Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (13 page)

The loss of credibility generated by this numerical exercise, combined with political populism, culminated with the publishing of UNODC reports from 2007 and 2008. In light of the growing criticism of Plan Colombia it became increasingly important to present clear findings, and several UN statisticians resigned after the political pressure to lie about the statistics became too great. When the figures for the Colombian coca fields in 2007 were presented — showing a dramatic 27-per cent increase from the year before — the then president, Álvaro Uribe, shot back with indignation that this was impossible as the efforts to eradicate drug fields had been intensified that very year, and the Colombian government declared the organisation incompetent. But in 2008, the UNODC, using the same survey methods, reported an equally dramatic
reduction
in the number of cultivated hectares, after which the government built a large media campaign around the statistics from the recently debunked organisation, claiming that the war on drugs was nearly won. According to Francisco Thoumi, an economics professor appointed by the United Nations to coordinate the UNODC
World Drug Report
and based in Vienna from 1999 to 2001, the entire system — in both Colombia and at the UN level — has been corrupted by political interests. After it was proven that their research had been manipulated time and time again, he resigned in protest, stating: ‘The statistics the UN produces today with regard to drugs and drug production are purely political. Data and statistics are systematically falsified to serve various purposes. It’s all just very tragic.’

But even if the Colombian government’s logic had been right — that the statistics for 2007 were completely wrong, while those for 2008, based on the same methodology, were correct — their successes would still only have been successes from a national perspective, not a global one. According to calculations by the UNOCD for the same year, the amount of cultivated hectarage gained in Bolivia and Peru was now proportionate to what had been lost in Colombia, and thus just as much coca was being cultivated in the Andes by the end of the first decade of the new millennium as at the beginning. And the same applied to cocaine production: in 2002, 730 tonnes were produced in the Andes, while in 2008 it was 820 tonnes, more than half of which was produced in Colombia. After ten years, 6.8 billion US dollars, and a million sprayed hectares in Colombia, nothing like a reduction in cultivation or production had occurred in the Andes.

Regardless of whether the statistics were true or false, when it came to combating the actual problem the priorities of Plan Colombia were difficult to fathom. Manual elimination — the process by which soldiers go out into the fields and uproot plants by hand in an effort to keep fields free from coca — had long proven to be both a superior strategy and a cheaper one, costing a mere quarter of the price of herbicide spraying: it costs 750 USD to spray just one hectare by plane, whereas the cost to eliminate the same area by hand, without any of the environmental consequences, is a mere 180 USD. Despite this, however, both the US and Colombian governments chose to continue mostly with the former method. Critics argued that the difference in expenditure would make it possible to unlock the social potential of Plan Colombia to a much greater extent, and consequently would allow for funds to be invested in schools, health care, infrastructure, and micro loans to impoverished peasants, as well as alternative-livelihood programs for farmers in the affected parts of the country. This notwithstanding, herbicide spraying became a permanent fixture.

By evening the monkeys are back and Nelcy has come to assist Edgar. Next to the lab a mound of leaf residue accumulates under a cloud of fuel vapours, which rises up into the trees, where the primates have to revel in the stink. Edgar and Nelcy treat the water with chemicals one last time, turning it a milky colour and causing it to curdle. After wrapping the separated mass in a towel, they begin wringing it out together until every last drop of liquid has been squeezed out, and the lump inside is packed solidly, as big as a bowling ball.

‘Phew. One more round.’

‘OK, phew, ha ha.’

They stand face to face, with eyes locked as if in an arm-wrestling match, while José sweeps up scattered bits of leaves and Luis makes
vroom-vroom
sounds with a plastic toy car between the oil drums. It is almost 6.00 p.m., and a familiar sound of muffled motors is heard coming from the mountains, a noise that has become somewhat of a soundtrack to life for indigenous peoples, Afro-Colombians, and recently settled farmers since the beginning of the new millennium: military helicopters.

