PART III
8
The period from 1970 onwards saw an explosion in the means devoted to fighting narcotics around the world. As of 1967 the Federal Bureau of Narcotics employed 295 agents: by the year 2000 the DEA would count more than 4,000 field personnel. As of 1967 active staff abroad totalled 23 people. By the early 1990s the DEA possessed 293 agents in 73 foreign offices. The FBN had functioned on an insignificant budget throughout its history. In 1997 the DEA received its first billion-dollar allowance, itself a small slice of the sums allocated to American drug enforcement.1 There was also a qualitative leap. Ronald Reagan, when president, passed legislative amendments enabling the military to assist in drug enforcement.2 The change ushered in the deployment of helicopters, gunships, aircraft and special operation units in what had essentially been a detective’s field. This is without counting the means allocated to the chase by the countries of the European Union, by UNODC and the UN agencies, or by the states within whose borders it took place, especially in Latin America.
There were victories, even spectacular victories. Another characteristic of the fight is that it featured actions against a handful of drug lords: high-profile figures destined to make it to the front pages of newspapers or as characters in television series. Most of them fell, some in dramatic scenes – epitomized by Pablo Escobar’s 1993 killing by multiple gunshots while trying to escape on a house roof. Yet the war was lost. Beefier enforcement did not stem the tide that was the fiftyfold rise in refined opiates and thousandfold surge in cocaine use described in the last chapter. New gang bosses took the place of the old. Trafficking thrived, becoming more diversified both geographically and in its product range. Supply suppression proved once again a costly fool’s errand as the sources of drugs, extinguished in one place, merely sprang up in another.
The assault began with the 1970s campaign against the French Connection. President Nixon’s strategy was two-pronged, and it was effective. At one end, it leant on the Turkish government to shut down poppy cultivation. At the other, it shamed the French authorities into prosecuting the Marseilles-based heroin refiners and dealers.
These tactics were well adapted to the differing conditions in both countries. In Turkey, opium cultivation, collection and morphine-base refining were all fragmented. There was no gang boss or cartel to be decapitated. From the farmer, the opium gum went to countless small collectors, who were either local notables or the underlings of caïds further up the chain. These caïds refined the opium gum into morphine base and dealt with the French buyers. Transport was similarly decentralized. There were many routes. A small proportion still passed through Lebanon for shipping out, but by 1970 this outlet was heavily patrolled. Most of the product now moved by road, via Bulgaria, Austria, Yugoslavia and Germany, where the borders were weakly policed.3 (Inquisitive journalists from Newsday crossed the borders into Germany and France multiple times, proudly displaying bags of sugar behind their windshields or on their car seats: they were never stopped.4) Extinguishing cultivation was the best way to curtail supply from that side.
At the French end, the bull needed to be taken by the horns. The Marseilles underworld, which handled refining into heroin and smuggling into the USA, remained no more than a loose alliance of gangs. By contrast with Turkey, these nevertheless revolved around a few key bosses and expert chemists. They could be persuaded to quit. The French ganglands were also shot through with rivalries. Cracking down, experience showed, might push the clans to take each other out.
The ground for the French Connection is believed to have been laid in the 1930s, but it is after the Second World War that the networks developed, linking the Anatolian plateau all the way to American street dealers. The Marseilles old-timers had made the mistake of collaborating with the Germans: eliminated or forced to flee, from 1945 they made room for a new generation. The new traffickers, most of them Corsican, coalesced around two main gangs. For a while the Guerini clan was in the ascendant, led by its chief Antoine Guerini and his three brothers. The second spot was taken by Jo Renucci. (It was Renucci who originally set up the Lebanese route in collaboration with the racketeer and trafficker Samil Khoury, and it is believed he was a friend of Lucky Luciano.) In 1958 Renucci was succeeded by his lieutenants Marcel Francisci and Dominique and Jean Venturi. In the mid-1960s Antoine Guerini fell victim to a gang war. His brothers were soon jailed for a murder that took place on the day of his funeral. The Francisci-Venturi consortium became paramount.5
The two clans may have battled it out with guns, but the Francisci–Venturi team enjoyed an edge in that it possessed better political connections. Francisci, like the Guerinis, owed his ascent to his participation in the French Resistance. But while the Guerinis were closest to the socialist mayor Gaston Defferre, the Francisci–Venturi boasted allegiance to the more powerful Gaullist political family. Marcel Francisci, born in 1919, had been made a prisoner of war in 1939 but had escaped and had served with distinction among the Free French. In 1946 he had joined the RPF, the Gaullist political party. Later he would be known to lend financial support to its successor, the UNR/UDR, and to provide protection to its Corsican candidates during campaigns in the unruly French south. Francisci was only ever arrested on minor charges and always quickly released. An American agent seconded to France reported that local police froze every time Francisci was mentioned.6
Yet cooperation between the French worlds of trafficking and politics went further. De Gaulle returned to power in 1958 in the midst of a particularly violent war of Algerian independence. An organization of die-hard colonialists named the OAS (Organisation armée secrète) ran a militia performing assassinations and acts of terror in both Algeria and metropolitan France, threatening the state’s very integrity. In response, the Gaullist regime resorted to extra-legal means, sponsoring the formation of a freelance SAC (Service d’action civique) to run a dirty war against the OAS. The SAC, numbering around 15,000, recruited heavily among Marseilles mobsters.7 It also coordinated with the French secret services, the SDECE. There is good reason to believe that the SDECE itself made use of Corsican mob muscle; its agents are known to have crossed the porous line between crime and covert ops.
There is even tentative evidence that some of the SDECE’S ops were funded through heroin trafficking into the United States. On 5 April 1971, a New Jersey customs agent discovered 45 kilograms (100 lb) of heroin hidden in a Volkswagen van on board the freighter Atlantic Cognac. Its owner, Roger Delouette, was arrested when he came for the car. Under interrogation he claimed to be working for the SDECE. The heroin was an accessory to his mission, he argued. While the French foreign ministry disavowed him, it confirmed that Delouette had been a secret agent. Another five men with SDECE pasts were arrested for heroin trafficking around that time: Ange Simonpieri, Christian David, André Labay, Joe Attia and Michel-Victor Mertz. In 1971 a Paris court convicted Mertz alongside his associate Achilles Cecchini. Cecchini was let go for medical reasons, and it is believed Mertz was quietly released from his five-year sentence.8 Mertz, a resistance hero, had once saved De Gaulle’s life by warning of a bomb plot against him. Though the Algerian war was long over, the SDECE owed a debt to the SAC and its mobster allies, some of whom it continued to employ even as they nurtured the tendrils of the French Connection.
After De Gaulle’s departure, this invulnerability began to fray. Georges Pompidou’s arrival as president shortly preceded Nixon’s declaration of war on narcotics. An embarrassingly high number of French Connection operatives were soon caught in the USA or in third countries. In March 1971 the Paraguayan police arrested Auguste Ricord, who had been running a gang of several men exporting heroin to Miami. The Ricord arrest helped net another French group working from Brazil. Meanwhile American agents seized 82 kilograms (180 lb) of heroin aboard the Italian liner Rafaello which they tied to the low-level dealer Richard Berdin. Berdin, grabbed on his way to a New York hotel, informed on a drug ring including several more second-tier French traffickers as well as American mafiosi. This in turn led to the arrest of André Labay, another gangster claiming to be working for the SDECE.9
Pompidou had meanwhile installed a new head at the agency, with instructions to carry out a purge. Ties to the SAC were severed, and Alexandre de Marenches, the new SDECE chief, fired 815 people.10 The French authorities at last moved against the Marseilles gangs and their labs. In March 1972 the police caught Jo Cesari, considered by some ‘the best heroin chemist in the world’.11 Cesari, who had been arrested before, hanged himself during his subsequent incarceration; he told the prison doctor that the heroin seized in the raid was to have been his last batch.12 Seizures that year rose from 125 to 576 kilograms.13 The French police caught no fewer than 108 traffickers.14 The pressure in turn invited infighting among the gangs: gangsters, when released, were suspected of having talked and were often attacked, leading to retaliation. During the first half of 1973 thirty mobsters were murdered in Paris, Marseilles and Lyon. The Paris and Marseilles police forces made yet more arrests, netting another thirty in a single month.15 Many of the independent dealers and members of the upper rungs fell.
The Guerini clan had already collapsed. This left only the top of the Francisci–Venturi organization in place. Jean Venturi possessed extensive legitimate business interests, including a travel agency, an export firm, a theatre and a painting company. He had briefly worked as a salesman for the spirits company Ricard in Montreal – his superior there was no less than Charles Pasqua, SAC founder, politician and future minister of the interior.16 Marcel Francisci owned bars and restaurants in Marseilles and Corsica as well as casinos – an ideal front and tool for laundering drug money. He had also made it into Paris society.17 Both he and Venturi apparently stood too far up the chain to be touched. The likelihood is that they were discreetly persuaded to remove themselves from the trade. Venturi lived until 2011. Marcel Francisci was shot by gunmen in a Paris car park in 1982 in mysterious circumstances.18 It was not an enviable end, yet both he and Venturi join the list of the drug barons to have enjoyed moneyed and comfortable retirements, alongside William Jardine, Elie Eliopoulos, Hoshi Hajime and Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano.
Success at the French end was cemented by Turkish cooperation at the other. Just as seizures rose in France and the trade became more dangerous, the Turkish supply faltered. An army coup had seen the replacement of Prime Minister Sulayman Demirel by Nihat Erim, with whom the American president would shake hands on the White House lawn. Erim announced that the 1971–2 poppy harvest would be the last. The supply collapsed. In the summer of 1972 the anti-narcotics administration reported a heroin shortage on the American East Coast. The drought persisted into 1973, and in September that year Nixon proclaimed: ‘We have turned the corner on drug addiction in the United States.’19
The Turkish ban was not built to last. In Afyon province – the name itself means ‘opium’ – about 75,000 farming families grew poppies at the time. The plant was part of the peasants’ life: they ate the leaves in salads and flavoured their bread with the seed.20 The proposed American aid, $35 million, was rightly judged low in Turkey, where no guilt was felt at foreign addiction problems. National elections saw Nihat Erim replaced by Bulent Ecevit at the beginning of 1974. Ecevit had campaigned against the ban. He promptly authorized the resumption of cultivation in seven provinces, to apply to the 1974–5 season, and he instructed the Ministry of Agriculture to replenish seed stocks.21
In a final reversal, however, the campaign was saved by technological innovation. Turkey announced that its poppies would now be used for straw conversion into morphine, under a new chemical and mechanical process. This bypassed the collection of opium gum by incision that was so prone to clandestine handling. The new method had the further advantage that it was less labour-intensive than milking poppy sap, leaving the farmers time for other activities or crops even while they continued to draw in revenues. Village leaders became responsible for their farmers’ delivery of the poppies, and inspectors were appointed to perform regular checks during harvest. In 1975 the DEA described the controls as ‘remarkably effective’. In 1981 the USA gave exclusivity to Turkey and India for opium supplies to its pharmaceutical industry.22 There would be no more diversion.
