What is offered here is an exercise: its subject is cocaine, a substance which decides a far greater part of our lives than we are disposed to think. Even – perhaps especially – if we don’t use it.
Cocaine. A sea of cocaine.
The newspapers like talking about it; it always makes for good copy: stories of gangland shootouts in the narrow streets of some Mediterranean city, colourful portraits of dealers great and small, the occasional alarmed – and cliché-ridden – reportage on the increase in consumption, especially among the young, in discos and nightclubs. Or chemical analysis of the water of a river near a big city, which reveals such quantities of dissolved cocaine in the sewers as to suggest prodigious everyday use. Cocaine by the ton. And news in equal measure.
Sometimes one comes across less fascinating information, which is difficult to work up into a crime story. It speaks of money. Of entire national economies – and not those of small, underdeveloped countries – kept afloat by the money from cocaine smuggling. For example, the ten million dollars that the Colombian cartels invest every year in the financial system of Florida (the fourth most populous state in the USA, crucial to the election of George Bush in 2000); without that sum the collapse of the entire local banking system would be inevitable, with consequences and repercussions on a global scale. According to the 1999 report of the Mexican Centre of Investigation and National Security, ‘if drug smuggling were to be eradicated, the economy of the United States would suffer losses of between 19 and 22 per cent, while the Mexican economy would see a fall of 63 per cent’.
It is as well to remember that as far as the drug cartels are concerned there are no nation states, no borders. We’re talking about markets that are capable of influencing the world economy. And therefore of determining how questions of sovereignty, the entitlement to and exercise of rights, and international relations, are decided.
On the face of it, this enormous, menacing, submerged world is being attacked with maximum zeal by powerful political forces. For example the colossal anti-drugs apparatus set up by George Bush Senior and dramatized as the ‘War on Drugs’, an elephantine enterprise which involved military control of the South American continent, agreements with governments and the massive deployment of high-tech equipment for aerial surveillance and for spraying defoliants on the coca crops. An enterprise which in 2000 put a burden of 103 billion dollars on US public expenditure, a sum comparable to the gross domestic product of a country like Portugal. Above I AM THE MARKET all, an enterprise which failed in its aims from the beginning. In 1992 a report by the American House of Representatives set out the reasons for its defeat: ‘In 1984,’ it says, ‘coca leaf was grown only in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador. Today it is grown in many other countries, refined in 9, transported across 25 and consumed in at least 18 Latin-American nations.’ To leave no doubt about the matter, the report concludes: ‘This expansion has been caused by the United States government and its policy of repression.’ Whenever the War on Drugs has concentrated on one region, the drug lords have reacted by moving the plantations and markets, and the result has been a widening of the areas of production. The cartels have been very imaginative, setting up, in the golden age of drug smuggling, an endless succession of improvised landing strips for their planes on hundreds of atolls and even, at one point (during the years of Pablo Escobar, the greatest drug smuggler of all time), digging an extraordinary tunnel under the border between Mexico and the United States. This is the most closely guarded border in the world (above ground at least), a fact testified to by the formidable ‘Tijuana barrier’, a monumental fence built to prevent illegal immigration which runs for tens of kilometres right into the waters of the ocean.
Besides, there is a widespread belief among the drug lords, as we shall see, that the transnational strategies for combating their operations are nothing but propaganda, masking a substantial connivance: the economy of the criminal market is so indispensable to the legal economy that the result is a universal policy of live and let live, behind a facade of repression. The drug lords see the War on Drugs as a big show, which has been played out to their advantage. According to the legend of Don Pablo Escobar, as handed down by his hangers-on, admirers and beneficiaries, what brought about the collapse of the Medellín cartel, which he founded, was his decision to move into the world of politics, instead of negotiating a form of subterranean coexistence that could guarantee the economic futures both of the drug dealers and of the no less massive empire of anti-narcotics bodies (including national and supranational police agencies, institutions, research centres and universities, as well as the public, and especially the private, rehabilitation communities). Two colossal industries which need each other if they are to survive.
The more than 100 billion dollars spent on the military repression of the drug plantations contrasts with the paltry sum invested in reducing demand (10 million dollars) and the miserly 4.5 million dollars invested in plans for replacing illegal crops. The aim of these plans is to induce the growers of coca and of opium poppy to sow their land with less harmful products such as cacao, coffee and rice, or to turn their fields into pastureland. The results of this strategy have been disastrous. Desperately poor regions are forced to grow crops which are unsuited to the local climate or which are not competitive internationally. The consequences for the growers are starvation and a headlong rush into the arms of the drug smugglers, the only people who can offer them any prospect of survival.
Everywhere in the countries affected by the plans for alternative crop development promoted by the United States government or the United Nations, drug plantations are spreading. There are many paradoxical cases: in the Ivory Coast, for example, the cultivation of rice was supported by the International Monetary Fund in the early 1990s through the building of colossal dams, but the maintenance costs of the dams proved so burdensome that it was impossible for the Ivorians to compete with rice produced in Thailand, which was itself receiving financial support from the IMF. Result: over the past decade the Ivory Coast has climbed steadily up the league table of the leading world producers of marijuana. No less disastrous is the widespread use of herbicides, sprayed by American planes on forests all over South America, mainly destroying the tiny allotments of the campesinos. Today the drug smugglers active in South America control a territory ten times the size of the one they controlled before the defoliation campaigns.
