DIEGO WAS 23 YEARS OLD, a poor Colombian living in a poor section of Cali, when his girlfriend had the baby.
He was broke—everybody was broke—but his grandmother knew where he could earn some money: He could go work the coca plantations in the hinterlands like she had. She could get him a job working for FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, Colombia’s Marxist-Leninist guerrilla army), which was better than working for the right-wing paramilitaries.
Diego is not his real name, and he’s currently living in a different Latin American country—otherwise, he said, he wouldn’t be talking to me.
SOMETIMES THEY PAY YOU IN LEAD
The Colombian cocaine trade has been tangled up in the country’s guerrilla wars for decades: FARC fights the government, the government fights FARC, and the right-wing paramilitaries fight FARC on the government’s behalf with an extra measure of savagery. FARC and the paramilitaries constantly jockey for territory—to gain not only political power, but access to rivers, coastal mangrove swamps, and other secret routes where they can smuggle weapons and cocaine to fund their decades-old war.
The paramilitaries, according to Diego and his family, are the worst of the bunch. FARC at least tends to pay its workers, they say. The paramilitaries, on the other hand, have a reputation for stealing coca leaves from farmers at gunpoint and making their cocaine workers labor for months for little or no pay. Sometimes, Diego said, they pay you in lead—a bullet to the brain.
“You can’t talk about FARC or the paramilitaries ever, because you don’t know who’s working for who or who they’ve recruited,” Diego said. “Even people you know are on both sides, so you can’t be drunk at a bar and bring up anything—your cousin’s girlfriend might be working for the other side. People disappear and get killed all the time. It’s very dangerous to talk, to do anything.”
But Diego had a family to feed and his grandmother’s assurance, so off he went.
MURDERED AT THE DOCK
His grandmother told him to go to Buenaventura, a port city on Colombia’s Pacific Coast and one of the most dangerous cities in the western hemisphere. Buenaventura has the highest murder rate in Colombia, the New York Times reported in 2007, and when Diego was there, in 2000, Colombia had the highest murder rate in the world. Buenaventura is “hell on earth,” Diego said. With no tourism to speak of, the government has limited incentive (or ability) to crack down on the leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, and narcos who walk the streets with their guns out in the open.
Diego remembers getting on a ferry that left Buenaventura at 5 pm. After a several-hour nighttime journey with 70 or 80 other people (plus rice, beans, beer, and other staples bound for the camp), they arrived at a dock. He was then loaded onto a speedboat that, he said, went 90 MPH for seven hours. He had no idea where he was or where they were going—which was the point. The speedboat traveled through swamps and up rivers, stopping only to refuel.
Some of Diego’s fellow travelers were laborers, like him. Others were delivering goods (the beans and rice and beer) to the temporary village that serviced the camp—like an old Alaskan gold rush village, except in a tropical jungle patrolled by guerrilla soldiers with machine guns.
When the speedboat finally arrived at the village, it was greeted by guerrillas asking each new arrival for information: Who are you? What job are you here to do? Who told you about the camp?
“You can’t just not know anything,” Diego said. “Some people died at the entrance because they did not have the right answers, so they got killed right there.” Diego saw laborers—who said they’d heard they could board the boat in Buenaventura to make some money—murdered at the dock. This particular camp was known as the Black-Bag Camp, so called because the guerrillas would put a black plastic bag over your head before executing you.
And this was FARC—these were the good guys, according to Diego’s family.
NO ONE OUT THERE USED COCAINE
The coca camps move around to make it harder for police to find them. “It’s very, very hard to get to them—it cannot be underestimated that guerrillas know the countryside and the police don’t,” Diego said.
According to Diego, the camp was maybe six football fields big. (We conducted our interviews over Skype, and his current girlfriend—not the one he had when he joined the coca trade—laughed in the background: “That is your measurement for everything!”) He was set to work picking coca leaves, which are thick and sharp. The guerrillas don’t issue gloves, and Diego was a city boy with soft hands: “It was really funny to everybody else but hard for me,” he said. “It was like ripping palm trees apart. You can still see the scars on my hands.”
