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For many people, today, Colombia and Cocaine are inseparable, the one "C" word evoking the other. The association is painful to most Colombians, whose entire culture, history, beauty and flaws are reduced, simplified, and digested by a malicious stereotype, which misrepresents them to the world and compresses the labyrinth of their politics, art, love and passion, into a "dumbed down" emotional package conducive to the wielding of ignorance. "Ignorance cursed by power is the downfall of Man… what has bloodied the hands of angels." Nonetheless, the intimate relationship between Colombia and Cocaine cannot be denied. What needs to be accomplished, for understanding, is to clarify the nature of that relationship; to put it in perspective, and accurately portray the protagonists of both the world that made coca, and the world that was made by coca. The villains, the heroes, and the masses of gray men and women who have built, fought, and used the industry do not always conform to the expectations we have of them.

As previously stated in this article, the history of la coca in Latin America dates back to the pre-Columbian Andean civilizations which discovered its energy-enhancing and spirit-lifting properties, and incorporated it into their religious rituals and their medicinal practices. The Quechua and Aymara peoples of Peru and Bolivia, who formed the basis of the Inca Empire, were devotees of la coca. So, too, were the Chibcha of Colombia.

When the Spaniards charged into the Americas, with the Cross in one hand and the sword in the other, they, at first despised la coca. Church people, fearing it as a symbol and sacrament of the Native religion, an "evil instrument of the Devil", initially outlawed it as they sought to tear down Native forms of spirituality, and to replace them with Christianity and its underlying message of submission (as it was presented by the priests). However, after a time, the Spanish conquerors discovered the usefulness of the plant, which was capable of re-energizing the exhausted work crews of the mita - the Indian laborers who they coerced to work in their mines and on their farms. Entire haciendas were soon dedicated to the cultivation of coca, worked by Native labor in the service of Spanish encomenderos. Harvested, the coca was transported to major work sites, and given to the Indians in the form of leaves, as a stimulant to maintain their productivity under harsh and degrading conditions. This is the historical watershed, when la coca was transformed from a sacrament into a drug.

After the collapse of the Spanish Empire, and its replacement by a large number of independent Latin American nations, the use of coca returned partly to its original patterns, although the erosion of Native culture in many regions diminished its significance. However, as the oppression of Indian communities continued in the newly independent Latin American republics, the use of coca as a mental and physical stimulant to help indigenous peoples endure poverty, hunger, and exhausting working conditions, remained in those areas where coca had been turned by the Spaniards into a drug. Coca, chewed as a leaf or ingested as a paste, as it was by Native peoples, was not the explosive substance it is today, in its processed form. But it was a drug, nonetheless, an answer to hopelessness and pain that could keep a man going, even after his heart had been broken and his soul had been stolen. Che Guevara, as a young man traveling through Bolivia, before he became a revolutionary, was appalled by the widespread habit of coca-chewing among indigenous peoples which he witnessed - by the sight of numbed faces and slowly churning mouths: stone-like masks that had frozen an impenetrable layer of indifference over overpowering sadness. Coca, no longer officially produced as a prop of exploitation, had nonetheless remained and become consolidated as a possibility for the future.

As previously stated, another legacy of the colonization of Latin America by Spain was the development of a lively tradition of contraband activity. This was provoked by the stifling mercantilist policies of Spain, which shut its Latin American colonies out of potentially lucrative trading relationships with Great Britain, France, and Holland, so that Spain could monopolize their resources and markets for its own gain. Subjects of the Spanish Crown in Latin America whose economic potential was limited and repressed by these policies, frequently chose to break the law, and developed impressive human networks and geographical routes for bypassing Spanish authorities and reaching the forbidden trade of other nations. In colonial days, some of these paths passed through the Colombian regions of Uraba and Panama. Strong foundations for continued contraband trade were laid: organizational, geographical, and folkloric traditions of smuggling which persisted in diminished, but recoverable, forms. La coca and a powerful smuggling tradition, were slowly traveling towards each other, through time. Also headed in their direction was a gigantic sense of disillusionment which was beginning to rumble in the soul of North American civilization, a terrible sense of emptiness that needed an awakening, a way of being born again or dying. The clock of history was about to strike the hour of cocaine.

Cocaine, which had alternately teased and fueled various intellectuals and artists in America and Europe in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, and actually found its way into various popular tonics, and even been an active ingredient in Coca Cola during the soft drink’s infancy, had eventually been banned from these markets as its benefits became suspect in the face of its dangers. Neither the praise of Freud, the fictitious advocacy of Sherlock Holmes, the testimony of Robert Louis Stevenson (who used it to write Jekyll and Hyde), nor the rave reviews of architect Frederick-Auguste Bartholdi, who said that if he had developed a taste for cocaine in his youth, he would have built the Statue of Liberty a few hundred meters higher, could deter more sober elements of society from driving it back, out of the mainstream of Western civilization which it was seeking to enter. However, the brief opening which was allowed the drug before its rejection, planted the seed of its future use in both North America and Europe; while in Latin American, the possibility of converting cocaine into a valuable export commodity, like coffee, had been put on the table.