The incredibly high profitability of illegal drugs makes them the fastest instrument of enrichment in the world, and one that has been fundamental in determining the outcome of wars; for example, during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia the three-way drugs-for-arms deals allowed the international embargoes to be circumvented. It has also given new tools of domination to the ruthless politico-commercial elites which came to power in so many parts of the world after the collapse of the bipolar USA–USSR order.
But why have commodities like cocaine (or the opium poppy, so crucial today to the destinies of central Asia, overwhelmed by the war in Afghanistan, and of the entire West) become the mainstays of the world economy? An investment of one dollar in the production of cocaine gives a return of a thousand dollars at the other end of the distribution chain: never in human history has there been such a profitable commodity. What confers such power on a form of agricultural production which is in other respects comparable to others? The answer is as simple as it is embarrassing: the artificial difficulty of access to the market at the retail level. In a word, prohibition.
Contrary to what may be thought, the producing countries suffer from this profitability, and the rich countries benefit from it. With the fall of protectionist barriers and local economies’ new exposure to global competition, it is inevitable that for the poorer agricultures the only competitive raw materials will be drugs. In that part of the world which was once called ‘the South’, there is a tendency to regard drugs as legal merchandise, and this is not a view that is easy to challenge, if one considers that most of the profits from this trade go not to the producers but, as in Florida, straight into the banks of the rich countries, those shrines to legality. The farmers receive only 0.5 per
cent of the wealth that is created by selling the merchandise in the West, and there is no cheaper way of paying off the foreign debt than with the remainder of that wealth. The ‘North’– if it can still be called that in these times of globalization – engaged as it is in the War on Drugs, seems to judge these substances according to a dual morality: tool of the devil when they undermine the health of its young, manna from heaven when the capital they generate fills the vaults of its banks.
What control can democratic countries exercise over a market chiefly dominated by the criminal economy? What can be said about the wars that bloody the planet if we are not prepared to acknowledge the extent to which they have been caused by intertwined interests and individuals which have evaded scrutiny until very recently?
To put it crudely, when we talk about drugs, and the economy connected with drugs, we are not talking about only one part of the planet. What is offered here is not a view of the criminal world, but a criminal view of the world.
And yet the stories of cocaine, at least those that we read in the newspapers or see on television, tend to suggest that the movement of one of the most profitable substances in the history of humanity takes place by means of a system of couriers who conceal the merchandise in the false bottoms of suitcases or swallow it after sealing it in special ovules resistant to the gastric juices. How much cocaine can be carried from one continent to another using these methods? A few kilos? A few hundred kilos? But the sea of white powder that is submerging Europe and changing its destiny cannot be transported in overnight bags, artificial limbs or gastro-protected capsules: sustaining the market – even just the European market – requires tons of pure cocaine, which must then be broken down into profitable fixes for the retail market.
Tons. Which means ships, cargo planes, containers: large, cumbersome, extremely tangible amounts. Curiously, no one has ever explained how it is possible to get all that merchandise through harbours and airports equipped with the most sophisticated means of detection. Much less how customs offices are deceived, legal and fiscal checks eluded and documents prepared to disguise a mountain of white powder. There is no shortage of analyses and data, just as there is no shortage of biographies of great criminals. And yet we still lack the true story of a world about which we know very little: its practices, sensibilities and values, its vision. It may be useful, for once, to forget all the clichés, suspend all moral judgements and try to see the world through the eyes of someone who lives, and builds his fortune, in the shadowy zone of the drug cartels.
The work that lay behind this book consisted of an attempt (a hazardous one, in all honesty) to allow these ‘shadowy individuals’ to hold the floor, without censoring them – simply to listen, as they told their stories and described their methods. Such an approach can enable us to look into the eyes of this monstrum (literally, ‘prodigy, object of wonder’), which is so fascinating and yet so rarely talked about. Discovering how a ton of cocaine is hidden and how customs controls are evaded, learning how the colossal empire we loosely call ‘drug smuggling’ has reorganized and how it interacts with the rival, ‘good’ empire, is a surprisingly enlightening experience. It can change the way we look at everyday life and some of our most common assumptions. We many never look at the car we drive, the wire that brings electricity into our home or the computer that a benefactor donates to a non-profit institution in the same way again.
The stories told in the book are all absolutely true, but it should be borne in mind on every page that the voice is that of the criminal participant: the style, the sensibility, the choice of images and the commentary are all his, as are the linguistic and mental habits and the anomalous morality that governs the narrative. The reader will not be surprised if the narrator prefers to remain anonymous: the insights he provides carry risks, and not only in the legal sphere.
These stories concern one of the most radical changes in the world economy, and they provide a context for reflecting on the contemporary world in a new and unusual way; but they are also stories of people, of questionable tastes, of risks and adventures. They have been collected in the conviction that a handbook on drug smuggling, in narrative form, can provide some defence against the enormous power of drug smuggling itself. One of the devil’s most cunning ruses, they say, is to have convinced mortals of his non-existence. Or of his total otherness.
This is an exract from I Am The Market by Luca Rastello (translated by Jonathan Hunt) published by Granta, £10.99, available now by clicking here.
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