The French Connection was dead. Turkish opium had at last been placed under control. It ceased to be diverted in any significant amounts. Its French handlers had died, were behind bars or had quit, and their labs had been shut down. The hydra’s head had been cut off. Two more were free to sprout in its place.
The United States Vice Secretary of State Marshall Green made the first known mention of a ‘Golden Triangle’ where opium production was concentrated, overlapping Burma, Laos and Thailand, at a press conference in 1971.23 The leader of the Trafficante mafia family, a key French Connection client, had gone on a prospecting tour of Saigon, Hong Kong and Singapore three years before. The Corsicans were already there.24
As of 1960 the Golden Triangle’s opium output may have stood somewhere around 500 tons. While some of this was refined into morphine base, a large share continued to be consumed as smoking opium or sold raw for refining elsewhere. This output would rise to over 1,000 tons in the 1970s and to 2,000 tons by 1990.25 Golden Triangle laboratories had by then added the final step to their production processes: refinement into heroin. In terms of potency, this added another multiplier to the fourfold rise in raw volume. Most production, accordingly, was now for export. As the Turkish supply fell, Southeast Asian producers picked up the slack.
The Golden Triangle was born of a triple legacy. First, local opium networks took over from the French and British monopolies once established in Indochina and Burma. Second, trafficking in refined products owed its revival to the relocation of Chinese gangs from the mainland – including that of Du Yuesheng, the gangster who, it will be remembered, had once been master of Shanghai’s French Concession. Third, the trade owed its resilience to the infrastructure put in place in the 1950s by the Kuomintang forces in exile.
The French had closed down their Indochinese opium monopoly after the Second World War, but in the colony’s dying days they had renewed ties with the drug in order to shore up their crumbling position. The French military, beleaguered and harassed by the Viet Minh, enlisted ethnic and religious factions to safeguard territory, attack enemy supply lines and provide intelligence: hill tribes, Catholic militia from the Tonkin delta, river pirates south of Saigon. These auxiliaries needed to be paid and supplied with weapons. The solution was Operation X, ‘a clandestine narcotics traffic so secret that only high-ranking French and Vietnamese officials even knew of its existence’.26 Led by the SDECE, this entered into full swing between 1951 and 1954. A Mixed Airborne Commando Group (MACG) bought opium in bulk from Hmong and Tai tribal leaders, flew it south and sold it to Binh Xuyen bandits, who served as Saigon’s militia and ran its opium traffic. The Binh Xuyen divided their receipts between the MACG and the deuxième bureau. Any surplus was sold on to Hong Kong smugglers or Corsican syndicates for shipment to Marseilles.27
After independence the South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem cleaned up. This included a ferocious battle in and around Saigon in 1955, in which the Binh Xuyen were pushed back into the mangrove forest. Yet when the South Vietnamese regime faced its own insurgency, it resorted to the same means. Its secret police now sourced opium in neighbouring Laos and sold it to a Chinese syndicate in Saigon. The product moved by way of charter airlines operated by Corsicans, the most prominent of which was Air Laos commerciale, run by the ‘flamboyant’ Bonaventure ‘Rock’ Francisci (not a relative of Marcel Francisci). Later a Laotian general named Ouane Rattikone decided to take over the trade for himself. He continued to buy from the tribal irregulars who had worked with the French, but he evicted the Corsicans. The Corsicans gone, the intelligence services in Saigon now had the opium brought over on regular commercial flights or on Vietnamese Air Force planes.28
A share of this opium was sold for profit in Saigon itself. It continued to be smoked, but some of it was sold as heroin, especially to the increasingly numerous American GIS. The remainder was exported, either refined or as morphine base to be further processed in Hong Kong. The trade there was run by the successors of Du Yuesheng, who during the Second World War had fled to the British colony. After he died, in 1951, Cantonese Triad bosses had taken his operations over, including his chemists. By the early 1970s, ten or so heroin labs were producing the grey no. 3 product sold locally but also pure white no. 4 for export to the USA and Europe. Hong Kong traffickers also sourced some product from Thailand – it was smuggled north on fishing trawlers whose crews transferred their cargo by burying it on desert beaches or dropping it in floating steel drums for picking up.29
Opium production in the Golden Triangle was not evenly spread, however. According to a 1968 American Bureau of Narcotics estimate, Thailand’s hill tribes harvested approximately 200 tons annually.30 Laos may have contributed another 100–150 tons.31 But most of the Golden Triangle opium originated in Burma. It was accordingly in Burma that the first of the late twentieth-century drug lords arose, and against him that the first great hunt began: Khun Sa.
Khun Sa’s storied rise was tied to the convoluted Burmese politics. Burma was changed forever when General Ne Win became prime minister in 1958 and installed himself as dictator in 1962. Ne Win imposed a brutal, one-party socialist regime. He also robbed of their autonomy the cultural minorities inhabiting the country’s vast and poorly accessible highlands. Both this and his blanket nationalization programme pushed these minorities into revolt. Among the discontented were the Shan, whose settlement overlapped eastern Burma, Laos and Thailand and who speak a language close to Thai. In 1963 Ne Win encouraged the organization of private militias called Ka Kwe Ye (KKY), self-financed through business and trade, whose mission would be to help the government fight the rebels. Many of these defected, though they sometimes returned to the fold when it was convenient to do so. There also remained the Kuomintang generals in exile and their forces to contend with. The ensuing decades saw a disorderly three-way conflict between Rangoon’s forces, the Kuomintang remnants and Shan independence fighters, soon to become a four-way conflict through the addition of a Maoist insurgency.32
Zhang Qifu, by his original name, was an unlikely champion of the Shan cause. Though his mother was Shan, his father, who had died early, had been culturally Chinese. What education he received was chiefly Chinese. He only assumed the Shan nom-de-guerre ‘Khun Sa’ past the age of forty, in 1976. Yet he was a talented guerrilla chief and a wily political plotter. He had also been the stepson of one of the main Shan chieftains, helping him raise a following. In 1963 he took the leadership of one of the KKY units nominally loyal to Rangoon: within one year he had defected.33
For a while Khun Sa was but one of several commanders and one of several actors on the Burmese opium market, but by 1967 he felt strong enough to challenge the force that remained dominant in the trade: the Kuomintang generals. Khun Sa’s guerrilla army had grown to about 2,000 troops. The emerging drug lord put 16 tons of opium gum on a 300-mule caravan and headed for Laos. There the product would be sold to General Ouane, the man who controlled the heroin route to South Vietnam. The sale would enable Khun Sa to enlist yet more men. Sensing danger, the Kuomintang generals waylaid Khun Sa’s column just as it reached Ban Khwan, its Laotian destination, where Ouane’s morphine-base refinery stood. A firefight ensued, both sides shooting from rifles, heavy machine-guns and mortars. (The press avidly dubbed the fight an ‘opium war’.) At that stage, Ouane saw his opportunity and ordered the Air Force to intervene. Both belligerents, bloodied, were forced to retreat. The Laotian general was able to seize the opium for free.34
The setback would prove temporary. More trouble brewed as, in an attempt at unification, Khun Sa opened talks with fellow Shan leaders in 1969. The Rangoon authorities got wind of the talks, and Khun Sa was captured and jailed. The silver lining was that the Kuomintang leadership was steadily retreating into the Thai sector of the Golden Triangle, where their welcome was but half-hearted. (One theory is that the Laotian intervention in Ban Khwan was never for real, and that it was contrived between Khun Sa and Ouane to rid themselves of the Chinese.35) Another Taiwanese airlift soon drew more of the Kuomintang away from the region.36 Demand for heroin was about to surge worldwide, and Turkey was ending poppy cultivation. The time was right, if only Khun Sa could get out of jail.
A stroke of luck came when one of Khun Sa’s commanders, who had continued fighting, captured a couple of Russian doctors in 1973. They were ransomed for the Shan chieftain, who was released the next year. Khun Sa thereupon united the Shan factions and, proclaiming himself leader of the independence struggle, established new headquarters at a town named Ban Hin Taek, actually in the northwestern hills of Thailand, close to the border. Laos lay in the throes of an insurrection. Khun Sa could now set up his own heroin refineries and smuggling networks. Ban Hin Taek was ideally situated, straddling the main route from Burma’s opium-growing regions and through the mountains where the new refineries nested. A dirt road connected to the rest of Thailand what became a boom settlement of two-storey concrete houses, marketplaces, cinemas, brothels and army barracks as well as a Chinese temple and a Shan pagoda.37
As business boomed and the Golden Triangle acquired notoriety, the settlement began to attract unwanted attention. It proved an embarrassment to the Thai leadership when Khun Sa began to be called ‘King of the Golden Triangle’.38 The American administration had signed bilateral drug treaties with Thailand and Laos in 1971 and 1972. The DEA’S presence was expanding in the region, where by late 1974 it employed 31 agents.39 The Burmese may have been powerless but Thailand, a long-standing U.S. ally, was another matter. In 1980 the Thai Air Force bombed Khun Sa’s base, destroying three chemical storage units. In 1982 Thai rangers stormed Ban Hin Taek. The battle left seventeen soldiers and 130 rebels dead.40
Khun Sa’s forces were nevertheless able to retreat across the border in good order. They built new headquarters on the other side, where they re-established their refineries.41 From this new base, they even moved against their last remaining competitor. The last shreds of the Kuomintang presence, including Khun Sa’s 1967 nemesis, General Li Wenhuan, had taken refuge in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where they dealt in drugs with corrupt Thai military officers. On 11 March 1984 a truck loaded with 7,000 sticks of dynamite erupted in the driveway of General Li’s mansion, destroying the house and leaving a crater 6 metres (20 ft) wide and 2 metres (6 ft) deep. Though Li was away in Bangkok, his heroin apparatus collapsed.42 In the second half of the 1980s Khun Sa’s position was strengthened again by the failure of the Burmese communist insurgency, which allowed him to sweep up even more of the regional opium. In 1987 the DEA estimated that his refineries processed 80 per cent of the Golden Triangle’s heroin. By 1989 he commanded more than 15,000 men. In a Newsweek interview, the drug lord himself bragged that he drew an annual income of $200 million from his labs.43
For several years, Khun Sa remained invulnerable. In 1987, under American pressure, the Thai mounted another assault on his forces. As reported by the government and press, the air force bombed his base, and the army followed in ‘hot pursuit’. But in April an American visitor arrived there and saw nothing. When asked about the recent fighting, Khun Sa laughed: ‘Oh that. That was a newspaper war.’ Thai and Burmese officials had come to explain that they stood to lose millions in drug-suppression funds. So they had worked out a deal: Khun Sa agreed they could come to the border and fire off guns and rockets into the air, helping them claim they were doing their part in fighting this ‘monster’, and in exchange he was allowed to build a new road leading from his headquarters into Thailand.44
It was only as the 1990s dawned that Khun Sa’s fortunes took a turn for the worse. In 1990 a New York federal grand jury indicted him for trafficking, the DEA having traced back heroin sold in the United States to his refineries. The American Attorney General called for his extradition.45 A change in regime made it more likely Burma might oblige.
