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The Cocaine Connection
Can Colombia finally win the war on drugs? Better to
ask, can it survive, if it does win?
The Los Angeles Times Magazine
September 24, 1995
Two degrees above the equator in a sultry, low
land province of eastern Colombia, runoff from
the Andes begins to drain away from the Caribbean
and flow south toward Brazil. This place, called
the Guaviare, is the upper reach of Amazonia,
where coastal savannas disappear beneath unbroken
forest, rain falls for 10 straight months and
biological fervor builds to near-delirium. About
the size of Belgium, the Guaviare has no paved
roads, or barely any roads at all. The main exception
is a 40 mile mud trench that, in dry weather,
connects the provincial capital of San José
(virtually inaccessible except by air or river)
to the jungle outpost of Calamar.
On the Friday evening of June 9, 1995, nothing
special was happening in Calamar. The afternoon
cloudburst had been torrential but brief. By sunset,
men and women in clean cotton shirts and dresses
were picking their way through slick, brown much
along the nameless main street that parallels
the Río Unilla, the northernmost tendril
of the Amazon, heading to public radiotelephone
stalls to make weekend calls back to civilization,
and then on for a chilled beer, a game of chess
or dominoes and some news and entertainment on
the big screen.
In the wooded storefront cafe belonging to Ernesto
Romero, a stubby, cheerful barkeep in blue shorts
and sandals, families sat at white plastic tables,
engrossed in bullfights transmitted live over
Madrid network. (Rising above the forest canopy
at the edge of the town clearing, three imposing
parabolic dishes, each scanning 120 degrees of
the heavens, keep Calamar's settlers better linked
to the world than most relatives back in Bogota
or Cali.) Yet just as the action heightened -
a flashy young Basque matador had managed to get
himself gored - Cali itself intervened. The alert
came from the excited shouts of radiotelephone
operators outside. The biggest news to hit Colombia
in two years was soon roaring over every TV in
town, overwhelming scores of throbbing portable
diesel generators and the squawking green parrots
overhead.
On the screen, General Rosso José Serrano,
director of the National Police, his steel-gray
hair flecked with confetti, proclaimed this a
moment for all Colombians to be proud. Colombian
President Ernesto Samper mopped his forehead with
undisguised relief and announced his intention
to sleep for 12 straight hours. Even the nation's
current resident scourge, U.S. Ambassador Myles
Frechette, pronounced it a "great triumph"
and hugged the startled Colombian official standing
next to him.
It referred to a videotaped sequence being replayed
almost continuously, showing a pudgy, middle-aged
man in a goatee and tan khaki jacket seated glumly
in an overstuffed chair, his hands shackled. Three
hours earlier, Colombian police had pushed aside
a bookcase and revealed Gilberto Rodríguez
Orejuela cowering in a hidden crawl space. For
weeks, they had been storming health clubs with
Range Rover-filled parking lots, gleaming corporate
headquarters of money-laundering fronts, five-star
restaurants and, repeatedly, Cali's Intercontinental
Hotel, where Rodríguez Orejuela and his
brother Miguel frequently commandeered four floors
at a time to conduct family business. Finally,
they'd pinpointed his refuge, a plain suburban
stucco house, and surrounded it with 3,000 men.
"This," declared Presidente Samper as
the camera cut back to him, one arm around his
wife, the other lifting a glass of champagne,
"marks the beginning of the end of the Cali
cartel."
Hundreds of roadless miles away in Calamar, dozens
of beers joined his toast. "Thank the blessed
Virgin," exhaled one grandmother. "Finally,
something to pop the lid off prices!"
"Amen!" concurred Ernesto Romero, who
was pouring shots of Chivas Regal on the house.
He then placed the bottle in front of a wiry man
with a chin mustache who was smirking at a TV
anchor's reference to "this long-awaited
victory for Colombian international relations,
especially with the United States."
