ZeroZeroZero (8 page)

Numbers and figures. All I see is blood and
money.

Take a rubber band and stretch it. At first there’s almost no resistance. You can make it longer, no problem. Until it reaches its full extension, beyond which the elastic will break. Today’s economy works like your elastic: All merchandise has to submit to the rules of the elastic. All but one. Cocaine. No market in the world brings in more revenue than the cocaine market. No financial investment in the world gives better returns than cocaine. Not even the record upward trends on the stock exchange are comparable to the “interest” coke offers. In 2012, the year the iPhone 5 and the iPad mini were launched, Apple became the most valuable company in terms of market capitalization ever listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Apple shares shot up by 67 percent in just one year. If you had invested €1,000 in Apple stock in the beginning of 2012, you would have €1,670 in a year. Not bad. But if you had invested €1,000 in cocaine at the beginning of 2012, after a year you would have €182,000.

Cocaine is a safe asset. Cocaine is an anticyclical asset. Cocaine is the asset
that fears neither resource shortages nor market inflation. There are plenty of corners of the planet where people live without hospitals, without the web, without running water. But not without cocaine. According to the UN, in 2009, 21 tons of it were consumed in Africa, 14 in Asia, 2 in Oceania. More than a 101 in Latin America and the Caribbean. Everyone wants it, everyone does it, everyone who starts using it needs it. The costs are minimal; you can place it immediately, and the profit margin is extremely high. Cocaine is easier to sell than gold, and the revenue from it can exceed that of petroleum. Gold requires mediators and bargaining time; petroleum needs oil wells, refineries, pipelines. You could discover an oil well in your backyard, or inherit a coltan mine and supply all the cell phones in the world, but you wouldn’t go from nothing to villas on the Costa Smeralda on Sardinia as quickly as you would with cocaine. From the streets to the stars with a nuts-and-bolts factory? From poverty to prosperity selling cars? A hundred years ago maybe. Today even the big multinationals that produce primary assets, or the last remaining colossal car manufacturers, all they can do is hang in there. Lower costs. Beat the far reaches of the planet in an attempt to increase exports, which is proving to be less and less feasible.

The most reckless licit investment, the most forward-looking speculation, the fastest movements of vast sums of money—which affect living conditions on entire continents—none can compare with cocaine’s multiplication of value. Whoever bets on cocaine accumulates in just a few years the sort of wealth that it takes big holding companies decades to achieve through investments and financial speculation. If an entrepreneurial group manages to get its hands on coke, it holds a form of power impossible to achieve in any other way. Which is why, whenever coke is traded, there is always a violent, ferocious clash. With cocaine there’s no
mediation. It’s all or nothing. And all doesn’t last long. When you traffic in cocaine, you can’t have unions and industrial plans, government assistance or rules subject to court appeal. If you’re the strongest, the cleverest, the most organized, the most armed, you win. The more you stretch the elastic, the more you assert yourself on the market—that’s true for any business. Only the law can break the elastic. But even when the law traces the criminal roots and tries to eradicate them, it probably won’t be able to track down all the legal activities, real estate investments, and bank accounts acquired thanks to the extraordinary tautness white powder allows.

Cocaine is a complicated asset. Behind cocaine’s candor hides millions of people’s work. But only those at the right point on the chain of production are getting rich. The Rockefellers of cocaine know how their product is created, every step. They know that in June you sow and in August you reap. That the sowing must be done with seeds from plants at least three years old, and that harvest is three times a year. That the harvested leaves have to be laid out to dry within twenty-four hours; otherwise they’re ruined and you can’t sell them. That the next step is to dig two holes in the ground. In the first, along with the dried leaves, you have to put in potassium carbonate and kerosene. That you have to pound this mix really well, so as to obtain a sort of greenish dishwater—cocaine carbonate—which, once filtered, is transferred to the second hole. That the next ingredient is concentrated sulfuric acid. That is how you get cocaine sulfate, the base paste, an off-white paste that then needs to be dried. That the final steps call for acetone, hydrochloric acid, and pure alcohol. That you have to filter it over and over, and then let it dry again. They know that’s how you obtain cocaine hydrochloride, commonly known as cocaine. The Rockefellers of cocaine know that to obtain more or less half a kilo of
pure cocaine, you need 300 kilos of leaves and a handful of full-time workers. The cocaine entrepreneurs know all this, just as any company head would. But more than anything, they know that the majority of the peasants, dealers, and transporters who have found jobs that pay a little better than those they could hope to get somewhere else still have both feet firmly planted in poverty. It’s unskilled labor, a sea of interchangeable subjects, that perpetuates a system of exploitation of the many and enrichment of a few. Those few at the top of the heap are the ones who had the foresight to realize that, in cocaine’s long journey from the leaves of Colombia to the nostrils of the casual consumer, the real money is made through sales, resale, and price management. Because if it’s true that a kilo of cocaine in Colombia is sold for $1,500, in Mexico for $12,000 to $16,000, in the United States for $27,000, in Spain for $45,000, in Holland for $47,000, in Italy for $54,000, and in the UK for $77,000; if it’s true that the price per gram varies from $61 in Portugal to $166 in Luxembourg, going for $80 in France, $87 in Germany, $96 in Switzerland, and $97 in Ireland; if it’s true that on average 1 kilo of pure cocaine is cut to make 3 kilos that are then sold in single-gram doses; if all this is true, it’s also true that whoever controls the entire chain of production is one of the richest men in the world.

