September 7, 2024 • 31 mins
Stephen Drill talks to journalist Richard McColl about living and working at the centre of the global cocaine trade.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We've had Narco coffee where coffee grains have been opened
up and cocaine inserted.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Into the individual grains.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Individual grains.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
We're talking with coffee beans. You mean nothing like that, actually,
just they're putting cocaine.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Into the beans, not into a packet.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hey there, Fiona here. Today we're bringing another bonus episode
from Cocaine Inc. My colleague Stephen Drill sat down with
freelance journalist Richard McColl who's based out in Columbia. Richard
had listened to our series and got in touch with Stephen.
The two got chatting about Stephen's reporting from Columbia for
(00:47):
our series, and Stephen felt it would be great for
you to hear some of Richard's insights. So from The Times,
The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia, this is Cocaine Ink,
a bonus episode Columbia Seized and Stolen Again.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Richard McColl is a British journalist who's lived in Columbia
for two decades. For this interview, Richard spoke with me
from a town called Mompos, which is about five hours
drive south of Cardahenia. That's the port city I visited
in episode three, where authorities are seizing rooms full of
cocaine bricks. Richard has reported and worked across South America
(01:37):
and knows the continent inside out. I started our conversation
by asking him about life as a reporter in the
country that's one of the world's main cocaine producers.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
I kind of got wary of always opening each introductory
paragraph with Columbia so long known for being the capital
of narco terrorism and Escobar, that I wanted to get
further into the story about Colombia rather than just headlines.
(02:12):
But you know, we have been in a civil conflict
in Colombia technically since nineteen sixty four, and this all
feeds into what is going on today and what creates
and a continuation of that, I would say, a Colombian
(02:36):
tragedy of such violence and suffering.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Well, can you give us a fifty year history in
perhaps five minutes? Can you give us some of the
main players now and how that came about? I know
there's fark, which is the revolutionaries in Colombia. Who are
they and why were they so entrenched.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
At nineteen sixty four? At the Cold War? There are
revolutionary groups in much of South America and Columbia is
no different. Columbia is a country where it is not equal,
the wealth is concentrated, and what starts as an uprising
and then consolidates as guerrilla warfare against the state. So
(03:20):
you have the FARK, that's the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia,
left wing revolutionary group, and they started in the nineteen sixties.
You have the el N, the National Liberation Army, and
then you have half a dozen other little groups. The
FARK was of course the biggest group and over time
(03:43):
committed heinous atrocities as the ELN did, human rights abuses,
genocide and so on. Kidnapping was rife. These groups controlled
much of rural Columbia because of course there was no development,
no communication, no access to these parts of Columbia. And
(04:04):
so when we talk about access, the Colombian government have
never seen the real need to invest in a like
a significant highway system or system of transport. And so
what you get are people who live in these isolated areas,
usually small holders and farmers, hoping to sell their products
(04:30):
at a highway or at a market nearby, and it
can take them up to eight hours to get to
a road. And so you've got this situation where it's
an underclass that has been overlooked since Columbia has been
a country that leads us all the way up to
the Peace of Cords of twenty sixteen signed with the
(04:52):
Fuck Gorillas. And that's one of the major major issues
and why the con inflict itself continues to this day,
is that there has been no land reform.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
So the divide between rich and poor is so extreme
that it was fertile ground for communism and communist groups
and these revolutionary groups. But also I will imagine fertile
ground for cocaine cartels, because if they came in and said, hey,
you can grow coca plants for us, that's one of
the few options they have. So you've got this fertile ground,
(05:28):
this inequality, and it can be exploited by people who
want to sell drugs.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And that's it, isn't it. It's the cartels, the gorilla groups,
newly formed criminal gangs. These are all the people that
get out to these distant areas and pay the farmers
for their product. The state isn't getting out there to
help them sell their milk or their crops.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Can you explain the role of the US and the
West in Cologne. Yeah, because we've got the communist groups.
And you said that this dispute, this war started in
nineteen sixty four. Now that's from my limited memory, that's
the Vietnam War. So you have Americans and Australians going
to Vietnam and spilling blood there to try and fight communism.
(06:17):
Did they get involved in Columbia the Americans.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
In a short answer, yes, in the sixties, there was
that great fear of the red tide of communism extending
up through Latin America and then across the Rio Grande
to the US. So there was an effort, but not
as much as you had, sort of like in Vietnam,
(06:42):
but there was an effort. The US involvement increases in
the nineteen seventies with the marijuana boom, but at the
same time Colombia has been seen as the most stable
democracy despite everything in South America. And then you get
(07:03):
the cocaine trade coming in, and then we're looking at
the war on drugs and that's where the real money
comes in. We're looking at Nixon, and we're looking at fumigation,
We're looking at US advisors on the ground. I've been
down to some of these areas, you know, with the
Colombian military. And there are these strange buildings built on
(07:28):
the side of the Colombian bases that we know are
used by US military, but they're there in advisory This
is today advisory capacities. And they don't wear uniforms. But
as soon as you start seeing my best expression is
corn fed white boys out there in the Columbia nowhere,
(07:48):
dressed in checkered shirts and jeans and not speaking Spanish.
These aren't, you know, Mormon settlers. These are military advisors.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
You talked about fumigational aerial spraying of coca plants. Now
have you gone through after seen where the coca plants
were sort of weak killed.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yes, Now, the fumigation it works to an extent, doesn't it.