Back to Top "Idiota. Wait'll the United States figures
out what it really means." Luis Eduardo Betancur,
president of the Guaviare provincial assembly
and Calamar's representative, took a slug of imported
Scotch. "Hell, maybe they'll approve, since
it's really a victory for free enterprise. No
more monopoly controlling the market and dictating
what growers get paid. It's just like when they
shot Pablo Escobar: Now money'll flow to everybody."
By "everybody," he meant his constituents.
The Guaviare's economy openly, and nearly totally,
consisted of the monoculture of a tall, pale-green
shrub known as erythroxylum coca. To these people,
the fortunes of celebrity cocaine capos like Rodríguez
Orejuela had little bearing on what actually happened
in the drug trade; hundreds of ambitious young
entrepreneurs would promptly step in to fill the
breach. But this time, the pursuit of the Cali
cartel was related to something else, which they
also believed wouldn't have much effect in the
long run unless, by some miracle, consumers in
the United States and Europe actually stopped
buying drugs. Still, it had become an irritant.
During the previous four months, under growing
duress emanating from the Clinton Administration
-- which was pressured in turn by Senate Foreign
Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms -- Colombia
had embarked on what President Samper and the
U.S. Embassy were touting as the biggest drug-eradication
program in history. Specifically, under Operation
Radiance, Colombia would eliminate nearly all
cultivation of coca, heroin poppies and marijuana
within two years.
Samper's surprise February announcement of this
ambitious undertaking variously incurred the disbelief
or derision of nearly everyone affected. Within
his government, aides complained that they'd been
blindsided, that such a thing simply couldn't
be done. (With estimates of up to 200,000 acres
planted in illicit crops here, this plan could
require the destruction of 500 acres per day).
They worried that, in response to assertions widely
repeated in the U.S. press that his presidential
campaign had accepted a hefty contribution from
the Cali cocaine cartel, their boss was risking
his credibility to defend his honor.
Over the following months, Operation Radiance
would become the least of their troubles. Even
as the manhunt continued to snare the remaining
Cali cartel leaders, a dark tide of evidence gathered
by Colombia's prosecutor general began to lap
at the president's heels. By August, with the
arrest of both his defense minister and former
campaign treasurer, Samper had ordered a congressional
committee to investigate him as well, vowing that
he'd be exonerated of any knowledge of misconduct
by his subordinates. Amid what has become one
of Colombia's gravest political crises, with the
president's public opinion ratings plunging and
demands for his resignation increasing, his commitment
to drug eradication now seemed crucial to his
survival.
For its part, the United States had immediately
promised $15 million to bankroll the aerial spraying
on which the program depended, as well as to train
pilots and provide aircraft. Still, State Department
officials privately suggested that, although encouraging,
the plan was more symbolism than substance since
Colombia, compared to traditional growers like
Peru and Bolivia, was far more involved in processing
and shipping cocaine than cultivating it.
In fact, while chances for success were arguably
improbable, Operation Radiance wasn't merely symbolic
at all. The misconception that Colombia doesn't
actually grow coca had been belied by cartel accountants
who'd lately concluded that planting at home made
sense. Ferrying the leaves from neighboring Andean
countries to Colombian laboratories is costly
and vulnerable; if the alkaloid content of the
local variant isn't as high, you simply grow more
of it -- so much more, in fact, that Colombia's
coca harvest recently surpassed Bolivia's. And
although Colombian marijuana farming had dwindled
to insignificance, as imaginative indoor agro-technology
helped make pot the most lucrative crop in the
United States, mounting demand in U.S. suburbs
and universities for the fashion fatale of the
'90s -- heroin -- had easily compensated for the
loss. (Unlike marijuana, opium poppies don't readily
submit to attic hydroponics, preferring volcanic
soils exactly like Colombia's Andean slopes. Their
cultivation -- unheard of here five years ago
-- was now escalating 13% annually, according
to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration warnings
that no one disputed.)