In 1988 Ne Win had resigned and a new military junta, known as the SLORC, took power in Rangoon. This junta was determined to do away with tribal separatists. In December 1993 the members of the Shan State National Congress assembled in the town of Homong, Khun Sa’s base, to proclaim independence and confirm him as leader. This was too much. The next year, a modernized Burmese Army finally began advancing into the region, first cutting off or diverting opium caravans and eliminating the heroin refineries.46 Khun Sa’s lifeblood was being severed. This time, moving away was not an option. Deprived of their main resource, Khun Sa’s forces became increasingly brutal, massacring villagers who sold their opium elsewhere.47 At last, on New Year’s Day 1996, the Shan leader surrendered, inviting Burmese troops into Homong and ordering his soldiers to down weapons.
Yet even here, there was more than met the eye. It was a negotiated surrender, and the drug lord and his aides were ceremonially welcomed in Rangoon. Khun Sa retired to a lakeside villa not far from where Ne Win lived. From his new residence, he was allowed to run various investments. He was never extradited.48 In order to rid themselves of the United Shan Army, moreover, the SLORC had recourse to another long-time drug baron: Lo Hsing-han. Lo was another half-Chinese Shan chief who had originally risen as a KKY commander. He had briefly been paramount in the opium trade when Khun Sa sat in jail in the early 1970s, but he had been caught, in turn, in 1973. In 1980 Lo had been released and empowered to build a new militia. In 1989, with the encouragement of the Rangoon military leaders, he was able to set up a group of heroin refineries at his northern Burmese base and open his own trafficking route into Hong Kong. The quid pro quo was that Lo was to harass Khun Sa’s forces. After Khun Sa retired, Lo Hsing-han was left standing. He was never caught again.49
Governments and the media enjoy chasing drug lords because they make for high-profile hunts and well-publicized victories when they are captured or killed. The problem is that they are always replaceable. Under Khun Sa as under the Kuomintang generals, Burmese trafficking functioned more like a trading alliance than a centralized organization. Independent merchants owned most of the opium on the convoys, with less than half typically belonging to the overlord protecting them. These merchants paid a percentage tax upfront plus a fixed-price frontier tax for the service. But they were prone to move from one army to the other, from the Kuomintang generals to Khun Sa to Lo Hsing-han, and even the soldiers, who were known to trade on their own account, sometimes melded into former enemy units.50 A similar system prevailed in refining. Khun Sa’s heroin refineries were actually owned by Bangkok-, Hong Kong- and Taiwan-based syndicates who paid him duty in exchange for enjoying the protection of his army.51 It was easy for these clients to switch allegiance and move their chemists elsewhere. Burmese opiate trafficking, in other words, functioned more like a cartel, or at times overlapping cartels, than like a single fiefdom. When one chief fell, the cartel could always find another.
Drug control did notch up one victory in the Golden Triangle. Between 1970 and 2000 poppy cultivation was significantly brought down in Laos and Thailand. Laos instituted a state monopoly, purchasing opium from farmers for use by the pharmaceutical industry. It began punishing users harshly, sending them to re-education camps. With help from UNODC, it launched substitute development projects. Over time, China also contributed, providing funds and agricultural experts. From 2002 the programme attracted private agricultural companies which bought tracts of lands and established plantations, employing local farmers. Some villages where crop substitution was not viable were forcibly resettled. This carrot-and-stick approach reduced illicit Laotian poppy acreage close to zero by 2006, when UNODC declared the country poppy-free – though production may have crept up again after 2010.52
A comparable approach proved itself effective in Thailand. Initially spurred by a Nixon envoy, successive opium reduction programmes garnered the support of key Thai military and royal figures. Eradication and substitute development initiatives were picked up by the United Nations Fund for Drug Abuse Control (UNFDAC) and by official donors including the USA, Germany and Norway. The programmes at first focused on crop replacement (coffee, tea, silkworms, rice, beans, ornamental flowers and so on), then on the infrastructure to ensure these crops could be brought to market. Alongside, there were education programmes, with the foundation of schools to improve literacy, plus treatment courses and vocational training aimed at reducing local demand. In the last phase, in the 1990s, the government deployed large-scale development schemes, including the establishment of new schools and health facilities in hundreds of communities, the construction of thousands of kilometres of roads, and the electrification of isolated villages. The sequential opium-reduction initiatives took place in the context of a huge rise in GDP per capita.53 This broad-based approach produced results. At its height, in the mid-1960s, Thai poppy acreage is estimated to have been 18,500 hectares.54 This declined to less than 7,000 hectares in the 1980s and almost zero in the 2000s.55
Both Laos and Thailand proved that local successes could be achieved in the war on drugs. The question, at the same time, is to what extent their poppy acreage simply shifted elsewhere. In the 1980s and ’90s Burma picked up the shortfall. The Rangoon government was neither interested in nor capable of enforcing opium eradication, and Burmese substitution programmes all failed.56 Admittedly, Burmese opium tonnage itself peaked in the early 1990s. By 2000 it had halved, and while Burma has continued to be a significant source of illicit opiates in the twenty-first century, the peak was never recovered.57 Yet this was not a problem, from the traffickers’ perspective. New opportunities for growing and refining opium beckoned in Mexico, Pakistan and, especially, Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s opium, too, owed a debt to the old East India Company, this time via Pakistan. After Partition, Pakistan had inherited India’s opium system. While it had been free of poppy cultivation, it now licensed farmers to grow the crop on small plots. The state collected and sold the opium. In 1955 a processing factory was constructed in Lahore. The next year, cultivation was extended to another four districts including, fatefully, the North-West Frontier province. Pakistan had successfully fought for the 1961 Single Convention to include exemptions for quasi-medical opium use, with a fifteen-year window. In 1967 the government passed a set of Dangerous Drug Rules providing for the gradual restriction of the sector to the medical sphere. The long time window, however, allowed Pakistani poppy cultivation to endure. (Anslinger, who had furiously opposed the exemptions, had been right.) Controls were next to non-existent. The inefficient monitoring of licensed sales allowed traders to bypass the state. In practice there was no reduction.58
Around 1975 European buyers, deprived of their long-time Turkish supply, began prospecting in Pakistan. The first heroin labs opened in the same year, on the North-West Frontier and in Baluchistan province. A drought that hit the Golden Triangle in 1978–9 provided a further boost to what would come to be named the Golden Crescent (soon also to encompass Afghanistan). Finally, the Iranian Revolution and the eradication campaign that followed it pushed production into neighbouring Pakistan.59 By 1979 the country had become the world’s leading illicit opium producer with an output of over 800 tons.60
Under UN pressure and in the process of implementing strict Islamic moral laws, including on intoxicants, the government passed a ‘Hudood Ordinance’ in the same year, banning the production, handling and use of opiates.61 Since Pakistan was not registered with the INCB as a producer for the pharmaceutical market, this amounted to a total ban on poppy cultivation.62 Opiate manufacturing and distribution were punishable by thirty ‘stripes’ and five years’ imprisonment. Possession of over 1 kilogram of opium was sanctioned with longterm imprisonment and thirty stripes, and in 1997 the possession of 100 grams of heroin would become punishable by death.63
None of this had much effect in practice. The Pakistan Narcotics Control Board might try its best to enforce the regulations, but it was woefully ill-equipped. Fifteen years later, it still only possessed Second World War rifles and a total of 29 vehicles, most of them out of order. Seizures rose, and by 1982 between fifteen and twenty heroin labs were being raided every year. But new ones sprouted. The personnel of the Pakistan Narcotics Control Board became notably corrupt and in a few instances actually helped the traffickers. The first lab owner was only prosecuted in 1988.64
The problem was that corruption extended higher, to the state’s top echelons. Interpol listed General Fazal Haq himself, the governor of the North-West Frontier province, as a drug trafficker.65 The patron of various anti-narcotics NGOS, Haq was widely alleged to have raided rival heroin factories to bolster his own dominance. A Norwegian investigator connected the traffic all the way to a bank account of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the president of Pakistan, who was suspected of smuggling heroin in his official plane.66 A defendant in a drug trial claimed to have financed the 1985 election of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Benazir Bhutto, premier from 1988, announced a war against drugs, but her foreign minister was alleged to have smuggled 400 kilograms (880 lb) of narcotics in bags taken from his rice mills. Suspicions extended to Bhutto’s husband, who would have used the ministerial residence itself to engage in trafficking.67
Such obfuscation extended to statistics. Official reporting was that, in the 1990s, Pakistani opiate addict population numbered in the millions. Meanwhile a 1980s survey suggested each user injected the considerable dose of 0.9 grams of heroin per day. In combination, the reports led to the conclusion that Pakistan used more opium than was produced worldwide. A historian explains: ‘Exaggerating consumption by officials . . . attract[s] more foreign aid, a good part of which goes into overseas numbered bank accounts.’68 Pakistan’s heroin industry was nevertheless sizeable, in dollar terms. By one more realistic calculation, it had ballooned to $8 billion annually by the late 1980s. This was a substantial share of Pakistan’s legal economy and more than its entire foreign trade, helping the country earn the label of ‘narco-state’.69
Heroin was promised an even brighter future, however, in Afghanistan, into which the trade spilled via army and secret-service involvement. The evidence is that major drug syndicates existed inside the Pakistani Army itself. In June 1986 the police arrested an army major driving from Peshawar to Karachi with 220 kilograms (485 lb) of heroin. Two months later, it stopped an air force lieutenant carrying a package the same size, suggesting it was a standard load. Before the men could be questioned, they escaped under what Pakistan’s Defence Journal called ‘mystifying circumstances’.70 Yet it was the Pakistani isi (Inter-Service Intelligence), aided by the CIA, who played the greater role. In 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the CIA and its Pakistani allies saw an opportunity to hurt and perhaps inextricably bog down their Cold War foe. They began arming guerrillas. This came just at the point when Pakistan’s opiate industry was booming. Heroin offered a simple, inexhaustible means of funding the Afghan resistance.