In the same way that the Colombian coffee industry grew in the shadow of developments in North American culture, responding to transformations in the American workplace that required the introduction of a mass stimulant in order to combat the exhaustion produced not only by physical labor, but also by boredom and monotony, so the Colombian cocaine industry mirrored the rise in existential distress and sensory curiosity which hit the United States in the 1960s. Today, anti-narcotics advocates frequently refer to marijuana as the "gateway drug", far more dangerous for its role in preparing users to go on to other levels of drugs, than for its own effects. In the case of the export and production of cocaine in Colombia, this was certainly the case. Marijuana was the "gateway drug", the groundbreaker and the dry run.

Marijuana first developed a significant presence on Colombia’s Atlantic Coast after hemp cultivation was introduced to the region as part of the US war effort during World War II. The hemp plants were utilized to produce fiber for rope, but locals quickly subjected them to additional uses, and pot soon became a standard ingredient in the social life of some local subcultures. As marijuana consumption skyrocketed in the United States during the 1960s, due to the impact of the "counterculture" and its thirst for transcendence or escape, criminal elements in Colombia sought to connect to the demand by organizing marijuana production for export. Poor peasants were recruited into the operation as growers and laborers. As previously stated, they could earn six times as much working in the illegal marijuana sector as they could by devoting themselves to coffee production. The Eucharist of Utopia, Holy Sacrament of the North American Counterculture, was just as great a blessing to the peasant of Colombia. The vacuum in the midst of one world’s wealth had created an opportunity for the healing of another world’s poverty. In those days, Colombian marijuana production was centered in the Guajira Peninsula, along the slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. As North America’s main marijuana supplier at that time, Mexico, became hampered by increasing vigilance at the borders and by increased police activity within Mexico, Colombian suppliers began to gain ground. They also offered a high-quality product, typified by "Santa Marta Gold."

From marijuana, it was but a small step to cocaine. As the 60’s drug experience seemed to grow a thousand heads, offering a dizzying array of stimulants, depressants, and psychedelics, cocaine emerged as a powerful option, a path to an ecstatic enhancement of the self, real or imagined; a means of leaving oneself behind like a rocket discarding the wearisome earth; to become someone better, smarter, more beautiful, tireless, able to run forever; to live without the islands of death that rest and mediocrity impose on us, to sail the sea of who we want to be without ever stopping (until the crash, which another hit can rescue us from). Let the God come in, and never leave. North America’s infatuation with cocaine was a godsend to Colombian smugglers, because Colombia was, in regard to this one product, perfectly situated to become the world’s leading supplier. Coca was native to the Andes, and in its natural environment, was of unsurpassed quality. Colombia was perfectly located, between the gigantic coca-producing potential of Peru and Bolivia, the traditional heartland of the sacred leaf, and the North American market which craved it. Colombia also had a significant capacity to produce the leaf itself. At the same time, marijuana traffic originating from Colombia (which by the late 1970s was responsible for 70% of the marijuana which reached the US from abroad), had established important links between Colombia and the US counterculture. Smugglers had been acquiring experience, and new generations of criminals had been inspired to follow in their footsteps.

Coca production for export seems to have gained ground in Colombia in the late 1960s, when a small coca-exporting network was set up by Miami-based Cuban mobsters in the Department of el Cauca, utilizing Paez Indians as cultivators, and smuggling the drugs into the United States via individual carriers known as "mules", who brought it in aboard commercial airlines in a thousand simple to brilliant ways, from hiding it in false-bottomed suitcases, hollow shoe heels, and underclothes, to inserting it into packages of coffee, and body cavities, to eventually ingesting it in packets and carrying it in in their stomachs (before eventually excreting the packets for recovery once they were past Customs). It was an ingenious, but ultimately small-scale operation. In the 1970s, as North American demand for cocaine rose, producers were forced to respond by augmenting the limited supply then available in Colombia with production from new sources in Bolivia and Peru. It was in this decade that Colombians began to take control of cocaine trafficking away from foreign mafias, and to become the mind, as well as the body, of the expanding drug trade. With the emergence of two powerful homegrown drug mafias during the 1970s - the Medellin Cartel and the Cali Cartel - the deadly "golden age" of Colombian drug trafficking was about to begin.