But it is a poison and there are enough studies
out there to show that the after effects for generations
on the jungle, on the natural environment, and then of
course in the food chain and affecting the people that
(08:30):
live in these areas. And then of course it leaves
the ground baron if you're going to try and grow
something else by the same measure, the coca plant does
grow back, and that it was one of the key
key issues in the peace dialogues was the agreement was
built around stopping the aerial fumigation of coca crops, and
(08:53):
that was agreed to very quickly by the government of
President Santos, who was the president in at the time.
The subsequent government, so the last one here in Colombia,
President Doulque, they really wanted to reintroduce it, but fortunately
there was just such a national outcry and I think
(09:15):
a constitutional court ruled it as illegal because of the
effects it has on local communities.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Is that driven by the people on the ground, Because
for me, if I was a cartel, I'd be pretty
happy that you could no longer humigate plants from the air.
If you look at it from when that aerial sprang
with banned, the actual amount of plants that have grown
now is almost double, if not tripled, in the past
of the sever eight years.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
I mean, that's the million dollar or billion dollar question,
isn't it. When fumigation began, the cartels and the people
growing or the cartels buying the coca crops, they started
moving their cultivations and also making them smaller cultivations so
very difficult to fumigate. And of course cultivations were then
(10:08):
placed in extreme geography, so like a mountainsides and so on.
Again even more difficult to fumigate because you've got to
get a pilot in there to make top gun style maneuvers.
And then the other thing they did is they moved
their small cultivations into national parks. And it's illegal to
(10:32):
fumigate national parks as well, So the coca trade will
find a way. It's too economically viable, the coca trade
finds a way.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
So like that tree that's at the front of your hotel,
with me, the dog can weigh on it, that you
can conquering on it, you can cut it down, it'll
still come back. What about the border. We've talked about
why coca plants grow so well, but there's another part
of the coqua trade and cocaine trade that is also
(11:04):
equally important. That's the border with Venezuela. Because when I
was in Colombia, it was pointed out to me regularly
said any homeless people, they're not Colombian. Now that may
have been national pride, but I think there's a fair
point to it. There are so many people in Colombia
who are from Venezuela and that's such a basket case
that people are willing to go out there. I mean
(11:26):
they're willing to walk all the way to the US
border for goodness sake. So how big is that border
between Columbia and Venezuela.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
It's huge. It runs from the Quahereda Pinonsula, so that's
right up in the northeast of Colombia all the way
down into the bottom near to Brazil. I mean it
runs the wholeway. A lot of it is only the
border areas are only accessible by river ways, and so
(11:53):
the Columbia Navy does not plice them as much. So again,
these are cocaine high ways in a small area beside
the border city of Kukuda in Colombia. I know for
a fact that in a space of a couple of
kilometers there are more than twenty prochas, that's illegal crossing
(12:17):
points from the Venezuela and Columbia border to get people across.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
We're talking less than every hundred meters seventy five meters.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
One of them will be controlled by a gorilla group,
another one will be controlled by a newly formed illegal gang.
And so you pay a wage, a small fee to
get through and you're through the authorities or the military
in Venezuela get their cut. Let's be entirely honest. Corruption
(12:49):
pervades all levels of society, not only in this region.
But let's just look at Venezuela, and that allows the
coca paste, the cocaine product, to get all the way
out to the ports in Venezuela and to leave. And
this is what has created a lot of upturning violence
(13:12):
in Jamaica because cocaine that comes out of Venezuela, a
lot of it goes up via Haiti. But there's also
another border. Let's look at the southern border with Ecuador.
And Ecuador has been in the news in the last
few months because it was seen as the country that
defied all odds as being a peaceful country sandwiched between
(13:35):
the two major coca producing countries of Peru and Colombia.
It wasn't majorly affected by the violence. It was only
seen as a transshipment point and as a strange consequence
of the Piece accords in Colombia that took two thirds
(13:56):
of the fark gorillas out of the equation. Well, criminal
groups in Ecuador, funded in part by Albanian groups, took
over the transshipment from the fuck through Ecuador using major violence,
and that's what led to Ecuador being in the situation
(14:19):
that it is now. The port of guya Kill on
Ecuador's coast is known as one of the major transshipment
ports for cocaine. A lot of it arrives at the
port of Rotterdam, which of course you covered in the podcast,
and out of Venezuela. Several ports going up through the Caribbean,
and of course we do have cocaine that goes straight
(14:41):
across to Africa and then up into Europe. This is
a globalized economy in Ecuador.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Now we've seen gangs go and take over a live
television studio in the past twelve months. They actually took
on on air one of the major morning shows and
we're threatening to shude people on there. We've had a
political assassination one of their main political leaders in the
past twelve months, where it was once before relatively in
comparison quite stable, I mean. And this is the as
(15:13):
you say, the globalization of the drug traders, because once
you get to that point, how do you stop it?
And I think that's the hard thing as well. I've
spoken to a lot of police. Police have to have meetings,
they talk about things. They have to have days off,
they've got sick days, they've got days where they stop.
(15:33):
When one of their sovello officers have died and they
actually on them, they might have a funeral. The criminal
gangs don't do that. If they want to do something differently,
they change in five seconds. If they don't like their rival,
they shoot them. They don't stop to bury somebody. They
just keep going. Life to them isn't worth anything. So
you're competing with people who just don't care. And that's
(15:57):
a really imbalanced equation.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Policeman has a family, he wants to save his life.