What role the drug traffic may have played in paying for early weapon deliveries is not known, but they passed through camps set up on the North-West Frontier, where both opium cultivation and heroin refining flourished. Fleeing Afghans began growing opium alongside Pakistani farmers. As the Mujahideen captured land in Afghanistan, they encouraged the peasants to grow the crop there, too. Within a few years, this produced a harvest of several hundred tons. The refined product being more easily portable, guerrilla leaders eventually established heroin labs in Afghanistan itself, adding to what was produced on the North-West Frontier. From 1982 Pakistani army trucks were carrying weapons from Karachi to the border province, where they loaded heroin for the trip back. The funds were moved through the Anglo-Pakistani Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) – it would go bust, after a lengthy investigation, in 1991.71
Afghanistan, too, had its drug lord. Like Khun Sa, he was able to lay claim to a national cause. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was a fundamentalist Muslim who had protested secularizing reform in the 1960s. News reports claimed he had thrown acid in the faces of unveiled women students. The isi had nurtured him even before the Soviet invasion. In 1972 he had fled accusations of murder into Pakistan’s North-West Frontier. There, the Pakistani agency had set him up as a guerrilla leader for intervening across the border, though initially without scoring any successes. His luck turned in 1979. As the American weapons began flowing in, the isi insisted that Hekmatyar get the bulk of them. Though he was not alone, he became by the same token the largest dealer in Afghan heroin. He is known to have run six heroin laboratories in Pakistan in addition to what his organization may have been operating in Afghanistan.72
As in Burma, it is sometimes difficult to discern to what extent warlord participation in the heroin trade was instrumental and to what extent it became an end in itself. Other guerrilla commanders included Mullah Nasim Akhunzada, the ‘heroin king’ of the Helmand valley – ostensibly more interested in trafficking than in fighting the Soviets, with whom he was known to agree ceasefires.73 After Hekmatyar failed to take power in the scramble that took place from 1992, he lost isi support and eventually departed, abandoning what trafficking infrastructure he may still have controlled.74 As in Burma, however, his departure did not mean the end of poppy cultivation. The Taliban, who conquered the country in stages between 1995 and 1999, raised taxes on opium, heroin labs and transportation. The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, occasionally made noises about ending his reliance on heroin income. In 2001, for example, a proclaimed eradication campaign took advantage of a drought having hit production. The idea was to obtain UN recognition and perhaps raise aid money.75 Actually Afghanistan became entrenched, under the Taliban, as the world’s principal supplier of illegal opiates.
Also, as in the Golden Triangle, a system akin to connecting vessels ensured that as output fell in one country, it rose to compensate in the next. During the 1990s Pakistan mounted an attack on its own illicit traffic. Its secular elites were concerned that the heroin industry was becoming the basis for an isi-supported, fundamentalist stronghold. Benazir Bhutto, who returned as prime minister in 1993, created an Antinarcotics Task Force the next year, and this time there were more arrests. Seizures rose. Pakistan staged a bonfire of 400 kilograms (880 lb) of heroin and opium in Peshawar in February 1999, for example. From its peak of 800 tons, Pakistan’s opium output fell to 100–200 tons during the 1990s and even less at the end of the decade.76
Afghanistan’s rising production more than compensated. The mountainous country enjoyed the advantage that its soil and climate are ideally suited to poppy cultivation. Poppy yields per hectare averaged 40 kilograms in Afghanistan, against 12–14 kilograms in Colombia or Mexico.77 The country produced approximately as much opium as Burma, in 1995, on a third of the acreage.78 Afghanistan’s output passed the 1,000-ton mark in the late 1980s. This doubled again in the 1990s as Pakistani production fell. By the year 2000, Afghanistan had reached a peak of over 3,000 tons.79 By then, it was producing more than half the world’s illicit opium.80 It would remain number one in the twenty-first century as its opiate sector continued to expand at a rapid clip.
The finger is sometimes pointed at the secret agencies for this debacle. According to the testimony of a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, the isi remained involved in drug trafficking long after Hekmatyar had departed.81 The CIA itself played an important role in fostering the Afghan heroin industry at its inception. Nor was this the first time it condoned narcotics trafficking in pursuit of Cold War aims. As the historian of Southeast Asia Alfred McCoy has demonstrated with great persistence and courage, drugs were also made use of in American covert operations during the Vietnam war in the 1960s and ’70s and in support of the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s.
The CIA originally picked up the use of Hmong guerrillas as auxiliaries in Vietnam, after a five-year hiatus, from the French. Between 1960 and 1974 the CIA maintained a secret army of 30,000 Hmong tribesmen in mountainous northern Laos. These units fought both the Vietcong and Laotian communist insurgents. They guarded radar installations vital to bombing North Vietnam, and they rescued downed American pilots. Conditions were harsh. The Hmong army was collected from a narrow population. It enlisted teenage boys and used food as leverage to keep the villages obedient. Opium, a longstanding Hmong crop, was in this context the only lifeline to hand. The problem was that it needed to be transported: the solution was provided by Air America, a small commercial airline founded by an army major after the Second World War. The CIA acquired indirect control over it, and began using its aircraft to ferry troops and supplies around. Until 1965 Corsican charter airlines were still running the opium south. After the Laotian general Ouane expelled them, that role, too, was taken over by the CIA-owned airline.82
Subcommittee and press investigations have revealed that the American government likewise shut its eyes to drug-based fundraising by the Nicaraguan Contras, a guerrilla movement opposing the country’s left-wing regime. The Contras, entrenched in neighbouring Honduras, flew cocaine into the USA for the Colombian cartels and allowed traffickers to use their airstrips and fuelling stations to do so. After Congress cut off aid to the Contras in 1984, the principal that was Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North enlisted, at official behest, an American citizen residing in Costa Rica named John Hull, alongside a small team of ex-CIA people. With funds from the sale of American arms to Iran, this group bought aircraft and paid veterans to fly weapons to the Contras. Hull owned a ranch with six airstrips, in particular, that were off limits to local customs or police. But drug pilots en route from Colombia also paid Hull for his services. North’s own notebook explicitly referenced the use of CIA airplanes to transport cocaine paste. An FBI investigation into Hull’s activities was dropped upon notification that he was working for ‘agencies with other operational requirements’.83 Another Contra-related affair exposed by the San Jose Mercury News, which remains controversial, suggests that the CIA may even have shielded cocaine dealers in California itself for several years.84
The CIA’S preparedness to dabble in or at least shut its eyes to narcotics trafficking has generated considerable excitement among conspiracy theorists. Books continue to come out alleging some grand scheme of oppression, or gleefully pointing at American hypocrisy. It is necessary to point out, however, that the CIA has not been alone in this field. The Pakistani isi and the French SDECE, at the very least, have demonstrably done like it. At least three factors conspire to make drugs a ready recourse to intelligence agencies. The first is that state failure invites drug dealing just as it invites intervention, including covert intervention, by foreign states. Whether in Burma, Afghanistan or Colombia, the emergence of trafficking networks was made possible by breakdowns in state control spiralling into or bordering on civil war. The second is that trafficking attracts ruthless men for whom hiding and killing are a way of life. As the SDECE’S experience attests, these men make obvious recruits for covert missions of a violent kind. Third, drugs offer an ideal means of funding operations for which aboveboard budgets cannot be found. They are portable and earn high price points per kilo, and their illegality ensures that the trade in them comes with useful payment or money-laundering facilities.
Nor does it follow that the CIA or other intelligence agencies can be made responsible for the millions of drug addicts one finds around the world. No doubt the double standards these agencies practise are reprehensible, but their role in propagating drug use has never been more than marginal. Even in Afghanistan, where arguably the CIA’S involvement was the heaviest and where drugs played such an important part, the agency did little more than provide an early impulse to the poppy’s progress (though the isi has arguably been more deeply involved). Afghanistan’s heroin production enjoyed its greatest boom after the Soviet war was over, not during it. As UNODC writes: ‘Opium production accelerated after the Soviet withdrawal for two reasons: first, it provided a viable source of income for warring factions; and second, it had proven itself to be a viable crop for cultivation and rural livelihood and unlike the destroyed licit agricultural sector, had developed systems and infrastructure which actually functioned.’85 Afghanistan only overtook Burma as the world’s premier poppy grower in 1991.86 The poppy harvest has continued to grow since then, whether under Afghanistan’s warlords, the Taliban or the governments that have succeeded it.
As McCoy himself notes: ‘For forty years, the CIA fought a succession of covert wars around these two points at the antipodes of the Asian massif – in Burma in the 1950s, Laos in the 1960s, and Afghanistan in the 1980s . . . The CIA’S role in the heroin traffic was an inadvertent consequence of its cold war tactics.’87 The flourishing of heroin trafficking did not await the intelligence agencies, whose contribution was no more than ‘inadvertent’. With the exception of the French Connection, the trafficking networks concerned went on thriving long after the spies were gone. The drug lords of the Golden Triangle and Golden Crescent needed no special agent’s supporting hand. Neither, in Latin America, did the cocaine cartels.
The Medellín of the 1960s and ’70s was a somnolent place, home to a Colombian version of puritanism and the virtues of frugality, thrift and enterprise, though also beset by a genteel decline reflecting the struggles of its textile factories. Within a decade or so, it had been made famous by a new, far more hip and dangerous industry: cocaine, in which it dealt in tons. It also became home to one of the world’s most infamous bandits and perhaps the best-known figure in the entire long war on drugs.