The Medellin Cartel, rather than being the initiator of Colombia’s cocaine industry, as many have assumed, was actually a response to the rise of that industry by various Colombian drug bosses, who sought to inject order and coherence into the business, to coordinate already existing operations, and, by pooling their resources and talents, to maximize their efficiency. Pablo Escobar Gaviria, generally considered to be the mastermind and driving force behind the formation of the cartel, began his criminal career humbly enough as a car thief in Medellin, which is the principal city of the Department of Antioquia, a region long renowned for its entrepreneurial spirit, outstanding for its nationally-revered heritage of personal ambition, initiative, and risk-taking. It was, in many ways, the natural intellectual birthplace of the gigantic new industry which was about to transform the world. Besides his experience with stealing cars, the young Pablo Escobar was also said to have robbed tombstones, from which he erased the names of the deceased, so that he might resell them to grieving families in need of a headstone; as well as to have engaged in the selling of fake lottery tickets. Always alert for new money-making opportunities, Escobar was quick to see the promise of cocaine and inserted himself into the rapidly growing business in the 1970s, leaving the world of petty, dead-end crimes behind him. Undoubtedly an entrepreneurial genius, although some detractors have attempted to reduce his success to sheer ruthlessness, Escobar did rely heavily on violence to augment his powers of persuasion as he went about the business of constructing his empire by means of winning allies and eliminating competitors, gradually gaining possession over trafficking networks, connections, and pathways. In the realm of criminal business, violence was a "legitimate" option - already outside the law, one was not restrained by the law - and Escobar, like any talented entrepreneur recognizing the conditions which define the possibilities and limits of his activities, acted brilliantly in accordance with them. Already, in his car-stealing days, he had mastered the skills of hiding his tracks (perfecting the art of quickly breaking down stolen vehicles in order to sell untraceable parts); bribery (he later resold stolen vehicles brazenly with the cooperation of local authorities who he had succeeded in buying off); and strictly enforcing the code of "honor among thieves", indispensable for the long-term success of any criminal operation (he had taken to hiring thugs to kidnap those who owed him money, holding them for a ransom equal to their debt). During his car-stealing days, Escobar had also developed a penchant for boldness, which was to become a hallmark of his drug-dealing days (oftentimes, the vehicles he desired would be accosted in broad daylight by members of his gang, and the drivers thrown out into the street as the thieves made off with their car). Somehow, Escobar survived the drama of his youth to graduate to a far greater drama. Alternately charming and cruel, clear-minded (except when his audacious spirit ripped him from the path of prudence), and uninhibited by conventional morals, which he and many other Colombians had seen violated so often by the wealthy and the powerful that they had ceased to submit to them, he was the right man at the right place at the right time to wreak havoc in Colombia and the world with the pent-up energy of a little plant that was about to be turned into the demon of an age.

If Pablo Escobar was the great galvanizing influence of the Medellin Cartel, the personality that defined it and projected its power outwards, Carlos Lehder Rivas, son of a German father and Colombian mother, was its technical master. Like Escobar, Lehder came to the cocaine industry from a background of petty crimes, in his case centered on dealing marijuana, and smuggling stolen cars between Canada and the United States. Eventually, the law caught up with him, and Lehder was forced to do time at a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where he met up with US marijuana dealer George Jung, who was also doing time. Their relationship, popularized in the movie Blow, was a criminal "match made in Heaven", because Lehder, who was already thinking beyond marijuana to the extraordinary new possibilities of cocaine, found, in Jung’s past experience, the inspiration which would enable him to exponentially expand the traffic flow into the United States. Jung had previously smuggled pot into the US from Mexico aboard a private aircraft which he, himself, had piloted, landing it off the beaten track where ground connections were waiting to meet him and unload the cargo. For Lehder, the idea was revolutionary - a light went off in his mind; he had his own moment of criminal satori, his own narco-Eureka. At that very moment in history, as North America’s demand for coke was growing, and as Colombia’s ability to respond to that demand by increasing the supply was also growing, transport was emerging as the last remaining choke-hold on the development of the trade: how to get the drugs into the US as fast as they were wanted, and as fast as they could be produced. The system of individual carriers, or "mules", smuggling in small amounts of coke aboard commercial airlines, was not capable of supporting the dimensions of the traffic which were possible. But if the dealers were able to bring in larger shipments with their own aircraft… Lehder spent the rest of his prison days working over this idea with Jung, building gigantic fantasies, then filling them out with concrete details. Utilizing the prison as an intellectual resource and unparalleled repository of criminal knowledge and experience, he not only developed the blueprint for a new transport system which would revolutionize the cocaine industry, but also made important breakthroughs in his understanding of "money laundering", which would enable the illegally-made fortune he planned to build in the US, by selling cocaine, to be camouflaged and invisibly transferred back to Colombia.

Upon leaving prison, Ledher and Jung took steps to turn their criminal dream into a reality. They built up investment capital through launching some small-scale drug smuggling operations, using hired girls to carry coke into the US in their suitcases. With this capital, they invested in a plane and pilot to smuggle drugs into the US from the Bahamas, which were a convenient staging area for the flights, being within striking range of the Florida coast while also lying along potential air and sea routes available to the Colombian suppliers, with whom they had begun to develop intimate relations. For Escobar, Lehder was an immeasurable asset whose operation could throw a door, which was only open a crack, wide open; while for Lehder, Escobar was the natural ally who could give him something to move through that open door. As Lehder’s increasingly successful operations generated more and more capital to work with, he set his sights on gaining possession of the Bahamian island of Norman’s Cay, gradually buying up local property owners and intimidating those who did not wish to sell into leaving, while bribing key Bahamian officials to turn a blind eye to his activities. After a time, Lehder succeeded in his purpose of consolidating the island as his personal drug-smuggling base, and the Medellin Cartel’s "gateway to America." Coke-filled jets from Colombia would land on his private runway, patrolled by well-armed bodyguards and attack dogs. The coke would then be unloaded, and transferred to the small aircraft which were used to smuggle it into the US (where ground crews would be waiting for it in clandestine landing zones). In cases, the planes would drop packets of drugs into the sea at arranged rendezvous points, where speedboats would pick them up, and smuggle them into the Florida coast by sea.

