Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (9 page)

WHEN VIEWED FROM
out at sea, the coast looks like a giant oil spill has just washed up over the beaches, cliffs, and jungle. All is black and white. When the sun is behind the clouds and the rain pours down, the forest is black and the sea grey. But as soon as the sun comes out, colour returns and the sea becomes a beautiful emerald green again. The water is soft and warm, and the scent of the sea permeates the air. Life.

Leo bites down hard on a thick fishing line, more like a rope, and proceeds to measure out how many arms’ lengths from the plastic can, a sort of float, he will attach the hook, which has a freshly caught sardine on it as bait. His friends do the same, and soon the little waves are capped with homemade fishing floats in a vast array of colours. It should not be too long before something big happens.

But when it does, it is not what they have been hoping for.

Leo sits, sets his paddle down like a spatula against the edge of the boat, and begins bailing out water with a decapitated plastic bottle. But he only manages three scoops before a huge steel-blue body shoots up out of the sea like a rocket.

‘
Hijoepucchhha!
Oh my God!’

The fish shoots up towards the sky, taking the hook, line, and sinker with it, only to plummet down helplessly with a giant splash some ten metres from the canoe. The little boat rocks from the backwash, and the other guys give congratulatory whistles. But they do not have the chance to watch how things develop, as several hooks suddenly get bites. In the middle of a circle formed by the seven canoes — each about a hundred metres from the next — blue bodies shoot up out of the water all around, like miniature explosions. Each fisherman has three buoys, and the one that Leo has a bite on spins like a bobbin, causing water to squirt up as he sits back and calmly begins to bail water again. ‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Now you just have to wait. The dog will soon be tired.’

When a marlin — they call them
perros
, dogs — bites down on a hook, it jumps up like a dolphin. Then it disappears beneath the surface until the water suddenly becomes ablaze with silver and black, five metres down in the bathtub-green sea. Leo watches contentedly, explaining that he usually lets it jump three or four times before hauling it in because otherwise it’s impossible to handle.

In a few minutes the calm water is disturbed again. Soon the marlin starts flapping around in the open air before collapsing on its fin, rather than diving down with its sword in front, like a dolphin unable to complete its loop in the air.

‘Now it’s time,’ Leo says.

He drifts over to the buoy and begins to haul in the line. Calmly, with his left hand, he pulls the line towards him metre by metre until the fish appears. The marlin is tired now, but still occasionally spasms. Leo swings the canoe around, bringing it closer to the fish. Like a stern master holding a leashed dog, he grips the line. Just half a metre of it separates him from the fish. He fumbles for the paddle.

The long sword has lost all its firmness and droops to the left, like a large machete bouncing in and out of the water, while the marlin’s mouth hangs open dejectedly. The fish is half the length of the canoe.

One of the other men pulls up. ‘
Mátalo
,’ he yells. ‘Kill it!’

Leo lifts up the paddle and stops for a moment like a matador just about to drive his sword through the head of an exhausted bull. He concentrates on getting his aim just right, and then strikes with full force, banging the skull right between the eyes. The fish gives a final jolt and lies there, like a log floating in the water. Leo kneels, shoving his entire arm down the throat and ripping out the heart. He throws the red lump at his friend as a joke. ‘
Listo
. Done,’ he says.

The canoe is floating in a pool of blood, but the fish still is not onboard. It starts to thunder. Nearby, all around the circle of canoes, other fish are being hauled in. The water turns red.

Leo pulls his ‘dog’ up into the canoe little by little. First he pulls the sword over the edge, and along with it a third of the fish’s body, and balances it on the rim before moving back a few metres in the canoe. He grabs hold of the fin with both arms and then rolls the whole fish onboard.

There are no sharp parts on the fish. The skin is smooth, and the sail-like fin is large and black but soft, like the bellows of an accordion. The body, although lifeless, is still warm. It takes up the entire floor of the canoe, but before Leo can even get it properly situated, another of his buoys starts to spin. Some water squirts up, a new missile is launched from the bottom, and the whole procedure is repeated.