He does not earn enough money to put his life
on the line. And not earning enough money and not
being able to make ends meet and seeing his friends
die also makes people entirely corruptible. And I'm not saying
(16:22):
that the police force is one hundred percent corrupt, but
of course there are corrupt actors in every level and
that's a real issue. And as we've talked about the
creativity of the economic model of the cocaine trade, we've
had Narco bananas coming out of Santa Marta that's on
(16:43):
the Caribbean coast, So cocaine being packed inside bananas and
packed inside boxes, and it's a preferred method of getting
cocaine on big ships over to Europe because it's a
perishable and so it needs to be fast tracked through
and so people it's easier for people to look the
(17:04):
other way. We've had Narco coffee where coffee grains have
been opened up and cocaine inserted into them, individual grains,
individual grains.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Which the coffee beans, you mean, nothing like that, actual
just they're putting.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Cocaine into the beans, not into a packet.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Just coming back to on poss where you are now,
that's about four or five hours from Cardagena. Can you
tell us about when some of the cocaine was actually seen?
So even when the police and the authorities do a
good job in Columbia, how hard is it? What happened
when the police seized a fair amount of cocaine and
(17:44):
was in Cardagenia? What happened?
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Yeah, there was there was a big seizure some years ago,
a container full of cocaine and the authorities got it
and so it was being held at the port under
police watch. Up there in Kurtahena and it was tons. Well,
the cartel came in, they knew the hour, or they
paid people off to walk away. There was only one
(18:08):
person guarding it when they came up. Whoever that was
the poor man lost his life. They killed him, stole
the product back, put it into several smaller trucks and
vehicles and drove it south over roads. The road checkpoints
were paid off beforehand, because we have checkpoints. This is Columbia.
(18:28):
We're still a nation in conflict. There are checkpoints. They
went off to their lunchtime at these times, you know,
the trucks would go through. And then when you used
to come down to near to where Montboss is, we
didn't have any bridges. We now have bridges. They've been built.
We just had and I'm sure you have them in
Australia and i know i've seen them in the US.
Just sort of like barges, almost like homemade barges where
(18:52):
your truck drives up onto it and they could almost
have just got an outboorn outboard motor and a punt
and they just sort of push it a cross a
river and then you drive off again. Well, the trucks
came up, they drove onto the barges, and they paid
every single one of these boat drivers to go home
for the day, so they paid them a day's wage
(19:13):
and more, and they left all of the barges on
the other side of the river. So the military chasing
this product suddenly couldn't get across the river, so they
were stuck. The military was stuck on one side of
the river. And then out here it's huge farms, huge areas,
(19:33):
and for the government to then sort of, let's say,
deploy the airplanes or radars or what have you, this
takes time. You don't just scramble them. So they just
drove these trucks off into farms, into warehouses and hid
them there until the noise the dust settles, and then
were able to take it back up to whichever port.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
It's kind of that was stolen. This was cocaine that
was seized by the police. It's gone to Calahelia, and
then it's been taken back and then it still got out.
It raises the other question, which we've talked a little
bit about in the podcast. Not a great deal, but
we have had some questions about it. In our bonus episode,
(20:16):
listeners got in touch with questions and one thing that
came up a lot was legalization. Basically, if we were
to legalize cocaine, would that be the silver bullet to
stop all the bloodshed associated with the trade. Where do
you say on this?
Speaker 1 (20:30):
It's the question I asked myself all the time as
a father, all I think about, obviously, in this perspective,
my two kids. It would be hard for me to
imagine them going down to a cafe. Oh Dad, we're
just going to do a couple of lines at the
same time. All of the offcuts of cocaine, so like
(20:53):
the low quality stuff that are down and out smoke here,
like a type of crack that can't be legalized. We
had an area of bullet now known as the Bronx,
which was four square blocks of anything goes and the
police just kind of had a ring round it to
make sure that nothing came out of there. I know
(21:15):
that a local politician, a left wing politician, has talked
about why doesn't the government buy all of the coca
the coca plants for traditional things to use it in
fabrics and fibers, But that would never pick up the
slack of the money. So I tend to veer towards
some sort of regulation. It needs to be an entirely
(21:39):
international agreement because if the US aren't on board, then
it just collapses completely.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Well, this is the thing because I spoke to someone
in Columbia about and asked them the same question, and
I said, well, if they did that, if we go
alone and say right, we're going to legalize or we're
going to regulate cocaine, America can just dumb Columbia out
of the banking system. Yeah, and they would because if
you get they could lose all the support and the
(22:07):
international support. That happened. So it has to be a
worldwide agreement. But even if it was legalized, what's to
stop it being grown in the next field. The government
buys all the cocaine and then well that's just from
Field A. They can go to Field dead and put
it there and make a stronger version.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
There isn't There was an experience I had on the
Colombian Pacific coast where a whole society was entirely altered
by the cocaine trade. And this is not a single case.
This is other cases as well. Is that traditionally the
communities on the Pacific coast, they're fishermen. There are small
(22:50):
airports near these towns, they sell the fish to buyers
that then sort of let's say fly them in to
meddie In for the fish markets or Buda Da. But
they were getting more money by finding the let's say,
those bundles of cocaine thrown overboard when the Colombian navy
would come along and find the Narco subs, so the
(23:12):
Narco submarines or vast boats shipping north to Central America.
