Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (11 page)

Both the guerrillas and paramilitaries in Colombia build their identity around a populist rhetoric about ‘victims’.
Although they often employ the same methods and their warriors come from similar social backgrounds, they represent completely different interests and worldviews.
The FARC sees itself as representing an excluded, marginalised peasant farming population, stripped of their economic and civil rights by capitalism, and thus believe it is ‘protecting’ the right of the oppressed to grow coca, owing to the absence of other means of livelihood.
The paramilitaries also offer protection, but based on a completely different logic: their ‘victims’ are ambitious entrepreneurs whose financially rewarding business ventures are sabotaged by guerrilla kidnappings, extortion, murders, and ‘taxes’. What the two groups have in common is their conviction that the government is incapable of protecting its citizens or their property; this is, in their view, what legitimises armed groups, and they see their violent methods as not only justifiable but also completely necessary.

Between 1993 and 1996 the FARC grew at a record pace, and it did not take long before southern Putumayo found itself entirely under guerrilla control. Police officers, mayors, and farmers weren’t able to take on any initiative without consulting the rebels — who not only gradually permitted the farmers to grow as much coca as they could but demanded they do so, and because coca cultivation was an effective instrument in their revolutionary project, this practice was repeated all over rural Colombia. According to their Leninist logic that there is no position between pro and contra, anyone who refused to grow coca was seen as acting in opposition to the FARC. This ‘law’ was one families in guerrilla-dominated territories had to abide by, unless they wanted to run the risk of being killed. Consequently, the number of cultivated hectares increased dramatically. Entire villages and small towns developed with coca as their only means of sustenance, and by 2000 green gold was being cultivated on 66,000 hectares in Putumayo, representing 40 per cent of all the coca grown in Colombia that year. This fact flew in the face of the US and Colombian governments, who, after the 9/11 attack in 2001, launched a historic retaliation in the form of Plan Colombia, the strategic military effort that would not only change Putumayo and Colombia, but also all of Latin America.

EDGAR PULLS ON
his galoshes and splashes some water, cement, and fertiliser over the heap before wading back and forth in the green mound to mix everything together until it becomes a thick, leafy pulp. The sludge is then dumped into oil barrels, which are filled with fuel. The stench of ammonia fills the air once the chemicals start to react, and four-year-old Luis holds his nose as his dad picks him up and moves him away from the fuel can.

‘I’ve only been found out once,’ Edgar says. ‘The military was passing through, but I just gave them a bag of fish. They thanked me and left. They’re poor guys like us. The police are worse, but I’ve never seen any of them here.’

Nelcy comes to tell him that lunch is ready. The family bands together, along with José, and crosses the creek, which glistens rainbow from a can of used fuel Edgar has dumped in the water. They walk about 200 metres through the mud, passing a brown fishpond before reaching the stairs of their home. A wall calendar showing a bikini-clad girl is the only colourful object in an otherwise completely grey wooden house. The dwelling is built on stakes, and under the floor fuel cans and hoses are packed in, together with broken toys. Two agitated tethered cocks flap their wings wildly in anticipation of the weekend’s cockfight, a sport as important to the lives of Colombian coca farmers as soccer is to the European working classes.

Nelcy puts out a couple glasses of fresh milk and some fried fish from their farm and apologises for their small size. Once the family could afford to wait until the fish were big enough to have some meat on their bones, but not anymore. She serves her children and then tells the story about ‘the aeroplanes’: ‘We were crying. They sprayed everywhere: the water, animals, crops. We had dug a well and it was ruined. It was terrible to see the coca die
—
because, of course, that’s our livelihood. We tried to wash the plants, but it didn’t work. Everything died. Even the monkeys died because there was nothing left on the trees for them to eat.’

