence than the president. Starting from nothing he accumulated wealth, gained respect, and conceived of the first cocaine distribution network, using small boats and single-engine planes. To safeguard his operation he relied on an old Colombian saying:
plata o plomo
, money or lead. If you were a police officer or a politician, you either accepted his bribe or you were dead. For Pablo, who became Medellín’s godfather, the cocaine business was simple: All you had to do was take a walk in the poor barrios and enlist the kids, who were ready to do anything—bribe people here and there, or pay off a friendly banker to help you bring the money you laundered back in. He said as much himself: “Everybody has a price. The important thing is to figure out what it is.” The vacuum filled quickly, and the Colombian system became a monopoly, its distribution network extending to the most important points on the American continent. Everything was done in high style: intercontinental flights crammed with cocaine; affable customs officers who let in thousands of containers of flowers full of white powder; submarines for really big shipments; even an ultramodern tunnel that ran from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso, Texas, the private property of a millionaire who lived more than twenty-five hundred miles away. Colombia ruled; Pablo
Escobar ruled. And the godfather of Medellín reached an agreement with the godfather of Guadalajara. Mexico looked, learned, pocketed its percentage, and waited its turn.

By the early 1980s Pablo was making half a million dollars a day; he had ten accountants. The Medellín cartel was spending twenty-five hundred dollars a month just on elastic bands to bundle its rolls of cash. This was capitalism at its beginning. Large concentrations of wealthy entrepreneurs were laying down the law and penetrating every fiber of society. It was a conservative capitalism, in which the captains of industry vied with one another in flaunting their power and their wealth, without skimping on gifts for the people. Pablo had four hundred public housing units built, and he opened a spectacular public zoo right on his estate, Hacienda Nápoles. Robin Hood capitalists—unscrupulous, bloodthirsty, ruthless spendthrifts. Capitalists in their infancy, though, at the top of rigid pyramidal structures. They felt like giants and considered themselves the incarnations of a sovereign power they’d earned with money and lead—the only legitimate form of power. Pablo even offered to eliminate all of Colombia’s public debt, because the country was already his, because the government of Medellín was stronger and wealthier than that of Bogotá. So if the government caused them any trouble they felt justified in waging a head-on war: car bombs, killings, attacks on enemy politicians and judges. A presidential candidate—the front-runner—was assassinated. But Escobar and his faithful failed to realize that the very thing they believed to be a show of strength was actually their weak spot. A body rots once its head is cut off. When Pablo fell, his organization died, creating another vacuum.

The vacuum Pablo’s death created was a warning sign: Colombian drug trafficking had to take another evolutionary step. Like capitalism itself, it had to adapt to changes, incorporate social and economic mutations, free itself of tradition, and cross the threshold of modernity. A new species of narco was ready; in fact, it had already begun to proliferate, colonizing more and more territory. Flanked by powerful natural allies, it didn’t have to bleed itself dry in its battle to gain
control. Pablo had been a real macho, a striking symbol of untamed sexuality. But now that dominant stereotype was broken, thanks to Hélmer “Pacho” Herrera, one of the bosses of the neohegemonic Cali cartel. Openly gay, Pacho wouldn’t have been able to take two steps under Pablo. But for the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers who founded the Cali cartel, business is business, and if a homosexual can pave the way for Mexico, can plant distribution cells right in New York City, then who cares who he sleeps with. Even women were accepted. Medellín’s old sayings fell out of use: People stopped saying that all women did was spend money and spoil business. Women knew how to do everything, and they did—from money laundering to important negotiations. “Ambition” was no longer a dirty word.

Another difference: Some of Pablo’s associates were practically illiterate; they didn’t even know who Gabriel García Márquez was, Colombia’s greatest writer then living. They were proud that their power had been born of the people, and they needed to identify with them. Cali bosses, on the other hand, recited verses by Colombian poets and knew what an MBA was worth. The new narcos were capitalists just as Pablo’s were, but they were more sophisticated. They were at home among the elite of the New World. They played at being honest businessmen, wore elegant clothes, knew how to behave in high circles, and moved about freely. No more bunkers and deluxe homes hidden away somewhere. The new narcos loved the light of day, because that’s where they did their business.

