TobyMuse.com

Bogota's Facelift

Toby — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 17:39:00 +0000

Jorge Alvarez says he spent six years in hell and it was only with the help of Jesus did he escape. And the police who evicted him.

This 33-year drug-addict and mugger lived in Bogota’s Cartucho, a war zone-like ghetto in the centre of the city. As part of a program to improve Colombia’s capital the local government tore down this slum so horrific it spread fear amongst all residents of the city.

A decade ago, Colombia’s capital was a pit; a grimy example of urban ugliness, chaotic crime and downtown dirt.

Two mayors transformed the city in to one of Latin America’s more amenable capitals; a greener, cleaner, safer Bogota. A tumbling murder rate allowed the city to take on the mantle of the country’s capital, re-emerging as the centre of finance and culture. Once called the “Athens of South America”, Bogota rediscovered its arts, with cinema festivals, opera seasons and international book fairs.

While the rest of the city received a facelift, the sore of Cartucho continued to fester.

If hell is urban, it may look a little like Cartucho. The slum, comprised of not even ten blocks, resembled the aftermath of the battle for Stalingrad with many of the buildings burnt out and half-collapsed. The residents – a mix of thieves, prostitutes, drug-addicts, beggars and rubbish recyclers - wandered the detritus often looking like zombies, the years of cheap noxious drugs taking their irreversible toll.

In the spiral of destitution, Cartucho was the last stop – here lived Bogota’s lowest of the low, the city’s untouchables, whose next move was usually to a pauper’s grave in the city cemetery.

The thieves spread out from Cartucho to rob and attack making much of the city centre dangerous night and day.

The zone was so lawless and the residents so violent, the rare police incursions were organized as military operations with dozens of officers and armoured vehicles.

That this slum was located just blocks from the Presidential palace reminded the observer of a common third world sight: unspendable wealth and power set next to bottomless misery.

Jorge got in to drugs after spending 8 months kidnapped by the country’s Marxist guerrillas and the deaths of both of his parents. To fund his addiction to Colombia’s cheaper more destructive version of crack, known as Bazuco, he started off as a male prostitute.

“Sometimes I just had sex with these fags, but if I thought they had money I would go back to their apartments and when they least expected it – BAMM!! “Shhhhh daddy – where’s the money?” jumping up to show the stranglehold he would perform on the victim.

Tiring of prostitution he turned to robbery. On busy days, he could make as much as 40 pounds a day mugging those unfortunate enough to pass by Cartucho.

And like a whirlpool, Cartucho dragged him closer.

“I used to sleep outside Cartucho because that place is rough on those just arriving,” he says, every drag on his cigarette hollowing his gaunt face further. “After a while, I started spending more and more time there just to be close to the cheap drugs.”

Cartucho to Jorge was like a dream and a waking nightmare. His eyes gleam remembering it, but he also confesses that he can’t sleep because in dreams he’s back in Cartucho terrified.

“It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen, it wasn’t just there was no law, but everyone acted like there was no law,’’ he says, legs trembling in excitement. “Everything was available. Guns, drugs, clothes, hookers, child prostitutes; it was all there.’’

A recurring nightmare has him back in Cartucho’s central street watching his friend’s young girlfriend being dragged away screaming by a man waving a gun.

“He took her in to a house. She never came out alive. I went to look for her the next day, and there she was in the backroom of this house. She had been raped to death. Someone in the house laughingly said that the man had sold her one time to the house for ten thousands pesos (equivalent of two pounds). She had been raped by 30 or 40 men who lived there,’’ he says imitating the position he found her in: legs splayed open, face contorted in pain, tongue hanging limply from the corner of the mouth. His friends nod as if to say that’s the Cartucho they remember.

Even in hell death was commonplace. In line with estimates of council workers, Jorge guesses that there was a killing each day. And this of a population of under 2,000.

“People were killed all the time, they killed you for a match there, for a single toke of marijuana,’’ he said. “But there were always new junkies arriving.”

With no hesitation, he admits to killing three people while living there. “They all tried to screw me over or owed me and wouldn’t pay.” Not a flicker of surprise passes over the faces of those listening to him.