In addition, President Samper and his country
were already pinned in the cross fire of the 1996
U.S. election. Republicans led by Sen. Helms had
branded Clinton a wimp on drugs for failing to
decertify Colombia -- certification being a process
by which the United States annually judges the
sincerity of producing and transit countries in
the war on narcotics. Failure to pass muster would
effectively make Colombia a pariah nation, unfit
for loans from the World Bank or other such institutions,
and severely restrict sales of its oil, bananas,
coffee and flowers to its biggest international
customer: us. In the Senate, Helms had alluded
frequently to cassette tapes, rather spitefully
divulged by Samper's opponent upon losing the
election, that apparently recorded the president's
men receiving narco-tainted campaign funds. Although
falling short of directly implicating Samper himself,
the charges were not playing well in Washington.
So between Helms' threats to sever diplomatic
relations and Clinton's response -- to give Colombia
a year's probation to clean up its act -- Samper
had known he had to do something. But could Operation
Radiance actually work? Or had drugs become so
entwined with the internal organs of Colombian
economy -- traditionally among Latin America's
most robust -- that surgically removing them would
kill the patient?
With oil, coal, dozens of potential agricultural
exports and diversified industries such as textiles,
leather, and publishing, Colombia had seemed poised
back in the '60s to be Latin America's entry in
the nascent Pacific Rim community. Unfortunately,
the growing taste in the United States during
that decade for potent marijuana (and, gradually,
for harder stuff) also stirred another old Colombian
tradition: smuggling. During colonial times, dealing
in contraband here was practically considered
an honorable act of defiance against a Spanish
crown that only permitted trade with Spain itself,
and many elite families originally grew to prominence
by doing it. In the 20th century this legacy inspired
lower-class entrepreneurs to traffic first in
black market Colombian emeralds, then in hallucinogens
and stimulants.
As the hapless international war on drugs has
served mainly to encourage the narcotics trade
the narcotics trade by keeping prices high, today
more than 300,000 families grow coca or poppies
in the Guaviare and neighboring provinces -- a
figure equal to the number of Colombians propagating
coffee. "What else could pay us enough to
put up with typhoid and malaria?" demanded
Emesto Romero on the night the Cali cartel began
to tumble, brandishing the nearly empty bottle
of Chivas Regal at President Samper's beaming,
televised image.
Already the drone of spray planes had invaded
the tranquility of their forest, inevitably drawing
the retort of automatic weapons fire. The government
was promising a costly, radical crop substitution
program, but a relic of when that was last tried
-- a fading, defaced color poster of a United
Nations project, showing caricatures of campesinos
happily digging fish ponds and reforesting --
hung on his barroom wall for comic relief. "We're
not rich like the capos and the corrupt generals,
but we're the ones who bear the cost. If they
don't come up with something better than soaking
us with herbicides, they'll have a civil war on
their hands."
Back to Top
As pilot César Quijano knows too well,
Colombia already as a civil war on its hands.
Like others in Latin America's battle-weary history,
it was kindled by greed: too few people controlling
too much land. The difference in Colombia is that,
after nearly 40 years, it burns on, pitting the
government against seasoned guerrilla armies operating
in terrain so tangled that El Salvador or Vietnam
seem comparatively featureless. Colombia has not
just one Andean cordillera but three, separated
by valleys that everyone covets or jungles where
anyone can hide. Over the past decade, the guerrillas,
originally inspired by leftist doctrine, have
made some ideological compromises to finance the
war effort. In the case of the largest insurgency,
the 8,000-strong Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias
Colombianas (FARC), this means skimming 10% from
every shipment of coca produced in areas they
control, such as the remote Guaviare.
In exchange, the FARC provides muscle and security,
ostensibly to defend peasant coca growers but
also to guard its cash cow. That's where the mild,
graying Quijano and his colleagues come in, because
their mission is to douse Guaviare coca fields
daily with the herbicide glyphosate. Quijano's
U.S.-provided, single- engine Turbo Thrush --
one of several, each rumored to be worth a $200,000
bounty to traffickers -- has now been hit by gunfire
seven times. Only the pilots' seats have protective
shielding, but that's better than the unarmored,
Vietnam War- surplus helicopters flown by the
police, who accompany them to provide cover. Since
the program began, guerrillas have already shot
down four.
