Binky
05-16-2005, 09:04 PM
Series: Part 2 Of 3
A PERFECT COCAINE STORM
Colombia: It All Comes Together In A Country Where Drug Lords Rise From The Dead And Smugglers Never Run Out Of Lucrative Schemes
His name is Wilber Varela, his criminal alias is Jabon -- or "Soap" -- and he has killed more people than you could easily count.
A month ago, he was supposed to be dead.
Now, it seems that Wilber Varela is alive and well and back at his day job, shipping illegal narcotics to foreign markets, mainly in the United States.
Welcome to Colombia, where it's hard to keep a bad man down. Lazarus-like, they just keep springing back up, even from the grave.
The same goes for the Colombian drug trade, a multi-billion-dollar business that somehow manages to survive and to flourish, despite all-out efforts by local authorities and the United States government to put the criminal industry out of commission.
"I can tell you, the drug cartels are still functioning here," says a senior anti-narcotics official at the U.S. embassy in Bogota, the Colombian capital.
Indeed they are. Take Wilber Varela.
A kingpin of the Norte Valle drug cartel, which is based in the southern Colombian province of Cauca, Varela has a $5 million ( all figures U.S. ) bounty on his head, but he successfully evaded capture until last month, when cancer finally accomplished what Colombia's National Police could not - -- or so it was believed.
The word early in April from the central Colombian province of Antioquia was that Varela had succumbed to the disease while staying at a country estate there. Pictures of the man's corpse appeared in various Colombian newspapers.
Now, it seems that reports of the drug lord's demise were greatly exaggerated.
According to Colombian police officials quoted recently in Bogota's El Tiempo newspaper, Varela is still very much with us.
The moustachioed drug trader merely faked his mortal exit, they say, likely in order to confuse the police and to confound his enemies in the Colombian drug underworld, most notably a man named Diego Montoya Sanchez, a.k.a. "Don Berna," another captain of the cocaine industry in southern Colombia.
A power struggle between the two men has left a long trail of death -- some 600 people murdered during the past five years alone, according to El Tiempo.
And yet, since 1990, the two feuding drug barons have somehow found time to ship some 500 tonnes of cocaine out of Colombia, with a total value of about $10 billion, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Most of those drugs departed Colombia from the Pacific seaport of Buenaventura and travelled to the United States via Mexico, part of a steady supply line of illegal narcotics running from Colombia's sun-baked tropical shores to the drug consumers of the north.
"When it comes to cocaine," says David Murray, special assistant to the director of the U.S. government's Office of National Drug Policy in Washington, "the U.S. is overwhelmingly supplied by Colombia."
This year, U.S. authorities will spend upwards of $500 million combating the drug trade in Colombia. They will eradicate more than 150,000 hectares of illegal coca plants, the raw material for cocaine. And they will invest immense efforts in capturing clandestine drug shipments on their way from Colombia's Pacific and Caribbean seacoasts toward American soil.
Their efforts will have an impact, somewhat suppressing Colombian drug production and distribution, as they have been doing since 2003.
And yet this year, as in years gone by, Colombia's drug traders will manage to supply about 90 per cent of the cocaine and half the heroin consumed in the United States. They also will ship huge quantities of these narcotics to Europe and as far away as Australia.
Somehow, this South American republic of 44 million people has managed to become and remain by far the world's leading supplier of cocaine, as well as a major source for other illicit drugs -- an achievement that has fuelled harrowing levels of political violence here, while displacing millions of Colombians, driving hundreds of thousands more to seek refuge abroad and sullying Colombia's image around the world.
"It's a perfect storm," says a long-time resident of Bogota, referring to a range of historical, geographical and cultural factors that have combined to make Colombia the Western hemisphere's headquarters for illegal narcotics. "Everything comes together here."
Albert Berry, a professor of economics at the University of Toronto and an expert on Colombia, speaks of a deeply rooted culture of violence in the country that has alternately simmered and flared at least since the Spanish conquest in the mid-1500s.
More recently, in 1948, the country descended into a long, dark night of killing and revenge that pitted liberal political factions against conservative ones.
Called La Violencia, the turmoil did not fade until 1966, by which time it had left more than 200,000 Colombians dead.
Meanwhile, other rifts were already opening, based partly on politics and partly on greed.
In the days before cocaine's ascendancy, Colombia was probably best known to the rest of the world as a leading source of emeralds. But the trade in gemstones was not a gentleman's game.
"The emerald industry was, by nature, a violent industry," says Berry.
The business helped to develop a talented Colombian entrepreneurial class, but it was a class with management skills that tended toward physical intimidation and firearms.
"Colombia, it is clear," says Berry, "is really special in being able to do violence."
It bears noting, of course, that most Colombians do not do either violence or crime.