Cocaine traffic today is managed by a new middle class of mafiosi. They use distribution to gain control of the territory where it is sold. A game of Risk on a planetary scale. On one side are the areas where cocaine is produced, which become fiefdoms where nothing but poverty and violence grow, areas the mafias keep under control by generously doling out charity and alms, which they pass off as rights. No development, only profits. If someone wants to better himself, he demands riches, not rights. Riches that he needs to know how to grab. In this way
only one model of success is perpetuated, of which violence is merely a vehicle and a tool. What is established is power. On the other side are countries where you plant your little flags to mark your presence: Italy, England, Russia, China. Everywhere. For the most powerful families coke works as easily as an ATM machine. You need to buy a shopping center? Import some coke, and after a month you’ll have enough money to close the deal. You need to sway an election? Import some coke, and you’ll be ready in a few weeks. Cocaine is the universal answer to the need for liquidity.

For years I’ve been asking myself what the point is of dealing with shootings and death. Is it really worth it? Why? Are you going to be called in as a consultant? Do a six-week teaching stint in some university, the more prestigious the better? Throw yourself into the battle against evil, believing you are the good? Wear the hero’s crown for a few months? Will you profit if people read what you write? Will they hate you, the people who said these things before you did but were ignored? And what about those who didn’t say them, or said them poorly, will they hate you too? Sometimes I think I’m obsessed. Other times I’m convinced these stories are a way of measuring the truth. Maybe that’s the secret. Not for others. Secret for me. Hidden from myself. Left out of my public pronouncements. Tracking the paths of drug trafficking and money laundering makes you feel you can measure the truth of things, understand the fate of an election, a government’s fall. It’s no longer enough to listen to the official statements. While the world is clearly heading in one direction, everything seems focused on something else, something banal even, superficial. Some government minister’s statement, some tiny, insignificant event, some piece of
gossip. But everything is really being decided by something else. This intuition is at the base of every romantic choice. Every journalist, novelist, and director would like to tell things the way they are, the way they really are. To say to his reader or viewer: It’s not how you thought it was,
this
is how it is. I’m going to open the wound for you, so you can glimpse the ultimate truth. But no one ever succeeds completely. The danger is in believing that reality—that real, pulsating, decisive reality—is completely hidden. If you trip and fall into it, you start thinking everything’s a conspiracy—secret meetings, Masonic lodges, spies. Reporters are full of this sort of idiocy. To square the circle of the world in your own interpretations is the onset of shortsightedness in an eye that thinks it has perfect vision. But it’s not that simple. The complexity lies precisely in not believing that everything is hidden or decided in secret chambers. The world is more interesting than a conspiracy between sects and secret agents. Criminal power is a mixture of many elements.

When you do figure out how to make the story gripping, when you hit on the exact doses of style and truth, when your words finally rise from your chest and begin to resonate, you will be the first to be disgusted by them. The first to hate yourself, with your entire being. And you won’t be the only one. Those who listen will hate you too, the very people who choose to listen, without being coerced, because you make them face this abomination. Because they’ll always feel you’re holding up a mirror to them: Why didn’t I do it? Why didn’t I say it? Why didn’t I understand? It hurts. A wounded animal usually attacks: He’s the one who’s lying, he’s doing it to throw people off, because he’s corrupt, because he wants fame, or money.

Maybe you think that dealing with all this is a way of redeeming the world. Of reestablishing justice. And maybe it is, in part. But maybe you also have to accept the burden of being a tiny superhero without a shred of power. Of being, in the end, a pathetic human being who has overestimated his strength merely because he’s never run up against its limits before. The truth is that there’s really only one reason for
deciding to stay inside these stories of drug traffickers, criminal entrepreneurs, massacres. To know that what you find out won’t make you feel better. Yet you keep trying. And you start to develop a disdain for things. By things I mean objects, stuff. You come to know how things are made, where they come from, how they all end up.

