Dispatch Number 69 -Cocaine

This is the last of the series of a one month journey in the northeastern region of Colombia on the Atlantic coast near Venezuela. Travel was a mixture of group and solo.

Cocaine is a part of Colombian life, it is legal to carry a personal amount of 3 grams of the white powder. It is illegal to grow and process it. Where coffee grows the cocoa plant can grow. The over rated white powder comes in several quality grades from 90%+ pure that sells for $20/gram, whereas, lesser quality in the 70% range is as low as $8/gram. Now, that I have dispensed with all the usual questions, and now, that some of you are planning your trip to Colombia, I will write about other aspects of cocaine and the government led wars against it.

In 1999, the United States and Colombia drafted Plan Colombia as a way to combat cocaine production and trafficking. The first draft was in English for this Spanish speaking country and the Spanish version came months later, that says something. The Colombian government wanted both military and social/economic aid (to support poor farmers and encourage alternative crops). The US shunned the request and made it a condition that funds be used exclusively for military use. Today and for the last ten years 80% of each budget went towards military hardware. I saw old Vietnam era helicopters with new jet engines and soldiers with "U.S." emblazoned ammunition belts. In 2006, $624 million went to military goods.

The Colombian Army and a special division of the national police force, the Antinarcoticos receive the lions share of funding in the form of hard cash, helicopters, arms, transport, intelligence and supplies for cocoa eradication (read: poison sprayed from crop dusters). All eradication is performed by the American company DynCorp that flies armoured crop dusters piloted by Americans with cover provided by the Antinarcoticos in their helicopters with Gatling guns. Turns out they are shot at a lot by the paramilitary forces (private armies) that protect crops.

I talked with Francisco, a helicopter pilot in the Antinarcoticos, leaning against one of the Kevlar armored doors of his chopper as he explained how it worked. The backdrop at this remote sea side base was the Atlantic sea, the rough and angry part of the Caribbean. The base sits at the northern most point on the South American landmass in a desert. His favorite aspect of flying was not skimming the ground at ten feet, but practicing "auto-rotation", a training method to crash land a helicopter without power. Francisco was an adrenaline junky and a consummate gentleman. Tall, dark, and handsome with exceptional manners.

When he flies cover for the crop dusters, he explained that flights are defensive in nature and not used to launch preemptive attacks from the sky, only to protect the crop duster. His helicopter had two bullet holes and it took he and a ground engineer a few minutes to locate the patched spots. Studies on this method of eradication have shown that more regular crops, such as, bananas, beans and potatoes are destroyed than cocoa plants. In my travels deep in the bush throughout Latin America I have experienced up close and lived with these poor farm families; the poverty in the countryside is extensive. These small crops and plots are how families eat. It is subsistence living. The program to poison from the air continues. It hardly seems worth it. Poison, pilots and planes bought with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Research findings on the merits and success of Plan Colombia have not been kind and surely make the men who want continued funding blanch when they tell lies about how successful their interdiction and eradication efforts are. Without exception, every report and committee convened have arrived at the same conclusion: that armed forces used to interdict drugs coming into the U.S. have minimal or no effect on cocaine traffic. These studies are conducted by the Who's Who of research organizations: RAND, U.S. Defense Department, and National Defense Research Institute.

The best proof of the failure of Plan Colombia is the market price of cocaine in the United States -it has remained constant. When implementing the plan the U.S. government boldly predicted that their efforts would cause the price of coke to go up. When their interdiction and eradication efforts were confronted with an unchanged market price they made the preposterous claim that there were stockpiles of processed cocaine and that these surpluses kept the markets stable. A claim made five years ago, now that is quite a stockpile! Sweet words for another year of funding.

Plan Colombia is a thinly veiled program for militarizing Colombia, a third-world country. In the near term seven new military bases will be opened and staffed with American military personnel and advisers. The university student movements in Colombia are against this militarization of their country. History shows over and over what happens when poor countries are militarized by Western nations, it is seldom good.