The conditions weren’t very good. He’d wake up at 5 am on a dirt floor with 20 other people, every man under his own mosquito net. “After 5 pm, it was just mosquitoes. It was boiling hot, but you had to wear long sleeves and pants, and still a lot of people got yellow fever and dengue fever.”
He’d work for three hours, from 5 am to 8 am, filling a 50-kilo (110-pound) sack with coca leaves, and take a break for breakfast. Then he’d be back at it until lunchtime at noon.
“We ate rice and fish and lots of bananas,” he said. “Sometimes they had juice. But you had to drink a lot of water, because it was really hot.”
They’d pick coca leaves until dark, hoping for rain to cool them down and to make their leaves heavier, meaning they had to pick fewer to fill their sacks. (He typically filled the sack three times in a day—150 kilos total.) Sometimes, when it didn’t rain, they’d piss in their sacks to make them heavier.
“Not one person I met out there used cocaine,” Diego said. “We would chew on the leaves—to kill the hunger, the fatigue, to stop the pain of the work. Spiders and scorpions, mosquitoes or snakes’d bite you, and you’d chew so you wouldn’t feel the pain. Some people believed the coca leaves would stop the poison and save your life.”
At his peak earning period, Diego was making the equivalent of $600 per month. “Back then, that was good cash and it was fast,” he said. It was incredibly dangerous, too: People would go back home with wads of money, usually to bring to their families, and get robbed and killed along the way, sometimes by the same people they’d been working with in the fields for four or five months. When Diego traveled, he always went with an entourage of uncles or cousins.
MAKING COCAINE STEW
After awhile, Diego graduated from the fields to the “factory,” which was more like a shed, where he helped turn the raw leaves into cocaine paste. “Making the paste is gnarly,” his girlfriend said. “That’s where the real scars come in.”
“There’s a big pool with all the leaves, a big wood tub,” Diego explained. Workers would pour leaves into the tub, stomp them down, and then add gasoline to extract the cocaine alkaloids.
“That’s the easiest way for the government to find the camps,” Diego said. “Gasoline is expensive, and most farmers don’t use that much—sugarcane and bananas are all farmed by hand—so you find whoever’s buying vats and vats of gasoline.”
They’d lay a tarp over the tub for 24 hours, with someone stirring the gasoline-coca stew every four or five hours. Then they’d taste the brew to see if it was strong enough. If it numbed the tongue, it was good. If not, it needed more chemicals. Diego doesn’t remember exactly which chemicals they used: “There were a lot of chemicals.” Eventually, they’d pull the plug on the tubs, collect the cocainized gasoline, add ammonia and sulfuric acid, and chemically reduce the brew into a paste that was taken elsewhere to be turned into cocaine hydrochloride—powder.
Diego and the other workers were encouraged to spit into the tubs holding gas and coca, and even pass spit-mugs around the camp, under the premise that saliva helped the extraction process. Workers were also encouraged to ash their cigarettes into the vats, perhaps because traditional coca chewers sometimes added a dab of quicklime or the ash of burned quinoa plants to their wad of coca. (Diego said he wasn’t sure why.)
Then there were the unauthorized additives. “Sometimes we’d piss or shit in the vats, just to be fuckers,” Diego said. “Only the rich use cocaine, and we thought it was funny.”
THEY WERE SHOT—TO PROVE A POINT
The territory where Diego was working—he still isn’t 100 percent sure where they were—was a death zone. The paramilitaries and guerrillas were fighting upriver, and he said that sometimes when he went to fetch water, he’d see dead bodies or severed limbs floating past.
“I often heard people say things like, ‘Yesterday I saw four bodies going down,'” Diego said. “All the time, people were talking about bodies. A lot of times they were tied together, big groups of people.”