They were getting more money from that because they would
then get an anomymous number to call or send a
message to with obviously a code to say that they'd
found a bundle of cocaine, and the cartel themselves would
buy it back from them. So you'd see people living
(23:35):
in abject poverty fishermen, but suddenly they had, you know,
fifty inch TVs and a sound system to rival a nightclub,
because that's where the money got spent. But this changed
society because the airplanes going to medi Inn or Borgata
with the fresh fish were no longer going with the
(23:58):
fresh fish. When they were to go many end back
to these towns. Normally they would take things to stock
up the pharmacies. Well, now the planes weren't traveling because
they weren't returning with anything, so that the pharmacies were
running out of the medicines, and you started seeing people
like the schizophrenics wandering around town because they weren't getting
(24:22):
their medicines. And at the same time, women the traditional
communities got tired of never having any fish to prepare
for their families. So the whole society flipped, whereas men
would go out looking for the bundles of cocaine thrown overboard,
and women would start fishing, which is not traditionally a
(24:45):
women's job, to ensure that the whole economic model once
again returned to how it was previously. I mean, there
are stories like this all over Columbia. There are parts
of the country where selling cocaine paste was legal tender,
so when you had cocaine paste, you would pay your
(25:06):
doctor's visit with cocaine and then the doctor would then
sell it on to a cartel. And a great friend
of mine, who is a conflict photographer, has a book
where gorilla fighters would come into town and go to
the local brothel with cocaine pace and pay the women
(25:29):
for their services in cocaine paste. And you can go
to these towns today and they will talk about it.
Oh yeah, back before we actually had the Colombian peso,
this is how it's done.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
So it was actually currency. It was like tinder. It
was legal tender in the way because there wasn't It
was such an isolated area that they.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Couldn't get these exact Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
That's extraordinary. So what you're talking about there is development
that would take not just years, but decades and decades
without corruption and decades with persistence. And that's really hard
because here in Sydney and here in Melbourne, there's just
so much demand for cocaine and it's almost laughed about
(26:12):
it. It's not even seen as a negative anymore. It's like
and it's almost like passing your joint. So I think
we've got a long way to go. There's no easy
answer to any of these problems. But that's I think
in some ways why the podcast has been so worthwhile
to do, because it is such a complex issue and
(26:32):
we are all playing a significant part in it.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
It's yeah, I mean, as you say, it's decades, it's generations,
and Columbia will always be tired with the stigma of
this conflict, the stigma of Pablo Escobar, the stigma of
being the number one coca cocaine pace producer. The government
(26:59):
will continually make bold declarations and statements about the seizure
of coca. The cartails now have more than they know
what to do with it. That's why coca seizures keep increasing.
But really does it actually even make a dent in
the cartel's profit? I mean, that's the big question. Well,
(27:21):
the prices largely remain the same with the cocaine market.
What has gone on is a there's a more pure
and more concentrated product out there now.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
The purity has gone up. That's the thing. People are
still using the same amount of cocaine, but instead of
getting twenty to sixty percent purity, which is what you
get here on the streets of Sydney and Melbourne, it
goes up higher. And in some ways that can make
it more addictive, because if you're getting better coke, then
you're going, this is great, I'll get more. And that's
(27:53):
so the market's always going to be in demand. One
thing that you mentioned, and something that I noticed in
my travels as well, was we were actually I was
with some police in Columbia in a hotel and there's
four of us that went up to the room and
then someone knocked on the door that were worried that
we were there and we're going to be in prostitutes
(28:15):
into the rooms. I mean, how b is the problem
or the industry of prostitution and also how willing or
are these women doing this by choice or or is
it a little bit more sinister than that.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Well, prostitution is legal in Colombia, but the pimping, so
anyone as an in between in business is illegal. But
prostitution is a massive, massive industry. There is a huge
hangover from the let's say the heady days of the
(28:53):
Narco cartels, the opulence of these narco cartels where we're
very much seen as objects and prizes for the cartels.
When you have a society where it takes I think
it was statistically it's thirteen or fifteen generations to pull
(29:15):
yourself out of poverty. You're always going to get those
who look for anything to get out of a situation
that they were born into, and lots of I would say,
sexual tourists coming down from Europe North America to take
advantage of strat the strong dollar and pound, with people
(29:41):
from a very precarious background.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
And this is an oblique way to sort of ended,
but it's also reality because if you think about it,
you've got people coming in with a strong dollar of
the strong pound to be sex tourists, and that, in
a way is a sort of paradigm what's happening with
the cocaine trade. The rich people in the West, in America,
in the UK, in Australia, they're using their adult they're
(30:06):
not directly going there to actually participate, but they are
changing the economy of Colombia and that's having real negative
effects on people. It is sort of just a real
sad story of what's happened to a beautiful country.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Colombia is known for its amazing people, amazingly friendly society,
and every single family here, without exception, rich or poor,
has been affected at some level by the conflict and
the conflict which has been extended due to the cocaine
(30:48):
trade itself.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
That's a good note to end on. Thanks so much, Richard,
and appreciate your time.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
Cocaine Inc. Was a joint investigation from the Times, The
Sunday Times and News Corp Australia. The reporters were David Collins,
Steven Drill and Me Fiona Hamilton. The series was produced
by Sam Chanterassak. The executive producers were Will Row and
Dan Box. Audio production and editing on this episode is
(31:22):
by Martin Peralta, with original music by Tom Virchell. And
as always, thanks for listening. Do leave us a review,
a nice one ideally, and please get in touch if
you have any questions. Our email is in the description notes.
