ZeroZeroZero (15 page)

“How old is he?”

“I don’t know. Thirty, thirty-five . . .”

“Are you sure he’s not married?”

“What are you saying, Mami? He was in Los Angeles, he came back to help his family, I think.”

“And what exactly was he doing in Los Angeles?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“So you have no idea what it is he does, this Julio of yours?”

“Oh, business of some sort. But he’s rich, family money. He has a fabulous house and some other properties too, a hotel maybe, or a country estate.”

“Maybe. But you don’t know how he got rich. Or how his family got rich.”

“No, Mami, and I don’t care! You can’t always think like this, calculating everything all the time, planning. Those things don’t matter at all when you’re in love!”

Natalia starts to cry and locks herself in her room. Lucia Gaviria stays sitting in the kitchen, devastated. She has an awful feeling; she can barely breathe. To calm down she pours herself a glass of water and finishes up some mindless house chores.

The only question she dares ask the next day is the last name of Natalia’s beau. She tries to sound casual, but she knows Natalia’s not fooled. With that piece of information she heads to court, as she does every morning. Off to face her tragedy.

Julio César Correa. A drug trafficker. He got his start as a hit man at Pablo Escobar’s side. His new last name, which replaces his original one, reflects his status as a killer: Fierro, Julio Fierro. All over Latin America
fierro
—as in Italy,
ferro
—literally meaning “iron,” means “gun.” In this new era Julio established his independence as a professional killer and got involved directly in the cocaine business, becoming a
traqueto
, a trafficker. Doña Lucia wonders if he went to the United States because of Don Pablo’s death, to make himself scarce. But now he’s back. Back in time to make Natalia lose her head. She simply won’t
listen to reason. She confesses that Julio carries a pistol around town, but then screams: “What’s wrong with that, everybody else does!”

Whenever she addresses her mother now, Natalia always shouts.

Doña Lucia establishes peremptory rules and strict curfews, much stricter than when Natalia was under age. But when she’s alone, waiting for her daughter to return, Lucia Gaviria takes to brooding and blaming herself. Why did she let her take that damned diving course?

The years pass. Natalia’s mother is done in by the war she is fighting in vain. More and more she has long crying fits that are only in part a way of emotionally blackmailing her daughter. Julio tries to soften her up whenever possible, reassure her how deeply in love he is, swears that he will always have the utmost respect for Natalia and those dear to her. And he does seem sincere and polite, quite different from the ugly, vulgar
traquetos
she comes across in court. But Doña Lucia remains coldly courteous. She must resist; she must break their bond.

But her daughter is still as crazy for Julio as she was that very first day. And everything Doña Lucia does—cry, threaten, argue furiously—merely pushes her daughter further away. Further into Julio’s arms.

One morning Natalia comes into the kitchen with a frighteningly serious look on her face, her eyes puffy and red. She’s been even more nervous lately, and has been sleeping poorly. She doesn’t open her mouth until her stepfather, Doña Lucia’s companion who has acted as Natalia’s father since she was little, arrives.

“Natalia wants to tell you something.”

“I’m pregnant, Mami. I’m in my fourth month.”

It’s a catastrophe, and Lucia Gaviria is the last in the family to know. She doesn’t speak to her daughter for a week.

But she doesn’t hold out for long. She senses that for the first time in all these years Natalia is frightened as well. She no longer lives in a fairyland. Fairy tales don’t exist in Medellín, and Doña Lucia can’t abandon her now. So one day she buys her a pair of sneakers, so she’ll be more comfortable in the months to come, when the baby in her womb starts to weigh on her. She leaves the box on Natalia’s bed with a
note that says “God bless you.” They both weep that evening, Natalia in her bedroom, her mother in the living room. But the door is too thin for them not to hear each other’s sobs.

Natalia is under contract with Cristal Oro for their new ad campaign, but she’ll be in her seventh month by the time the shooting starts. Is Lucia Gaviria supposed to cancel? What excuse can she give them?