Stories circulated from the guerrillas to the workers about small bands of soldiers who “went to make some business away from the group” and were savaged by larger groups of paramilitaries: “First they cut their hands off, then they cut their legs, and then they’d kill them.” The threat of infighting and defection was constant, as workers felt the tempting urge to abscond with packages of paste and sell them on their own.
Then, of course, there was the guerrilla war. In nearby villages, guerrillas and paramilitaries enforced curfews, telling villagers to “go to bed early, because if we see anyone walking around after 10 pm, we’ll kill them.” They also went from village to village, Diego said, conscripting boys for their armies, sometimes leaving notes under people’s doors ordering them to bring their sons to the town center (the church, the plaza) at a certain time. If anyone refused, the soldiers might return to murder the entire family.
One weekend, Diego and some of the workers had a Sunday off, so they went to the little village that serviced the camp to drink beer, loaf around, and look at the women. (Most of the women in the camps, he said, were either cooks or prostitutes, some of them very young local girls.) “We were playing billiards and chess, and all of a sudden people got really quiet. Then people freaked out and were running because the paramilitaries showed up.”
The paramilitaries forced everybody inside a classroom, then said that government soldiers were on their way and not to tell the guerrillas.
“A lot of people were shot,” he said. “Then they left. That was it—people were shot because the paramilitaries wanted to show something or prove something, to make a point.”
LEAVING THE COCAINE KINGDOM
During his time working in the cocaine kingdom—several months-long shifts—Diego saw a parade of corpses, guns, bags of cocaine paste, and barrels full of US dollars that mysteriously appeared and disappeared. One of his cousins and some of his uncles were killed. (He declined to say how or why.) The breaking point came one day when he went to get drinking water, saw yet another corpse floating past, and snapped. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do this anymore. No, no, no, no, this is not the kind of life I want for me.'”
Diego left the trade and eventually the country. As of our last conversation—we had multiple hours-long conversations over two months—he does not intend to return. At one point, he called his family to clarify a few details he couldn’t remember. A few days later, he said his family was very upset that he’d been talking to me and upset that he’d asked them about the trade, and that he couldn’t talk to me anymore.
That was the last I heard from him.
Cocaine consumption in the US went from 80 metric tons in 1979, to 600 metric tons in 1987. Most of the cocaine is facilitated into this country by via the CIA. Access to the 700 billion annual drug profits is a critical source of liquidity for wall street, and the US economy is utterly dependent on it.
So, let me get this straight…not only does the Mercury have to resort to a re-hash of a weeks-old Stranger article, but they can’t even run the entire series?
This paper is truly pitiful.
Oh please Spindles…
These conspiracy theories are plain silly. Aliens and Bigfoot help out in the coke industry too, right?
Coke can be a fun high, sure. But what happens to get it here is crazy, and I am to blame for it too.
Good article.
Geez Spindles… it seems you haven’t met a conspiracy theory you didn’t like, or I mean – fall for.
I do agree with some of your other views though.
Conspiracy theories flourish in times of public mistrust. Be cautious of them all.
frankieb how about some Conspiracy Facts? I wonder if you’ll bother to read even one word of any of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_traf…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contr…
1988-08-26: Ron Paul on CIA Drug Trafficking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBh_hzU-jdI
1996-11-15: Former LA Police Officer Mike Ruppert Confronts CIA Director John Deutch on Drug Trafficking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT5MY3C86bk
1999-01-28: Blacks Were Targeted for CIA Cocaine – It Can Be Proven by Michael C. Ruppert
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/pand…
2000 September: Wall Street, CIA and the Global Drug Trade
http://www.whale.to/b/ruppert1.html
This may be the single most amazing, informative, and scary interview I’ve ever read. Of course the predictions about Columbia didn’t happen but that’s because this was one year before 9/11 and the “war on terror” when the focus shifted to the Middle East, especially the Afghan poppy fields. But there’s still time for South America … oh yes there’s still time …
It’s a long read so here are some excerpts to demonstrate that it’s worth the time:
It wasn’t just CIA dealing some drugs to fund covert operations. It is that drug money is an inherent part of the American economy.