"We Colombians in our immense majority are honest, hard-working and just people," says Alberto Pinero, a resident of Soacha, an impoverished neighbourhood south of the capital
Still, the violent few have long caused the many to suffer.
Just as Colombia was recovering from La Violencia, it faced a new and destabilizing threat -- the emergence in the early 1960s of a range of communist insurgent armies, two of which continue to operate and cause havoc today.
Unable to police its national territory, the central government in 1964 passed a law permitting the establishment of private armed militias, which eventually devolved into little more than right-wing death squads.
In 1997, the paramilitares, as they are known, formed an alliance among themselves called the AUC, Spanish abbreviation for Colombian Self-Defence Units. The force is considered responsible for the vast majority of human rights abuses in Colombia.
Combine all these volatile elements, then add drugs -- along with the massive profits they generate -- and the result in some ways is Colombia today.
In their early incarnation, the men who ran Colombia's drug trade were a strange blend of physical brutality and benign civic-mindedness.
They included flamboyant back-slappers such as Pablo Escobar, who was among the kingpins of the Medellin cartel that dominated the cocaine trade in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Escobar and his ilk were ruthless in business, but they gave houses away to the poor, sponsored soccer teams and enthusiastically backed local favourites in the annual Se=F1orita Colombia beauty pageant, a national obsession.
"They were philanthropic," says a foreign resident of Bogota. "The notion was, `We're good guys.'"
In 1993, Colombia security forces killed Escobar and shut down the Medellin cartel, but it soon was replaced by a cartel based in the southern city of Cali.
In turn, the Cali cartel was run out of business, more or less.
But even as Wilber Varela returned from the dead, Colombia's drug lords keep reproducing themselves. More than a decade after Escobar's death, the industry seems to be more deeply entrenched than ever.
"When they went after the Medellin cartel and beheaded it, they actually created a bigger problem than they solved," says the foreign resident. "Pablo Escobar didn't have huge militias."
But the left-wing rebels and the right-wing paramilitary outfits certainly do. With the vacuum left by the destruction of the old-style cartels, both these factions have entered the drug business in a big way.
The current generation of Colombian drug traders is better educated, smarter and more skilful than its predecessors, while being equally fond of violence.
Time and again, the traders have adapted to changing circumstances, and they have prospered.
"Fifteen years ago, my primary concern ( about illegal drugs ) would have been aircraft going from South America to the Bahamas and vessels going directly to south Florida," says Cmdr. Peter Brown of the U.S. Coast Guard in Miami.
"Now, the primary drug flow goes into Central America and the drugs come into the U.S. from Mexico."
The drug smugglers seem ready to try just about anything.
In September 2000, the Colombian National Police made a novel discovery when they entered a warehouse just outside Bogota: a partly constructed, steel-hulled submarine that apparently was to be used by resourceful drug smugglers to carry a cargo of up to 10 tonnes of cocaine to destinations abroad.
This past January, U.S. officials discovered that a Cali drug ring headed by one Orlando Ospina had smuggled roughly 100 kilograms of 80-per-cent-pure heroin to the United States via Nicaragua by secreting the drugs in drinking straws that were hidden in boxes of seafood and shipped to Miami.
At the same time, the Ospina drug gang was exporting its profits out of Colombia by having couriers roll $1,000 bills into cylinders and swallowing them. This way, a single courier in one trip could export up to $100,000 in undeclared greenbacks.
In 2003, U.S. narcotics agents came across 702 green plastic bananas in a U.S.-bound shipping container carrying cargo that had originated in Colombia. Each banana was stuffed with a balloon filled with 75-per-cent-pure cocaine.
Sometimes, in this business, it is difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
In March, three U.S. soldiers -- part of a contingent of more than 500 American military personnel involved in training and support missions in Colombia -- were caught trying to sneak drugs back to the United States aboard an American military plane.
Rather than letting the trio stand trial in Colombia, Washington spirited them home, raising the ire of many people here who see a contradiction between the repatriation of the three soldiers and Washington's insistence on the right to extradite suspected Colombian drug traffickers to face trial in U.S. courts.
American authorities concede that this country's abiding cocaine woes are not really caused by Colombia itself, but mainly by drug users in foreign lands, especially the United States, which is by far the world's largest market for illegal narcotics.
"We recognize the unfortunate role of the United States worldwide as a consuming nation of drugs," says Murray at the Office of National Drug Policy. "The U.S. needs to reduce that demand pull."
Until it does, many observers see little likelihood that the war against drugs in South America will be much more than a holding operation, a conflict that can be waged, but not decisively won, not in a country as large and wide open as Colombia.
"The theory is, they can press these guys into smaller and smaller spaces," says a long-time observer of the drug scene. "But it's just not true. There's too much territory."
And no shortage of cash.
Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2005 The Toronto Star
Contact: lettertoed@thestar.com
Website: http://www.thestar.com/
A PERFECT COCAINE STORM
Colombia: It All Comes Together In A Country Where Drug Lords Rise From The Dead And Smugglers Never Run Out Of Lucrative Schemes
His name is Wilber Varela, his criminal alias is Jabon -- or "Soap" -- and he has killed more people than you could easily count.
A month ago, he was supposed to be dead.
Now, it seems that Wilber Varela is alive and well and back at his day job, shipping illegal narcotics to foreign markets, mainly in the United States.
Welcome to Colombia, where it's hard to keep a bad man down. Lazarus-like, they just keep springing back up, even from the grave.
The same goes for the Colombian drug trade, a multi-billion-dollar business that somehow manages to survive and to flourish, despite all-out efforts by local authorities and the United States government to put the criminal industry out of commission.
"I can tell you, the drug cartels are still functioning here," says a senior anti-narcotics official at the U.S. embassy in Bogota, the Colombian capital.
Indeed they are. Take Wilber Varela.
A kingpin of the Norte Valle drug cartel, which is based in the southern Colombian province of Cauca, Varela has a $5 million ( all figures U.S. ) bounty on his head, but he successfully evaded capture until last month, when cancer finally accomplished what Colombia's National Police could not - -- or so it was believed.
The word early in April from the central Colombian province of Antioquia was that Varela had succumbed to the disease while staying at a country estate there. Pictures of the man's corpse appeared in various Colombian newspapers.
Now, it seems that reports of the drug lord's demise were greatly exaggerated.
According to Colombian police officials quoted recently in Bogota's El Tiempo newspaper, Varela is still very much with us.
The moustachioed drug trader merely faked his mortal exit, they say, likely in order to confuse the police and to confound his enemies in the Colombian drug underworld, most notably a man named Diego Montoya Sanchez, a.k.a. "Don Berna," another captain of the cocaine industry in southern Colombia.
A power struggle between the two men has left a long trail of death -- some 600 people murdered during the past five years alone, according to El Tiempo.
And yet, since 1990, the two feuding drug barons have somehow found time to ship some 500 tonnes of cocaine out of Colombia, with a total value of about $10 billion, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Most of those drugs departed Colombia from the Pacific seaport of Buenaventura and travelled to the United States via Mexico, part of a steady supply line of illegal narcotics running from Colombia's sun-baked tropical shores to the drug consumers of the north.
"When it comes to cocaine," says David Murray, special assistant to the director of the U.S. government's Office of National Drug Policy in Washington, "the U.S. is overwhelmingly supplied by Colombia."
This year, U.S. authorities will spend upwards of $500 million combating the drug trade in Colombia. They will eradicate more than 150,000 hectares of illegal coca plants, the raw material for cocaine. And they will invest immense efforts in capturing clandestine drug shipments on their way from Colombia's Pacific and Caribbean seacoasts toward American soil.
Their efforts will have an impact, somewhat suppressing Colombian drug production and distribution, as they have been doing since 2003.
And yet this year, as in years gone by, Colombia's drug traders will manage to supply about 90 per cent of the cocaine and half the heroin consumed in the United States. They also will ship huge quantities of these narcotics to Europe and as far away as Australia.
Somehow, this South American republic of 44 million people has managed to become and remain by far the world's leading supplier of cocaine, as well as a major source for other illicit drugs -- an achievement that has fuelled harrowing levels of political violence here, while displacing millions of Colombians, driving hundreds of thousands more to seek refuge abroad and sullying Colombia's image around the world.
"It's a perfect storm," says a long-time resident of Bogota, referring to a range of historical, geographical and cultural factors that have combined to make Colombia the Western hemisphere's headquarters for illegal narcotics. "Everything comes together here."
Albert Berry, a professor of economics at the University of Toronto and an expert on Colombia, speaks of a deeply rooted culture of violence in the country that has alternately simmered and flared at least since the Spanish conquest in the mid-1500s.
More recently, in 1948, the country descended into a long, dark night of killing and revenge that pitted liberal political factions against conservative ones.
Called La Violencia, the turmoil did not fade until 1966, by which time it had left more than 200,000 Colombians dead.
Meanwhile, other rifts were already opening, based partly on politics and partly on greed.
In the days before cocaine's ascendancy, Colombia was probably best known to the rest of the world as a leading source of emeralds. But the trade in gemstones was not a gentleman's game.
"The emerald industry was, by nature, a violent industry," says Berry.
The business helped to develop a talented Colombian entrepreneurial class, but it was a class with management skills that tended toward physical intimidation and firearms.
"Colombia, it is clear," says Berry, "is really special in being able to do violence."
It bears noting, of course, that most Colombians do not do either violence or crime.