Half an hour later, it is 9.00 p.m. The sky is dark. It is going to rain again. By now the canoe is so heavy and low in the water that only a mere decimetre keeps it from filling up and sinking. Leo says that he has to hurry, as there is a place in the village where people will buy the catch, but the later he gets there, the less he will be offered. ‘
Vamos
.’

He paddles away from his friends, but halfway back to shore a cargo ship full of felled rainforest crosses his path. No other boats are in sight. The high-grade timber is being dragged behind the boat like a bundle of gold ingots, making a long, yellow trail of woodchips in the water. Leo signals to the captain to slow down. The boat is headed for Buenaventura, and if he can sell his fish directly to the crew he will get an even better price than if he is the first one back to the village. Plus he will not have to carry it.

They agree to buy it. From the boat’s gunwale, a seaman lowers a large meat hook three metres down to Leo’s little dugout and picks up the marlin like they are a couple of slaughtered pigs. Once he has pulled them up, he lowers 40,000 pesos, 22 USD, in a plastic bag.

The boat chugs along on its way. Leo drops a gob of spit into the water and points with his thumb towards the boat and the glimmering timber. ‘Illegal,’ he says. ‘Everything’s illegal around here.’

In a way it sounds as though he’s trying to comfort himself for not having received his ‘miracle catch’ again today. It is as if he wants to say that at least his livelihood is honest, compared with all the other boats going up and down this coast. He goes on to tell other stories about cocaine and people in the village as if to prove that sudden wealth does not guarantee eternal happiness. Today Iván is a laughing-stock, Leopoldo is increasingly ostracised by people in town the more money he rakes in, and it is the same with the others. Except for Lucho. He is doing well.

The canoe is still half full of bloody sludge, and Leo sits and starts bailing again. His grumbling comes across a bit like sour grapes, but there is a very serious background to everything he says: Chocó has changed completely. Many people would go so far as to say it has been ruined, but it has nothing to do with the occasional white catch making the fishermen rich overnight or turning them into alcoholics. It is because of the arrival of production facilities here — both plantations and labs. That is entirely new. Trafficking by boat has been around since the days of Pablo Escobar, though on a smaller scale, but now the entire malignant social and political cancer that spread warfare to the poorest corners of Colombia has taken root here as well. Just eight years ago there were no plantations in Chocó at all. Today, they are everywhere.

Chocó is the latest chapter in the story of how most of the cocaine production in the world — from cultivation to processing and exportation — came to be concentrated in one specific nation, but it begins in the province that has played a greater role than any other in the production of and battle against cocaine: Putumayo. And the story has several layers: about how a war over drugs became a war financed by drugs, about how the cultivation of coca became the guerrillas’ most effective weapon, about why the US war on drugs failed, and finally, about how the white powder fuelled one of the worst refugee disasters of all time.

Leo lets the waves sweep the canoe to shore. It is 10.00 p.m., and he is back on land. His daily work is done, and now he will see what is on television. Have a beer and a chinwag. Not very different from what he would have been doing had he been a millionaire. And when he turns his dugout upside down and the last of the bloody water gushes out, he says two sentences, and it’s not clear whether he is alluding to his catch that day or to his life in general, but either way they presuppose that he and his family can go on living here. Which applies to fewer and fewer people. Because the problem with the arrival of all facets of the drug complex is that the profits are now individualised while the costs are collective. What comes in the wake of this industry, people have learned, is always violence, war, guerrillas, corruption, massacres, and environmental degradation, and the price tag ends up pretty much even for the Leos and Luchos of society — even though these days it is mostly the Luchos, the guys with the motorboats, who stand to reap the benefits of the floating drums in the sea. The long collective tradition in Chocó has been cut short, and today the only thing that is divvied out in equal amounts is misery.

What Leo says is that until he gets his miracle catch, he will just try to ‘stand aside’. To think of his family’s interests, not those of society. ‘I’m doing alright. As long as I can fish.’

THREE MONKEYS ARE
playing in the mango trees when Edgar starts the lawn trimmer, which causes a steel-blue smoke cloud to shoot out of the engine. His son quickly puts away his toy cars and his daughter hides behind an oil drum. Dad is off to work.