Colombian trafficking first developed around marijuana plantations in the 1970s, when demand was booming in the USA and Europe. In the following decade, the government fumigated most of them.88 An economic crisis was meanwhile shaking the whole of Latin America as the commodities boom of that era ended and several countries found themselves over-indebted. Fiscal difficulties undermined the state everywhere, favouring corruption and the rise in influence of ruthless men with pocketfuls of hard currency. The same countries were at the same time undergoing demographic explosions. Poor peasants struggling to hold on to their farms were lured into growing coca. For those who drifted, dispossessed, into the towns, the well-paid jobs of refining, transporting or guarding cocaine offered life rafts. For the drug barons, it was easy to hire the more ambitious or desperate among them as gunmen or sicarios.
The economic crisis, nevertheless, did not hit Colombia as hard as its neighbours. The country did not default on its debt, and its economy was buoyed by new oil, coal and nickel mining ventures, while even its textile industry adapted and survived.89 Nor was Colombia even the home of coca: that privilege went to Peru and Bolivia. Two things, rather, favoured it as the future centre of the trade. The first was that it was strategically placed on the road to the all-important United States, where demand for the drug was growing geometrically. The second was that it had a history of violence and lawlessness, ensuring that its drug lords, when they emerged, were the most brutal.
Colombian cocaine was not at first home-grown: it was imported from further south. The product went through four stages. Peruvian or Bolivian peasants grew and harvested the bush. Local dealers processed the leaf into paste. Trafficker organizations refined this paste into the intermediary product that was cocaine base. This, finally, was flown out to the Colombians, who ran the laboratories for transformation into the end product: pure cocaine. The Colombians, of course, also took this cocaine to the United States and Europe and sold it there.
The regional cocaine industry began to take off in the 1970s. Though Peru was equally important, Bolivia provides an example of the boom and the features it assumed, as well as having been the home of one of its first notorious kingpins.90 The industry was particularly active in the densely forested, central region of Chapare. Small towns swelled in size, turning into centres for buying and selling leaf or paste. Coca farmers sometimes turned to making their own paste. A physically arduous task that took several days, this involved crushing the leaf mixed with corrosive chemicals (sulphuric acid, kerosene and lime) underfoot, then letting the solution dry. By 1985 police estimated that there were 5,000 coca pits in Chapare, one for every eight coca-growing families. Pits pockmarked the forest, criss-crossed by the trails leading to them. Cocaine meanwhile provided employment for people to collect and transport paste, liaise with traffickers to have it taken to market, contract and pay the stompers, provide them with food, transport the materials to the pits, construct them and so on, not including the boon to local restaurants, hotels, tradesmen and jewellers.91
Only large narcos organizations could churn the paste into cocaine base. The investments were sizeable: at least half a million to a million dollars for one lab. Just the chemicals – sulphuric and hydrochloric acid, potassium permanganate, acetone, ether and ammonia – were expensive. Placed deep into the jungle, the camps where refining took place functioned as self-contained communities complete with laboratories, sleeping quarters, kitchens and latrines. Some even had electric generators, refrigerators, televisions and gymnasiums. Then there were the landing strips, plus the aircraft. Bolivia’s cocaine industry was run, accordingly, by around 35 such organizations, most of them family businesses headed by a patriarchal figure.92
Much like the Burmese heroin industry, the sector was resilient, apt to recombine if one kingpin fell. Some families shared chemists, pilots, labs, assassins and government contacts. To the casual observer, nonetheless, Bolivian cocaine came to revolve around one egregious figure: Roberto Suárez. Suárez became famous for orchestrating the sensational ‘cocaine coup’, in which a band of traffickers took over an entire government.
Born in 1932 to one of Bolivia’s oldest lineages, a family of diplomats and ranchers, Suárez was a socialite. Well connected and successful, he owned property, and his wife was a former Miss Bolivia. They had four children. It has been rare, historically, for the well-to-do to embrace the illicit drug trade, but Suárez had one advantage: connections. Suárez had made the acquaintance of Klaus Barbie, a former Nazi and the wartime head of the Gestapo in Lyon, who had fled to Latin America. The ex-Nazi, in turn, had introduced Suárez to Luis Arce Gómez, a former chief of intelligence who operated an air taxi business and had been trafficking in cocaine since 1975. Barbie had also served in the Bolivian Interior Ministry and army intelligence, and he had put together a group of bodyguards styling itself the Fiancés of Death. With his backing, Suárez flatly offered General Luis García Meza $1.3 million to launch a coup, the condition being that Arce Gómez be made minister of the interior. A collective of traffickers would fund the military government at will, and they were ready to make a down payment of $70 million to help service Bolivia’s foreign debt. On 17 July 1980 the ‘cocaine coup’ took place.93
There followed one of the most unedifying episodes in the long war on drugs. At first, the generals took a percentage cut from cocaine: levying a tax of $2,000 per kilogram provided the government with around $200 million per year. Then they realized they could make more through the ‘concentration’ of the trade. Arce Gómez established a list of 140 smaller dealers to be ‘suppressed’ by paramilitary squads, including Barbie’s. He, Suárez, their associates and various army officers cashed in. Gómez was reputedly making $200,000 a week personally. He soon owned eleven planes and multiple mansions.94
After a while, even Meza began to find the whole display embarrassing. In February 1981 CBS television broadcast a merciless documentary programme accusing Arce Gómez of being Bolivia’s number one trafficker. The DEA demanded delivery of the top five cocaine dealers. Meza discreetly moved Gómez to a job at a military academy. He cleaned up the Fiancés of Death, also moving Barbie to a more quiet place. Yet it was only when Meza was ousted in a counter-coup in August 1981 that the whole ring fell. Arce Gómez fled, later to be captured and jailed on a long sentence. Barbie was extradited to France, were he was judged for his wartime crimes against humanity. Astonishingly, Suárez, who had been made to pay a get-out-of-jail $50 million by Meza, lived on to persevere in the trade.95 In 1983 he was able to meet with the new Bolivian president’s narcotics adviser and offer the government the perhaps apocryphal sum of $2 billion in four $500-million instalments.96 Power, regardless, was passing to the Colombians.
Pablo Escobar was born in 1949, during a particularly disturbing episode of civic strife known in Colombian history as La Violencia. His parents were middle-class, his father a middling cattle rancher and his mother a schoolteacher and director, though his grandfather had been a known smuggler. Escobar was no academic success. He dropped out of school just before his seventeenth birthday, three years short of graduation. He started out early as a petty swindler and thief. By the time he was twenty, he and the gang he had assembled had become adept at stealing cars, dismantling them and selling the parts. Later he bribed municipal authorities to be able to resell the vehicles whole, and finally he simply extracted protection money from car owners.97
Escobar lacked a towering physical presence: he was short, standing just under five feet and six inches, with a large, round face, black, curly hair which he wore long, and a thin moustache. His authority came from his fearlessness and complete absence of scruples in the face of violence. Escobar the car thief recruited thugs to kidnap people who owed him money or simply for ransom. If the family could not pay, the victim was killed. Sometimes the victim was killed even if the ransom was paid.98 Around 1974 he started moving cocaine across the Andes, ferrying small doses in ‘a rickety stolen Renault’ with built-in secret compartments – an activity that earned him a few months in prison.99 His break came the next year, when he met a young pilot who went by the nickname of Rubin and worked for one of the local cocaine chiefs, named Fabio Restrepo. Escobar met Restrepo and briefly worked with him, then had him killed and took his place. Rubin said of Escobar: ‘He was a gangster, pure and simple. Everybody, right from the start, was afraid of him. Even later, when they considered themselves friends, everybody was afraid of him.’100
In 1976 the future drug lord was arrested again, on his return from a run in Ecuador. The police found 39 kilograms (86 lb) of cocaine in his car trunk. Escobar tried bribing the judge, but the man turned the money down. But the trafficker hit upon the idea of hiring the judge’s estranged brother as his lawyer, prompting the magistrate to recuse himself. The new judge could be bribed, and Escobar was able to shake the charges. It was a close escape, typical of Escobar’s uncanny mixture of guile and bravado. Meanwhile the two policemen responsible for the arrest were killed.101
The episode that was the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar has come to typify the war on drugs in its post-Nixon phase. It was bloody and breathless, and it enlisted all the stereotypes about drug bosses. Though Escobar’s killing was hailed at the time it took place as a victory, with hindsight this victory has come to be recognized as pyrrhic, with scant result to show for the violence unleashed. Beyond the cops-androbbers story, it serves as a dramatic illustration of the damage wrought by the war on drugs on the countries where it has raged.
Within a few years, Pablo Escobar directly or indirectly controlled the Medellín traffic in cocaine. Business boomed, bringing about a lighting-fast transformation. At first he employed individual drug runners, known in the trade as mules, but soon he was operating a fleet of trucks and planes. His organization absorbed the smaller entrepreneurs, the labs, the distributors. What he could not take over outright, he ‘insured’: his thugs oversaw the delivery routes, exacting a tax on each kilo shipped and adding the load to his own shipments. Profits were reinvested into more labs and larger aircraft. By 1979 Medellín’s drug king was able to construct an estate outside the city on land worth $63 million. There would be an airport, a heliport, six swimming pools and artificial lakes. Escobar had exotic animals flown in – elephants, buffaloes, lions, rhinoceroses, gazelles, zebras, hippos, camels, ostriches – to fill the park.102
The gains did not all flow to one man. Medellín itself was transfigured. The price to pay for eating the forbidden fruit having yet to be asked, a city native recalls:
Medellín jolted alive. Discothèques sprang up in what were once empty overgrown lots along Las Palmas . . . The city’s first malls opened and stores selling an unheard-of array of imported items proliferated. Along the main road to the upper-class neighbourhood of El Poblado imported car dealerships mushroomed . . . It became usual to see the small grotto outside the crude little chapel of Sabaneta covered in expensive flowers and the field surrounding it crowded with late model BMWS, Mercedes Benz, and Montero jeeps as drug dealers and their wives and girlfriends paid their respects to the Virgin and expressed their gratitude for being alive.