When Colombian officials inquire at the embassy
why, if the United States wants them to do this,
they won't at least provide suitable equipment,
they're told that the same senators who demand
it are also cutting foreign aid. Quijano is used
to such inconsistencies. Once, he and his crew
sprayed benign targets like corn and rice for
a living. Then, around 1990, George Bush's Enterprise
for the Americas succeeded in enticing Colombia
and several of its neighbors to open their markets
and not miss out on the New World Order. Bush's
visions of equal trading partners forging Pan-American
prosperity, however, soon proved disastrous for
Colombian agriculture, which couldn't compete
with the deluge of cheap grains and other foodstuffs
that poured in from giant U.S. corporate producers.
Not only did crop- dusting jobs vanish, but many
of the now-bankrupt farmers whose crops they formerly
dusted ended up either in the Andes tending poppies
or right here in the Guaviare planting coca.
"Let's go get 'em," Quijano says to
his men, zipping his flight suit. "Anybody
scared?" "We're all scared."
Moments later, two fixed-wing spray planes, four
support choppers with dual mounted M-60 machine
guns, and an ambulance helicopter are air-borne,
heading south from San José. Instantly,
the truth of what is happening in the Guaviare
becomes apparent: Huge hunks of the jungle's skin
have been ripped away -- nearly a third of it
seems to be missing. From above, a healthy rain
forest is as dense as a living coral reef, so
impenetrable that no ground can be glimpsed through
the green. Here, the Colombian Amazon is pocked
with dead scabs: olive-gray patches sown in wispy
coca shrubs, brown cars where the planes have
fumigated with glyphosate, and charred black holes
where campesinos continue to advance into the
forest.
Sensitive to concerns that Operation Radiance
is defoliating the rain forest, Colombia's Environmental
Ministry sometimes sends monitors on these flights.
So does the attorney general's office, responding
to farmers' gripes that food crops such as corn
and cassava are being eradicated as well. Glyphosate,
a common weed killer sold in the United States
under the trade name Roundup, blocks photosynthesis,
effectively suffocating a plant, but it supposedly
biodegrades within a few weeks. The controversy
over its use presents a conundrum for Colombian
ecologists: Which is worse for the forest, herbicide
or the slash-and-scorch assault of dope cultivation?
A recent "humanitarian" decision by
the government to spray only areas larger than
three hectares (about 7.5 acres) -- reached after
thousands of irate, small-plot coca farmers marched
on San José to protest that they were being
fumigated disproportionately -- has visibly backfired.
Every week, new three-hectare coca clearings are
making the jungle resemble a vast field of craters.
But today's target is well over the legal limit.
Forty minutes out of San José, the pilots
veer toward a thick, black column of smoke on
the horizon. There, a police commando scouting
unit has already swooped into a 90-hectare coca
plantation along the shores of a swollen river.
Under covering fire from the circling helicopters,
the commandos had descended by rope from the troop
transport. After discharging several hundred rounds
into the surrounding forest, flushing dozens of
terrified toucans and macaws but drawing no answering
fire from guerrillas, they radioed for the spray
planes to come in. While waiting, they'd torched
the processing laboratory -- which, since the
agent used to leach the cocaine alkaloid from
the leaf is gasoline, vaporized rather dramatically.
From the barracks where the rasperos -- the harvesters
-- live, Serafin Barét watches the twin
Turbo Thrushes approach, about 100 feet above
the ground. From 64 ducts spaced along the underside
of their wings burst jets of opaque white mist,
dispersing over the coca. Despite U.S. State Department
claims that the nozzles were ingeniously designed
to unload only upon the desired objective, Serafin
takes an acid blast through the open window. Outside
he can see the commandos, coming across an adjacent
soccer field, also wiping glyphosate from their
faces.
Back to Top Six of them enter, carrying M-16s, Galils and
a grenade launcher. Barét, wearing just
green cutoffs and blue socks, waves both hands
to show that he's unarmed. Having served in the
army himself, he's unruffled by their weaponry.
