A Colombian peasant checks the mix as he turns coca leaves to coca paste.
Everyone remembers the small plane that buzzed around the
clear sky over this beautiful section of western Colombia toward the end of
2003, tossing out hundreds of pamphlets. Promising a "black Christmas," the
pamphlets said "the good children will go to bed early. The bad children we'll
put to bed ourselves." Colombia's worst drug war in more than a decade was
about to get worse.
Set amid rich farmland in the shadows of mountains, the
towns of El Dovio, Zarzal, and Roldanillo are snapshots of rustic Colombia's
beauty. Middle-aged women, overweight in that way peculiar to a rich rural
diet, can be seen driving the latest SUVs. Behind this rural gentility, these
towns have long served as the headquarters of Colombia's largest remaining
cocaine trafficking organization, the Northern Valley cartel. The cartel is at
war with itself, a firestorm of violence targeting anyone linked to the
organization in the past or present, no matter how tenuously.
In this tiny corner of Colombia, with a population of
260,000, more than 1,000 people have been murdered during the last 20 months.
The war is between former partners within the cartel, one of whom, Diego
Montoya, sits alongside Osama bin Laden on the FBI's top-10 wanted list.
According to police, the war began when each capo began worrying that the
others might be planning to negotiate with the Colombian and U.S. authorities
at the expense of their associates.
The war has followed the cartel's trail across Colombia,
with a series of grisly killings in the country's principal cities: Bogota,
Cali, and Medellin. The war's cruelty has shocked a country that thought it was
desensitized to violence. Victims have been asphyxiated with plastic bags,
killed by nails hammered into their heads, and in some cases dismembered while
still alive.
The authorities are struggling to cope with the underage
assassins carrying out many of these killings. Since the most popular form of
assassination involves a shooter sitting on the back of a high-powered
motorbike, some Colombian cities made it illegal for two men to travel on the
same motorbike. The assassins responded by putting wigs on the shooters to make
them look like women.
"This drug war has moved beyond a question of crime," says
Apolinar Salcedo, the mayor of Cali, Colombia's second largest city and the
scene of much of the killing. "This is now a question of national security."
This hurricane of violence has led a growing number of
Colombians, including leading members of the venerable Conservative Party, to
question the drug policies that have helped make their country one of the
world's most dangerous. "We Colombians have had enough," says Ferney Lozano,
director of the Legalization Now movement, which was founded in 1999 and claims
more than 100 elected officials across the country as members. "We're sick of
paying the consequences of this war against drugs with thousands killed each
year. People are seeing that if anything things are getting worse, with more
people becoming addicts, and they are now questioning whether the costs of this
drug war are worth it."
Legalization Now says the money spent waging the War on
Drugs should instead be spent on rehabilitation for drug addicts and aid to
coca farmers to help them switch crops. The changes advocated by Colombia's
reformers range from decriminalization, which would lift all penalties on drug
possession, to the worldwide repeal of prohibition, which would eliminate the
drug trade's artificially inflated profits and put the traffickers out of
business. By itself Colombia can do only so much, since both the demand for
cocaine and the demand to eliminate its production come from abroad. But
criticism of the War on Drugs from members of the country's political
establishment shows that President Alvaro Uribe's gung-ho support for U.S.
anti-drug efforts is not the only respectable position. "To be honest," says
Lozano, "I think before 10 years it's highly unlikely that we'll see a change
in the drugs policy, but we've made huge advances in the five years we've been
working."
Drug Warriors
Cocaine violence, combined with endemic poverty, has given
Colombia one of the world's highest murder rates. The violence does not stop
with the cartels: The illicit drug trade is the main source of funding for the
country's four-decade civil war, which pits Marxist guerrillas against extreme
right-wing paramilitaries and the state.
The right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known
by their Spanish acronym AUC, have grown to become the most important illegal
armed group in the country, eclipsing even the guerrillas as they've
consolidated power in different regions, taking over local governments and
reaching as high as the Colombian Congress. The rapid growth was funded both by
contributions from legal businesses and by drug profits; according to a former
head of the AUC, 70 percent of the group's income comes from drugs.
In 2003 a rogue AUC commander known as Double Zero attempted
to lead a rebellion within the paramilitaries against the drug traffickers.
"The paramilitaries lost their way," he told me in early 2004. "Instead of
concentrating on defeating the guerrillas, they've become dedicated to nothing
more than drug trafficking." In a match between ideals and drug money, ideals
were crushed. Double Zero's bloc was annihilated and he himself assassinated.
The drug trafficking wing of the paramilitaries was supreme. In a reflection of
how high the traffickers reach in the movement, six of the 14 commanders in
peace talks with the government have extradition warrants out for them,
including the current leader, Salvatore Mancuso. They all deny dealing drugs.