The nature of trafficking changed too. Now you had to guarantee shipments, using fake companies or exploiting those legal channels in which it was easy to pass off illegal goods. And then there were the banks. First the Banco de los Trabajadores, then the First Interamericas Bank of Panama, prestigious and respected credit institutions that the new narcos used to launder money from the United States. The more territory they gained in the legal economy, the more maneuvering room they had to grow their cocaine business. Construction companies, factories, investment firms, radio stations, soccer teams, car dealerships,
shopping centers. The symbol of this new mentality was a chain of American-style drugstores called Drogas la Rebaja, Discount Drugs.

Pablo’s pyramid structure—a dinosaur that had been limping along—had been surpassed. Narco-businesses now established “production objectives,” actual multiyear plans. The Cali cartel was divided into five strategic sectors: politics, security, finance, legal support, and drug trafficking.

Violence and terror were not done away with, though:
Plata o plomo
was still the order of the day, but while
plata
still flowed freely,
plomo
had to be weighed more carefully, applied more professionally and with more common sense. Before the hit men were youths yanked out of poverty; now they were former or corrupt soldiers. Well-trained mercenaries. Politics became one of the many sectors of society to finance. The money injected into the political system was like an anesthetic: It paralyzed Congress, making it incapable of mounting any threats while conditioning its actions. The last, weak link that tied drug traffickers to their lands was broken as well. To do business the country must be at peace, a fictitious, papier-mâché peace that needs shaking up every now and then—a warning to remind Colombians that those in charge are always there, even if they’re unseen. Henry Loaiza Ceballos, alias the Scorpion, was a real pro in this regard. One day in April 1990 he ordered hundreds of campesinos to be chopped to pieces with chain saws: Under the leadership of Father Tiberio de Jesús Fernández Mafla, the Trujillo parish priest, they had organized a march to protest the armed conflict and call for better living conditions in the countryside. Father Tiberio’s body was found—hacked to bits—in a bend in the River Cauca. Before death took him he was forced to witness the rape and murder of his niece. Then Scorpion Loaiza had the priest’s fingers cut off and forced him to eat them, along with his toes and his genitals. Father Tiberio is buried in a park honoring the Trujillo victims. The inscription on his tomb—something he’d said during his last Easter mass—is prophetic: “If my blood can help a much-needed peace to be born and blossom in Trujillo, I will spill it gladly.”

 • • • 

To their Italian partners, the use of violence in the New World still seemed excessive, but nonetheless, the Italians were quite happy to form a strong connection with Colombia, to get on well with their new suppliers. The Calabrese mafiosi were as tied to their land as the men of Medellín, yet they shared with the new men of Cali the most salient feature of their success: rule and prosper, without making too much noise. Don’t challenge official power, but rather use it, drain it, manipulate it. It was as if they’d been traveling the same road together for a while.

The narco-state expanded and flexed its muscles. Rather than kill a presidential candidate it didn’t like, it preferred to buy votes to elect one it did. It contaminated every corner of the country, infecting it like a cancer, mutating it in its own image. By now everybody, including the United States and the magistrates who had not been bribed, realized that Cali had become too bloated. Its fall seemed to obey a law of physics: When more growth was no longer possible, it didn’t take much to implode, and Mexico, Colombia’s North American cousin, started getting in on the action. The narco-state, presided over by the cartel, starts to vacillate, and then unravel.

The end of the Cali cartel was the last real revolution of Colombian drug lord capitalism. And with it went the whole colossal, systemically pervasive structure. It was like a beam of bright light penetrating the dark shadows for the first time, scattering cockroaches in all directions; friends became enemies, every man for himself. Some Cali cartel deserters joined the Norte del Valle cartel, which from the beginning was merely a pale imitation of the one that preceded it. Brutal without being charismatic, greedy without any particular business skills or inventiveness, incapable of keeping internal rivalries at bay, they were so scared of extradition and the betrayal of informers that they became paranoid. But times were different now. Times had changed because capitalism had changed, and the Colombians were the first to realize it.

The rest of the world was optimistic, euphoric even. It was heading toward the new millennium convinced that peace, democracy, and liberty were destined to conquer the globe. President Bill Clinton was reelected in November 1996, and a few months later Labour Party leader Tony Blair—who was convinced that a social democratic agenda must be coupled with greater free markets in order to keep step with modernity—was elected prime minister in the UK. On Wall Street, until early 1997, the Dow Jones Index climbed to levels never seen before, and the NASDAQ—the world’s first electronic stock market, which is dedicated to tech stocks such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, Apple, and Google—was up big. What’s more, Steve Jobs had just returned to the helm at Apple, confident he would be able to lead the company out of crisis, and, as we all know, he succeeded brilliantly.