She is more furious with Julio than ever, even though he does everything one could expect from a Colombian man. He says he wants to marry Natalia, that having a baby with her is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to him, that everything will be fine. And her daughter goes along with everything he says. But at a certain point, Natalia’s happiness no longer seems like the other side of fear. She starts sleeping better, and gradually looks more radiant. Doña Lucia attributes the difference to hormonal changes related to her condition, until her daughter talks with her again.

“It’s all resolved, Mami. We’re going to go live in the United States soon; we’re going to start a new life there!”

A new life? In the United States?

The United States is every drug trafficker’s nightmare, so much so that in the 1980s a popular saying among the Colombian narcos was: “Better a tomb in Colombia than a prison cell in the United States.” What’s more, in 1997 Colombia, backed into a tight corner by the United States, altered its constitution so as to reintroduce extradition. Sometimes her daughter is so naïve she seems stupid.

And yet everything Natalia told her turns out to be true.

Not even a month goes by before Natalia leaves for Florida. All she had to do was pack her suitcase. Julio took care of everything else: the villa on the beach, their visas, all the other paperwork necessary for settling in the United States. Or rather, his new Yankee contacts took care of most of it. They’re not cocaine importers, though. In fact, they’re the cocaine importers’ antagonists par excellence: the Miami DEA.

Julio César Correa is one of the first Colombian narcos to negotiate
something that officially never existed. Precisely because his case is intended to motivate others, he’s one of the luckiest ones: not a single day in jail; no more trials hanging over his head for having flooded the streets of North America with cocaine. In exchange for millions of narco-dollars deposited in U.S. coffers and—more important—precious information.

The Miami DEA’s undertaking seems like a wild shot. How can the “world’s policeman” allow someone guilty of serious crimes under its own jurisdiction have his sentence eliminated?

Beyond that, how would it make contact with a drug lord and propose something of the sort to him? He would be the first to suspect he was being screwed. The contact person might never come back. The DEA’s office needs a more sophisticated intermediary.

 • • • 

Baruch Vega is a Colombian fashion photographer living in Miami. He has worked for Armani, Gucci, Valentino, Chanel, Hermès, all the major fashion houses and cosmetics companies. The second of eleven children of a trumpet player from Bogotá who relocated to Bucaramanga, a plateau in the middle of the mountains in northeast Colombia, Baruch won a Kodak competition when he was fifteen. He immortalized a bird as it emerged from a lake with a fish in its beak. But his parents make him study engineering. At the University of Santander he is recruited by the CIA and sent to Chile: Salvador Allende’s government is about to fall.

Baruch Vega hates his job. To make his escape he dusts off his skill as a photographer. He arrives in New York in the 1970s and photographs the very first top models, the likes of Lauren Hutton and Christie Brinkley. He manages to get what matters most where he comes from: success, money, and women. Earning them in the United States increases his prestige. Every time Vega goes back to Colombia he shows up with a slew of cover girls. They’re his business card. And that’s how, in the course of his double career as photographer and undercover agent,
he got to know many of the big Colombian cartel bosses and frequented the homes of important drug lords, such as the Ochoa brothers, Escobar’s associates in the Medellín cartel.

His first encounter with Julio Fierro is in a hotel in Cartagena, during the Miss Colombia pageant, not coincidentally. Vega plays his part. He says he knows some DEA agents you could make a deal with. All you have to do is pay: the gringo cops’ assistance, plus a percentage for his services.

For a drug lord, if you don’t have to pay, it’s not credible. The higher the price, the more trustworthy it seems. Baruch Vega is the best guarantee on the bargaining table. What could a man like him, who makes money in an enviable profession, want? More money. A man who risks his life for more money is a man who deserves respect. Respect and trust. As proof of his reliability, Vega organizes trips to Miami with his “private plane,” which will later turn out to be paid for by the DEA. The presence onboard of an antidrug agent guarantees that there will be other friendly cops at the airport ready to walk the drug traffickers—several of them on the top of the DEA’s most wanted list—through passport control without a visa. Just a little outing—to take their girlfriends to the hottest restaurants, shower them with gifts, and then back home. Next time, their farewell to Colombia and drug trafficking will be final.