Cocaine also funds their enemies, the Marxist guerrillas.
The U.S. and Colombian governments claim the 20,000-strong Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (known by its Spanish acronym, FARC) earns hundreds of
millions of dollars a year from the drug trade. A number of FARC guerrillas
face extradition warrants, and the highest-ranking leader ever captured was
sent to the U.S. over Christmas
to stand trial on drug trafficking charges.
FARC denies any participation in the drug trade, insisting
it only taxes coca farmers. FARC's other main source of income is kidnapping,
helping propel Colombia to the top spot on the world's kidnapping index.
FARC's actions suggest a growing interest in drug
trafficking to finance the revolution. FARC has targeted paramilitary coca
fields, killing peasants working there. It's no coincidence that the civil war
is most heavily contested where coca is grown and along the borders, where
control of territory allows the export of drugs and import of arms.
Who Profits?
While bearing the brunt of prohibition-related violence,
most Colombians have not benefited much from black market profits. The U.N.
estimates that the drug trade may account for as little as 1 percent of the
country's GDP, placing it below oil. The product itself is cheap until it
arrives in the U.S.; most of the profits are made outside of Colombia.
Francisco Thoumi, an economics professor at Bogota's Rosario
University who has published a number of books on the cocaine industry, says
Colombia's economy has suffered as a result of the drug trade. "In the 1980s,"
he says, "the rate of homicides skyrocketed, and that made investments too
risky for many companies." The attitudes encouraged by the drug trade also have
hurt the economy. "It becomes impossible to do business because everyone
distrusts everyone else," says Thoumi, "so everyone is playing defensive and
not willing to take any sort of risk."
Colombians have an ambivalent attitude toward the drug
industry. In the old cocaine centers of Cali and Medellin, billions of inflowing
dollars funded a boom that lined everyone's pockets during the 1980s and '90s.
Tellingly, when the Cali drug lords were arrested the city's construction
industry virtually ground to a halt. In Medellin during the '80s, a popular way
for otherwise law-abiding people to make almost guaranteed profits was to buy a
stake in a shipment of cocaine from drug lords seeking to spread the risk of
seizure.
Even today, drug money and drug traffickers hang at the
edges of legitimate society. Although members of the upper classes are not
above profiting from the cocaine trade, they look down on the narcos in the
same way that wealthy people the world over disdain the nouveau riche. The
narcos' propensity for gold-plated toilets, bejeweled prostitutes, and loud
parties has not endeared them to their neighbors in the fashionable districts.
Among many of Colombia's poor, by contrast, drugs are seen
as a way to earn money in an economy where more than 60 percent of the
population lives on or below the poverty line. The Medellin cartel's Pablo
Escobar, after all, started out stealing gravestones before entering the
cocaine trade and becoming one of the world's richest men. Admiration for the
industry is reflected in a genre of music popular in Colombia's poorer
neighborhoods that features songs with titles like "I Prefer a Tomb in Colombia
(to a Jail in the U.S.)" and "The Cartels Are Still Alive."
Surveys indicate that public support for legalization has
grown since Legalization Now was founded five years ago, when it hovered around
7 percent. A poll taken in July 2003 by Invamer-Gallup showed 22 percent
national support for "the legalization of production and consumption of drugs."
What was more interesting was how the figures broke down. In the capital, 27
percent of people were in favor, while in the historic centers of the cocaine
cartels, Medellin and Cali, the numbers were 16 percent and 13 percent,
respectively. Responses also varied by class, with nearly 40 percent of
Colombia's upper classes supporting legalization, compared to 16 percent of
Colombia's lowest social strata.
"We have found that it's an educational difference," says
Legalization Now's Lozano. "Poorer neighborhoods often are more against this
because they believe that as soon as we legalize everyone will immediately
become addicts. We've got to educate these people that the current approach is
not working and if you really want to protect your children, you must help
legalize drugs."
Colombia has changed from a producing country where drug use
was frowned upon and drugs were a gringo problem, to a producing and
consuming country. Authorities say that in recent years the cartels noticed the
virgin market at home and started a drive for greater sales in Colombia.
Studies show that Colombian children are starting drugs younger, and a trip to
any of the country's city centers finds homeless children passed out midday
with a bag of bazuco, a cheap drug made from the remnants of cocaine
production. Legalization Now estimates that of Colombia's 45 million inhabitants,
some 5 million are regular drug users.
Unexpected Reformers
Proponents of drug legalization are often accused of being
in the pay of the drug lords, a testament to the power the narcos wielded in
the past, especially in Colombia's Congress. (One former president became
synonymous with corruption after it was found that the Cali cartel helped
bankroll his campaign.) President Uribe recently ripped open the debate again,
accusing M-19, a now defunct guerrilla group, of working with the drug traffickers.