Like any good soldier, Lehder diversified his strategy, infusing it with multiple options and protecting it with unpredictability. In addition to his Norman’s Cay route, the Medellin Cartel developed a variety of routes and strategies for penetrating the US with cocaine shipments. One major pathway of coke into the US was via northern Mexico, which could be used to launch flights of small aircraft into the US, and also used as a staging area for sending in shipments of drugs hidden aboard trucks. The US-Mexican border area already had a well-developed tradition of contraband, and the groundwork for the Medellin Cartel’s efforts here had been laid beforehand by the marijuana trade. All that was needed was to bring local smugglers and marijuana-trafficking networks into the operation. This had, in fact, already been accomplished by another important Colombian drug lord, Jose Gonzalo Rodriquez Gacha, AKA El Mejicano ("the Mexican"), who not only had a fascination for, and love of, Mexican culture (he particularly admired its aura of virility and lore of bandit heroes), but who was also the owner of a gigantic warehouse of Colombian marijuana located in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. In other words, Gacha already had a major operation installed in this strategic region, an operation which could use well-proven marijuana-smuggling networks to begin to move cocaine as well. Like Lehder, Gacha was a "big catch" and a crucial asset to the growth of the Medellin Cartel.

In addition to Lehder’s Norman’s Cay route and Gacha’s Mexican inroads, the Cartel was sometimes able to deliver major shipments of cocaine into the US hidden aboard commercial airliners or ocean-going ships, which were protected by Customs agents and/or dockworkers and airport workers who had been drawn into the operation by means of bribes. As Philip of Macedon, the ancient warrior-king, once said: "I can conquer any city into which I can slip a bag of gold." For the Medellin Cartel, this saying was proved true time and time again.

Besides Escobar, Lehder, and Gacha, the Ochoa family came to be a prominent player in the development of the Medellin Cartel. The family’s patriarch, Fabio Ochoa Restrepo, was a well-loved breeder of racing horses who was never formally accused of involvement in drug-trafficking, but was rather, regarded by many as the colorful "victim-father" of rogue sons whose criminal activities tarnished the family’s reputation. However, many others regarded Don Fabio as the one who avoided the details and kept his hands clean, while using his fatherly influence to create an aura of support, within the family, for his children’s delinquent activities. One of Don Fabio’s sons, Jorge Luis Ochoa, was apparently involved in the contraband trading of electrodomesticos (electrical appliances) and whiskey before he linked up with Pablo Escobar, and turned his criminal experience and skills to the smuggling of cocaine. His brothers Fabio (Fabito) and Juan David, soon joined him. Their intelligence, resources, and family contacts proved to be of immense value to the Medellin Cartel.

As this huge criminal empire was carefully constructed by Pablo Escobar and his associates, other Colombian cocaine-smuggling operations were gradually swallowed up, either "brought in" or cleared out of the way. Although some other operations did continue to exist, they were soon dwarfed by the Medellin Cartel, which did not allow major competitors to survive alongside it. One exception would be the Cali Cartel, another cocaine mafia based in the city of Cali in the Department of el Valle, which Escobar’s organization could not co-opt, intimidate, or shoot into extinction. Its founders included Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, his younger borther Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, and Jose Santacruz London~o, and its rise was essentially contemporary with that of the Medellin Cartel. Although violence was always an intrinsic part of the large-scale cocaine business, the Cali Cartel would, over the years, gain the reputation of being far less bloody than the Medellin Cartel, and also far less flamboyant, preferring to "fly under the radar screen" and to do business without making waves, securing the space it needed to operate through bribery and the political influence which its money could buy, rather than by intimidating or directly challenging the system. Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela and his cohorts were, in fact, known as "the Chess Players", in contrast to their rivals from the Medellin Cartel, who were more often compared to "cowboys" and gun-slinging bandits of the "Wild West." (Yes, Hollywood Westerns had by then become a part of world culture, and served as an apt metaphor for Escobar & company both in the US and Colombia.) Although tensions between the two drug mafias persisted throughout the 1980s, and violent skirmishes between them sometimes erupted, the two giants of the international cocaine trade maintained an uneasy coexistence throughout this period, allowing each to become the master of its own turf and to conserve its energy for those struggles which could not be avoided.

Around 1978, the Medellin Cartel decided to take its foot off of the brakes of its ascending power, and to augment its control of South America’s coke supply, and its domination of the cocaine-smuggling routes into North America, with control of cocaine distribution inside the United States. In business terms, it decided to "eliminate the middlemen" who were, at that time, outsiders, needlessly taking away profits from the Cartel by performing a service which the Cartel could perform for itself. The problem between the Colombian mafia and the US-based mobsters who handled their distribution for them could not be settled peacefully, and resulted in a turf war of incredible violence in Miami and southern Florida, which shocked US law-enforcement officials and put the Medellin Cartel on the international map for the first time as a criminal presence to be reckoned with. The power of drug money, and the fierce persistence and determination of the Medellin Cartel, which embodied Pablo Escobar’s will, resulted in victory for the Colombians who, by late 1981, had succeeded in installing their own middlemen in Miami, who took charge of receiving and moving the coke to local distributors throughout the US. While the Medellin Cartel dominated the markets and distribution networks originating from South Florida and Miami, and Southern California and Los Angeles, the Cali Cartel grew particularly successful in the New York market.