According to Jorge, a popular pastime amongst the drug dealers was to let the homeless addict consume as much drugs as they liked and then demand the bill. When they begged that they couldn’t pay – the dealer would pull out a gun and demand that the addict play Russian roulette – if lucky the bill was forgotten. “I remember one dealer saying: “if you’re not lucky, well I’ll collect in the next life.”

But while the robberies caused Bogota’s decent folk to walk carefully passing the slum, as long as the killings remained inside the slum the city could look the other way.

“The city’s residents thought that because they didn’t have to see these people every day the problem had disappeared – when we had to move them out people realized that they hadn’t gone away and that we as a city had to do something about it,’’ said Consuelo Corredor, administrative director of Bogota’s welfare department.

The city began the process of destroying the slum in 1998, block by block. But it was only this year the city evicted all the residents from the zone. The people were moved on to another neighbourhood called the “slaughter house”. The residents of the slaughter house, appalled by the new arrivals, staged marches to protest their new neighbours.

Responding to the protests, last Saturday the local government rounded up all the residents they could and deposited them in to homeless shelters.

Double-digit unemployment, prevalent drugs and a civil war that forcibly displaces hundreds of thousands each year all make the homeless a common sight in Colombian cities. The local government says that there are 15,000 homeless in Bogota, but it certainly feels like more (beggars and street vendors are such a common sight at traffic lights, a joke doing the rounds asks “What’s the mayor’s new plan to cut unemployment? Build more traffic lights”).

As in other countries, there’s a debate on how to resolve the problem of the homeless. Some advocate the homeless should be given more aid, while others insist less help will force the homeless to find jobs.

Of course there is a third option – exterminate them.

In line with many across this country, shop-owners and residents feeling that the police cannot protect them from these violent homeless contract guns for hire to “socially cleanse” their neighbourhoods killing the thieves, prostitutes and drug-addicts.

“Just a couple of years ago we were down to almost no “social cleansing” but it seems to be coming back in force,’’ said Corredor.

Given the violent world these homeless live in it’s often difficult for authorities to determine which is a simple homicide and which is a social cleansing.

But the homeless know.

“Many people I knew were disappeared, we knew that if we didn’t see that person for a couple of days, they had been killed and dumped somewhere else,’’ says Jorge, who now lives in one of the shelters but plans on entering a public rehabilitation clinic. “You learnt which neighbourhoods you could go to and which would kill you.”

Less than five minutes walk from the shelter is one of the zones the homeless know they’ll be killed if they’re caught there. This is one of Bogota’s cheap shopping centres, mainly dealing in contraband and pirated material. Receipts are worth exactly the paper they’re written on and the consumer has at least an 80% chance that the goods they buy will work.

This shopping centre is also known to be controlled by the extreme right-wing paramilitaries who see such places as rich pickings for protection money.

John Gutierrez sells goods here.

“People hear that these homeless people have been killed and they think “ohhh poor things!,’’ he says mockingly. “That’s not the reality – they come here and rob from our stores, rob from our clients or sell drugs on the street.”

“We call the police but there’s not enough police around here to stop them, so the police arrive late and the muggers have already left – you tell me what we’re supposed to do? I’ve never paid for anyone to be killed, but I understand why some people do.”

As Drug Violence Continues, Colombian Consider Legalization

Toby — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 16:57:00 +0000

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.

Sex, drink, and the coca boomtown blues

Toby — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 21:20:00 +0000

http://www.guardian.co.uk/colombia/story/0,11502,1571461,00.html

Five years ago Llorente was a quiet farming community of fewer than 4,000 people dealing mainly in cattle, African palm and fruits; an impoverished place indistinguishable from hundreds of others scattered across the Andes.

But a surge in the production of coca, the raw material used in the manufacture of cocaine, in the surrounding countryside has turned the town into one of Colombia's most notorious marketplaces for farmers to sell to drug traffickers. Gone is the rural tranquillity. In its place is a loud, violent settlement awash with money where gold chains, cocaine, guns, and alcohol are abundant.

When Llorente became an outlaw town it gave up the protection of the law. In the absence of any authority, it is ruled by drug traffickers and the gun, giving the town a constant feeling of wild west chaos.