. . . The adobe farmhouses gave way to concrete bunkers surrounded by security cameras that swivelled menacingly day and night at guarded steel gates painted strident tones of orange and red. Haphazardly planted orchards were transformed into well-manicured lawns dotted with miniature golf courses and huge stadium-like lights that insured against intruders. The road that local property holders had struggled for more than a decade to have paved was suddenly a smooth ribbon of tar and gravel that did not flood in the rainy season . . . And as if this were not enough, a bullring sprang up on land that had once been an empty field owned by a distant relative. Spanish bulls and bullfighters were shipped in and out by jet at huge expense for the pleasure of the local Mafiosi.103
Escobar is every so often pictured as a slob who ate only pizza, favoured the company of the soccer teams he bought and hired beauty queens to perform erotic games at his villa.104 Yet images of gold-chain-wearing drug dealers, even if accurate, also confuse and distract. Behind this facade surely was hidden a shrewd organizer, capable of masterminding the complex networks essential to handling billion-dollar sums, of whatever origin. Putting together million-dollar labs in remote locations, keeping distributors inside U.S. borders regularly supplied and faithful, maintaining tabs on the myriad payments while ensuring half of them did not go amiss: all this must have demanded detailed, everyday follow-up. Only a skilled businessman could be up to the job. (Another dubious characterization is that the drug lords were all, in spite of their violent nature, devoted family men, from Escobar to Félix Gallardo and El Chapo. Yet they all had multiple mistresses and fathered children out of wedlock.)
Or did it all rely on terror, with obscure but capable lieutenants performing the legwork? How the cartels worked from a business standpoint, their operating model, and their methods of trade remain poorly known. The impression is sometimes that the cartels functioned much like large corporations, and sometimes that they were more akin to markets where the bosses exercised, for a large fee, the judicial arbitration and enforcement normally reserved to the state. Certainly the Medellín cocaine industry was never completely centralized, earning its title as a cartel. Besides federating smaller operators under his protection, Escobar coordinated activities with another three families or gangs, each with their own boss: José Rodriguez Gacha, Carlos Lehder and Jorge Luis Ochoa. From the early 1980s, when the cartel was formed, members shared ties to political interests and oversight of the crucial distribution networks in the United States.105 Rodriguez Gacha’s organization, according to a U.S. Attorney General’s report, nevertheless maintained its own more centralized distribution. The report stated: ‘He has representatives in South Florida and southern California who are in charge of receiving, inventory control, accounts receivable, and general organizational support. Unlike the representatives of the Pablo Escobar group, who work on commission, Rodriguez’s U.S. representatives work on straight salary. They work regular business hours, wear suits and ties, and are instructed to keep a low profile.’106
This combination of hierarchy and amorphousness made for equal measures of vulnerability and resistance. Because the cartels involved at least a degree of organizational rigidity, they could be cut down to size if the kingpin was taken down. The Medellín cocaine trade never quite recovered from the falls of Lehder, Gacha and Escobar – yet neither did it completely die out. Even if one cartel could be destroyed, moreover, the same pattern of competitive collaboration between the regions ensured trafficking in Colombia as a whole would survive. Alongside the Medellín and Cali organizations, there existed a Bogotá and a North Atlantic Coast cartel – this last unit, with a presence in key American cities including Miami, Los Angeles and New York, provided smuggling and money-laundering services to the others.107 Organizations and methods of trade, finally, are likely to have changed and adjusted to circumstances over time. The Cali cartel, though it, too, possessed a few notorious figureheads, was ostensibly the more adaptable: ‘This apparatus utilized taxi cab networks, corrupted officials, and the ability to statistically determine opposing Colombian government activities by means of sophisticated analysis of phone and other records derived from the use of an actual IBM AS/ 400 super-computer. With shadowy and out of the limelight bosses sporting monikers like “The Chessplayer” and “el Señor”, the Cali organization relied far more upon its brains than on the barrel of a gun.’108 It would pounce when Escobar began to be fatally weakened.
‘We’re taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts. We’re running up the battle flag. We can fight the drug problem, and we can win,’ President Reagan announced in 1982.109 In the USA the cocaine boom was eliciting mounting anguish. Americans had begun taking the drug as crack, a crystalline, concentrated and more dangerous form that is not snorted but smoked. Both import and street prices were falling fast. Cocaine use was hitting record levels.110
The United States responded first by putting pressure on governments such as Meza’s in Bolivia to perform clean-ups. A similar angle of attack succeeded in the Bahamas, from one of whose islands Carlos Lehder ran his fleet of aircraft, yielding a temporary hit: pressure on the Bahamian government and persistent law enforcement in South Florida caused Lehder to lose his perch in 1983. (Having escaped, he would join Escobar’s gang before being captured and extradited in 1987.) As this Caribbean route became less practicable, however, the cartels began to shift their transhipments through Mexico.111 The American crack epidemic continued unabated.
In 1986 the American president issued a directive declaring drug trafficking a threat to national security for the first time. This allowed the use of military force for fighting drugs overseas.112 Multiple operations in Latin America based on the deployment of surveillance and military means followed. First came Operation Blast Furnace, a four-month mission during which the U.S. military and DEA worked with Bolivian police to locate and destroy cocaine-processing labs and trafficker airstrips.113 The next year came Snowcap, designed to cut cocaine output in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia by half within three years. After that would come Safe Haven, Ghost Zone, Support Justice and many more.114
Blast Furnace’s achievements were not promising. On 14 July 1986 nearly two hundred U.S. troops in full combat gear swooped down on Santa Cruz, a Bolivian trafficking centre, spilling out of c-130 transport planes. Their c-5A aircraft birthed six Black Hawk helicopters. The aim: to take down Roberto Suárez’s business, in one of the largest drug busts ever undertaken. The DEA itself sent in twenty agents. But the size of the operation – to the DEA men’s own dismay – had blown away any hope of secrecy: ‘The first bust was a lab about 50 miles north of their staging base known as El Zorro (The Fox). The site had two airstrips, and 15 large camouflaged tents housing about 75 workers. There was a restaurant, a children’s playground and a basketball court. The lab had been manufacturing 700 kilos of cocaine a week. When the Leopards [Bolivian special forces] arrived, however, no-one was at home. The lab had been dismantled and all that remained were a couple of barrels of gasoline and some chemicals.’115 Two months later, the U.S. forces decided to tackle another major cocaine centre: Santa Ana. On arrival, the eighty Bolivians and thirty Americans who carried out the raid were chased away by a 3,000-strong mob armed with machetes and shouting: ‘Kill the Yankees!’ They found no drugs and made no arrests.116
‘Victory over drugs is our cause, a just cause,’ proclaimed President George Bush after another three years. Operation Just Cause was about to begin, the 1989 invasion of Panama by 26,000 troops. Panama had been acting as a platform for cocaine-laden aircraft and as a money-laundering centre. Even its president, Manuel Noriega, was wanted in the USA on narcotics charges. The steamroller approach was this time more successful: the coup passed with little resistance, and Panama was forced to clean up its act, at least when it came to drug trafficking.117 While the canal state was an important waystation, however, it was not a vital centre. As a follow-on, Bush promised the governments of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia record contributions of $2.2 billion under a programme dubbed the Andean Initiative. The flow of cocaine would fall by 60 per cent over ten years, or so it was hoped.118 Among the multiple operations belonging to the Andean Initiative was one specifically targeting Colombia: Operation Support Justice. With the Medellín drug barons at the top of its hit list, it would at least achieve media success.
In 1988 Forbes estimated the Medellín cartel’s income at $8 billion per annum, and it placed Ochoa and Escobar among the world’s richest men.119 Escobar had five more years to live. As for Khun Sa in Burma, however, so for Escobar in Colombia. The seeds of the Medellín kingpin’s downfall were planted through his inability to avoid meddling in national politics.
In 1978 Escobar had been elected a substitute city council member in Medellín, and in 1982 he ran for parliament, standing as a substitute for Envigado, a Medellín suburb. Theoretically this granted him parliamentary immunity, but his election only gave rise to a tumultuous confrontation with Colombia’s justice minister, Rodrigo Lara, on the first day he appeared in chamber. Escobar would never forget the humiliation. Six months later, in 1984, the national police raided a large cocaine facility named Tranquilandia, belonging to fellow cartel kingpin Gacha. The police seized 14 tons of cocaine, the largest cocaine seizure in history at the time. The cartel retaliated by eliminating Lara, who was machine-gunned by a passing shooter on a motorbike while sitting in his Mercedes.120
The killing of a justice minister was a serious matter, and it could not go unpunished. President Belisario Betancur vowed at Lara’s grave to enforce a new extradition treaty with the United States. He placed the country under a state of siege, authorizing the police to confiscate narcos assets. The situation looked so bad that Escobar temporarily left the country. The treaty had to be nullified, he decided, and the cartel arranged for a lawsuit to be filed against it. But this strategy only caused him to wade into hotter waters. Escobar bribed the Attorney General for a favourable recommendation. He threatened the judges involved – four recalcitrant judges would be murdered. In November 1985 a guerrilla group named M-19 stormed the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, demanding among other things that the treaty be rescinded. The action caused the death of fifty Palace of Justice employees and eleven of the 24 justices while the guerrillas destroyed 6,000 criminal case files, including the records of proceedings against Escobar.121
Shortly thereafter, the Colombian Supreme Court declared the extradition treaty invalid on a technicality. It was but a short-lived victory: days later, a newly elected president, Virgilio Barco, signed it anew. Things threatened to look even more difficult if, as looked likely, the Liberal Party candidate Luis Galán became president in the upcoming elections. On 18 August 1989 a sicario with a sub-machine gun shot down Galán as he was making a campaign speech. But the traffickers realized that his appointed successor, César Gaviria, was no better. To get rid of him, the Medellín cartel embarked on the most notorious crime in its career: that November, believing Gaviria was on the flight, the narcos planted a bomb on an airliner belonging to the company Avianca, blowing it out of the sky and killing 110 people.122
