Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (27 page)

‘Over there,’ says Picón to one of his men. ‘Steer over there.’

THE HISTORY OF
those who have suffered the most at the hands of the global cocaine industry is as old as the boom itself. As the country’s largest port, ever since the 1980s Buenaventura has been seen as an attractive area, over which many have vied for control. It was from here that those taking La Fany, the classic route of the Medellín Cartel, departed for Mexico with almost ten tonnes of cocaine a month; it was here that the FARC took over when they became reliant on the drug trade in the 1990s; and it was here that civilians were killed by the thousands when the state regained control in the 2000s, with the help of the paramilitary death squads.

The flow of cocaine has continued to grow irrespective of which armed group has been in control, and since the early 2010s an ever-increasing importance has been placed on the aesthetic aspects of the war on drugs. Like every other place in Latin America in which the drug industry has gained a foothold, the government has ignored the Colombian coast along the Pacific for as long as Colombia has existed as a nation. The commercial port in the city from which 40 per cent of the nation’s exports are shipped has been the central power’s only object of interest, while the Afro-Colombian inhabitants next to it have been left to fend for themselves to the best of their ability, without state support. This has resulted in a peculiar, but in many ways functional, settlement along the southern part of the island; as the number of poor though picturesque pole houses has increased, so has the amount of trash, gravel, and other debris in the water beneath them. This has caused the island to expand in an organic way, a process that has been uncomplicated for two reasons: because the sea and small-scale fishing have been the only reliable means of livelihood, and because, since the water belongs to everyone, there is never a need for anyone to purchase land they cannot afford. Over time, the city’s destitute have established a strong cultural identity, and many residents proclaim that, were it not for the poor health care, the absence of schools, and the ubiquitous violence, life here would be paradise.

The problem is that cocaine strategists have found this type of environment ideally suited to their needs. When the tide rolls in, there are thousands of homes just above the surface of the water; and when it rolls out, the wooden seaside shacks look like dancing storks. This odd convergence of nature and culture has made these houses the ideal stations from which small amounts of illegal cargo can be shipped north on a nightly basis. The hundreds of brushwood-covered islands scattered just off the coast are infested with
caleteros
: people paid to collect small packages containing a few dozen kilograms and gather them until there is a decent quantity, never more than three tonnes, that can be picked up by a
volador
continuing on to Panama or Mexico. By no means all, and likely only a fraction, of the families in the southern shantytowns work, voluntarily or at gunpoint, by providing feeder services to the collection points; but for those fighting in the war on drugs, these distinctive residential areas have become synonymous with the cocaine trade.

Yet it is not what is actually being done, but what it
looks like
that is the central problem in the modern-day war on drugs. A large part of the economic growth promised by Plan Colombia is based on the concept of an impending tourism boom in this exotic and colourful yet largely uncharted land. Colombia, the idea goes, will be restored, and presented to the world with a new image in which wars, guerrillas, massacres, death squads, kidnappings, and even poverty are history. If only the country dares to embrace free trade fully, the logic holds, both foreign investments and tourists will be drawn here in droves. The only problem is all the visible misery caused by the cocaine trade, and that has to be eradicated. Cities such as Buenaventura not only need a fresh new image, but new inhabitants as well. People that are, in the words of the drug police, less ‘crazy’.

After the paramilitary takeover, the government, military, and municipality have started construction on ‘the new Buenaventura’, based on the Western ideal of the southern European seafront boardwalk. Rather than channelling resources into schools, health care, and security for long-time residents, a mega-project with the intention of pleasing the rest of the world has gotten underway; the original inhabitants of Buenaventura will, according to the urban plan, be relocated and their homes razed, in the hope that in a few years’ time one of the most notorious cities in the world will attract sophisticated tourists who will stroll along the seafront, among chic hotels and cafés, with lattes and frozen yoghurts in hand.

This will be painful for the thousands of families who will have to see their homes bulldozed, but the project itself would not be completely unreasonable if there were a potential customer base. However, Buenaventura has none of the attributes that attract the more picky travelers from the wealthy corners of the world, in their pursuit for postcard-perfect tropical experiences — no white sandy beaches, no crystal-clear waters, no steady sunshine. Here it rains every day, and the port, which is the focal point of the city, gives the entire island an implacably industrial feel. If the city has anything to offer the global leisure industry at all, it would be its distinctive social life and culture, its people.

But the Europeanisation of Colombia’s African roots is already underway, and the war on cocaine has become an effective tool to bring about the city’s new face. Sections of the boardwalk are under construction, and a number of cafés have been decorated in the style that the owners believe the wealthy of the world expect. But most places have already been abandoned for lack of patrons. Today Roxette blasts from a deserted concrete desert and Marlboro and Absolut memorabilia dangle in empty bars, while the remaining wooden shanties vibrate with their own rhythms and neighbourhood parties. According to Aida Orobio, a nun from the Buenaventura Diocese, the transformation is typical: the city’s most basic problem is, she says, not drug trafficking, but the fact that the state stubbornly insists on investing in everyone except the people who reside here.

But as always in Colombia, there is a parallel story on another level, one that is both related to and separate from drugs. The vast majority of the unfathomable tonnes of cocaine passing through this little town of 300,000 inhabitants every year does not go out through the roughened hands of fishermen from
los esteros
, but in containers via the main harbour: in coffee sacks, boxes of tuna, bags of sugar, crates of bananas, and loads of timber. And at every level, from loaders and unloaders to customs chiefs and city councilors, there are people working under contract with the mafia. The fact that the Coast Guard and the narcotics police put such emphasis on these marginalised residential areas and their canoe trafficking cannot be explained in terms of quantities of powder; it is due to something else. In the earliest years of the war on drugs — during the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations — elimination was the main objective, with the support of bans, and this was validated on a global scale at United Nations conventions. Eradication was key. Yet since then the lack of results has forced Washington to lower its expectations, and elimination is no longer the goal. Instead, what is essential to the DEA and White House today is which kind of powers are strengthened and which weakened by the drug industry. The new goal is merely to make sure that the amount of drug production going on is not so prodigious that it becomes ‘a threat to national security’.

