Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (35 page)

María Jimena Duzán welcomes new perspectives on the topic, but does not think that either the number of murders in Latin America or the number of addicts in the United States will compel Washington to reconsider its former policy in earnest. There is, however, something she thinks will finally have an effect on Washington: the migration of the brutal phenomenon that so many of the books on her bookshelves deal with — war. ‘That’s what has arrived in their country. War. It sounds cynical, but I think it’s good that the war has reached the US. Today the entire Texas border is a war zone. People are being killed left and right. Drug violence has finally crossed the border, which has made the US wake up. The cost of this has also become evident there. That’s why new ideas are beginning to take root in Washington. They’re not changing their way of thinking because of the number of addicts, but because of the changed security situation. It’s a good start. I’m optimistic now. Very.’

MELISSA AND HER
mother are standing by the statue of Simón Bolívar when Daniel Pacheco, one of the instigators of the protest and a columnist for
El Espectador
, begins to speak. The crowd draws in closer. Pigeons scatter. Cops look on. Five centuries have passed since the Spaniards were first introduced to the coca leaf, and it’s been 150 years since Albert Niemann revealed the chemical formula for what would, in the 20th century, spawn the white gold that would forever affect medicine, psychology, literature, addiction, the film industry, the White House, and Latin America.

‘
Hola
,’ says Pacheco to his listeners.

He has curly hair, and his eyes peer out through a pair of big glasses as he gazes over the urban heart of the country — where Melissa Álvarez was born in 1991, during the raging cocaine war, right between the assassination of Luis Carlos Galán in 1989 and the killing of Pablo Escobar in 1993. She is the same age as the constitution, the ‘secular and anti-authoritarian’ document the Christian right successfully disarmed with the help of cocaine and the war on it in the 2000s. But what has played out over the last two drug-filled decades since the constitution was written has more concrete than theoretical consequences; guerrilla resources increased tenfold and, with the state as the instrument, the elite struck back with paramilitary death squads, who have now killed over 40,000 people — more than the Chilean and Argentinean dictatorships combined.

All of this has happened while the global demand for cocaine has increased, and so it will most likely continue. No one — not even the DEA, the United Nations, the European Union, or Washington — seems to think any longer that demand can be controlled; so how will it all end? Is it true, as Alfredo Rangel suggests, that legalisation is the least detrimental alternative? Or is the opposite true, as Jay Bergman argues: that it is a good thing that so much has been invested in maintaining prohibition, and that, if the DEA and the other institutions fighting drugs could get just a little more funding, order could soon be restored in Colombia, Mexico, the rest of Latin America, and the world? Or is it as María Jimena Duzán says, when she claims that both the war on drugs and legalisation are naïve schemes that will soon be scrapped in favour of a global policy in which selective decriminalisation goes hand-in-hand with effective prevention and much better methods of crime fighting?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. At least as far as cocaine is concerned. Research into the history of drugs and addiction shows that laws play an insignificant role in how drug-related problems evolve, and that other things are far more decisive in shaping the patterns of drug use and abuse: the economy, migration, knowledge, poverty, or trends. And, not least, the invention of new drugs. Cocaine is in many important ways an outdated drug — requiring cultivation, a special climate, and expensive logistics, with a high that is appealing but in no way unique. In Misha Glenny’s book
McMafia
Sandro Calvani, former director of the UN anti-drug agency in both Bolivia and Colombia, prophesises the future of drug-related organised crime and sees cocaine playing a starring role — as the loser. Calvani ascertains that ‘cocaine has no future’ because drug users can easily get rid of the yoke of today’s traffickers thanks to chemical developments and free markets. ‘Wherever amphetamines and synthetic drugs have arrived onto the market, they replace everything — cocaine, heroin, the lot,’ Calvani states. ‘It works fast and doesn’t involve the paraphernalia of injecting or sniffing. A much better kind of drug. More dangerous, but it works. Here, it has already started in Medellín. So the future is in the new drugs. The market will change and determine this. They don’t need the narco-traffickers. The future will be completely different.’