We've had Narco coffee where coffee grains have been opened
up and cocaine inserted.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Into the individual grains.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Individual grains.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
We're talking with coffee beans. You mean nothing like that, actually,
just they're putting cocaine.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Into the beans, not into a packet.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hey there, Fiona here. Today we're bringing another bonus episode
from Cocaine Inc. My colleague Stephen Drill sat down with
freelance journalist Richard McColl who's based out in Columbia. Richard
had listened to our series and got in touch with Stephen.
The two got chatting about Stephen's reporting from Columbia for
(00:47):
our series, and Stephen felt it would be great for
you to hear some of Richard's insights. So from The Times,
The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia, this is Cocaine Ink,
a bonus episode Columbia Seized and Stolen Again.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Richard McColl is a British journalist who's lived in Columbia
for two decades. For this interview, Richard spoke with me
from a town called Mompos, which is about five hours
drive south of Cardahenia. That's the port city I visited
in episode three, where authorities are seizing rooms full of
cocaine bricks. Richard has reported and worked across South America
(01:37):
and knows the continent inside out. I started our conversation
by asking him about life as a reporter in the
country that's one of the world's main cocaine producers.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
I kind of got wary of always opening each introductory
paragraph with Columbia so long known for being the capital
of narco terrorism and Escobar, that I wanted to get
further into the story about Colombia rather than just headlines.
(02:12):
But you know, we have been in a civil conflict
in Colombia technically since nineteen sixty four, and this all
feeds into what is going on today and what creates
and a continuation of that, I would say, a Colombian
(02:36):
tragedy of such violence and suffering.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Well, can you give us a fifty year history in
perhaps five minutes? Can you give us some of the
main players now and how that came about? I know
there's fark, which is the revolutionaries in Colombia. Who are
they and why were they so entrenched.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
At nineteen sixty four? At the Cold War? There are
revolutionary groups in much of South America and Columbia is
no different. Columbia is a country where it is not equal,
the wealth is concentrated, and what starts as an uprising
and then consolidates as guerrilla warfare against the state. So
(03:20):
you have the FARK, that's the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia,
left wing revolutionary group, and they started in the nineteen sixties.
You have the el N, the National Liberation Army, and
then you have half a dozen other little groups. The
FARK was of course the biggest group and over time
(03:43):
committed heinous atrocities as the ELN did, human rights abuses,
genocide and so on. Kidnapping was rife. These groups controlled
much of rural Columbia because of course there was no development,
no communication, no access to these parts of Columbia. And
(04:04):
so when we talk about access, the Colombian government have
never seen the real need to invest in a like
a significant highway system or system of transport. And so
what you get are people who live in these isolated areas,
usually small holders and farmers, hoping to sell their products
(04:30):
at a highway or at a market nearby, and it
can take them up to eight hours to get to
a road. And so you've got this situation where it's
an underclass that has been overlooked since Columbia has been
a country that leads us all the way up to
the Peace of Cords of twenty sixteen signed with the
(04:52):
Fuck Gorillas. And that's one of the major major issues
and why the con inflict itself continues to this day,
is that there has been no land reform.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
So the divide between rich and poor is so extreme
that it was fertile ground for communism and communist groups
and these revolutionary groups. But also I will imagine fertile
ground for cocaine cartels, because if they came in and said, hey,
you can grow coca plants for us, that's one of
the few options they have. So you've got this fertile ground,
(05:28):
this inequality, and it can be exploited by people who
want to sell drugs.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And that's it, isn't it. It's the cartels, the gorilla groups,
newly formed criminal gangs. These are all the people that
get out to these distant areas and pay the farmers
for their product. The state isn't getting out there to
help them sell their milk or their crops.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Can you explain the role of the US and the
West in Cologne. Yeah, because we've got the communist groups.
And you said that this dispute, this war started in
nineteen sixty four. Now that's from my limited memory, that's
the Vietnam War. So you have Americans and Australians going
to Vietnam and spilling blood there to try and fight communism.
(06:17):
Did they get involved in Columbia the Americans.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
In a short answer, yes, in the sixties, there was
that great fear of the red tide of communism extending
up through Latin America and then across the Rio Grande
to the US. So there was an effort, but not
as much as you had, sort of like in Vietnam,
(06:42):
but there was an effort. The US involvement increases in
the nineteen seventies with the marijuana boom, but at the
same time Colombia has been seen as the most stable
democracy despite everything in South America. And then you get
(07:03):
the cocaine trade coming in, and then we're looking at
the war on drugs and that's where the real money
comes in. We're looking at Nixon, and we're looking at fumigation,
We're looking at US advisors on the ground. I've been
down to some of these areas, you know, with the
Colombian military. And there are these strange buildings built on
(07:28):
the side of the Colombian bases that we know are
used by US military, but they're there in advisory This
is today advisory capacities. And they don't wear uniforms. But
as soon as you start seeing my best expression is
corn fed white boys out there in the Columbia nowhere,
(07:48):
dressed in checkered shirts and jeans and not speaking Spanish.
These aren't, you know, Mormon settlers. These are military advisors.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
You talked about fumigational aerial spraying of coca plants. Now
have you gone through after seen where the coca plants
were sort of weak killed.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yes, Now, the fumigation it works to an extent, doesn't it.