At the same time as the Medellin Cartel was mastering the penetration of the cocaine trade into the United States, and increasing its share of the profits there, it was also expanding its supply operation to encompass large swaths of Peru and Bolivia, where coca cultivation had a long history, and where the quality of the leaf was unsurpassed. Local peasants drawn into the operation by the incentive of higher economic returns than they could receive for other crops, grew and harvested the leaves, which were mashed and soaked in organic solvents (including kerosene and sulfuric acid), and then filtered and dried, converting them into a paste more suitable for transport, and much more potent than the raw leaves. (From an initial purity of 0.1 to 0.9 % cocaine per coca leaf, the paste was eventually upgraded to a purity level of 60 - 80%.) This paste was picked up by aircraft landing on clandestine runways, or by helicopters which took advantage of clearings in the wilderness, and moved along a trail of supporting landing sites, or else flown directly, to coke-processing laboratories in the Colombian jungles, where the coca received an additional level of processing. Once the final stage of refinement was complete, the result was a highly concentrated, hydrochloride salt version of the drug: that is to say, the powdered form most recognizable to high-end coke users in the US.

In order to protect the operations in Peru and Bolivia, massive payoffs of local officials and police were utilized. Bribes were also used to lower defenses in Colombia. The cocaine-processing/refining laboratories crucial to the success of the operation were nonetheless kept out of the way of law-enforcement officials. In the beginning, these facilities were protected by private security forces recruited by the mafia. Since many of the best out-of-the-way places for running this kind of operation were in regions heavily influenced or controlled by the guerrillas, the narcotraficantes (drug traffickers) soon learned to cut deals with the guerrillas, who agreed to allow the labs to come in, and to stay up and running, so long as they - the guerrillas - were paid for the concession. In this way, the narcotraficantes were able to take shelter in spaces beyond the control of the Colombian State, a move which simultaneously protected them from honest members of the Colombian government which wished to crack down on them, as well as from those elements of the Colombian government which had been bought off, but which needed an excuse not to crush the drug trade which was enriching them. As students of international business have been right to point out, what the Medellin Cartel succeeded in creating in the 1970s and 1980s was actually a highly complex and proficient criminal transnational, utterly admirable in terms of its vision, inventiveness, and powers of organization; utterly reprehensible in terms of its methods and product. And yet, the destructive product which it fed to the world, in order to satisfy its dreams, was no simple offering of black and white. There was ambivalence in the poison, enormous complexity within the sin. For the immorality of the Colombian drug traffickers took on an entirely different meaning when seen in the light of international power relations, the economic inequality of nations, and the gigantic gap in income between the Northern and Southern hemispheres of the Americas. For men of a certain cynical bent, and for others who had been wounded enough not to play any longer by the rules of a game that was killing them, the drug trade was less of a crime than an act of self-defense. Liliput was tired of being stepped on, and had finally found a remedy, a way to take its place among the giants who decided who would live and who would die. As Carlos Lehder put it, in words which bore the unmistakable stamp of nationalism and were pregnant with historical implications: "Cocaine is the atom bomb of Latin America." More than a merely lucrative business venture, la coca was a weapon, a way to reverse history, to right the wrongs of time, to see to it that the first should be last, and the last be first. With la coca, justice would be attained. Centuries of impotence would be discarded. South America would rise up from its knees.

This vision, shared by Lehder and Escobar, has been termed megalomaniacal by many of their critics, and yet, there were economic and historical roots which fed the perception of self-importance which they succumbed to. As will be recalled from an earlier section in this article ("Liberals and Conservatives"), the economic theories of David Ricardo had not generated favorable results for Latin America. Learning to specialize in the production of primary products such as coffee, bananas, minerals, and timber for export had led to the rise of wealthy elites linked to the international economy, but failed to generate the broader revenues needed to lift the masses out of poverty. The prices of the products which Latin America’s economic growth depended upon fluctuated too greatly, and were subject to decline due to overproduction, as many poor countries were driven into competition against each other in obedience to the same strategy. Furthermore, exporting low-priced primary products, and importing more expensive manufactured products according to the precepts of global specialization and free trade, created unfavorable trade balances, which ate away at the income possible for Latin American countries to attain within the international system. In many cases, foreign companies became major forces in the development and marketing of Latin American resources, remitting large percentages of the profits made by these endeavors to North America and Europe, rather than investing them in the overall growth of the host countries. As Latin American governments outspent their earnings in the desperate desire to develop infrastructure which would further their economic growth, out of moral zealousness to help their poor or an elitist sense of urgency to quell social unrest, or simply to imitate the grandeur of North America and Europe, which was beyond their means, debt was incurred, and grew at last to debilitating proportions. Service to the debt then siphoned off critical percentages of the GNP from vital facets of economic development, further impoverishing the debtor nations. At the same time, the need to retain access to foreign credit, in order to keep their economies afloat, forced the Latin American countries to accept the political and economic dictates of international lending institutions such as the IMF (International Monetary Fund), which imposed conditions and regulations for the receipt of new loans which were not always beneficial to the social welfare of the masses or the sovereignty of Latin American States. For example, they might require the lifting of government price controls used to make certain staples affordable to the poor; demand the dismantling of "inefficient" government bureaucracies, resulting in increased unemployment; force the abolition of tariffs and other restrictions sometimes used to give local businesses a chance to compete against foreign multinationals; and mandate the privatization of important national services and assets, ranging from control of the oil industry, to ownership of telecommunications networks, electrical power systems, and the infrastructure utilized to provide drinking water to the people. In theory, the changes were meant to vitalize the target economies and lead to long-term improvement. In reality, for many Latin Americans, the policies of the international lending institutions, which were governed by the wealthy and powerful nations of the world, especially by the US, created unbearable social pressures in Latin America, and perpetuated the domination of the region by foreigners who interfered with its development, because they wanted to use Latin America for their own growth, without leaving Latin America what it needed for its growth. Radical Latin economists complained that the economic models being foisted on them by the US and Europe were not valid, and would never led to the genuine development of Latin America; they were merely intellectual disguises for the perpetuation of neocolonialism: blueprints for enabling and justifying foreign exploitation, and for creating and cultivating, through their partial success, the collaborating elites necessary to maintain that exploitation. For these radicals, the international system was cursed by contradictions and double standards. "Free Trade" meant "Latin America, open your doors to our products", but whenever Latin American economic success threatened the living standard of Americans by outcompeting American producers, and endangering the jobs of US workers, the US would take steps to protect its own by imposing trade barriers, an option which it sought to deny to Latin Americans, through the political power of the debt, and the veiled threat of its military. In other words, the equalizing dynamics of the free trade system were not being allowed to occur. (According to these dynamics, as they had been traditionally presented, living standards in the poor countries should give them one crucial economic advantage over the wealthy countries: the ability to factor cheap labor into their production. Over time, as they slowly moved from the export of agricultural goods into the export of both agricultural goods and light industrial goods, which were to be launched with earnings invested from the agroexport sector, their ability to undersell producers in the wealthy nations would gradually increase their share of world trade, and also help to improve their balance of payments. More wealth would begin to flow from the wealthy nations into the poorer nations, who might then, further embellish their economies by investing increasing profits into the development of competitive heavy industries, and capital goods industries.) Unfortunately for Latin America, the uneven use of trade barriers which reflected power differentials between the rich nations and poor nations of the world, was being used to sabotage the redistributive aspects of the free trade system; while the economic value of cheap Latin American labor was being captured by foreign multinationals, which were moving many of their operations abroad, yet continuing to dominate the profits of the operations they had set up in other lands. Outraged by this betrayal of a paradigm, radical economists were wont to exclaim, "This is not development, this is conquest wearing the mask of economic science! This is the mita speaking with the voice of Adam Smith. This is the grand illusion, the El Dorado that does not exist, that is leading all of Latin America to destruction in the desert of a tomorrow that will never come!"