When the White House under Richard Nixon, the man who coined the term ‘the war on drugs’, shifted focus from demand to supply, a theory was born that would steer the approach of every future Washington administration to the global cocaine problem. It was thought that spraying coca fields with herbicides, destroying laboratories, confiscating shipments, and arresting smugglers would reduce the amount of cocaine reaching US and European markets, whereupon the quality would drop and prices would soar — and eventually the curves would intersect, causing the entire industry to implode, since it would no longer be profitable to produce and transport an increasingly diluted drug to the wealthy markets of the world. Since then the graphs have, in reality, been pointing in very different directions, and since Obama was elected the theory has been called into question, but in the second decade of the 21st century it is still the logic that’s dictating the war on drugs.

What was new about Plan Colombia, instigated by Bill Clinton in 1999, was that it was to implement herbicide spraying on a massive scale. A package, which would grow to five billion dollars, was given to the Colombian government — 70 per cent of it earmarked for the military — to cut the number of coca fields in the country by half within a five-year period by employing a systematic herbicide-spraying campaign. Like Nelcy and Edgar, an average farmer owns four hectares of land, lives in a hovel without running water, and is lucky to get a couple of hours of electricity a day from a fuel-driven generator. Farmers earn less than any other group working in the lucrative cocaine chain, and are not only oppressed by poverty but also terrorised by all parties involved in the Colombian conflict. In Putumayo the short coca boom may have created a state of consumer hysteria for a few years, but it did nothing for prosperity, or to change the fact that 85 per cent of the rural population lives in poverty.

It was these socially crippled farmers who, at the turn of the new millennium, found themselves the target of the US-led war on drugs, and plenty of environmental, human-rights, and indigenous community organisations were infuriated. Putumayo — the greenhouse for nearly half of all the cocaine consumed in the world — became the central warzone. When herbicide spraying began, the goal was to eradicate all the coca growing there within five years; after two years over 104,000 hectares in the region had been sprayed, almost twice the area that had ever been cultivated. Even the legal crops the farmers were growing were destroyed, and they protested, with the assistance of environmental organisations and international NGOs, while the government highlighted the results: by 2004, 66,000 hectares of coca fields in Putumayo had been reduced to 4400.

‘It was a terrible time,’ says Nelcy. ‘All the yucca and banana trees died. We had to go and beg from the people living in areas that had escaped the spraying. Then we planted again, but the planes returned. After the second time we didn’t plant any more
—
but they came back and sprayed anyway.’

By 2006 almost 900,000 hectares in Colombia had been sprayed, most of which were in Putumayo. It resulted in an actual reduction of 85,000 hectares of coca fields, meaning that more than ten hectares had to be sprayed to eliminate just one. Herbicide spraying seemed extremely ineffective as a method to eradicate coca crops, and the environmental repercussions were enormous; but what was worse, in the long run, was the social cost.

Nelcy wipes the milk from Luis’ mouth. ‘It’s as if they’re all against us: the police and the military. It’s like we are their enemies. It feels as if they don’t care about our situation. If we grow a little coca, we end up in prison. If someone here is murdered, nothing happens. You can’t help but wonder why it’s like that.’

For the people of Putumayo, the concept of ‘government’ does not exist
—
only
la ley
, the law. Edgar says that there are many laws here, but for him and his neighbours ‘the law’ does not mean a set of rules but whoever represents the prevailing rules at the time. He talks about the law like it’s a living being. The law is in the woods. The law moves. The law is alive. If you do this or that, he says, ‘the law gets mad’ and ‘the law is armed’. It’s a bit like he’s talking about a hibernating bear that can’t be woken under any circumstances, and this is because here ‘the law’ is just the term for whichever armed group is in charge. First the guerrillas were the law, and then Los Masetos, and then it was the guerrillas again
— and
then in December 2000 all the planes loaded with poisonous herbicides arrived, flanked by several Black Hawk helicopters, and no one had any idea who had sent them. Los Masetos? The military? The government? The United States? Somebody else? Regardless of where they came from, it was obvious that they were now the law. Eventually the farmers were told that the planes came from something called ‘the state’, and that they had no reason for fear as long as they cooperated.