"Where's everyone else?" a corporal
demands, probing a pile of clothing with his bayonet.
"Very deep in the jungle, I suspect."
About 80 men work here, plus a cook and her children.
They were prepared for the possibility of being
fumigated, with vats of molasses water ready to
coat the leaves so the poison won't penetrate,
but nobody had counted on a commando raid, too.
Usually, they can pick up the choppers' radios
on their FM, but their generators conked out.
Fortunately, growing season coincides with the
rainy season: If there's a downpour within a couple
of hours, they won't lose much. The most careful
farmers immediately prune sprayed bushes down
to the stalk, then process the leaves, glyphosate
and all. If done quickly, it saves the plant,
and in three months they're back in business.
"Aren't you about ready to leave?" Barét
inquires.
"Our movements are classified," the
corporal snaps, knowing why he's asking. Barét
shrugs. Already the fumigation planes have gone,
their 500 gallon capacity quickly depleted. Sooner
or later, he figures, they'll get tired of having
to constantly respray, or the gringos will get
tired of paying for it. A former rice farmer,
he works harvests here, bagging coca flour, but
he has a few of his own three hectare plots a
few miles farther into the forest. Days like this
are a pain, but surely not the end of coca in
the Guaviare.
In the morning of May 26, 1995, the FARC missed
a once-in-a-war opportunity. A C-130 transport
that flew from Bogota to San José del Guaviare
carried no less than President Ernesto Samper,
nearly his entire cabinet, the federal prosecutor
general and, among other dignitaries, the ambassadors
of Peru, Spain, France and the United States.
One sharpshooter's bullet might have brought down
the nation.
In fact, the occasion for this auspicious gathering
was meant to resurrect it. The only thing about
drugs that everyone in Colombia agreed upon, from
the government to the growers to the guerrilla,
was that in order to get rid of them, farmers
would need something else to do -- something that
paid. Dressed in shirt-sleeves, his hair sticking
to his brow in the equatorial heat, Samper had
chosen an open-air assembly hall at an agronomy
institute to launch PLANTE: Colombia's National
Plan for Alternative Development. But before he
was able to present it, he was publicly lectured
by the governor of the Guaviare: "You can
give us seeds to sow, but unless there are markets
to sell to and roads to reach them, you might
as well not bother."
A growl of assent elicited from the campesinos
present. How many times had they heard this business
about substitution crops? Everyone here knew the
history of government and U.S. perfidy and these
God-forsaken lowlands. During World War II, Colombia
had allowed the U.S. Rubber Corp. into the Guaviare,
back when practically no one lived here except
for forest-dwelling Indians. They'd dug a road
between San José and Calamar, lured a labor
force here with daily cargo planes laden with
food and supplies from Bogota -- and then pulled
out once the war ended. Abruptly stranded, the
rubber tappers turned to hunting jaguars, tapirs,
river otters and alligators, whose pelts provided
sustenance until the wildlife was virtually exterminated.
By then, the 1950s, a civil war had erupted between
Colombia's two major political parties. Over a
decade, the conflict expanded the property holdings
of both sides' leaders and drove thousands of
small farmers from their land. In desperation,
many fled to wild places like the Guaviare. When
a truce was forged in the '60s, the government,
eager to be rid of potential trouble in its midst,
promoted further colonizations with radio ads
that assured fertile land for the taking and one-way
flights for new settlers, courtesy of the Colombian
air force.
In the former rubber port of San José
del Guaviare, war-sick, dispossessed refugees
were sold machetes and axes and told to walk until
there were no more houses. They did, taking turns
helping each other clear the jungle, turn tree
trunks into boards, trap monkeys when there was
nothing else to eat, and bury the children who
died of malnutrition. Then, in the 1970s, government
agricultural agents appeared with a plan. The
Guaviare, they promised, would become a cornucopia
of rice and corn. They distributed seed, which
everyone planted. The agency's warehouses in San
José filled with grains. When there was
no more room, the people erected tents. Then they
commandeered every available space. Finally, when
even the church was bursting and cereals were
spilling into the streets, they knew that something
had gone wrong.