Locals whisper of the Marxist guerrilla militia members who keep watch here. Violence is endemic. Shots ring out throughout one Saturday night, and Sunday morning brings two dead bodies left alongside the road. The police mainly stay in their bunker-like station, leaving the job of patrolling to the army, who occasionally pass through in tanks.

But it is the hundreds of prostitutes, some of whom chartered buses to make it down here, who are the most visible sign of the town's new wealth.

Adriana Suarez, an amiable 23-year-old, has, like the rest of this town tucked away in south-western Colombia's flatlands, tied her fortunes to the cocaine industry, the largest in the world. She sits easily at the bar, fanning herself under the spinning, tatty disco ball. Nearby five prostitutes sit chatting, bored in the humid heat.

"I came here a month ago because a friend told me I could make a lot of money here with the coca farmers," says Ms Suarez, who is saving money to support her six-year-old daughter who lives with her parents back home in western Colombia. "It's hard to be away from my daughter, but I was never going to bring her somewhere so violent," she says.

Natives of Llorente are amazed by the town's growth. "This town used to be so quiet, then people starting making money here and soon so many people were turning up," says Lucia in her bakery. She asked that her second name not be used for fear of reprisals. "Of course it's good that there's more money but people don't know how to spend it, it all goes on prostitutes and alcohol."

One result of the farmers switching to coca, she adds, is that prices for food have been driven up. Llorente shows the central role coca plays in Colombia's rural economy but also serves as a warning of the limits of the government's drug eradication programme.

As Plan Colombia, the multibillion-dollar US-Colombian anti-drug plan, has heavily fumigated coca crops in south and central Colombia, coca production has dispersed, in particular to the south-west. In 1999 Colombia's south-west province of Nariño, which contains Llorente, accounted for less than 3% of coca crops. By last year Nariño was the second largest producer, providing nearly 20% of total output.

With its ample crops, hundreds of cocaine laboratories and Pacific Ocean port, the province has become, according to the UN, the "most important illicit drug production centre in Colombia".

While government figures show this shift in production, what has been less documented is the migration of thousands of people leaving zones where coca has been eradicated for the new boomtowns. Llorente locals talk of an influx of agricultural consultants, of the increase in salesmen and doctors.

One such person is Luis Burbano. He moved here to open an electrical goods store. While in other farming communities across Colombia his wares are an expensive rarity, Mr Burbano is selling out of stereos, DVD players and huge television sets. "It's common here for people to live in shacks, but inside you'll find the latest electrical goods," he says.

"This town has been forgotten by the government, it should be helped," Mr Burbano adds. "The government must help these farmers to change to other crops instead of just destroying the coca crops because when the coca goes this town will simply die."

One of Llorente's doctors, Freddy Mejia, has to attend to the town's new problems. "There's a lot of sexually transmitted diseases here which came with the prostitutes, and alcoholism is pretty common," says Dr Mejia, who himself moved from another coca zone to work in Llorente. "Every weekend when everyone gets drunk I have to deal with machete attacks and shootings," he says, but adds. "It's not much better for the rest of the week, now I think of it."

Unfortunately for Ms Suarez, the action tonight is not in the brothel but at the cockfight. In a wooden barn, cages hold the chickens waiting to fight. Men in baseball caps and gold jewellery casually bet £500 a fight. During the evening one man will laughingly pull up his T-shirt to show a 9mm pistol tucked into his belt. Another enters with a girlfriend and is greeted by all with handshakes and hugs as "little godfather".

Even as the money continues to swirl around, Llorente's future is already set. Colombia is littered with virtual ghost towns that once were boomtowns but withered away when the government began eradicating their coca.

The government has noticed the shift in coca production to this province and has fumigated more coca here than anywhere else. Locals in Llorente say that since coca became its number one industry there have always been ups and downs. But now the slow patches are longer and more frequent.

Ms Suarez is getting out. "People get killed here all the time, and you just have to learn to not ask why they were killed because they'll kill you too," she says. "I don't want to live in a place where I can get killed for nothing."

She's leaving for the capital. As she walks off down the street the drinking continues and farmers stagger back and forth, grasping their bottles of rum.