Joseph McNamara, a former chief of San Jose from the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, published some really telling figures. In 1972, when Richard Nixon started the War on Drugs, the annual federal budget allocation was 110 million dollars a year for enforcement. In fiscal year 2000, 28 years later, the budget allocation was 17 billion dollars a year, and yet, in the year 2000, there are more drugs in this country, they are cheaper, and they are more potent than they were in 1972. That has to tell you that there’s some other agenda going on here.
The National Security Act that created the CIA in ’47 was written by a guy called Clark Clifford, who was a Wall Street banker and lawyer. He’s the guy that brought us BCCI. The job of writing the outline for CIA, the design for the Agency, was given to Clark Clifford by John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles–both law partners in the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. In ’69 after Nixon came in, the Chairman of SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] was William Casey–the same guy who was Ronald Reagan’s Director of Central Intelligence. And the current Vice President in charge of enforcement for the New York Stock Exchange, Dave Dougherty, is a retired CIA General Counsel. The CIA is Wall Street, and vice versa. When you understand that, and that money is the primary objective, everything else just falls into place.
Organized crime is probably the lubricating force for the entire world economy right now. There’s a trillion dollars a year in organised crime money. That trillion dollars a year is liquid, and if you think of money–criminal money, drug money–as water, which is thin, it can flow very quickly from point A to point B. And in the world markets, where you apply money is where you control business. You control markets. You control banks. You control interest rates. Drug money flows fastest. Money that is not criminal money has to go through regulations and banking systems. It has to go through taxations. It’s tracked. The lawyers follow it. That money moves like molasses.
So those who have access to the cheapest capital always win. That’s why if you don’t play with drug money in the world economy today, you can’t play at all. That’s why, as we have documented, drug money was going directly into Al Gore’s presidential campaign. Why? Because the Republicans, going as far back as Reagan, were using drug money, and that’s how they put Reagan into office–with Bill Casey. If you don’t play in that mode, you can’t play at all. But the analogy I use is that it’s like a snake eating its own tail: it’s got to stop sooner or later.
2001-10-10: The Lies About Taliban Heroin
Russia and Oil the Real Objectives With Heroin As A Weapon of War
A Replay of CIA’s Vietnam-era Drug Dealing by Michael C. Ruppert
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/…
2004-02-25: Haiti’s Nightmare: The Cocaine Coup & The CIA Connection by Paul DeRienzo
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/RIE4…
C.I.A (Cocaine.Import.Agency) …The Drug Affair
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ9fgi7IZSk
“There has never been a conspiracy in this country!” – Dewey Clarridge
CIA Cocaine – Then and now
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/245.html
“In 2004, Webb who remained active as an independent journalist reportedly, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head – twice.”
Gary Webb on C.I.A. Trafficking of Cocaine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6dHqP9wc3k
2007-12-19: Cocaine Jet That Crashed in Mexico Part of Cowboy Government Operation, DEA Sources Claim by Bill Conroy
http://www.narconews.com/Issue48/article29…
“The Gulfstream II jet that crash landed in the Mexican Yucatan in late September carrying close to four tons of cocaine was part of an operation being carried out by a Department of Homeland Security agency, DEA sources have revealed to Narco News.”
CIA Torture Jet crashed with 4 Tons of COCAINE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oszATUJ4IRE
2008-09-13: Crashed Jet Carrying Cocaine Linked to CIA
http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/09/crashed-…
2009-05-21: Kerry: CIA Lied About Contra-Cocaine Connections
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/21/k…
2009-08-17: Cocaine on 90% of US Dollar Bills
http://www.nowpublic.com/world/cocaine-90-…
“They say the rise observed in the US may be due to increased drug use caused by higher stress levels linked to the global economic downturn.” Right, OR it could be because the state-sponsored drug trafficking had to be increased to prevent an economic meltdown. Which came first? Probably both are true, i.e. another case of the chicken AND the egg.