The problem was simple: hauling commodities over
the Andes to markets in Bogota or beyond cost
many times what they were worth. The agricultural
agents stopped coming, and the mountains of rotting
grain had to be dumped into the river. The colonists
of the Guaviare were again left to survive along
- until 1979 when some now- legendary, husky blond
men appeared, bringing very different seeds. Roads,
they explained, weren't a problem. This time,
buyers would come to them.
Now, 16 years later -- or maybe 16 years too
late -- here was President Samper saying: "We
will never abandon you again. Many doubt that
we can do this. But we must." PLANTE, he
explained, was for small subsistence growers,
who it's estimated cultivate half of all illicit
crops in the country. It would make low interest
credit available for substitutes with good market
potential, like rubber, African oil palm, palm
hearts and tropical fruits. During the four to
10 years it would take for these trees to mature,
the farmers could grow perishables -- grains,
bananas, sesame and cassava -- that the government
guaranteed to buy itself. At the same time, PLANTE
would build roads and establish regional purchasing
hubs. And settlers would receive official permanent
title to their land - "unless, of course,
you return to planting coca."
Polite applause. At least, grunted one young grower,
it wasn't like the United Nations a few years
back, with their caps and T-shirts, their comic
books portraying coca as a seductress who leaves
wretched campesinos exhausted and broke, and their
schemes for pet boa constrictor farms and ornamental
butterfly hatcheries. That substitution program
had actually stimulated coca proliferation: To
qualify for their credits, you had to be growing
ilícitos. "At the time, a lot of us
weren't. So we started."
As everyone here now realized, coca hadn't solved
all their problems and had brought plenty others.
When it all began, buyers had paid top prices
to hook them. Soon, colonos were exchanging their
banana-stained shirts for fine silk and their
plastic jugs of homemade sugar beer for multicolored
bottles that lined the mirrors of new San José
nightclubs. Every week, chartered flights arrived
with prostitutes from Bogota, even in backwaters
like Calamar.
The intoxicating effect of such affluence led
eventually, of course, to overproduction. By 1985,
prices had collapsed and civic order along with
them. Deranged by the sudden loss of their unaccustomed
wealth, neighbors turned on each other. Thieves
ran amok, and every morning bodies lay in the
streets. Fortunately -- thanks to the United States
-- coca prices crept back before everyone either
fled or perished. In the early '90s, when the
Bush Administration tried for a while to clamp
down on growers in Peru and Bolivia, Colombian
production promptly ballooned again to meet the
U.S. demand, which showed no signs of abating.
Today, no one in the Guaviare is as wealthy as
when coca first appeared: In a region where everything
costs double because it must be flown in, three
hectares yield at best the peso equivalent of
$1,200 per month. Right now it's lower, as the
spraying has driven many buyers back to Peru.
Everyone knows they'll return -- from one place
or other, demand must be satisfied. But for many,
a more modest living free of wild price gyrations,
with guaranteed land titles and credit to grow
viable, legal crops and run a few cattle, is increasingly
an attractive option -- if the government could
ever be trusted to keep its word.
"But why," complained Juan Carlos Londoño,
a leader of the coca growers' recent protest march
on San José, "do they think that bombing
our fields will make us want to co-operate? Why
not let people gradually phase out, say, a third
of their coca each year while the government builds
the roads and markets? Don't they realize the
spraying just drives people into the arms of the
guerrillas?"
Back to Top
Hector Moreno, the man in charge of making the
government keep its word, realizes much more than
that. Enhancing the guerrillas' popularity is
just one of many paradoxes he deals with as the
author and director of PLANTE. Another involves
the subsidies they'll have to pay 300,000 small
farmers for crops. It's always possible that the
United States -- a country that dictates drug
policy elsewhere while failing to control its
own consumption -- may object, because subsidies
violate the spirit of free global trade. Not that
Colombia is any less mercurial: Banco de la República,
its federal reserve, identifies halting narcotráfico
and slashing public spending as the nation's two
biggest economic priorities. But how can drugs
be fought without spending money? PLANTE alone
will cost $300 million. Colombia has just half
that budgeted and is counting on the balance coming
from interested foreign countries. Thus far, the
European Union is interested. The United States
is not.