But it is a poison and there are enough studies
out there to show that the after effects for generations
on the jungle, on the natural environment, and then of
course in the food chain and affecting the people that
(08:30):
live in these areas. And then of course it leaves
the ground baron if you're going to try and grow
something else by the same measure, the coca plant does
grow back, and that it was one of the key
key issues in the peace dialogues was the agreement was
built around stopping the aerial fumigation of coca crops, and
(08:53):
that was agreed to very quickly by the government of
President Santos, who was the president in at the time.
The subsequent government, so the last one here in Colombia,
President Doulque, they really wanted to reintroduce it, but fortunately
there was just such a national outcry and I think
(09:15):
a constitutional court ruled it as illegal because of the
effects it has on local communities.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Is that driven by the people on the ground, Because
for me, if I was a cartel, I'd be pretty
happy that you could no longer humigate plants from the air.
If you look at it from when that aerial sprang
with banned, the actual amount of plants that have grown
now is almost double, if not tripled, in the past
of the sever eight years.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
I mean, that's the million dollar or billion dollar question,
isn't it. When fumigation began, the cartels and the people
growing or the cartels buying the coca crops, they started
moving their cultivations and also making them smaller cultivations so
very difficult to fumigate. And of course cultivations were then
(10:08):
placed in extreme geography, so like a mountainsides and so on.
Again even more difficult to fumigate because you've got to
get a pilot in there to make top gun style maneuvers.
And then the other thing they did is they moved
their small cultivations into national parks. And it's illegal to
(10:32):
fumigate national parks as well, So the coca trade will
find a way. It's too economically viable, the coca trade
finds a way.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
So like that tree that's at the front of your hotel,
with me, the dog can weigh on it, that you
can conquering on it, you can cut it down, it'll
still come back. What about the border. We've talked about
why coca plants grow so well, but there's another part
of the coqua trade and cocaine trade that is also
(11:04):
equally important. That's the border with Venezuela. Because when I
was in Colombia, it was pointed out to me regularly
said any homeless people, they're not Colombian. Now that may
have been national pride, but I think there's a fair
point to it. There are so many people in Colombia
who are from Venezuela and that's such a basket case
that people are willing to go out there. I mean
(11:26):
they're willing to walk all the way to the US
border for goodness sake. So how big is that border
between Columbia and Venezuela.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
It's huge. It runs from the Quahereda Pinonsula, so that's
right up in the northeast of Colombia all the way
down into the bottom near to Brazil. I mean it
runs the wholeway. A lot of it is only the
border areas are only accessible by river ways, and so
(11:53):
the Columbia Navy does not plice them as much. So again,
these are cocaine high ways in a small area beside
the border city of Kukuda in Colombia. I know for
a fact that in a space of a couple of
kilometers there are more than twenty prochas, that's illegal crossing
(12:17):
points from the Venezuela and Columbia border to get people across.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
We're talking less than every hundred meters seventy five meters.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
One of them will be controlled by a gorilla group,
another one will be controlled by a newly formed illegal gang.
And so you pay a wage, a small fee to
get through and you're through the authorities or the military
in Venezuela get their cut. Let's be entirely honest. Corruption
(12:49):
pervades all levels of society, not only in this region.
But let's just look at Venezuela, and that allows the
coca paste, the cocaine product, to get all the way
out to the ports in Venezuela and to leave. And
this is what has created a lot of upturning violence
(13:12):
in Jamaica because cocaine that comes out of Venezuela, a
lot of it goes up via Haiti. But there's also
another border. Let's look at the southern border with Ecuador.
And Ecuador has been in the news in the last
few months because it was seen as the country that
defied all odds as being a peaceful country sandwiched between
(13:35):
the two major coca producing countries of Peru and Colombia.
It wasn't majorly affected by the violence. It was only
seen as a transshipment point and as a strange consequence
of the Piece accords in Colombia that took two thirds
(13:56):
of the fark gorillas out of the equation. Well, criminal
groups in Ecuador, funded in part by Albanian groups, took
over the transshipment from the fuck through Ecuador using major violence,
and that's what led to Ecuador being in the situation
(14:19):
that it is now. The port of guya Kill on
Ecuador's coast is known as one of the major transshipment
ports for cocaine. A lot of it arrives at the
port of Rotterdam, which of course you covered in the podcast,
and out of Venezuela. Several ports going up through the Caribbean,
and of course we do have cocaine that goes straight
(14:41):
across to Africa and then up into Europe. This is
a globalized economy in Ecuador.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Now we've seen gangs go and take over a live
television studio in the past twelve months. They actually took
on on air one of the major morning shows and
we're threatening to shude people on there. We've had a
political assassination one of their main political leaders in the
past twelve months, where it was once before relatively in
comparison quite stable, I mean. And this is the as
(15:13):
you say, the globalization of the drug traders, because once
you get to that point, how do you stop it?
And I think that's the hard thing as well. I've
spoken to a lot of police. Police have to have meetings,
they talk about things. They have to have days off,
they've got sick days, they've got days where they stop.
(15:33):
When one of their sovello officers have died and they
actually on them, they might have a funeral. The criminal
gangs don't do that. If they want to do something differently,
they change in five seconds. If they don't like their rival,
they shoot them. They don't stop to bury somebody. They
just keep going. Life to them isn't worth anything. So
you're competing with people who just don't care. And that's
(15:57):
a really imbalanced equation.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Policeman has a family, he wants to save his life.