And yet, for all the rage and sense of violation, economic alternatives had not flourished. The import substitution strategy previously mentioned ("Struggles for Land and Labor") had not panned out well for most of Latin America. The partial retraction from an unfavorable international system, and the effort to base development not so much on exports as upon the creation of domestic industries geared towards internal consumption, had foundered badly. In most cases, the domestic markets had not been large enough to support the development of substantial and efficient industries. In order to correct this problem, some Latin American countries had attempted to expand the "internal markets" available to them by combining with each other to create zones of economic cooperation, with experiments such as the Latin American Free Trade Association, the Central American Common Market, and the Andean Group. However, these efforts, though useful, had also run into significant obstacles, among them the inability of participating Latin American governments to incur the heavy political and social costs inherent in any genuine act of regional integration, in which some sectors of one’s economy are bound to suffer in the name of improving the performance of the whole. For many nations, poverty was too deep and social tensions too alive to be able to navigate through such sacrifices for the sake of the future. The present could not tolerate the politics of the horizon. And so, with modifications, the old export-oriented models of development had returned, burdened by the same limitations, the same sense of powerlessness, the same need to hope and the same empty words. Radical departures such as Cuba existed, which switched dependency from the US to dependency on the Soviet Union, then plunged into a marginal existence without a guardian; or Allende’s Chile (1970-1973), which lived in defiance of the system, seeking to reshape its destiny without recourse to guns, until it was punished for not conforming and finally dropped into the abyss of Pinochet. Cases such as these seemed to underline the inevitability of the farce, the eternity of the inequality.

And then came la coca. Lehder was not necessarily being melodramatic when he called it the "atom bomb of Latin America." Trapped in the dead-end formula of Ricardo, cursed by the contours of the system and the inequality of the price structures which characterized it, the coffee planters and the banana growers had failed to lift Latin America out of the pit of poverty. Even the oil drillers, indebted to and dominated by foreigners, had failed. But now, la coca had arrived: the primary product with manufactured-good prices; the agricultural sector with industrial-sector power. It was the perfect product to inject into a warped system, the mythical equalizer come to life, which suddenly made it possible to play and win by the rules of Ricardo. For the very first time, Colombian exports could finally begin to hold their own in the war that is mistakenly called "economics"; the wealth of the world that was used to trick nations into losing theirs could be recaptured and brought back to Colombia; the poor could be redeemed; what had been stolen from them could be stolen back. And Escobar and Lehder, who craved love as much as opulence and power, would be the new heroes of the Americas. For them, the promotion of la coca was not a crime, but an act of justice and revenge. What was being done to Latin America under the regimen of the international economy was the real crime, and they were about to ride to the rescue of el pueblo (the people), like Robin Hood.

Besides this aspect of la coca, Lehder seems to have envisioned Latin America and North America as being engaged in some kind of war to the death. La coca went beyond economic power, beyond the raw material of Latin America’s financial renewal, and political and military enlargement. He saw it, also, as a bullet aimed directly at the heart of the United States; as a bullet which could destroy North America’s will, unravel its "moral fabric", disorganize and divide it, self-involve and blind it, hasten its "decline and fall" like the Roman Empire, whose invincible weapons were destroyed by decadence, ultimately buried under the dust of its entertainments and its insatiable drive to satisfy the senses. For Lehder, who knew the US better than other members of the Cartel, having lived there for some time (both outside and inside of jail), la coca was the instrument by which Colombia would be raised, and North America would be lowered.