It was a point of no return. Barco again increased the means devoted to fighting the cartel. The Medellín bosses responded with a communiqué declaring ‘total and absolute war on the government’.123 Cartel sicarios attacked judges, policemen and informants. They gunned down a former chief of the anti-narcotics police together with several pro-extradition legislators.124 At some stage, the cocaine barons announced they would kill ten judges for every extradited suspect. (Judges took to wearing hoods in the courtroom so that traffickers could not identify them.125) Those who did not want to die were offered bribes. Famously the choice was plata o plomo – silver or lead: take a bribe or take a bullet. But while violence had so far been mostly confined to agents of the state, it was now taken to the people of Colombia, with little or no discrimination. Escobar and his allies broadened the fight beyond Medellín and began to deploy car bombs. In Bogotá cars blew up on a daily basis, killing numerous bystanders alongside the intended targets. One bomb hit the headquarters of the DAS, the Colombian anti-narcotics police, killing 64 people.126 Within two years, 1,500 lay dead.127
While the state increasingly responded in kind, the difficulty lay in catching the traffickers on their home ground. Escobar was one of Medellín’s biggest but also most generous employers, paying salaries his workers could not hope to make elsewhere. But he also donated funds to build roads, electric lines and floodlit soccer fields. The Medellín drug baron even built a social housing development named after himself, removing people from the slums.128 ‘To many of the poor [Escobar] was not remembered as a man who had led a veritable war against the state, but as a Robin Hood figure who distributed cash and goods and built soccer fields in poor neighbourhoods,’ writes a witness.129 After his death, he would be mourned by thousands. Crowds rioted as his casket was carried through the streets of Medellín, people pushing the bearers aside to open the lid and touch his cold face.130
Stalemated, the fight underwent a brief truce. The Colombian forces had cornered and mowed down Gacha at the end of 1989. Escobar was on the run, at the very least prevented from running his business. The Ochoa brothers turned themselves in in exchange for leniency.131 On 19 June 1991 a new Colombian Constitutional Assembly outlawed extradition. On the same day Escobar surrendered, to be taken to a newly built prison on Mount Catedral, outside Medellín.132
La Catedral was no proper prison. It possessed a gymnasium with a sauna, a bar with a lounge and disco, and a soccer field. DEA agents Steve Murphy and Javier Peña toured the place after he had gone: they found a photograph of Che Guevara on the wall and a collection of the Godfather movies, but also collected works by Gabriel García Marquez and Stefan Zweig, as well as over the bed ‘an ornate, gold-framed portrait of the Virgin Mary painted on inlaid tile’.133 Escobar was allowed to take in a group of sicarios with him and continue running his business from his new base. He was not even obliged to stay inside: police would block off traffic to allow his motorcade to visit the football stadium for a game or for nightclub outings.134 Yet he was indiscreet enough to ruin his settlement with the government: he hounded two of the cartel families he felt were disrespecting their arrangements, then killed the heads of these families in La Catedral itself. Again, state authority was being openly defied, forcing César Gaviria, now president, to intervene. The army arrived. Escobar was to be moved to another detention point. There was a tense standoff, then the drug boss escaped.135
American assistance had by then begun pouring in under the Andean Initiative. A task force of SEALS sailing off the coast had helped take Gacha down. The Americans also contributed surveillance equipment and teams.136
Alongside them, Colombia had created a new special police unit named Search Bloc, based in Medellín. Kept separate from the untrustworthy Medellín police, this was placed under the command of Colonel Hugo Martinez, a low-profile police administrator of 48 who would nevertheless surprise everyone by staying the course until the job was done.137 Search Bloc took the fight to Escobar’s organization on its home ground. The cartel took more casualties. By the end of 1992 twelve of Escobar’s top players had been killed in gun battles with the task force, including his best sicario, nicknamed Tyson. It was becoming increasingly clear that he was flailing when he offered a $2,000 bounty on every Medellín policeman.138
Nor was wanton brutality the solution: the tables began to be turned on Escobar by another group. In January 1993 a hacienda owned by his mother was burned to the ground. Two car bombs exploded in front of apartment buildings where his family members were staying. A third exploded at a property owned by him, injuring his mother and aunt. A people’s militia styling itself Los Pepes (for People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar) was bringing his own methods to the cocaine baron. (The group may have been supported by any number of organizations, including Search Bloc itself or the Cali cartel, but most likely it was formed by the Moncada and Galeano families, whom Escobar had attacked while still at La Catedral.) Los Pepes shot Carlos Ossa, Escobar’s banker. They gunned down his managers and dealers. They burned the warehouse where he kept his collection of antique cars.139 Escobar could not fight a war on two fronts.
Besides, there were only so many places where he could safely hide, and at last the Search Bloc started to close in on his position. The fugitive had a close escape when one of his houses was raided, a rundown place where he had been sheltering with two women, a cook and an eighteen-year-old girl he had been ‘dating’. In December 1993, by tapping into communications with his son, the Bloc was able to locate him a second time. Hugo Martinez, an officer and the son of the Search Bloc commander, drove over and identified their target by sight in the window of a house, part of a nondescript row of similar two-storey buildings. The Bloc moved in, surrounding the place. As the assault team charged in, Escobar’s bodyguard, nicknamed Limón, leapt out of a window and onto the back roof. He began running, but the snipers arrayed in the street behind opened fire and he fell. Escobar followed, having kicked off a pair of flip-flops to jump. As he tried to reach over to a sloping roof of orange tiles on the opposite side, he too was shot multiple times, sprawling forwards. The men scaled the roof and turned the body over, recognizing his bearded face and black curls.140
The hunt for Escobar was at an end. It was a victory for justice and, at least cosmetically, for the war on drugs. Five years later, the Commission on Narcotic Drugs would still be boasting: ‘Effective law enforcement operations had fragmented the large cartels that once dominated the cocaine trade.’141 Even then, the massive effort invested in the endeavour had barely proved sufficient, and victory had only been clinched with the help of the extra-judicial means provided by Los Pepes. The Medellín cartel had nevertheless been busted. Cali, or others, could take over.
Twenty-five years on, Escobar’s hippopotamuses have thrived and invaded Colombia’s rivers, having escaped from the lakes where he kept them. An estimated eighty or more hippos live on, tramping on the native flora, the descendants of the drug lord’s original four.142 The vignette is an apt metaphor for the war on drugs.
Just as the attempt to suppress the opium supply in Turkey and later in the Golden Triangle caused it to move first to Burma and Pakistan and then to Afghanistan, the long string of cocaine-suppression programmes merely moved the drug’s sources around. Between 1986 – when the large-scale campaigns began – and the end of the 1990s, coca-leaf output fell in Peru and Bolivia: from 150,000 to 69,000 tons for Peru and from 71,000 to 23,000 tons for Bolivia. Colombia’s output rose to compensate, from 18,000 to 261,000 tons.143 This was even while eradication efforts skyrocketed, from approximately 3,000 hectares uprooted in 1986 to more than 73,000 in 1999.144
Colombia, which had seen the most spectacular campaigns – the imprisonment of Lehder, the killing of Escobar, an ensuing clampdown in Cali – remained at the end of the century responsible for 67 per cent of world cocaine output.145 Worldwide, the authorities were seizing cocaine to the tune of 360 tons.146 Anti-narcotics squads were raiding more than 2,000 labs annually.147 Yet the cocaine that made it to market was more than double what it had been in the mid-1980s.148 Likewise, according to a U.S. State Department report, the world’s illicit supply of opium multiplied five times between 1971, when the axe was taken to the French Connection, and 1999.149
A classic argument for anti-narcotics enforcement is that it forces prices up, thereby curtailing demand. But the average street price for cocaine in the USA fell from $400 a gram in 1981 to $170 at the end of the 1990s. Adjusted for inflation, the price decline was even steeper. As to heroin, within ten years from the mid-1980s, average prices fell from $225 to $110 per gram in Western Europe. In the USA heroin prices likewise collapsed by half while purity increased.150
Seven years after his predecessor had said effectively the same thing, in 1989 George Bush proclaimed: ‘I have some bad news for the bad guys: hunting season is over.’151 His drug tsar promoted a policy of tough enforcement, promising to reduce drug use by half within a decade. ‘This scourge will stop,’ he boasted.152 More cocaine supply-suppression plans followed, with bigger budgets. Operation Support Justice went through four iterations. The U.S. government donated more helicopters to Bolivia and assisted in the launch of more militarized campaigns. For the better part of two decades, it ran a major suppression operation called the Air Bridge Denial Program. This attacked not only air routes into the U.S. but trafficker supply lines between Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. The programme mobilized, beside local police forces, the DEA, the CIA, the FBI and the Coast Guard, plus various institutions operating under the Department of Defense. In 1996 the Department of Defense announced the launch of Operation Laser Strike, with nine countries participating and any number of radars and aircraft. In 2000 President Clinton broke ground on a new ‘Plan Colombia’ with a $1.3 billion military budget to train anti-drug units, supply helicopters and defoliate coca fields.153
None of this can be shown to have had any significant effect. The deck was and remains stacked too heavily against enforcement. To begin with, for all the big budgets, there was a simple inadequacy of means. Between 1980 and 2004 the U.S. government spent $45 billion on drug-supply control in foreign countries.154 This may sound like an impressive number, but UNODC estimates that the total market for illicit drugs at the end of that period was $320 billion annually. Even at the wholesale level (rather than street value), this was $94 billion.155 In other words, what financial means traffickers were able to deploy outmatched law enforcement by a factor of over fifty.
Even if one chose to count the anti-narcotics budgets of other developed nations (themselves much smaller) and the boots on the ground provided by supplier countries in Latin America and elsewhere, the total would still fall well short. The get-rich-quick potential of illegal drugs ensures that traffickers can always find foot soldiers. The DEA and French anti-narcotics bureau calculated that in the early 1990s the price mark-up for opiates between the Golden Triangle and Europe was 1 to 1,000. For cannabis it was 1 to 300.156 Opium-to-heroin mark-ups in the time of the French Connection were of a similar order.157
Aside from raw financial logic, three factors work to hinder and make ineffective the efforts of anti-narcotics agencies. The first is that traffickers are willing to embrace levels of violence that far exceed what police forces are prepared to deploy, or even what the military may be allowed in a civilian context. The Medellín cartel’s bombing of the Avianca flight, with its full load of passengers, just to get at one man whom they were not even certain was on the plane, is sufficient illustration.