He does not earn enough money to put his life
on the line. And not earning enough money and not
being able to make ends meet and seeing his friends
die also makes people entirely corruptible. And I'm not saying
(16:22):
that the police force is one hundred percent corrupt, but
of course there are corrupt actors in every level and
that's a real issue. And as we've talked about the
creativity of the economic model of the cocaine trade, we've
had Narco bananas coming out of Santa Marta that's on
(16:43):
the Caribbean coast, So cocaine being packed inside bananas and
packed inside boxes, and it's a preferred method of getting
cocaine on big ships over to Europe because it's a
perishable and so it needs to be fast tracked through
and so people it's easier for people to look the
(17:04):
other way. We've had Narco coffee where coffee grains have
been opened up and cocaine inserted into them, individual grains,
individual grains.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Which the coffee beans, you mean, nothing like that, actual
just they're putting.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Cocaine into the beans, not into a packet.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Just coming back to on poss where you are now,
that's about four or five hours from Cardagena. Can you
tell us about when some of the cocaine was actually seen?
So even when the police and the authorities do a
good job in Columbia, how hard is it? What happened
when the police seized a fair amount of cocaine and
(17:44):
was in Cardagenia? What happened?
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Yeah, there was there was a big seizure some years ago,
a container full of cocaine and the authorities got it
and so it was being held at the port under
police watch. Up there in Kurtahena and it was tons. Well,
the cartel came in, they knew the hour, or they
paid people off to walk away. There was only one
(18:08):
person guarding it when they came up. Whoever that was
the poor man lost his life. They killed him, stole
the product back, put it into several smaller trucks and
vehicles and drove it south over roads. The road checkpoints
were paid off beforehand, because we have checkpoints. This is Columbia.
(18:28):
We're still a nation in conflict. There are checkpoints. They
went off to their lunchtime at these times, you know,
the trucks would go through. And then when you used
to come down to near to where Montboss is, we
didn't have any bridges. We now have bridges. They've been built.
We just had and I'm sure you have them in
Australia and i know i've seen them in the US.
Just sort of like barges, almost like homemade barges where
(18:52):
your truck drives up onto it and they could almost
have just got an outboorn outboard motor and a punt
and they just sort of push it a cross a
river and then you drive off again. Well, the trucks
came up, they drove onto the barges, and they paid
every single one of these boat drivers to go home
for the day, so they paid them a day's wage
(19:13):
and more, and they left all of the barges on
the other side of the river. So the military chasing
this product suddenly couldn't get across the river, so they
were stuck. The military was stuck on one side of
the river. And then out here it's huge farms, huge areas,
(19:33):
and for the government to then sort of, let's say,
deploy the airplanes or radars or what have you, this
takes time. You don't just scramble them. So they just
drove these trucks off into farms, into warehouses and hid
them there until the noise the dust settles, and then
were able to take it back up to whichever port.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
It's kind of that was stolen. This was cocaine that
was seized by the police. It's gone to Calahelia, and
then it's been taken back and then it still got out.
It raises the other question, which we've talked a little
bit about in the podcast. Not a great deal, but
we have had some questions about it. In our bonus episode,
(20:16):
listeners got in touch with questions and one thing that
came up a lot was legalization. Basically, if we were
to legalize cocaine, would that be the silver bullet to
stop all the bloodshed associated with the trade. Where do
you say on this?
Speaker 1 (20:30):
It's the question I asked myself all the time as
a father, all I think about, obviously, in this perspective,
my two kids. It would be hard for me to
imagine them going down to a cafe. Oh Dad, we're
just going to do a couple of lines at the
same time. All of the offcuts of cocaine, so like
(20:53):
the low quality stuff that are down and out smoke here,
like a type of crack that can't be legalized. We
had an area of bullet now known as the Bronx,
which was four square blocks of anything goes and the
police just kind of had a ring round it to
make sure that nothing came out of there. I know
(21:15):
that a local politician, a left wing politician, has talked
about why doesn't the government buy all of the coca
the coca plants for traditional things to use it in
fabrics and fibers, But that would never pick up the
slack of the money. So I tend to veer towards
some sort of regulation. It needs to be an entirely
(21:39):
international agreement because if the US aren't on board, then
it just collapses completely.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Well, this is the thing because I spoke to someone
in Columbia about and asked them the same question, and
I said, well, if they did that, if we go
alone and say right, we're going to legalize or we're
going to regulate cocaine, America can just dumb Columbia out
of the banking system. Yeah, and they would because if
you get they could lose all the support and the
(22:07):
international support. That happened. So it has to be a
worldwide agreement. But even if it was legalized, what's to
stop it being grown in the next field. The government
buys all the cocaine and then well that's just from
Field A. They can go to Field dead and put
it there and make a stronger version.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
There isn't There was an experience I had on the
Colombian Pacific coast where a whole society was entirely altered
by the cocaine trade. And this is not a single case.
This is other cases as well. Is that traditionally the
communities on the Pacific coast, they're fishermen. There are small
(22:50):
airports near these towns, they sell the fish to buyers
that then sort of let's say fly them in to
meddie In for the fish markets or Buda Da. But
they were getting more money by finding the let's say,
those bundles of cocaine thrown overboard when the Colombian navy
would come along and find the Narco subs, so the
(23:12):
Narco submarines or vast boats shipping north to Central America.