No sight in the air space above southern Colombia today is more common than that of the arrival of the Black Hawks, which appear in the sky like ships in formation, all on different assignments in conjunction with the DEA-led war on drugs. Control, presence, and power: that is the message. It is a symbolic language directed at the guerrillas and at individuals suspected of sympathising with them, and even if the spraying is ineffective and perhaps even counterproductive as a means to fight drugs, such activity in the sky plays an integral role in anti-guerrilla warfare. Ecological destruction, financial depletion, and failed results with regard to coca is a price the US and Colombian governments are willing to pay to keep the FARC in check and to create the feeling that, despite everything, the state is in control.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING,
rain patters down over the house. Edgar melts the white paste in a saucepan over a fire before allowing the creamy white substance to harden on the bottom. Now it is ready.

‘It’s no good if it doesn’t harden. You can’t sell a soft product.’

It should have the consistency of taffy but the colour of meringue. He stirs it with a ladle, mixing it until it has achieved just the right texture. After a little while it dries as it should and can be broken into pieces like hardened chocolate. He looks pleased. Nevertheless, a sense of sadness hovers over the entire process, the activity to which Edgar has devoted himself for the past two days. Nothing is as it used to be. While the green leaf was once regarded as a sign of prosperity, today it is associated with an entirely new set of connotations and no one has pleasure any more from the mere sight of a coca plant or a kilo of paste.

‘We don’t make our living from coca any longer,’ Edgar says. ‘We do it to bring in pesos. It’s money you just can’t get any other way. The food we eat doesn’t come from coca, but rather from other things we have here: fish farming, chickens, potatoes, yuccas, corn. A little of everything. And then we also have two cows.’

For the farmers of Putumayo, just as in most other parts of the country, coca cultivation has always been viewed as a legitimate activity, not only because coca is always in demand but also because they see themselves as
exploited
, something the guerrillas never tire in pointing out. But 15 years after the boom, the concept of what has always been known as green gold is a double-edged sword; the leaf that distinguished itself as sacred in the past is now somewhat of a curse. Those wild heydays that characterised Putumayo long before the region became the bloody battlefield did not exactly make for a paradise, either. Edgar maintains that he does not yearn for the past and the exorbitant spending, but rather looks to the future. The people living in the villages and cities born out of the coca boom in the 1980s and 1990s were suspicious and jealous of each other, and the streets were lined with whorehouses and populated with people recovering from excessive liquor consumption and partying. Today, people are well aware that much of the misery that followed has to do with coca in one way or another. That there will always be a hangover.

For Edgar, Nelcy, Ester, José, and the vast majority of other farmers living in the province,
la coquita
, coca, is an extra income, not a primary one. There was more to Plan Colombia than just chemical aerial bombs; one-fifth of the resources were dedicated to social funding, aimed at eliminating the incentive to cultivate coca — at combating poverty, in other words. While most of the money was lost to corruption and bureaucracy, a small amount did manage to trickle down to the farmers, and Edgar’s fish farm is the result of such assistance. It will never measure up to coca in terms of proceeds, but in the long run it could prove very profitable for, just like coca, fish also has an immediate market.

But the lesson the farmers of Putumayo, the region where coca has been cultivated the longest, have learned from their financially treacherous dealings with the cocaine industry have not really spread to other parts of Colombia. The promise of fast cash sweeps across the country like a giant windstorm, shaking up everything in its path, and out of all the socially vulnerable regions presently on the verge of being sucked into the carousel, none is as typical as the coastal jungles where Leo and his fishermen hunt for the miracle catch: Chocó.

After scraping his finger over the product, Luis licks the white film from his fingertips. He giggles when his tongue goes numb. Dad does the same and nods approvingly. The quality is good. Nelcy says that there is less than she had been hoping for. Diana teases one of the fighting cocks. Maria, the eldest daughter, comes home in her school uniform and passes by her parents with a resounding ‘God bless you’, to which Edgar and Nelcy respond by shifting attention from the raw cocaine to their daughter, answering back in unison: ‘God bless you.’

THE CANOE ROCKS
slightly in the turns as Graciano steers his dugout deeper, into the heart of the business. Vines, branches, brushwood, trees, and leaves as large as bedsheets hang over the water as he carefully guides the canoe through the foliage and its dark, cave-like passages, like a tiny strand of thread through the eye of a needle.