Trafficking organizations, moreover, stop at nothing to acquire the best military hardware on the black market. An analyst commented, in the time of the Air Bridge Denial Programme: ‘[They] have state-of-the-art equipment, including satellite radios, digital decryption devices, and voice privacy mechanisms, that makes it difficult for even the U.S. armed forces to penetrate. General Gorman made this clear when he said, “I have seen equipment used on the aircraft that fly between the United States and Colombia, and I can assure you that it is more sophisticated and more facile [sic] than the equipment that I had on my aircraft of the U.S. Air Force in the U.S. Southern Command.’’158 Latin American trafficking organizations have been known to possess equipment including sub-machine guns, rocket launchers, anti-tank rockets, surface-to-air missiles, dynamite, night-vision devices, Kevlar ballistic helmets, helicopters, radio transmitters and ‘modern wiretapping equipment’, alongside simpler firearms.159 The same could be said, of course, of the Burmese or the Afghan warlords. Nor is training an issue: the Mexican Zetas, for example, were originally an elite, airborne special forces unit trained for apprehending drug-cartel members. Hired for much higher pay by the Gulf cartel, they decided to go it alone around 2003, becoming a self-standing drug-dealing organization. They have been known to enlist members of the Guatemalan special forces to bolster their ranks.160
The second, insuperable hurdle anti-narcotics forces have faced is corruption. The Bolivian ‘cocaine coup’ provides an illustration at the highest levels of government. It was not alone. Drug dealing became institutionalized in Paraguay under Alfredo Stroessner until his departure in 1989. The Paraguayan leader and his dependents directly managed drug-trafficking enterprises, which became a major source of funds for the armed forces. The same could be said of Panama under both President Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega. In the Bahamas various officials including Prime Minister Lynden Pindling and cabinet ministers were exposed during the 1980s for taking bribes from American and Colombian drug traffickers, including Carlos Lehder.161
In these high-profile cases, at least, foreign actors and international institutions are able to exert pressure. Part of the American arsenal is an annual certification process by which the president provides Congress with a list of drug-producing and trafficking countries. In order to gain certification, a nation must be confirmed in this process to have ‘cooperated fully’ with or to have undertaken ‘adequate steps’ in tandem with U.S. policy. Lack of certification can cost a country military and economic aid, access to multilateral lending institutions and trade preferences.162
More insidious and difficult to deal with has been police and judicial corruption, made all the more effective by the stark choice of plata o plomo forced on countless humble officers and judges. Most of Mexico’s 350,000 police officers made less than $250 per month as of 2010. In 2009, 93 of them were arrested in the central state of Hidalgo for being on the Zeta payroll: some were receiving as much as $225,000 monthly.163 In the 1980s Bolivian traffickers were known to grant police and town officials between $15,000 and $25,000, more than their annual salary, just to keep quiet for 72 hours and allow a small aircraft to land, pick up a drug load and take off again.164 An academic study dated 1994 calculated that Mexican drug traffickers spent as much as $500 million in bribes annually, more than double the budget of the Attorney General.165
Third, reflective of the huge incentives available to them, drug traffickers have proven infinitely adaptable. Their smuggling techniques have ranged from the most technologically advanced practices to the simplest tricks. In 1997 former Soviet mini-submarines were confiscated in Santa Marta, a Caribbean port, and found to be loaded with cocaine from Colombia.166 A police officer from Douglas, Arizona, describes a far more basic system: ‘Sometimes . . . someone runs to the fence from the Mexican side and lobs a long football-like ball to someone on the other side. There was a report this week from Nogales that people were seen in the surveillance cameras throwing softball-sized aluminium foil balls into the U.S. while others were seen collecting the balls. One of the balls was found to contain an assortment of controlled pills . . . In the days before taller fences, several would jump the fence and scatter in a nice shotgun approach, while only one would be carrying the payload.’167
In another tactic, the cartels have been gifted at enlisting local populations in their fight, creating enclaves where the law cannot reach them. Escobar was not alone in showering social works on his community. In the Bolivian town of Santa Ana the narcos ‘dispensed largesse like village squires’, installing street lighting, founding clinics and building a ‘house of culture’ containing 5,000 books. When in 1989 the police and DEA launched an assault on the town, the population rose in armed resistance, prompting a shootout. The local drug baron was nowhere to be found.168 The same system prevailed in Burma under Khun Sa and Lo Hsing-han, who were able to pay for infrastructure and social services well in excess of what the central government might provide.
Traffickers have also learnt to keep one step ahead of anti-narcotics forces in their cultivation and manufacturing processes. Fumigation and eradication of coca fields in the Andes merely led cultivation to shift around between countries, from Peru and Bolivia to Colombia and back again. But growers also responded by shifting cultivation within countries. Within Colombia, production moved to more remote regions and agricultural zones, spreading out geographically.169 A farmer threatened: ‘If they fumigate 20 hectares here, we’ll cultivate 200 hectares over there. They’ll have to get rid of the whole forest.’170 But growers also adapted through agronomical innovation, such as by increasing plant density, using fertilizers or planting new, faster-growing bush types, boosting yields. As of 1986 the Andean regions produced 240,000 tons of coca leaf on 200,000 hectares. In 1999 it was able to deliver 353,000 tons on 220,000 hectares, a 34 per cent increase in yield. Manufacturing processes also became more efficient, and the pure cocaine yield per ton of leaf increased by an even broader margin.171
The same process of adaptation has been at work among illegal amphetamine labs. One of the provisions of the UN’S 1988 Convention was to impose restrictions on precursor chemicals, the materials used for making bootleg synthetic drugs. This included ephedrine and pseudo-ephedrine, key amphetamine precursors.172 However, regulations, while restricting the trade on these products in bulk, left them available without prescription in most countries, in pill or capsule form. Traffickers switched, buying the pills. When, in the USA, recordkeeping on these was tightened, setting individual limits, dealers sent individuals out in droves each to buy their legal over-the-counter limit. Larger-scale traffickers moved operations to Mexico, and, when that country clamped down, to South Africa, China or India. Some of them switched from ephedrine to phenyl-acetone, a substitute, and when this was barred they began synthesizing phenylacetone from other chemicals (‘pre-precursors’).173
The principal result of thirty years of ever tougher supply-suppression efforts, rather, has been deepening and expanding violence. The Colombian violence looked exceptional at the time. It continued after the kingpins fell, and it was nothing compared to what would come to Mexico.
Already in the 1970s Mexican poppy growers and heroin refiners had briefly stepped into the breach created by the dismantling of the French Connection. The authorities, with U.S. assistance, sprayed and destroyed several thousand hectares in the later part of the decade.174 Mexican output has grown back gradually, and by the year 2016 it counted approximately 26,000 hectares of poppy, yielding 500 tons of opium, or enough to account for 10 per cent or so of world heroin production.175 Alongside, there existed a profitable business growing marijuana and smuggling it into the USA. Cocaine, however, has been the making of the Mexican drug cartels.
The petty Sinaloan gangster Felix Gallardo – soon to be known as the godfather or ‘El Padrino’ – took control of the trade towards the beginning of the cocaine boom, assisted by Ernesto ‘Don Neto’ Fonseca and Rafael Caro Quintero, both of whom were marijuana smugglers. Gallardo began dealing in cocaine in 1977 or 1978, and he appears to have first struck a deal with Gacha of the Medellín cartel.176 The Mexicans picked up Colombian product and moved it north and over the border, though for now they played second fiddle to the Colombians, who retained control of the vital American distribution.
El Padrino imposed a peace of sorts, but this collapsed in the 1980s. The DEA agent Enrique ‘Kiki’ Camarena had infiltrated Gallardo’s network. In 1984, based on information provided by him, a squad of Mexican soldiers raided and destroyed a 1,000-hectare marijuana plantation known as ‘Rancho Bufalo’. In February 1985 Camarena was abducted. He was tortured for at least two days and killed. But the DEA responded with another investigation leading to the arrests of Don Neto and Rafael Quintero. Although El Padrino escaped, he was on America’s wanted list, undermining his position as kingpin. Gallardo divided the cartel into regional fiefdoms: the Tijuana route, on the Californian border, went to one family, the Arellano Felix, while Ciudad Juarez, on the Texan border, went to the trafficker Amado Carrillo Fuentes, soon to be known as the ‘lord of the skies’ for his possession of a large fleet of cocaine-smuggling aircraft. The Sinaloan, Pacific coast operations, through which the drugs moved north from Colombia, fell into the hands of three men: Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, Hecto Palma ‘El Güero’ and Joaquín Guzmán, also known as El Chapo.177 Gallardo was arrested in 1989. The Sinaloans, supported by Carrillo Fuentes, soon entered into a long-running conflict with the Arellano Felix. Involving several shootouts in Tijuana and Guadalajara, the fight notably included the inadvertent killing of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, Archbishop of Guadalajara.178 He was but one of the thousands and even tens of thousands of victims to come.
The second step towards never-ending drug wars was that the Mexicans acquired control of U.S. distribution, creating far higher stakes. The long fight against the Medellín and then the Cali cartel had taken its toll, but it was the Mexican traffickers, not anti-narcotics enforcement, that benefited. The Sinaloa–Tijuana clash was the first of many vendettas, some of them nationwide. The twenty-first century would see gruesome killings, beheadings and the routine shooting of bystanders. As Sinaloa and Ciudad Suarez went on to battle it out with the Gulf, then the splinter group that was Los Zetas, far more blood would be spilled.179 Difficult as it was to believe after the closure of Escobar’s saga, at the time, drug-related violence in Latin America was only in its first innings.
As the twentieth century came to a close, the rise of El Chapo to worldwide fame and the headlong rush of the Mexican drug cartels into blood-soaked anarchy lay in the future. That two decades of muscular supply suppression in Latin America and in South and Southeast Asia had achieved nothing was not yet clear, or at least not clear to all. The surrender of Khun Sa, the killing of Escobar: the headlines had been good, no matter what story the data told. The Commission on Narcotic Drugs congratulated itself: ‘Improved cooperation between law enforcement authorities had contributed to some of the largest drug seizures, forcing traffickers to constantly shift transportation routes in moving illicit drugs to markets. Improved judicial systems had made it more difficult for drug traffickers to buy their freedom, while tougher extradition laws denied them the national havens that they once could count upon.’180
In 1998, faithful to its mandate, the UN called a conference for one more push against drugs. What it envisaged was a fight to the finish, a last, victorious battle. Attendance was correspondingly high-level, involving multiple heads of state. ‘“Yes” to the challenge of working towards a drug-free world,’ proclaimed Kofi Annan, the secretary general, to the assembled dignitaries.181 The UN would commit to reducing worldwide drug use ‘substantially’ by the year 2008. An attending political declaration promised new strategies for ‘overcoming the world drug problem [and] to reduce both the illicit supply of and the demand for drugs’.182 Belying its supposed novelty, it would involve tighter transnational cooperation, more crop eradication and tougher enforcement. That neither coca nor poppy acreage were falling did not matter: there would be more efforts ‘with a view to eliminating or reducing significantly the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy’.183
Others, however, wished to draw the lessons. For them, the paltry results of the latest iteration of the war on drugs were proof enough that it could not be won. Nor was the level of violence it produced something they could continue to contemplate. Ever more strongly enforced prohibition was not the answer. It was time for other solutions, or at least for an earnest debate.