While researching Plan Colombia I reflected on the illicit things I have seen and done. We were invited by Francisco and another pilot to camp inside their Antinarcotico base on the Atlantic coast in northeastern Colombia near the border with Venezuela. The base walls were rotting from the corrosive sea air in a beautiful desert-on-the-sea location of yellow earth and a sea with no ships on it. The Antinarcoticos are a special branch of the national police that receive extensive training and have a professional air about them unlike other encounters I have had with military personnel throughout Latin America. We were sitting in the lions den of America's War on Drugs and it was guarded 24 hours day with big guns and a helicopter.

The irony was just a week earlier while in the Santa Marta mountains on a 6-day hike to The Lost City that I saw cocoa plant farms far away from anything except the foot trail I was on. The Lost City is a hard to reach place similar to Machu Picchu in Peru without all the people. A day later I visited a cocaine chemist who performed before my eyes the first phase of extracting the drug from the raw plant leaves. No, there is nothing to sniff at this stage, just toxic pale dough. It is a horrible chemical process. A list of chemicals and two links to a documentary are at the end of this Dispatch.

Inside the base we were treated very well given access to precious freshwater showers, joked with them in the mess hall as they fed us, crashed in their hammocks, and drank desalinized water (the desalination plant was donated by Southern Command of the US military). Another irony was one of the travelers in our group, Andreas was a chronic pot smoker who became agitated when he didn't smoke, he was grumpy living in the Antinarcoticos base. And the only one drinking beer inside the base to temper his edge.

I traveled for two weeks in the Guijira desert and after talking with the farmers, truck drivers and Antinarcoticos it was clear that the region was a major gateway for cocaine being smuggled out of the country and for cheap Venezuelan gas being snuck in. I benefited from the cheap gas that sold for half the price of legal fuel. La Guijira is a smugglers paradise of dirt roads, desolation, and illegal airstrips.

It was odd how little the Antinarcoticos patrolled their zone and how few men were stationed at the base we camped at. In fact, according to the soldiers and pilots stationed there it was a relaxing commission compared with the interior where fighting was frequent and tensions ran high. They liked the posting on the sea. There was no tension on this base where the desalination plant groaned in the background. When I met them we were all drinking beer together out front of a tienda, convenience store near the base.
I left Guijira thinking, If there was a place where they could make an endless stream of busts it would be in this open desert.

The cocaine business is big money, very big and this facilitates government cooperation at the highest levels and when financial coercion is not successful the cartels respond with swift violence. It is compelling to cooperate. Surely, some of the lack of Colombian military and police presence in Guijira is a form of understanding between the cartels and the government. A very good book on the cartels and government corruption is Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw by Mark Bowden.

A savory part of traveling off the beaten path are the unpredictable things that happen such as camping inside a remote police base, sitting on a helicopter and talking with the young pilots. Getting lost and not knowing where you will sleep until you get there. Seeing cocoa farms and visiting secret processing plants. The satisfaction of making your own way on roads less travelled.

There I stood at the edge of the windswept Atlantic ocean in the lions den of America's Failed War on Drugs. All major research has made clear it is a failed policy to use armed forces. Other studies have demonstrated the same money, if used for social and recovery programs would be both economically and socially more successful.

As a war on drugs it has been a near total failure and has been going on since President Nixon started it in the early 1970s. In light of the well documented failure of Plan Colombia the chimera continues with American funding approaching $1 billion each year. More truthfully it is militarization of a third-world country in the name of drugs. A review of geopolitics in the region reveals a great deal about America's policies and politics in Colombia. It is hardly about interdicting drugs.

EXTRAS-
List of chemicals used to extract the drug from the plant leaves, resulting in cocoa paste, the first stage of making cocaine:
Salt
Calcium
Gasoline
Sulfuric Acid
Caustic Soda (Drano)
Potassium

Watch this two part documentary on cocaine production and the government efforts to eradicate cocoa plants:
Part I http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4831

Part II http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4832

David
Otavalo, Ecuador