Moreno also ponders the 50% of illicit crops
not grown by campesinos. Over the past five years,
the coca equivalent of 30,000 prospectors have
arrived in Miraflores, an old rubber camp nine
hours down river from Calamar -- not to colonize
but to engage in narco-agribusiness. Months into
Operation Radiance, none of Miraflores' enormous
commercial fields had been sprayed yet. The official
explanation mentions strategic police timetables,
but the truth was that Miraflores is too remote
for planes to safely reach and return. The solution
means finding money to build and fortify another
base. Meanwhile, traffickers ship cocaine northward
in Boeing 727s that they can afford to junk after
a single flight, because a $4 million airplane
is a trifle compared to its $150 million cargo.
Illicit crops aren't worth much more than legal
ones, until smuggling them into the U.S. hikes
their value by a factor of 200. Years before running
for president, Ernesto Samper wrote an article
suggesting that the sole remedy for such distortions,
so costly in dollars, lives and ecosystems, may
be legalization. Given current geopolitical realities,
that option is inconceivable. Unless -- as many
here pray -- the gringos manage to synthesize
the cocaine alkaloid and eliminate the need for
coca leaves altogether, both Samper and Moreno
believe the only hope is for farmers to accept
the carrot of substitute crops. However, since
cassava or palm oil can't compete with the price
of cocaine, that carrot must be pounded down their
throats with the stick of total eradication.
Yet Moreno, who spent years studying rural colonization,
knows that carrots and sticks are behavior modification
tools that avoid confronting root causes. "For
generations, we've postponed agrarian reform in
this country. We're now paying for our greed.
Until we give people land to colonize and the
infrastructure to line in it, drugs will exist
for generations more." The long- term solution
he envisions to his nation's deeper ills will
cost much more than war-surplus helicopters and
herbicide: He has proposed practically building
a new state in Colombia's eastern plains, equipped
with roads, schools and clinics, and relocating
every possible colonist out of the rain forest.
But the issue of land reform here is no longer
just a matter of rich versus poor. What may truly
undermine Colombia's future is not that narcotraficantes
have bought its police and politicians, but that
they're literally buying the country. The pressure
to launder money, combined with macho ranching
fantasies, has translated into a nationwide real
estate nightmare. Fully one- third of Colombia's
fertile land now belongs to drug barons. Their
immense acreage is rarely economically productive:
the narco norm is owning a few show cattle and
having stables filled with expensive paso fino
horses. This rural tragedy has deepened with the
continued onslaught of cheap agricultural imports,
as more Colombian farmers give up and sell. Drug
dealers are even buying up 450 year old coffee
plantations and ripping out the bushes for pasture.
Nor have cities been spared. Property values
in north Bogota now rival Manhattan or Tokyo,
as narcos burdened with excess dollars routinely
purchase entire neighborhoods. When owners of
provincial, tile-roofed family houses insist that
they wouldn't dream of selling, an offer five
times above appraisal -- plus a hint of what might
happen should they refuse -- usually changes their
minds.
Then, because construction is another deft way
to launder cash, the old, dignified brick homes
of Bogota are swept away by monstrous condo towers,
with prices that defy laws of supply and demand
and designs that shatter all standards of architecture
taste. Worst of all are the horrors rising over
the once-graceful city of Cali: multistory spires
and prisms with diagonal yellow sashes and red
racing stripes, Greek-Renaissance miscegenations
topped with pink vaults and the inevitable parabolic
antennae encrusting the skyline like gigantic
steel fungi.