Julio Fierro proves to be very useful to Vega and his friends at the DEA, whose initiative makes a qualitative leap. In Panama they organize the first of many big meetings between drug traffickers and antidrug agents. A summit of sorts, or a convention. In fact, that’s exactly what they call them. Julio arrives from Florida with Baruch Vega and the men from the DEA. Vega has taken care of everything, down to the last detail. He has filled the plane with the usual bevy of beauties, booked suites at the Intercontinental Hotel; he even makes sure that, after their trying day, they can catch some R&R at just the right club, with agents and drug traffickers emptying champagne bottles together, surrounded by willing women.

But Julio holds the trump card. He takes out a Colombian passport and passes it around to his former rivals and allies. The gringos have given him a new identity and a regular visa. Thanks to the United States, Julio Fierro no longer needs to hope for a tomb in Colombia. His gesture sets off a chain reaction that will change everything. But the big news in Natalia’s life is something else: Mariana, born in Miami, is a U.S. citizen.

 • • • 

These negotiations between the DEA and the drug lords—which sound like something right out of a novel—are less unbelievable than they first seem. The situation in Colombia is extremely complicated. The government’s credibility is lower than ever, incapable of holding any sway at home or of representing it abroad. In some respects, the United States takes advantage of this weakness. During the last year of President Ernesto Samper Pizano’s term, he was under investigation for having been elected through Cali cartel support, and Article 35 of the constitution is altered so as to reintroduce the long-awaited—or feared—policy of extradition. The Colombian president knows he has nothing more to lose.

For the moment, that’s all the United States can obtain through official channels. Unless they’re considered in this new juridical context the “under the counter” meetings the DEA promoted don’t make much sense. The concrete threat of extradition with no possible sentence reduction all of a sudden makes the alternative of near impunity in exchange for collaboration and the restitution of large sums of illegal money quite attractive. The DEA’s real objective is to corrode the trafficking organizations from within, to use the information obtained to prepare the decisive blow and to foster a climate of suspicion that generates exhausting internal feuds. Giovanni Falcone, the Italian judge killed by the Mafia in 1992, noted that
pentiti
, or criminals turned informers, were the legal weapon the Mafia feared most. In Italy it was possible, albeit with notable resistance, to strictly regulate the way criminals turned informers were handled. But for the United States the
problems are many: Its widespread
Law & Order
culture; its international hegemony, which cannot be openly compromised; the very fact of approaching non-U.S. citizens; and finally, the urgent need to do something to reduce the power of cocaine, which, despite the dismemberment of Colombia’s drug-trafficking dinosaurs, continues to grow. The DEA targets every exponent of real power: bosses who still control the old cartels; high-ranking members of rising clans; and narcos for all seasons, such as Julio Fierro. But also members of Mancuso’s and the Castaño brothers’ Autodefensas, who are becoming an increasingly formidable threat.

After the Cali cartel’s fall, paramilitary groups started receiving many more requests for their protection services from emerging groups, such as the Norte del Valle cartel. But their own involvement in drug trafficking is reaching a level of systematic autonomy in direct relation to the increase in their territorial dominance. By now they manage every step, from cultivation to transportation routes to negotiations with buyers. Half the department of Córdoba
cocaleros
are under their control, half under the control of leftist guerrillas. They can now take each other on with the force of two opposing armies. In 1997 the self-defense groups formed a federation, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), or AUC, headed by Carlos Castaño. The Monkey was a cofounder, in command of AUC’s largest military formation, the Bloque Catatumbo, which would come to include forty-five hundred men.

The conflict is becoming less of an ideological clash and more of a full-blown war of conquest. Once the outer shells of extreme right nationalism and revolutionary Marxism are removed, events in Colombia prefigure the current postmodern barbarity in Mexico. The AUCs are the “founding fathers” of the Familia Michoacana and the Knights Templar, and they increasingly descend on villages in areas controlled by the guerrillas, wiping out the inhabitants. They use primitive tools, such as machetes and chain saws, to behead and chop peasants to pieces,
but they plan their operations with cold military calculation, flying military planes hundreds of miles to the place of action and then flying out once the killing is done.