The problem for Colombia is that the white powder didn’t give rise to the country’s injustices and war; it just multiplied them. In other words, the end of cocaine will not solve the problems either, but only reduce them. Colombia is not dependent on cocaine, but cocaine is dependent on Colombia. The global drug industry relies on conflict, poverty, ineffectual government, police forces for sale, and criminal know-how, all of which has put Colombia on a carousel of evil: the narcotics industry is here because the armed groups are here, and the armed groups are here because the narcotics industry is here. And so it goes, round and round. Francisco Thoumi, the leading drug scholar in the country, thinks that there is only one way to put the brakes on: ‘What has to be legalised is Colombia, not cocaine.’ But that’s easier said than done.

Darkness falls over the demonstrators. Even though the goal of the protest is doomed to failure, everyone is upbeat. Chaos and warfare have not caused Colombians to lose their sophisticated sense of humour. With polite irony, typical for the country, Daniel Pacheco asks the protesters to show some unreturned respect by not smoking pot right in front of the police and the Congress. They comply, but laugh. The lighted neoclassical façade on the south side of the square looks like a giant glowing grill illuminating the crowd, as Daniel Pacheco picks up a thread from one of his columns:

Do you understand why they forbid us from using mind-altering drugs? Why there are people who want to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry and adopt children? Who deny women the right to abortion? Why it is called unpatriotic to choose not to bear arms? Why people are denied the right to die with dignity? Why certain people want to forbid things that have nothing to do with them? Neither do I.

Pacheco encourages everyone to hold up a ‘dose of personality’. It can be anything that has contributed joy and fulfillment to one’s life: books, CDs, joints, mountain-climbing equipment, sex toys, Bibles, partners, guitars. In his thick glasses Pacheco resembles a young Gabriel García Márquez, and it was here exactly six decades ago that Castro, Márquez, and Gaítan all took part in the street demonstrations that ended in Gaítan’s assassination, launching what remains to this day the world’s longest ongoing civil conflict.

Ivonne stands eye to eye with Simón Bolívar. Her curly hair flies around in the breeze. Melissa stands by her side. What is interesting about all the talk on narcotics in one of the largest drug-producing nations in the world is that the phenomenon of abuse is rarely, if ever, mentioned. Almost never. But this is certainly not because there are no addicts in Colombia; just a stone’s throw away a whole community of poor people in one of the most miserable ghettos in the city are completely hooked on
basuco
, a simplified version of crack. And in order to cope with the cold nights, the city’s hordes of street kids are every evening numbing their brains by sniffing glue. Ivonne, mother of two, used harder drugs than cannabis during her student days. But her family and neighbourhood smoothly prevented her from letting her life go down the drain. And that’s a type of secure environment many — very many — people lack.

She looks thoughtful and her face breaks into a pensive expression momentarily as she thinks about the drug problem in relation to class and social environments. Is the reason why hardly anyone in progressive Colombia is against legalisation because the educated middle and upper classes are mainly the ones committed to the debate and politically active? Are the people who raise their voices also the ones who have a social safety net? ‘I don’t think so,’ she finally says. ‘When we think about legalisation in Colombia, what we are really thinking about is getting rid of the mafia. Nothing else. The war is what matters here. I’m not thinking about misery or abuse, but about something completely different: an opportunity. Peace and liberation for this country.’

NOTES ON SOURCES

I HAVE ATTEMPTED
to write a book on one of the world’s most complex societies that is both readable and accessible. In doing so I have chosen to work without footnotes, with all the pros and cons such an approach entails. However, this section contains additional commentary, along with a list of my sources, which
will allow the reader to see which accounts and facts the analyses are based on.