Such unbridled exorbitance has meant that a few
middle-class urban Colombians can afford homes
anymore. The myth that the nation's economy has
benefited lavishly from drugs "is exactly
that: a myth," says Banco de la República
director Salomón Kalmanóvitz. "We
figure $3.5 billion in untaxed, money-laundered
contraband enters every year." Electro-domestics,
computers, clothing, cameras, luxury automobiles
and pharmaceuticals -- all purchased with narco-dollars,
all whisked past suborned customs officials --
sell by the ton in proliferating "free"
zones that undercut lawful businesses and knock
historic Colombian industries like textiles into
bankruptcy. Bogota's streets grow glutted with
inexpensive cars imported with funny money, their
drivers forced to conduct business over cellular
phones while languishing in stupendous traffic
snarls. Sidewalk vendors hawk hot designer fashions
in front of legitimate apparel stores, ambushing
customers before they get through the door. And
nearly everyone fills their prescriptions and
has film developed in cut- rate drugstore and
photo-processing chains that are owned by the
families of cartel members.
"This is fine for consumers," Kalmanóvitz
concedes: "Personal computers cost less here
than in Miami. But it weakens our commercial sector,
our industry, our productivity. Our nation."
A hundred miles south of Bogota, in Huila province,
it is possible to stand atop the Andes and have
the illusion that, except for its two seacoasts,
the entire country is visible. It is a land with
so much: more than a thousand rivers, greater
biodiversity than nearly anywhere on earth, deep
soils, rich harvests and a capital still called
the "Athens of the Americas" for its
many universities and museums. There are also
its people, a high percentage of them educated
and enterprising yet stigmatized everywhere because
their nationality is linked to heinous substances
whose consumption at home is negligible compared
to that of the so-called developed world.
Thousands here have died for the sake of other
people's distant fancy for a certain white powder.
Now, the very liquid of life is draining from
these mountains, as Colombia's cloud-forest watershed
is torn down to produce yet another. Like their
lowland coca counterparts, growers of heroin poppies
on precipitous Andean inclines ravage about two
hectares of nature for every one they plant in
narcotics. The magnitude of deforestation is revealed
by a World Bank statistic: Ten years ago, Colombia
ranked third in world hydroelectric potential.
Today it is 25th.
The planes have been here to spray, but in the
Huila hamlet of Turquestán, poppy farmers
like to point out two things. One is the remains
of the police helicopter that guerrillas downed
in a ravine nearby. The other is growing on the
steepest slopes, from the banks of gushing streams
right up to the ridge lines.
Concealed among thick, sheltering rows of corn
are pink, white, red and lavender constellations
of tissuey poppies, bearing multiple buds swollen
with raw opium milk. "After the spraying,
they just grew better," marvels one grower.
"It's like fertilizer." By observing,
the farmers have learned what university ecologists
in Bogota have confirmed: As glyphosate biodegrades,
it enriches the soil with phosphorus and essential
amino acids -- veritable poppy food.
They have also learned to organize. With the
blessing of municipal officials, their Association
for Alternatives to Poppies has a deal for President
Samper, and for the United States: "The problem
is huge, but the solution is so small," says
association president, Israel Ramírez.
"If they bring us fairness instead of fumigation,
find us decent prices for our fruit and beets,
and begin building roads to get us to market,
in six months we will rip these flowers out ourselves."
He stoops to pluck a crimson blossom. "If
not, we will grow them as long as there's demand.
And nothing can really stop us."
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Selected Works
Books
The World Without Us
An Echo in My Blood: The Search for a Family's Hidden Past
Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World
La Frontera: The United States Border With Mexico
Articles
University of Arizona Spring Commencement Speech
May 15, 2009
Three Planetary Futures Vanity Fair, April 2008
Earth Without People
Cartoon Op-ed
Mining the Imagination for New Energy
The
Cocaine Connection
Diamonds in the Wild
Power Trip
The Sacred and Profane
Vanishing Forests, Endangered People
Radio
 Chiloé: A Bridge Too Far?
Resurrecting the Zápara
Laguna
Madre
Straw
Bale Homes in Mexico
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