And even if you feel bad, you convince yourself that you can really understand this world only if you decide to stay inside these stories. You may be good at what you do, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you want your calling in life to be to stay inside these stories forever. Being inside means they consume you, compel you, corrode your daily life. Being inside means you carry city maps in your head, maps marked with construction sites, open-air drug markets, places where pacts were sealed and where “excellent” homicides were carried out. You’re not inside them just because you’re on the street or you infiltrate a clan for six years, like FBI undercover agent Joe Pistone. You’re inside because these stories are what give meaning to your being in the world. I decided to stay inside them years ago. Not only because I grew up in a place where the clans decided everything and I’d seen those opposed to their power die, not only because defamation dissolves all desire to oppose criminal power. Being inside cocaine trafficking was the only way I could fully understand things. To look at human weakness, the physiology of power, the frailty of relationships, the inconsistency of bonds, the appalling power of money and ferocity. The absolute impotence of all those teachings about beauty and justice I’d been raised on. I realized that the axis around which everything turns is cocaine. There was only one name for the wound.

 • • • 

“The Serbs. Precise, ruthless, meticulous torturers.”

“Bullshit. The Chechens. They have such sharp knives, you bleed to death before you even know you’ve been cut.”

“Amateurs compared to the Liberians. They rip your heart out when you’re still alive and eat it.”

It’s one of the oldest games in the world. The ranking of cruelty, the top ten of Earth’s most ferocious people.

“What about the Albanians? They’re not satisfied just eliminating you; they wipe out your future generations as well. They cancel everything out. Forever.”

“The Romanians put a bag over your head, tie your wrists to your neck, and let time do its work.”

“The Croatians nail your feet down, and all you can do is pray that death comes as soon as possible.”

The escalation of blood, terror, and sadism goes on for quite a while, eventually getting to the inevitable list of special forces: France’s Foreign Legion, Spain’s El Tercio, Brazil’s BOPE.

I’m sitting at a round table. One by one the men around me, all soldiers, share their experiences and catalog the cultural distinctions of the people they know best, having been on peacekeeping missions in various territories. It’s a ritual, this sadistic and slightly racist game, but like all rituals, it’s necessary. It’s the only way they have of saying that the worst is over, they survived, it’s real life from here on in. A better life.

I keep quiet. Like an anthropologist I try to interfere as little as possible, so that the ritual will unfold without any hitches. The guys’ faces are serious. When their turn comes to talk, they all avoid looking at the guy across the table or the one who just finished talking. Each one tells his own story as if he were in an empty room talking to himself.

I’ve heard dozens of these classifications over the years, in meetings, conferences, dinners, over a plate of pasta, or in court. Usually they’re just lists of acts of increasingly inhuman brutality, but as these episodes gradually accumulated in my mind, a common denominator surfaced, a cultural element that recurred with stubborn insistence. Cruelty is awarded a place of honor in the genetic patrimony of a people. Making the mistake of equating acts of ferocity or war with an entire population, drafting lists of this sort becomes the equivalent of showing off one’s sculpted muscles after endless hours in the gym.

Ferocity is learned. You’re not born with it. As much as one may be born with certain inclinations, or have inherited rancor and violence from his family, ferocity is taught, it is learned. Ferocity is passed down from teacher to pupil. The impulse isn’t enough; it has to be channeled and trained. You teach a body to empty out its soul, even if you don’t believe in the soul, even if you think it’s religious nonsense, a flight of fancy, even if for you it’s all muscle fibers and nerves and veins and lactic acid. Yet something’s there. Otherwise, how do you explain the brake that, right at the last minute, keeps you from going all the way? Conscience. Soul. It has a lot of names, but regardless of what you call it, you can compromise it. It’s convenient to think that ferocity is inherent to the human condition, handy for anyone who wants to cleanse his conscience without first coming to terms with things.

When one soldier finishes his story, the guy next to him starts immediately. Everyone seems to agree that some populations just have that impulse, it’s in their blood, there’s no way around it, we’re born with it. A soldier to my right seems particularly eager for his turn to speak. He fidgets in his plastic chair, making it squeak slightly. He’s obviously not some undisciplined novice: His long beard suits his face, and the insignia on his uniform make it clear that he’s faced quite a few dangerous situations. He shakes his head. I think I even glimpse a scornful smile on his face. It’s distracting, so now I’m eager for his turn too. I don’t have to wait long, because halfway through a graphic description of someone’s nails being removed by some secret service in Eastern Europe, the man silences the discussion.