‘I have nine bags today. That’ll make 300 grams.’

He straddles the mound of coca leaves as he runs his trimmer in them. The machine causes the leaves to spin as it chops them to tiny shreds, and in just a quarter of an hour the pile has shrunk to less than half its size. You don’t have to shred the leaves, but shredding saves space as it cuts down on the amount of air in the raw material.

The lab is just a stone’s throw away from the shack Edgar and his family live in, and consists of a simple wooden floor, seven by seven metres, built on stakes and covered with a thin tin roof to keep out the tropical rain. In addition, there are four rusty oil drums, six cans of fuel, three plastic barrels, two bags of cement, a small bag of fertiliser, and some buckets with all the other necessities: sulfuric acid, sodium hydroxide, and potassium permanganate. On one side is the corrugated-iron chute, the most defining feature of a lab.

There is now a 111-kilogram pile of raw material on the floor, like a heap of freshly cut grass, waiting to be processed and become the most sought-after powder in the world.

‘That’ll do it,’ Edgar says. ‘Now it will all go into one barrel instead of three. That means less fuel, less cement, and fewer chemicals. Two-thirds less. That saves money.’

It is 7.00 a.m., and Edgar is just one of the hundreds of thousands of coca farmers on the slopes of the Andes who has started up his shearing machine. In the Colombian southern provinces this morning, like all mornings, small motors buzz in the hands of illiterate family men and women who wear themselves ragged in an effort to respond to an ever-growing global need. Demand in the United States has stabilised or even decreased in recent years, while the opposite is occurring in Europe, Australia, parts of Asia, Africa, and, not least, in the most well-developed Latin American countries — Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, and Colombia — where demand has been rapidly increasing over the last decade.

Edgar picks up a leaf missed by the shearer and holds it reverently, like a priceless stamp, between his thumb and forefinger before slowly folding it and snapping it in two. ‘This is a good leaf, ripe. It should feel like paper. If it’s soft like cloth it’s been harvested too early, and the paste won’t harden as it should. No one buys a bad product. One time I couldn’t get it to harden and had to throw all of it out. It was a financial disaster for my family, because I still had to pay all the farmers I’d bought the leaves from, and then I’d also spent a lot of money on chemicals and fuel. But if you just have ripe leaves from the beginning, you can hardly mess it up. It’s a simple process.’

Edgar turns the mythical leaves of the coca bush into coca paste: the first and most labour-intensive, but least profitable, link in the cocaine chain. He sells the paste to local buyers, who are under the wing of either the guerrillas or paramilitary groups, and who in turn take it to the more sophisticated labs —
cocinas
, usually strategically located adjacent to the points of exit — where the final stage of production takes place. After that, the cartels take over transporting
la
mercancía
, ‘the goods’ — the only term used here — to modern-day mafias, who distribute it to old and new markets.

Since the war on drugs has escalated and large plantations are no longer possible in the region, the entire hierarchy is based on this network, which consists of thousands of small contributors. But even though Edgar and his colleagues’ grunt-work is absolutely essential if everything is going to work, the financial allocation of the narcotics pyramid is brutal. Less than one per cent of the going street price ends up in the pockets of the coca farmers. Four per cent goes to the groups involved in the fine processing of the powder and 20 per cent goes to the smugglers, while those who benefit most are the people who control sales in the United States and European markets. This is also where most of the money laundering takes place: 75 per cent of the enormous earnings generated by cocaine trafficking remains in the country where the end product is sold.

It requires 1.2 grams of coca paste to produce one gram of pure cocaine and, according to current street rates in Europe and the United States, Edgar’s little daily harvest is worth around 21,000 USD. His own earnings after two days’ work — when leaves, fuel, and chemicals have been paid for — is 50,000 pesos (27 USD). About 1.50 USD per hour. But he is satisfied. ‘Yes, very. It’s four times more than I get for other crops. No product brings in a profit like coca. Sometimes the authorities show up, gather us villagers around, and try to convince us that there are other crops that are more profitable, but it’s not true. If I grow pineapples or yuccas there’s never anyone who wants to buy them. Coca paste, on the other hand, I can get rid of in five minutes.’