In the scandal that erupted, prominent congressmen who had belonged to M-19 and
had in the past spoken favorably of legalization said they would no longer talk
about the issue for fear of further being associated with the drug traffickers.
†"I've been calling
for legalization for 20 years, and I can't remember the [number] of times I've
been called in the pockets of the drug lords," says Antonio Caballero, one of
Colombia's most famous columnists, who writes for the country's largest news
magazine, Semana. "Of course, it doesn't make any sense, because it's
the drug lords who will be out of business if there is legalization, but it
does help shut down the discussion."
When Gustavo de Grieff, then Colombia's prosecutor general,
started criticizing the War on Drugs in the 1990s, he likewise was tarred as a
tool of the traffickers, even though he had led the successful effort to shut
down Escobar's murderous Medellin cartel. In 1994 Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)
wrote a Washington Post op-ed piece in which he said De Grieff's
"positions are nearly identical with those of the [Cali] cartel itself. As
such, they demonstrate the degree to which the Cali cartel has already gained
influence in the very offices of Colombian law enforcement that are supposed to
protect society against the cartel."
But as the suffering of Colombia continues in this brutal
War on Drugs, an irreproachable group is stepping forward to call for a review
of the country's drug policies. Colombia's Conservative Party is very
conservative indeed. Founded in 1849, it earned a reputation for ferocious
religious violence during Colombia's various civil wars between the
conservatives and liberals. A poster in party headquarters listing its goals
and policies ends with the highlighted words "a party that believes in God and
seeks to insert him into life." More than half of Colombia's presidents have
come from the Conservative Party, which in many eyes is associated with
landowners, the church, and the oligarchy. Yet this bastion of conservatism is
now mulling the decriminalization of drugs.
Enrique Gomez Hurtado comes from an illustrious political
dynasty. His brother was assassinated while running for president on a
right-wing ticket. In his congres-sional office sits a bust of his father, a president
in the middle of the last century. Gomez Hurtado belongs to a class of
Colombians who resemble English gentlemen of the Victorian era. On the wall of
his office hangs a copy of the Ten Commandments. He is proposing the
decriminalization of drugs as a way of dealing with Colombia's problems as both
a drug-producing and a drug-consuming nation.
"We know that the industry is profitable only because it is
illegal, and the day that tobacco becomes outlawed, that will take cocaine's
place as the largest mafia business," Gomez Hurtado says, sitting at a desk on
which a stack of pamphlets outlining his case for decriminalization is neatly
piled. "To produce a gram of salt or sugar is more expensive than [producing] a
gram of cocaine. The difference in final price only comes because cocaine is
illegal."
Gomez Hurtado is asking his party to agree on a platform
that includes decriminalization of drugs in Colombia, rather than outright
legalization, and a shift of government resources from aggressive anti-drug
policies to rehabilitation. "Legalization would show indifference in front of
this illness of drug addiction," he says. "It would be like legalizing
tuberculosis or AIDS. You can't legalize a disease." He recognizes that
Colombia alone cannot eliminate the black market in cocaine. "We need greater
help in reviewing international policies towards drugs," he says, "because this
is economics; the supply comes from the demand."
Legalizing Alone?
Conservative support for the decriminalization or
legalization of drugs is based largely on the belief that Colombia fights alone
on the front line of the War on Drugs and that as a result the entire country
has become a battlefield. All this for a war demanded by other countries, most
conspicuously the United States. Drugs are so profitable because they are
illegal and in great demand among those who can afford them. Nearly 75 percent
of the world's cocaine is consumed in North America and Western Europe.
"I share Colombians' frustration," says Sandro Calvani,
director of the United Nations International Drug Control Program in Bogota.
"They pay with all the violence of the war, yet the consuming countries don't
share the burden. Some European countries don't even help Colombia with one
peso."
But Calvani is hesitant about extrapolating from the
experience of other countries that have experimented with more tolerant drug
policies. "Where they've done this, such as Holland and Switzerland, there has
been a history of liberal thinking and high levels of education among the
population," he says. About one in 10 Colombians is illiterate, and that rate
rises sharply in the countryside, where children are often taken out of school
to work.
Colombian supporters of drug policy reform are concerned
about the international reaction to their proposals. "We cannot become a pariah
state, and that is what would happen if we legalized alone," says Sen. Carlos
Holguin, leader of the Conservative Party, who is spoken of as a possible
presidential candidate. "It would make no sense, because it's not so much the
problem here, but the problem is that they're illegal outside. It should be a
policy of the Colombian government to pressure the international community to
force them to review their drug policies. We must look at this as a health
issue."