‘Almost there.’

The sun flashes sporadically through the thick jungle coverage, and the quick shift from total darkness to intense sunlight gives the setting the appearance of a fast-winding newsreel in sepia tones. The dense river water is mustard-coloured, and here and there dragonflies stop in midflight, hovering like helicopters.

Graciano suddenly whistles and points to the right. ‘There,’ he says.

Three men, standing in a glade in black bathing suits and pouring water over each other, look up when Graciano arches the canoe around them, greeting him with a familiar hello. The guerrilla soldiers are taking a swim, their guns having been left on the riverbank. A bit further up are the remains of a house where some armed silhouettes are seen moving about. This is the checkpoint — the border, defence, security. It is what the farmers are paying for; no military, no police, and no paramilitaries pass by here. On the other side of this point, everything is safe. Graciano’s little outboard motor–driven canoe sails on for two more kilometres towards the mountains before he switches it off by a mud bank and glides in among five other canoes all pointing in the direction of a tree, like fish surrounding a food source.

‘This is where it begins. All of this is new. Eight years ago there wasn’t a single coca plant here. No one even knew what coca was. Now there’s nothing else. And nobody talks about anything else. Many of these fields are no more than a couple years old. Everybody here knows that it’s a golden opportunity — but that its time is nearly up and it won’t be coming back.’

This is the inland of Chocó, the last of the new frontiers of the cocaine industry. The province, wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the western mountain range, consists of impenetrable rainforests crisscrossed by thousands of rivers, comprising one of the largest water systems in the world. The Atrato River flows north into the Caribbean and is the economic artery of Chocó, while the San Juan, the second-largest river in the region, runs south into the Pacific. If these two waterways could be connected, Colombia would have a navigable channel between the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific that could compete with the Panama Canal; it’s been a moneymaking dream of many past governments. But there is a long way to go. So far Chocó only has one main road, hardly drivable, and is inhabited exclusively by waterborne people no one has ever cared about. Living here far below the poverty line are the descendants of slaves, indigenous peoples, and settlers, whose slow-paced lives, centred on fishing and small-scale farming, are only interrupted by occasional short-lived economic booms based on sudden and whimsical demands and desires from the outside world — gold, wood, silver, coca.

‘
Buenos días
. Done already?’ He laughs.

A group of
raspachínes
— leaf pickers — have finished for the day and are now heading back home to the village. Graciano exchanges pleasantries with them, asking about their day, before climbing up a steep slope and making his way down into a valley of glistening coca fields. Hectare upon hectare has been thoroughly cleared, and newly planted coca bushes shine like emeralds in a black landscape of burned logs. And then suddenly a familiar sound is heard, followed by another. Adjacent to each plot is a lab, and in the clearing far below the afternoon sun beats down on a tarp, stretched across a simple wood construction that protects Solin, César, and Andrea from the sun. The process is now in full swing, and the shearing machine’s motor roars, causing leaves to whirl and insects to scatter. Andrea is cooking, César is cutting the leaves, and Solin is mixing chemicals. And soon the lab is full of the pungent vapours of ammonia and fuel.

‘You get a bit groggy,’ Solin says. ‘But we’re used to it. We’ve been here for eight days straight.’

They are a team of three, each of whom have a different role, but all work together to deal with the harvest from César’s plot. Today the pickers have gathered 12
arrobas
, which will now be turned into paste, and when that is done — the harvest will generate 3.5 kilograms of paste — it will be sold to local buyers, the sale authorised by the guerrillas, for a total of 8.4 million pesos, or 5320 USD. One
arroba
, equivalent to 12 kilos, is the base unit of the coca economy.
Los raspachínes
, who are the bottom level of the cocaine hierarchy, earn 6000 pesos per
arroba
, which means an average daily pay of about 15,000 pesos, or 11 USD. But they also get three meals, which Andrea is responsible for providing. One hectare yields about 150
arrobas
per harvest, and there are four harvests a year. The smallholders usually own between two and five hectares each.