“You haven’t understood a damn thing. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. All you do is read the tabloids, watch the eight o’clock news; you don’t know shit.”

Then he rummages in his pants pockets—military fatigues—and takes out a smartphone, scrolls his finger nervously down the screen until a map appears. He zooms in, blows it up, zooms in more, and finally shows the others a slice of Earth. “Here, these guys are the worst.” His finger points to a place in Central America. Guatemala.

“Guatemala?”

The veteran utters just one word, unfamiliar to most of them: “Kaibil.”

I’d heard that name in depositions from the 1970s, but no one remembered it anymore.

“Eight weeks,” the bearded soldier starts up again. “Eight weeks and everything human about a human being is gone. The Kaibiles have a way of annulling one’s conscience. In two months they can extract from a human’s body everything that distinguishes him from a beast, what allows him to tell good from evil, to know moderation. They could turn Saint Francis into a killer in eight weeks, capable of biting animals to death, of drinking piss to survive and eliminating masses of people without worrying how old they are. All it takes is eight weeks.”

Silence. I’ve just witnessed a heresy, the paradigm of innate savagery has been shot down. I have to meet a Kaibil. I start reading. I learn that the Kaibiles are the Guatemalan army’s elite counterinsurgency force. They were formed in 1974, when the Commando School, which would later become the Kaibil training center for special operations, was established. A civil war was raging in Guatemala at the time, and government and paramilitary forces, backed by the United States, had to face first disorganized guerrilla fighters and then the rebel group Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, or Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity. A relentless struggle. Students, workers, professionals, opposing party politicians—anybody and everybody—were caught in the Kaibiles’ net. Mayan villages were razed to the ground, peasants slaughtered, their bodies left to rot. In 1996, after thirty-six years and over 200,000 deaths, 36,000
desaparecidos,
and 626 confirmed massacres, the civil war in Guatemala finally ended. A peace treaty was signed. The first president after the war, Álvaro Arzú, decided, at the request of the United States, to transform Guatemala’s counterrevolutionary army, considered to be the best anti-insurgency force in Latin America, into an efficient weapon against drug trafficking. On October 1, 2003, a counterterrorism platoon of Kaibil special forces was officially created.

By their own definition, Kaibiles are “killing machines.” They are put through gruesome tests, their courage challenged constantly, day after day, horror after horror. Drinking the blood of an animal he has just killed and eaten raw makes a Kaibil grow stronger. Guatemala’s Historical Clarification Commission has been taking an interest in these practices and drafted a document entitled “Memory of Silence.” It states that 93 percent of documented crimes in Guatemala in the thirty-six years of civil war were committed by law enforcement or paramilitary groups, in particular the Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil and the Kaibil special forces. The report also states that Kaibiles committed acts of genocide.

One of the most brutal slaughters took place in Las Dos Erres, a village in the department of Petén, which was razed to the ground. On December 6, 1982 forty Kaibiles entered the village to take back nineteen rifles lost in a previous guerrilla ambush. No one was spared: They killed men, women, and children; raped young girls; kicked and beat pregnant women with their rifle butts, jumping on their stomachs until they aborted; threw live children into wells or beat them to death with clubs, even buried some alive. The youngest were smashed against walls or trees. The bodies were thrown into wells or left to rot in the fields. There is talk of more than 250 deaths: 201 deaths have been documented, 70 of them children less than seven years old. When they left the village the soldiers took with them two girls, ages fourteen and sixteen. They made them dress as soldiers and held them for three days, raping them repeatedly. When they got tired of them, they strangled them.

 • • • 

It’s not hard to meet a Kaibil, as it turns out. They are proud of who they are. After I heard that soldier talk I started asking around, looking to meet a Kaibil fighter. I was directed first to a household servant who works for a Milanese entrepreneur’s family. He’s pleasant; we arrange a time and meet on the street.

He tells me he used to be a journalist; he keeps copies of some of his
articles in his wallet. He rereads them every now and then, or maybe just saves them as proof of his former life. He knows a Kaibil.

“I know him. It’s hard for a Kaibil to become an ex-Kaibil, but this one has done some not good things.”

He doesn’t want to explain what those not good things are.

“You won’t believe a word he tells you. I don’t believe him either, because if what he says is true, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. . . .”

Then he winks at me. “I know it’s true, but I hope it’s not exactly completely true.”