Perhaps this poem captures something of the hugeness and ferocity of the historical role conceived of for cocaine:

Big Devil

Big Horns

Coca on the way

Little Man’s

going to grow overnight

Overthrow the one

who called himself

God

because his

sword was biggest

Big Devil

Big Horns

Coca on the way

Giant

tied to a leaf

Stolen treasure

came back home

The whole world

paid the price

Big Devil

Big Horns

Coca on the way

Rome snorted itself

back to

two boys

sucking on a she-wolf’s teats

There’s a hole in power

where pleasure fits

Rome gave itself

back to the world

through its nose

Big Devil

Big Horns

Coca on the way

The empty space

behind the gold

knelt down

at the feet of the dead

Blood filled the streets

The gift was revenge

Big Devil

Big Horns

Coca on the way

What was easy

will never be easy again

Your friend

got lost

in the labyrinth

of you wanting everything

Now

the only one who will talk

to you is

the one

who will never find you

And all you can have

is what you broke

Big Devil

Big Horns

Coca on the way

End it

before they do

While the bigwigs of the Medellin Cartel boldly inserted themselves into the flow of Latin American history, re-imaging their criminal pasts with a compelling if not entirely accurate justification of their actions, how did the poor peasant producers of Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia envision their roles in the new world unfolding from the coca boom? For these peasants, la coca represented a chance, not always realized, to break out of the trap of poverty which the social and economic dynamics of their own countries, and the international system, had previously condemned them to. Although the path of coca-farming was not a ticket to wealth for the peasant class utilized in its production, which stood at the bottom of the totem pole of the drug profit structure, the increase in income was still impressive. La coca provided peasants formerly locked into subsistence patterns of agriculture with the opportunity to increase their living standard, to save money, buy needed items such as clothing and medicine, consolidate property of their own (if they were raspachines, or seasonal coca pickers), perhaps invest in farm animals, and lay foundations for their children’s future. For people living a marginal existence, these gains were not superfluous, they were essential. This was especially true in Colombia, which was the original growing area tapped by the drug mafias; then a reserve growing area (after the Peruvian/Bolivian coca zones had been fully integrated into the operation); then, once again, the primary growing area after anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency operations in Bolivia and Peru (including substantial victories against the Sendero Luminoso, a guerrilla organization which had provided cover to the growing zones in Peru’s Upper Huallaga Valley), destabilized these sources. For poor Colombian colonos, driven by the dynamics of land ownership and violence which had marred their nation’s history into the remote jungle regions of Putumayo, Caqueta, and Guaviare (where 60% of Colombia’s coca is grown today), la coca was the only answer that made economic sense. The cost of transporting their produce to markets from these isolated regions was simply prohibitive: the income available from the sale of traditional crops would be negated by the expense of getting them to market. Relying on the production of traditional crops such as yucca, frijoles, platanos, and maiz, was, therefore, an approach that could only perpetuate subsistence, enshrining bare survival as the destiny of one’s life and the fate of one’s progeny. Coca, on the other hand, due to the extraordinary price it was able to command in international markets, could be economically transported out of the marginal zones where it was produced, leaving behind profits for the peasants, and hope for the future.

There are many in the US, today, who fault the poor peasant coca-grower of Latin America as selfish, egotistic, heartless: oblivious to the damage his economic choices are producing on the streets of North America. But these critics would do well to think twice. For these peasant cultivators, the reality which motivates them is what is in front of their eyes, and what is most immediate in their hearts, the welfare of their families. North America and its problems are hundreds and perhaps thousands of miles away. To identify with North American victims of cocaine use requires an act of the imagination, while to react to the hunger of their own children requires only the normal functioning of the strongest of human instincts. And North Americans should ask themselves: do we take into consideration the effects which our economic choices are having on the people of Latin America, when we buy jeans, or put gasoline into our cars, or eat bananas, or drink our favorite soft drink, or give flowers to a friend? Or do we only consider the prices and the quality of what we wish to buy, in light of what will make us and the ones we love happy, with no thought to the social consequences imbedded in our purchases? Do we see the girls in the sweatshops, the workers poisoned by pesticides, the union activists gunned down in cold blood so that rising wages will not sabotage the price we are looking for? How should the Latin American coca-grower, who has far less economic room to spare than we do, sacrifice his income to protect strangers who, for the most part, make no such effort on his behalf?

Perhaps no one said it better than Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in a passage which could be applied to humanity, in general, which inhabits the universe of the near while only faintly perceiving the universe of the far: "Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake… [After reflecting on it for a while, the thoughtful humanitarian man of Europe] would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this own paltry misfortune of his own." Indifference is a vice which cuts two ways; and the guilt is greater the less need one has of one’s vice.

Besides this emotional distance from the destructiveness of cocaine, of course, which insulated peasant coca-growers from the harmful nature of their product, it must be noted that the moral cruelty of cocaine was not obvious or universally agreed upon at the outset. Cocaine was glorified by many users, and came into vogue in the wake of marijuana’s drive from the social fringe towards (but not quite to) the North American mainstream. As part of the 60’s Drug Culture, which was infused with an ideology of experimentation, mind-expansion, pseudo-spirituality, and rebellion against "anachronistic" and personally-limiting laws, cocaine was only a "vice" and "force of evil" to the "squares" and "repressive institutions" of the Establishment. It took time for the damaging properties of coke addiction to become evident; and an expansion of coke consumption from the class which was originally able to afford it on a regular basis to wider sectors of the populace, before the alarm bells would start to ring in all quarters.