But just what qualifies as a threat of this kind is determined by the United States and is interpreted in completely different ways throughout Latin America. In Bolivia the democratically elected government is, according to the DEA, a threat to Bolivian national security, whereas in Colombia the democratically elected government maintains Colombian national security, despite the fact that both governments have ruled over national institutions and authorities that played key roles in streamlining cocaine production in the 2000s. In Buenaventura’s case, drug ambitions and priorities are both closely related to the new emphasis on the
function
of drug trafficking in society, and what the city has been through recently is, in many ways, a consequence of this emphasis.

When in the 1990s the guerrillas strengthened their positions in this strategic city — Buenaventura is in the province of Valle del Cauca, just two hours from the sugar and cocaine metropolis of Cali — the elite classes throughout the entire region began to smell a rat. Paramilitaries were in full bloom in other parts of the country, and as the guerrillas made advances in the largest port off the Pacific Coast, the need for a counterattack grew. Various stakeholders financed the AUC’s arrival in the city; landed proprietors, drug lords, sugar magnates, and a whole range of industrial sectors with interests in Buenaventura’s harbour entered into an alliance with the provincial political clans and unscrupulous military officers, and the first of several purges were carried out during the early years of the new millennium. One of Carlos Castaño’s brothers in arms from Urabá — Ever Veloza, alias H.H. — took it upon himself to make changes in the balance of power in Buenaventura, and seven years later, after he had demobilised his private armies, he would confess to having ordered the killing of over 1000 people in the city between 2000 and 2001 — and that the murders had been carried out ‘in cooperation with representatives of the state’. Since then several mass graves have been discovered, confirming Veloza’s version of the story. The authors of
Parapolítica
, the investigation that includes the most extensive analysis of the connection between the private armies and the state apparatus, maintain that ‘the establishment of the AUC in the central parts of Valle del Cauca went hand in hand with a weak police response, which for the most part accepted the actions’.

The ‘actions’, which were carried out in the 2000s and continue to this day, often took place in
los esteros
of Buenaventura. The wooden hovels and their inhabitants were synonymous, in the eyes of the elite and paramilitary groups, with guerrilla-controlled territory — an assessment that has sometimes been correct, but many times hasn’t. Over time the idea took root that a sustainable guerrilla remediation of the city could not be achieved with anything less than an elimination of the cultural traditions and housing conditions that were perceived to be an essential part of the social ‘water’ in which the guerrilla swam. War between the FARC and paramilitary groups raged in the neighbourhoods until the latter eventually proved victorious, after which the plan for ‘the new Buenaventura’, with its clean seafront instead of ‘crazy’ neighbourhoods, was presented. The fact that several districts in
los esteros
were controlled and often terrorised by urban branches of the FARC was nothing new, but after thousands of innocent people were murdered before the eyes of a passive army and police force, distrust developed between the people and the state — a distrust which has remained the hallmark of the city ever since. And the seafront, which has only just begun to be built, has become a highly charged political symbol of white against black in Buenaventura. A symbol of the future against the past. Drugs flow as effortlessly through the harbour as through
los esteros
, but the government and the DEA view drug trafficking as more of a hazard to society when it moves through the poor area, with its dirty waters and seeming chaos, than when it has to do with corporate boardrooms and the main harbour. And for the FARC, it is becoming easier and easier to convince the city’s Afro-Colombian majority that the focus of the war on drugs is not primarily on the flow of drugs, but on what kind of people are involved in it.

IT IS 10.00
a.m., and a great deal of commerce is taking place down by the piers when the Coast Guard pulls up beside two abandoned boats, each loaded with three large plastic oil drums. In a sea of chatter, quantities of goods both large and small are being bought and sold on the nearby boats, but these two have suddenly been abandoned. No one wants to take responsibility for them.

Quite undramatically, Captain Picón’s subordinates simply loosen the punts before the merchants’ trained eyes, making no other seizures, and tow them behind their patrol boat towards a little island in the bay, which functions as one of many military bases.

‘See here,’ says Picón, once the six drums have been rolled out into a large hangar. He points to a semicircular incision at the bottom of each large drum. Nothing can be seen from a distance, but if you look closely it’s obvious that someone has cut out a sort of a lid in the hard blue plastic and then glued it back in. This, he says, is what they always look like. Picón’s staff break open lid after lid and start to pull out tightly packed rectangles of cardboard, all carefully taped and labeled either ‘Scrooge McDuck’ or ‘Batman’.

‘This means that the goods originate from two different labs,’ says Picón. ‘McDuck is one producer, Batman another. They are like logos for the cartels. Had the packages been sent unmarked, absolute chaos would ensue once everything arrived in Panama. Distributors and producers always double-check with each other just to make sure they know whose goods have arrived. So the labels are essential.’

Kilo after kilo is arranged in endless rows on the shiny concrete floor, like dominos, while technicians, chemists, prosecutors, and more police officers arrive. In the retail sector cocaine is dealt in grams, though here a kilo is the smallest denomination. A soldier in a blue uniform, crawling on all fours, numbers each brick with a squeaky felt-tip marker, and after a couple of hours of tedious work he scribbles out digits on the last three Batman packages: 390, 391, 392. ‘Phew.’