2010-03-03: Colonel James Sabow (potential witness to Iran-Contra and military/govt drug trafficking)
MURDERED IN HIS OWN QUARTERS ON MARINE CORPS BASE
http://current.com/items/92266363_forensic…
Mounting evidence strongly indicates that “Thou shall not kill” was ignored to support the Contra War in Nicaragua and to protect the “butts” of those involved in bringing cocaine into the U.S. on former military aircraft. The overwhelming forensic evidence supports murder of a senior Marine Officer to prevent him from ‘telling all’ at a courts martial.
2010-04-21: The Afghan War: “No Blood for Opium”
The Hidden Military Agenda is to Protect the Drug Trade
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con…
2010-07-20: All in the “Family.” Global Drug Trade Fueled by Capitalist Elites
http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/20…
One former U.S. government official told investigative journalist Bill Conroy, “‘Black operations have been going on forever. The recent [mainstream] media reports about those operations under the Obama administration make it sound like it’s a big scoop, but it’s nothing new for those who understand how things really work’.”
The cozy relations among the world’s biggest banks, drug trafficking organizations and the U.S. military-intelligence apparatus is not a new phenomenon. What is different today is the scale and sheer scope of the corruption involved.
2010-09-05: The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda.
The CIA’s Drug-Running Terrorists and the “Arc of Crisis”
Part I by Andrew Gavin Marshall
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con…
2010-09-09: 9/11 ANALYSIS: From Ronald Reagan and the Soviet-Afghan War to George W Bush and September 11, 2001
by Michel Chossudovsky
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con…
A major and unexpected turnaround in the CIA sponsored drug trade occurred in 2000. The Taliban government which came to power in 1996 with Washington’s support, implemented in 2000-2001 a far-reaching opium eradication program with the support of the United Nations which served to undermine a multibillion dollar trade. (For further details see, Michel Chossudovsky, America’s War on Terrorism, Global Research, 2005). In 2001 prior to the US-led invasion, opium production under the Taliban eradication program declined by more than 90 percent. In the immediate wake of the US led invasion, the Bush administration ordered that the opium harvest not be destroyed on the fabricated pretext that this would undermine the military government of Pervez Musharraf.
Since the US led invasion, opium production has increased 33 fold from 185 tons in 2001 under the Taliban to 6100 tons in 2006. Cultivated areas have increased 21 fold since the 2001 US-led invasion. In 2007, Afghanistan supplied approximately 93% of the global supply of heroin. The proceeds (in terms of retail value) of the Afghanistan drug trade are estimated (2006) to be in excess of 190 billion dollars a year, representing a significant fraction of the global trade in narcotics. The proceeds of this lucrative multibillion dollar contraband are deposited in Western banks. Almost the totality of the revenues accrue to corporate interests and criminal syndicates outside Afghanistan. The laundering of drug money constitutes a multibillion dollar activity, which continues to be protected by the CIA and the ISI. In the wake of the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan.
In retrospect, one of the major objectives of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was to restore the drug trade.
OK, obviously you have given me alot of material to ponder – more than I could quickly read, even just half.
I’ll check some of this out and get back to you.
However, my first thought is that there has also been a wealth of material written on the belief in Bigfoot.
But, I promise to read some with as much an open mind as I can muster, OK?
in the meantime…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_th…
So, I’m maybe halfway through your suggestions, and I see that you put one heck of alot of stock into this Mike Ruppert joker.
There is also many things you can find on-line refuting him, if you wanted to look.
I found his testimony on the youtube clips completely unbelievable.
I also wonder if you are to believe him, as well as 99% of other conspiracy theories, why isn’t so many others that are part of the CIA, etc, coming forword to fight this blatant injustice? People are notoriously bad at keeping secrets.
And, do you choose to believe the one or few holding such beliefs, or should you believe the many others that disagree completely?
Think about the Global Warming ‘debate’ in that context, even if it doesn’t exactly qualify as a conspiracy theory.