They were getting more money from that because they would
then get an anomymous number to call or send a
message to with obviously a code to say that they'd
found a bundle of cocaine, and the cartel themselves would
buy it back from them. So you'd see people living
(23:35):
in abject poverty fishermen, but suddenly they had, you know,
fifty inch TVs and a sound system to rival a nightclub,
because that's where the money got spent. But this changed
society because the airplanes going to medi Inn or Borgata
with the fresh fish were no longer going with the
(23:58):
fresh fish. When they were to go many end back
to these towns. Normally they would take things to stock
up the pharmacies. Well, now the planes weren't traveling because
they weren't returning with anything, so that the pharmacies were
running out of the medicines, and you started seeing people
like the schizophrenics wandering around town because they weren't getting
(24:22):
their medicines. And at the same time, women the traditional
communities got tired of never having any fish to prepare
for their families. So the whole society flipped, whereas men
would go out looking for the bundles of cocaine thrown overboard,
and women would start fishing, which is not traditionally a
(24:45):
women's job, to ensure that the whole economic model once
again returned to how it was previously. I mean, there
are stories like this all over Columbia. There are parts
of the country where selling cocaine paste was legal tender,
so when you had cocaine paste, you would pay your
(25:06):
doctor's visit with cocaine and then the doctor would then
sell it on to a cartel. And a great friend
of mine, who is a conflict photographer, has a book
where gorilla fighters would come into town and go to
the local brothel with cocaine pace and pay the women
(25:29):
for their services in cocaine paste. And you can go
to these towns today and they will talk about it.
Oh yeah, back before we actually had the Colombian peso,
this is how it's done.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
So it was actually currency. It was like tinder. It
was legal tender in the way because there wasn't It
was such an isolated area that they.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Couldn't get these exact Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
That's extraordinary. So what you're talking about there is development
that would take not just years, but decades and decades
without corruption and decades with persistence. And that's really hard
because here in Sydney and here in Melbourne, there's just
so much demand for cocaine and it's almost laughed about
(26:12):
it. It's not even seen as a negative anymore. It's like
and it's almost like passing your joint. So I think
we've got a long way to go. There's no easy
answer to any of these problems. But that's I think
in some ways why the podcast has been so worthwhile
to do, because it is such a complex issue and
(26:32):
we are all playing a significant part in it.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
It's yeah, I mean, as you say, it's decades, it's generations,
and Columbia will always be tired with the stigma of
this conflict, the stigma of Pablo Escobar, the stigma of
being the number one coca cocaine pace producer. The government
(26:59):
will continually make bold declarations and statements about the seizure
of coca. The cartails now have more than they know
what to do with it. That's why coca seizures keep increasing.
But really does it actually even make a dent in
the cartel's profit? I mean, that's the big question. Well,
(27:21):
the prices largely remain the same with the cocaine market.
What has gone on is a there's a more pure
and more concentrated product out there now.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
The purity has gone up. That's the thing. People are
still using the same amount of cocaine, but instead of
getting twenty to sixty percent purity, which is what you
get here on the streets of Sydney and Melbourne, it
goes up higher. And in some ways that can make
it more addictive, because if you're getting better coke, then
you're going, this is great, I'll get more. And that's
(27:53):
so the market's always going to be in demand. One
thing that you mentioned, and something that I noticed in
my travels as well, was we were actually I was
with some police in Columbia in a hotel and there's
four of us that went up to the room and
then someone knocked on the door that were worried that
we were there and we're going to be in prostitutes
(28:15):
into the rooms. I mean, how b is the problem
or the industry of prostitution and also how willing or
are these women doing this by choice or or is
it a little bit more sinister than that.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Well, prostitution is legal in Colombia, but the pimping, so
anyone as an in between in business is illegal. But
prostitution is a massive, massive industry. There is a huge
hangover from the let's say the heady days of the
(28:53):
Narco cartels, the opulence of these narco cartels where we're
very much seen as objects and prizes for the cartels.
When you have a society where it takes I think
it was statistically it's thirteen or fifteen generations to pull
(29:15):
yourself out of poverty. You're always going to get those
who look for anything to get out of a situation
that they were born into, and lots of I would say,
sexual tourists coming down from Europe North America to take
advantage of strat the strong dollar and pound, with people
(29:41):
from a very precarious background.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
And this is an oblique way to sort of ended,
but it's also reality because if you think about it,
you've got people coming in with a strong dollar of
the strong pound to be sex tourists, and that, in
a way is a sort of paradigm what's happening with
the cocaine trade. The rich people in the West, in America,
in the UK, in Australia, they're using their adult they're
(30:06):
not directly going there to actually participate, but they are
changing the economy of Colombia and that's having real negative
effects on people. It is sort of just a real
sad story of what's happened to a beautiful country.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Colombia is known for its amazing people, amazingly friendly society,
and every single family here, without exception, rich or poor,
has been affected at some level by the conflict and
the conflict which has been extended due to the cocaine
(30:48):
trade itself.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
That's a good note to end on. Thanks so much, Richard,
and appreciate your time.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
Cocaine Inc. Was a joint investigation from the Times, The
Sunday Times and News Corp Australia. The reporters were David Collins,
Steven Drill and Me Fiona Hamilton. The series was produced
by Sam Chanterassak. The executive producers were Will Row and
Dan Box. Audio production and editing on this episode is
(31:22):
by Martin Peralta, with original music by Tom Virchell. And
as always, thanks for listening. Do leave us a review,
a nice one ideally, and please get in touch if
you have any questions. Our email is in the description notes.
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