"We Colombians in our immense majority are honest, hard-working and just people," says Alberto Pinero, a resident of Soacha, an impoverished neighbourhood south of the capital
Still, the violent few have long caused the many to suffer.
Just as Colombia was recovering from La Violencia, it faced a new and destabilizing threat -- the emergence in the early 1960s of a range of communist insurgent armies, two of which continue to operate and cause havoc today.
Unable to police its national territory, the central government in 1964 passed a law permitting the establishment of private armed militias, which eventually devolved into little more than right-wing death squads.
In 1997, the paramilitares, as they are known, formed an alliance among themselves called the AUC, Spanish abbreviation for Colombian Self-Defence Units. The force is considered responsible for the vast majority of human rights abuses in Colombia.
Combine all these volatile elements, then add drugs -- along with the massive profits they generate -- and the result in some ways is Colombia today.
In their early incarnation, the men who ran Colombia's drug trade were a strange blend of physical brutality and benign civic-mindedness.
They included flamboyant back-slappers such as Pablo Escobar, who was among the kingpins of the Medellin cartel that dominated the cocaine trade in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Escobar and his ilk were ruthless in business, but they gave houses away to the poor, sponsored soccer teams and enthusiastically backed local favourites in the annual Se=F1orita Colombia beauty pageant, a national obsession.
"They were philanthropic," says a foreign resident of Bogota. "The notion was, `We're good guys.'"
In 1993, Colombia security forces killed Escobar and shut down the Medellin cartel, but it soon was replaced by a cartel based in the southern city of Cali.
In turn, the Cali cartel was run out of business, more or less.
But even as Wilber Varela returned from the dead, Colombia's drug lords keep reproducing themselves. More than a decade after Escobar's death, the industry seems to be more deeply entrenched than ever.
"When they went after the Medellin cartel and beheaded it, they actually created a bigger problem than they solved," says the foreign resident. "Pablo Escobar didn't have huge militias."
But the left-wing rebels and the right-wing paramilitary outfits certainly do. With the vacuum left by the destruction of the old-style cartels, both these factions have entered the drug business in a big way.
The current generation of Colombian drug traders is better educated, smarter and more skilful than its predecessors, while being equally fond of violence.
Time and again, the traders have adapted to changing circumstances, and they have prospered.
"Fifteen years ago, my primary concern ( about illegal drugs ) would have been aircraft going from South America to the Bahamas and vessels going directly to south Florida," says Cmdr. Peter Brown of the U.S. Coast Guard in Miami.
"Now, the primary drug flow goes into Central America and the drugs come into the U.S. from Mexico."
The drug smugglers seem ready to try just about anything.
In September 2000, the Colombian National Police made a novel discovery when they entered a warehouse just outside Bogota: a partly constructed, steel-hulled submarine that apparently was to be used by resourceful drug smugglers to carry a cargo of up to 10 tonnes of cocaine to destinations abroad.
This past January, U.S. officials discovered that a Cali drug ring headed by one Orlando Ospina had smuggled roughly 100 kilograms of 80-per-cent-pure heroin to the United States via Nicaragua by secreting the drugs in drinking straws that were hidden in boxes of seafood and shipped to Miami.
At the same time, the Ospina drug gang was exporting its profits out of Colombia by having couriers roll $1,000 bills into cylinders and swallowing them. This way, a single courier in one trip could export up to $100,000 in undeclared greenbacks.
In 2003, U.S. narcotics agents came across 702 green plastic bananas in a U.S.-bound shipping container carrying cargo that had originated in Colombia. Each banana was stuffed with a balloon filled with 75-per-cent-pure cocaine.
Sometimes, in this business, it is difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
In March, three U.S. soldiers -- part of a contingent of more than 500 American military personnel involved in training and support missions in Colombia -- were caught trying to sneak drugs back to the United States aboard an American military plane.
Rather than letting the trio stand trial in Colombia, Washington spirited them home, raising the ire of many people here who see a contradiction between the repatriation of the three soldiers and Washington's insistence on the right to extradite suspected Colombian drug traffickers to face trial in U.S. courts.
American authorities concede that this country's abiding cocaine woes are not really caused by Colombia itself, but mainly by drug users in foreign lands, especially the United States, which is by far the world's largest market for illegal narcotics.
"We recognize the unfortunate role of the United States worldwide as a consuming nation of drugs," says Murray at the Office of National Drug Policy. "The U.S. needs to reduce that demand pull."
Until it does, many observers see little likelihood that the war against drugs in South America will be much more than a holding operation, a conflict that can be waged, but not decisively won, not in a country as large and wide open as Colombia.
"The theory is, they can press these guys into smaller and smaller spaces," says a long-time observer of the drug scene. "But it's just not true. There's too much territory."
And no shortage of cash.
Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2005 The Toronto Star
Contact: lettertoed@thestar.com
Website: http://www.thestar.com/