People have extremely subjective memories too…
check out that documentary “Capturing the Friedmans”. It not only shows how police can abuse their power, to tragic ends – but also how public hysteria is easily manipulated into crazy beliefs.
Also, why wouldn’t the ‘mainstream media’ been jumping all over these stories too? Man, they love to exploit just about anything they can get their hands on, right? They must be part of the cover-up too then, right? Valerie Plame, CIA operative — doesn’t that story illistrate some of my points here?
JFK asassination by the mafia, moon landing being faked, the hit list on the Clinton cabinet members cover-up deal, Air Force hiding aliens down in New Mexico, etc etc etc…
The list is becoming endless, especially with the internet allowing any crack-pot idea to gain interest. Obama is a muslim….. Bush was responsible for 9/11… etc etc
There is also a wealth of material on-line discussing the phenomena of Conspiracy Theories, from many different academic disciplines and viewpoints.
People want to believe in some funny shit sometimes.
OK, I gotta say it knowing it will offend some – friggin’ Astrology. Many many folks put some level of belief in this shit, regardless of the scientific proof that refutes it quite easily.
I could go on and on about that. Life is this mysterious thing, and folks want to find some reason and order in it where there is none. I think religion is a way of coping with the fear of death as well… alot of Japanese are into the belief that ones’ charachter is determined by blood-type….
However, I am told that I don’t believe in anything, so there you go.
I remain unconvinced by what you have presented me, though appreciate the civility you showed presenting it. Uncommon these days, unfortunetly.
Dang, I had some links to post, but I think Kenric Ashe beat me to it. Nice work. Frankeib, whistle blowers do come forward (Gary Webb, Barry Seal), and sometimes the level of corruption has to be addressed by the media for damage control purposes (Iran-contra). By the way, I love me some conspiracy, but aliens, or faked moon landings, or any of type of thing I don’t touch. I won’t throw out any more links into the mix, save one. I would urge anyone interested in these topics, skeptic or not, to read this story by Catherine Austin Fitts. The former assistant Secretary of Housing under Bush the first, Managing Director and member of the board of Wall Street firm Dillon, Read & Co.http://solari.com/assets/PDFs/myth_of_the_rule_of_law.pdf
What the hell, these are good too…
CIA Drug Running Judge Bonner 11 19 1993 CBS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q28NagfegJY…
Excellent documentary on how Bush and Clinton were complicit in CIA drug running in the 80s. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8…
q=mena+connection&total=20&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=2#
CIA Drug Running DEA Agent Celerino Castillo Whistleblower 9 23 1996 CBS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBYz8Fk0sk0…
CIA Drug Running Rep Maxine Waters 10 23 1996 ABC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK21ITFf5Sc…
Dateline report on CIA drug trafficking http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=57…
CIA Drug Trafficking Allegations
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92KlBZQd4p4
@ frankieb
if you don’t like mike Rupert or whoever check out Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987 by Bob Woodward. Despite his recent tomfoolery I think he’s still viewed as a non-tinfoil hat journalist.
Aside from the open-ended closure which left many unanswered questions, there are several things through-out this artical that just don’t make any sense.
The guy “Diego” went through all that just for $600 bucks a month?! I don’t get it. If he were some poor villager/local who lived in rural Columbia, i suppose $600 would be alot of change. But the guy was living in CA & there $600 ain’t shit! I don’t see how “Diego” couldn’t have gotten a job as a dish-washer making easily twice that much. Then the article says that [now] lives in a [different] Latin American country. So like, was he even living in CA or not.
And the right-wing paramilitaries are mentioned as a “third party” apart from FARC & govt. soldiers. But i thought the paramilitaries WERE working for the [extremely right-wing] govt. of Columbia.
How did the Merc. even get ahold of this guy?
@DamosA Santiago de Cali simply referred to as Cali, is a city in western Colombia and the capital of the Valle del Cauca Department. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cali
Ahhh, 90mph for 7 hours = 630miles. You know, the entire length of Columbia. Sounds like half the guys you meet at a bar bragging how tough the shit is that they came from.