To report in Colombia means acting in extremely sensitive, conflict-ridden environments, particularly in rural areas. A reporter who doesn’t take the necessary precautions or is careless with information can cause fatal consequences for individuals, or even trigger social and political dynamics that may end up in massive internal displacement. Consequently, in some cases names have been changed to protect identities. In two instances I have also changed the name of the location. In the notes on the following pages, all pseudonyms are italicised. Alfonso, in the preface, goes by a different name in real life, too.

These notes are also intended as tips for further reading for those who wish to learn more about cocaine and Colombia’s incredible history, which I hope this book will inspire them to do. Publishers and years of publication for the books I have used are included in the bibliography. Tips on further reading on Latin America in general, and Colombia in particular, may be found on my website: www.magnuslinton.com.

The greatest challenge with regard to sources when writing about coca and the distribution of cocaine, as well as the successes and failures of the war on drugs, is deciding which statistics to use. Two major institutions that follow these developments — the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC, and the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, or ONDCP — present such drastically conflicting figures that the discrepancy between them reveals just how difficult it is to assess illegal activity. For instance, according to UNODC there were 181,600 hectares of cultivated coca in the Andes in 2007, while according to ONDCP there were 232,000 hectares. According to UNODC 99,000 of those hectares were in Colombia, while according to ONDCP Colombia had 167,000 hectares of cultivated coca — almost twice as much. UN statistics show a 25 per cent decrease in the total amount of land worldwide on which coca was grown between 1990 and 2006, while the US agency shows an increase, claiming that in 2007 more hectares were used for coca cultivation globally than ever before. If you factor cocaine
production
into the equation, the situation becomes even more confusing; according to UNODC, in 2007 a total of 902 tonnes of cocaine was produced in the world, while ONDCP, which reported 50,000 more cultivated hectares that same year, claimed that only 785 tonnes were produced — that is, nearly 15 per cent
less
.

For Colombia, the fluctuations in statistics in recent years have been extreme. In 2007 there was, according to the UN office, a dramatic increase in the number of hectares used for coca cultivation, compared with 2006 (the figure rose from 78,000 to 99,000); the following year a nearly equal reduction was reported (from 99,000 to 81,000), while the US stats showed an increase for both years. According to the latest UN figures on Colombia, the total amount of pure cocaine produced decreased from 545 tonnes in 2007 to 390 tonnes in 2008, while production in both Bolivia and Peru increased. I’ve chosen to use the United Nations’ statistics since UNODC openly reports the methodology they use in their assessments, which includes satellite photography, whereas ONDCP doesn’t.

However, I encourage the reader to take all statistics in this regard with a grain of salt. As explained by the expert Francisco Thoumi and as shown in the chapter ‘Green Gold’, the reporting of figures is highly politicised. The majority of coca farmers I spent time with camouflage their coca plants among other crops so that the plants won’t be detected in satellite images. Another problem with obtaining reliable statistics on the actual spread of coca cultivation is that much of the land that has been heavily cultivated in Colombia in recent years is in the rainforest provinces, which are nearly always cloudy, and this complicates satellite photography — so much so that, according to the UNODC research team in Colombia, it seriously affects the monitoring. However, an actual decline in production in Colombia, as reported in 2008, is plausible, given the United Nations also reports that 230,000 hectares of coca were destroyed (130,000 by herbicide spraying and 100,000 by manual elimination) in the same year, almost three times as much as the organisation had reported as having been cultivated.

In light of the more than two decades of United Nations statistics, from 1990 to today, it can be concluded that the number of cultivated hectares — the total amount in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, after all the efforts of the war on drugs — has been reduced by 25 per cent, while production during the same time has increased by 28 per cent. More-potent plants, better processing techniques, and faster replanting following herbicide spraying are some of the reasons why the increased demand has been able to be satisfied. Dramatic fluctuations, particularly in Colombia, will most likely continue, and the statistic I report in this book, with Colombia’s share of global production at around 60 per cent, is an average calculation for the most recent decade as a whole, based on the UN statistics.