Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (23 page)

People liked him. At least in the beginning. The oligarchy supported him as long as he was successful, but were quick to turn their backs once things turned sour and they felt they had to protect themselves. Large parts of the working class, on the other hand, were faithful up until the very end. It made more sense for them to back an unadorned anti-hero from the hood than a member of the Bogotá elite. In Barrio Escobar today, many people living in the small single-family homes built by their saviour still have his portrait hanging next to paintings of Christ, and some of the older generation, who had the chance to shake his hand, insist that he is still alive and will show up one day with the refrigerators he promised them in 1984.

But there is no doubt that Escobar was the worst perpetrator of violence to ever emerge from the global cocaine trade, and the romanticising of him and his deeds is sometimes shockingly distasteful. Yet what’s much more tragic is that Escobar’s downfall actually intensified a number of existing maladies in Colombian society, and there appears to be no cure for them. It was during these years that intimate, often secret relations between the Pentagon and the Colombian military — the latter notorious for human-rights violations — were established, an alliance that soon became a force to be reckoned with, and by the 2010s would come close to triggering a major war in Latin America.

The intense focus on one individual, Escobar, instead of on the structures of society also made it possible to depict evil in an overly simplistic way, which has had devastating consequences for Colombia’s political development ever since; so many different representations of violence and barbarism were projected onto him that many became blind to just how sick the state and its internal organs were in their own right. General Miguel Maza Márquez — the security police chief during the Escobar era and depicted in all historical accounts as an unwavering public servant, as well as an incorruptible hero, for having brought down Escobar — is just one of many examples. ‘Of everyone Escobar wanted to kill, I am the only one who is still alive today,’ Maza Márquez has been quoted as boasting. His words have circulated over the years and been used to reinforce the image of a black-and-white dichotomy in which good and evil are mutually exclusive in an unadulterated, almost biblical way; the Lord sentenced evil to death and allowed goodness to live on. Such was the case at least until 18 August 2009, when Colombians were shaken once again. On the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Luis Carlos Galán, the attorney-general made public the disturbing news: General Maza Márquez, one of the national heroes of the 1990s, had been arrested and imprisoned, as mounting evidence implicated him as a participant in Galán’s assassination.

Another phenomenon, for which Escobar is more directly liable, and one few other countries have experienced to the same extent, is the practice of making murder a business. The 1990s as well as the 2000s saw the emergence of a number of scandals, and when news of
falsos positivos
exploded, it only confirmed the deep structural problems. This
confusión de valores
— confusion over values — is still a greatest problem in parts of Colombian society, and its roots in poverty and an historically violent rural elite go back much further than the Escobar era. What Escobar did, however, was to propel ethical chaos to levels from which the country has never recovered. His Nadaismo, with its fierce oscillation between absolute atheism and absolute spirituality, combined with cannabis, revolutionary radicalism, and the confession/forgiveness logic of the Church, was in the beginning just an innocent part of a Wild West mentality. But when the dollars from the cocaine trade started pouring in and gradually infiltrated most institutions, the consequences of a get-rich-quick culture, dominated by arms, quickly rose to the surface, posing a threat to society.

Once the images of Escobar’s body began circulating all over the world, the United States, Colombia, and even Europe assumed that the hub of the global cocaine wheel had been destroyed. This conclusion was drawn through simple but naïve logic: the Medellín Cartel controlled over 80 per cent of world production, and the collective belief was that if Escobar, the CEO, could be killed, then the entire enterprise would simply crumble. Yet this is not what happened. Other presumptive CEOs were waiting in the wings, and in terms of production, the pursuit of Escobar actually had the reverse effect. Between 1990 and 1994 presidents Bush and Clinton invested more millions of dollars than ever before on combating cocaine, but the global price during the same time fell by one-third. While the quality just got better and better. In only a year’s time, between 1993 and 1994, production doubled.

Those who came out on top after the Medellín Cartel was toppled were not the state or its citizens, but Escobar’s adversaries: Gilberto José Rodríguez Orejuela, the Castaño brothers, and the man who founded Los Pepes, Don Berna. From this point on, the latter would be the new leader of Medellín’s crime syndicate, and he and his men would never repeat Escobar’s biggest mistake — making an enemy of the state. Nor would Escobar’s successors repeat his over-the-top and violent megalomania. After his murder, keeping a low profile and cooperating with the state became hallmarks of the modern cocaine industry. While the Cali Cartel, like the
marimba
kings, had always striven for peace with the political class, and in doing so had won every battle, the Medellín Cartel, which had mostly sought out war, had always lost in the end. So it was after Escobar’s death: his adversaries took over all his routes and created a smuggling machinery five times as lucrative as the former drug king’s empire.

Although the Escobar era left a vast number of problems in its wake, the two most devastating phenomena, which quickly started to infect politics and culture, were: for the state, the military’s tendency to believe that the ends justifies the means, and for the citizens, the development of a fast-cash culture. While the defeat of Escobar didn’t reduce cocaine production and consumption, it strengthened the ties between the criminal Castaño brothers and the military. Los Pepes came to rewrite Colombian history, and with the help of expanding drug revenues, Carlos, the middle brother, was able to transform the small right-wing militias into a single giant organisation called Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, the AUC: a national, albeit illegal, communist commando unit equal to the FARC in size, which by the late 1990s and early 2000s was wreaking havoc, with military approval. Over 30,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed. An entire left-wing party, Unión Patriótica, was eliminated after 3000 elected representatives were assassinated. The number of refugees, displaced from their homes during the three-way war between the AUC, the FARC, and the military, would skyrocket to four million by 2010, a number of internally displaced people surpassed only by Sudan. The military refined the Castaño brothers’ ‘everything goes’ strategy and cooperated with the AUC, which the European Union labelled a terrorist organisation due to its involvement in a number of massacres.