It was hard for the farmers to figure it out. ‘The law’ meant too many different things by now
—
and if you made one law mad, another one came and killed you. The year before the state sprayed herbicides over the farms, one of the laws
—
one that was a blend of new and old,
los paras
, the paramilitaries
—
re-established itself in the region in a strange way that was also difficult to understand. In 1997 Carlos Castaño, an anti-guerrilla warrior who would later unite paramilitaries across the country in the illegal anti-communist organisation Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (the AUC), had let it be known that he intended to send some of his troops to Putumayo to eradicate the rebels in ‘their own jungle’ and to kill all the mayors, who were ‘guerrilla soldiers in civilian clothing’.

The following year the AUC arrived, and human-rights organisations sounded the alarm when eight massacres — most of which took place within the densest coca-producing districts — resulted in 96 victims. One year later, 13 massacres were reported, with a total of 77 deaths. Many of these murders happened during the course of a single sanguinary night: on 9 January 1999, 150 men from the AUC received assistance from the 24th brigade of the national army to obstruct the road to the little village of El Tigre, and after dark they began calling names from a list. In a pattern that was being repeated all over the country at this time, people who were considered to be cooperating or sympathising with the guerrillas were killed off, one by one. Terror-stricken villagers were forced to stand by and watch, the pedagogical purpose being to demonstrate what would happen the next time anyone offered a guerrilla solider some food or a glass of water. According to the reports that followed, the military and police — both practically and ideologically allied with the AUC, which was to be labelled a terrorist organisation by the United States in 2001 — had no objections. This is the way it happened in many isolated regions where the state had taken territorial control back from the guerrillas: the AUC carried out a number of pedagogical massacres; then came the army. And Putumayo was just another example. A year after the massacre in El Tigre, aeroplanes loaded with herbicides arrived — Plan Colombia — and the military, police, and paramilitaries have been in control ever since. The guerrillas were forced over the border into Ecuador, or deeper into the Amazonian rainforests.

‘It’s no longer possible to move around at will,’ says Edgar. ‘When they take you in they ask if you know people in the village, and if you can’t immediately track down people who can vouch for who you are and confirm that you live here, they simply assume that you’re with the guerrillas and cart you off. This is how so many people have been murdered. The village was full of paramilitaries for a while. There was always someone being taken away. Of course I live here, so I could always just say I know this or that person. But everybody who couldn’t was killed.’

As a result of the clashes between the guerrillas and the AUC, an informants’ culture — a legacy from the civil war in the 1950s — also resurfaced. The bloodshed that has characterised the country for so long is not just the result of a political conflict between more or less rational, albeit perverted, interests, but is also sometimes of a more personal nature. In the swarm of armed stakeholders and in the absence of the rule of law, people have learned over time to take advantage of these purges, which sweep back and forth across the country seasonally, and more than ever in the wake of drug trafficking. Regardless of whether the problem is a dispute with one’s neighbour, a crime of jealousy, over the settlement of a debt, or a disagreement about inheritance, the easiest way to take revenge on someone is to single them out as a collaborator with this or that group. Death will quickly result, although it may have absolutely nothing to do with the truth. It is a commonly used method that breeds lies, which in turn feeds the paranoia that breeds new lies, eventually causing violence to spread.

José looks up from his plate. His best friend was killed yesterday. Shot in the eye. Buried this morning. Who did it? Why was it done? No one knows. No one wants to know. ‘It’s incredibly easy to have someone killed here,’ he says. ‘All you have to do is go to
los paras
and say that this or that person is a
guerillero
. Or you go to the guerrillas and say that this or that person is a
paraco
.’

Edgar finishes his lunch, licks off his milk moustache, and says that it’s time to get back to work. The first ‘washing’ of the leaves is done. Now they have to be soaked in fuel three times, for at least 40 minutes each time, so that ‘the product’ is released from the leaf pulp. But before standing, he gives Luis a kiss and reflects for a moment on how he defines
la ley
. For him, the law is in a constant state of flux — in the sense that what it decrees is constantly changing, as well as its being in the hands of different groups at different times — but in any case it always refers to whoever is strongest militarily at the moment.