Many opponents of the drug war think its environmental cost
is reason enough to abandon it. The cornerstone of Colombia's U.S.-funded
anti-drug effort is aerial fumigation. The U.S. and Colombian governments have
been celebrating the success of the fumigation program. The U.N. reported that
in 2003 the number of hectares devoted to coca cultivation fell 16 percent, to
86,000, the lowest level since 1997. President Uribe recently estimated that
the country would have less than 65,000 hectares of coca by the end of this
year. "Sixty-five thousand hectares is immense, and the political aim has to be
zero land devoted to drug crops in Colombia," he said.
Fumigation missions will cost some $100 million this year.
As coca production has spread to encompass much of Colombian
territory—satellites even pick up images of coca fields near the capital—so
have fumigations. Residents and environmentalists protested the fumigation of
Colombia's national parks, including the Sierra Nevada, the world's highest coastal
range. Indigenous tribes who live there complain that the fumigations are
polluting the rivers and killing legal crops. The U.S. and Colombian
governments insist the fumigations, which use the herbicide glyphosate, are
safe. Farmers living in fumigated areas complain of myriad sicknesses,
including skin problems and birth defects.
Pedro Arenas is head of the leftist Communal and
Communitarian Movement and congressman for the Department of Guaviare, one of
the biggest coca-producing regions. Not coincidentally, it is also the site of
the government's largest-ever offensive against the FARC rebels. "We're seeing
in this drug war the militarization of our communities, and peasants becoming
enemies of the state," Arenas says. Although the official numbers show a
decline in coca production, he says, the coca farmers in his department have
told him they think it is rising. Farmers are shielding coca from satellites by
planting more trees. Any potential decline in land given over to coca
production is offset by the increasing use of a coca strain that can be
harvested more often and produces more cocaine per plant. Critics of the
eradication program also point to a "balloon effect": As production is pushed
down in one area, it pops up elsewhere. Peru's anti-drug agency estimated that
the country produced 160 tons of cocaine in 2004, one-fifth more than in 2003,
and another increase is expected this year.
Drug traffickers normally outsource the production of coca
to the farmers, who grow the coca and take the initial steps in processing it
into blocks of coca paste, which are then purchased by the traffickers and
turned into cocaine. "These fumigations are going after the lowest people on
the chain," says Arenas. "These farmers need to live, and they see no alternative
but coca." He estimates the coca farmers, known as cocaleros, have a monthly
profit of 400,000 pesos, just over $150. "These fumigations are destroying our
environment," he says, "because every time they fumigate fields, the peasants
plant again on new land, and they're moving deeper into the jungles."
Many Colombians and foreign observers feel fumigations treat
the symptom rather than the underlying illness. While the poverty that propels
farmers to plant coca remains, any attempt to stop them from doing so will in
all likelihood be futile. "At the moment, we're spending around $5,000 per
hectare fumigated," says the U.N.'s Sergio Calvani. "If that money could be
distributed among the peasants, then Colombia would be like Switzerland."
It's All Uphill From Here
The government of Alvaro Uribe, a member of the Liberal Party
and Washington's closest ally in South America, has avoided any discussion of
decriminalizing drugs. In fact, the president backed an unsuccessful referendum
that would have overturned the current laws that allow possession of drugs for
personal use. His supporters in Washington say Uribe is the president Colombia
has long needed, praising his offensive against the Marxist rebels and the drug
industry. Uribe has boosted the army and the police and struck at the FARC's
traditional stronghold in the south.
The relationship between Uribe and President Bush "could not
be closer," says Kimberly Stanton, deputy director of the Washington Office on
Latin America, an organization that opposes fumigation and argues that the war
on drugs is counterproductive. Bush paid Uribe a compliment by visiting
Colombia on his first trip abroad following his re-election.
In any case, says Stanton, "There is no way the U.S. will
allow the Colombian Congress to adopt legalization. It will do everything in
its power to stop this, I assure you." The U.S. is the largest donor of aid to
Colombia, takes about half of Colombia's exports, and has tremendous influence
on multilateral institutions that lend vital money to the cash-strapped central
government. Colombia has become increasingly dependent on U.S. aid for its war
against the Marxist guerrillas, the right-wing paramilitaries, and of course
the drug industry. The country has received nearly $4 billion from the U.S.
since the launch of the huge anti-drug initiative Plan Colombia in 2000.
"Way too many Colombian leaders think that unless they do
everything the U.S. wants they'll lose everything," says Stanton, adding that
Colombia should propose a review of global anti-drug policies. As the drug
violence continues and the deaths mount, Colombia's population may just force
their leaders to stand up and demand from the world a change in global drug
policies.
Toby Muse is a freelance journalist
based in Bogota, Colombia.