Just as devastating as the state’s merger with the successors of Los Pepes was the idea about fast and easy money, a seed planted in Colombia by the cocaine bonanza. The notion that working, saving, and planning were necessary for achieving wealth was negated by the thousands of people who had succeeded in making their fortunes by participating in one or another link in the drug chain. At the time of Escobar’s death Colombia was producing 120 tonnes of cocaine a year, and ten years later it was producing 550 tonnes annually. Gustavo de Greiff, attorney-general during the hunt for Escobar and one of the key people interviewed in
The Memory of Pablo Escobar
, revealed that it was during the second cocaine wave he decided to reconsider his entire approach to the war on drugs, an evolution that eventually led him to become one of Latin America’s most outspoken proponents of legalisation:

In terms of the drug business, when Escobar died, the same thing happened that had happened when Gacha died — absolutely nothing. This was one of the things that made me think about the hopelessness of the fight against drugs and prohibition. When they extradited people, when they put Escobar in prison, when they killed Gacha, when we put more than a thousand smugglers in prison, nothing happened to the drug-smuggling business. The cocaine kept arriving.

AT 6.00 A.M.
on Tuesday 18 July 2006, three bulletproof vehicles dispatched by the US ambassador stopped outside Virginia Vallejo’s mother’s apartment in Bogotá. And Virginia was ready. The night before, security personnel from the embassy had given her strict rules to follow, including not to stand in front of or look out the window, and under no circumstances to open the door.

Still a diva, she had packed her Gucci and Vuitton suitcases full of designer-label clothes by Chanel and Armani, but knew that from that day on her life would never be the same. She would be a refugee, a lot in life which was becoming increasingly common for all kinds of people who, like her, dared to do the most dangerous thing imaginable in the country: speak out about the past.

The historic crimes committed in the 1980s — the attack on the Palace of Justice and the assassination of Galán — were still unresolved. While Escobar’s involvement had been assured, the role the state and the political class had played in the bloodbath had not. And the deeper investigators and journalists delved into the case, the more convoluted things became. The military clammed up, lies were concocted, and truths went untold.

Over 20 years had passed since the Palace of Justice tragedy and Virginia’s time with Escobar, and after having watched his old friends come to power one after the other, she decided that she had had enough of the hypocrisy. Álvaro Uribe — one of Escobar’s early partners, according to Vallejo — had been elected president, and a third of the Congress was now made up of individuals with ties to the mafia. She thought it was time to give her side of the story. Galán’s widow and sons were convinced that the head of the National Intelligence Service at the time of the assassination, General Maza Márquez, had been integral in Galán’s murder, but in a recent interview with
The Miami Herald
Vallejo had maintained that the original architect of the crime was in fact Alberto Santofimio, former justice minister, senator and, on two occasions, the Liberal Party’s presidential candidate.

Just 24 hours after the interview was published, the seemingly endless dark forces of Colombian society — those who had killed Gaitán, assassinated the justices at the Palace of Justice, and killed 3000 representatives of the Unión Patriótica — had descended upon the park located directly across the street from where Virginia was staying. The investigator for the US government had discovered several suspicious men lurking around her building, and because they knew she could be killed at any moment, they decided to fly her out of the country. Neither the United States nor Colombia wanted to have yet another drug-related scandal on its hands that could be directly traced to the state apparatus. Before Vallejo had given her account against Santofimio, two other people had done the same; both were now dead.

She took her place in the caravan of vehicles and was driven to the airport. A car equipped with machine guns led the procession through the city, snaking its way in Bogotá’s smoggy morning traffic. Once there, she marched right up into the DEA’s specially chartered plane in her usual elegant way, in the presence of a throng of security personnel, and nine hours later, following a stopover at Guantanamo, they landed in what would be her new land of exile. Ironically, it was the very place where the now 30-year-plus modern cocaine drama had begun: Miami, Florida.

Carlos Lehder had by now already been in prison for several decades, and Norman Key — just 120 kilometres out from Miami, in the Caribbean — was in other people’s hands. It was somewhat typical, even telling perhaps, that the little plane Virginia was flown in took almost the same route that so many young men of the cartel had made use of to become immensely wealthy: from central Colombia, via Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, around Cuba, over the Bahamas, and landing in Miami.

Virginia had never taken part in any illegal activity, but she could not bring herself to despise Escobar completely, however much she wanted to. He had a double nature; her head was spinning now as she considered her adventures with him and how all of these disparate images could come together in a book. Hundreds of films, books, documentaries, and television programs had already been made about the mafia honcho she had once loved, but to her they had all been too cliché. In her mind the little man with the soothing voice, the occasionally sensitive guy who treaded a fine line between monster and hero, had never been accurately portrayed. She felt that her depiction of him would be better — a picture of both sides of the man. She also wanted to draw attention to the tumours within the Colombian state.

In October 2007 Alberto Santofimio was sentenced to 24 years in prison for instigating the assassination of Galán, with Escobar’s help. To the despair of Virginia and the Galán family, the higher courts acquitted him just one year later. Some of the testimonies were not credible, according to the court. The case was still being deliberated in the early 2010s, though showing signs — like most other major political assassination cases since cocaine began to reign — that the country would end up with yet another huge scar. In Colombia it is very hard to prove things. No one is credible. And often the truth comes at much too high a price. Twenty years was not enough time to clarify much more than that the head of the National Intelligence Service had most likely been involved. Virginia was disgusted by the terrible chain of events in her country and had started to feel contempt for her homeland, although her personal story was also replete with paradoxes.