This widening of coke consumption began as the Colombian mafias sought to cut losses inherent in their commitment to shipping only "quality product" to the United States: what to do with substandard coke? Eventually, the solution of "dumping" coca paste of inferior quality, which had been withdrawn from the final stages of refinement due to its unsuitability, was adopted. Colombian cities such as Medellin were hardest hit. There, the paste sold for a low price, and mixed with tobacco or marijuana and rolled into cigarettes, became a favorite among the young and the destitute. Known as basuco, the high was considered intense, and addiction rates soared. To their dismay, Colombian health officials noted an almost 100% relapse rate of addicts brought into public detoxification programs, while astonishing stories circulated of doctors who actually performed lobotomies in an effort to destroy the addiction (but with only a 50-80% success rate).

While this epidemic of basuco hit susceptible urban populations of Colombia during the 1980s, the US was subjected to its own wave of "cheap cocaine" in the form of "crack", which was recognized as a massive new social problem around 1985. Cocaine, in its previously standard powdered form - generally snorted, but occasionally dissolved into water and injected - had been too expensive for regular consumption by the masses. Crack, however, brought cocaine to the people in a new, affordable, and extremely powerful form which was designed for smoking. Cocaine, in its powdered hydrochloride form, was not suitable for smoking, due to the fact that the coke began to decompose before the temperature needed to vaporize it could be reached. Crack was a new variation of cocaine (reached by a different method of preparation), which, available in "rock" or "crystal" form, could be vaporized at lower temperatures than the hydrochloride powder, and therefore smoked (typically in a "crack pipe") without losing its properties. The cracking sound made by these crystals as they were heated gave the drug its name; while the means of delivery (smoking) had much to do with the heightened impact of the experience.

For the drug cartels, the introduction of crack diversified their product line, and enhanced their revenues by allowing them to reach a new market, one which the high prices of powdered coke had prevented them from tapping. For North America, the introduction of crack triggered a social nightmare, or perhaps, only deepened an existing one. Inner cities were overwhelmed by the powerful and affordable drug which suddenly appeared on the streets, offering itself as a remedy to the pain and frustration of lives stunted by poverty, racism, and a dearth of opportunity. As the song once said: "Did you know/ that it’s true/ that for me/ and for you/ the world is a ghetto?" For those most despondent and most wounded by the bleak horizon of the urban slum, crack felt like a savior, even though its rush was ephemeral and its departure a torment. Angel Crack, take me out of here, lift me out with your poison hand, that the King and Queen don’t understand: they’ve got other doors into Happy Land. I’m not less and they’re not more, we just go in by different doors. We just go in by different doors. As a result of the 1980’s crack epidemic, the already shaky future of many capsized into absolute oblivion. Addiction and an utter loss of social functionality replaced what was at least a slim chance; violence proliferated, as gangs grew up around the new commodity and fought for turf as local distributors; and as addicts resorted to crime to get the money they needed to crawl back to the oasis of another high. Families truly did unravel, as addicted mothers neglected their young, and damaged their fetuses because they couldn’t stop smoking, even during pregnancy; as kids stole from their parents and other relatives to get "crack money"; as dollars needed for staples went to the local drug dealer instead. Racial tensions also escalated, as the fear of "black crime" prompted increasingly harsh drug laws with unequal punishments meted out to the races (based on the kind of cocaine they used), and an intensifying police presence in many of the slums, which some locals accused of imposing a veritable state of siege in their communities. Racial profiling and the harassment of youth were frequently cited as abuses.

Back in Colombia, as all this was going on in the USA, coca-producing peasants did not comprehend what was taking place; and the drug lords did not care. This was business, and business was war. There was a product that people wanted, and the mafias were going to provide it. As cynics often said of North America’s drug consumers, "Nobody is holding a gun to their head. They can ‘just say no.’" While others added, "The sin is not with us, not with the supply side of the drug trade. We are only responding to demand. Who made that demand? Who made the people want drugs? Who made them need drugs? Who made them crazy for drugs? The society that put that hunger in them is to blame."

While the drug lords of the Medellin Cartel might be ruthlessly indifferent to the impact of their business on North America (and look the other way as they dumped basuco into the poorest of their own slums), they nonetheless sought to politicize their gangsterism and to infuse it with elements of social content which would rescue it from pure villainy, and convert it into a movement with widespread appeal in Colombia. Carlos Lehder, for example, bought interests in several newspapers, and began to toss his political ideas around, as he sought to formulate and articulate a new social order based upon a combination of intense Latin American nationalism with his own brand of outlaw capitalism. He flirted with leftist guerrilla movements, yet at the same time publicly confessed to an admiration for Hitler, who he characterized as a "great warrior", and most likely loved for the "strength" which he showed in not allowing international concepts of morality to hem him in. In the manner of Nietzsche (Hitler’s favorite philosopher), Lehder saw the morality of the common man as nothing more than cowardice; or, alternately, as mental weakness, by means of which the enemy disarmed him from within so that he could have his way with him.

While Lehder sought to find ways to transform coca from a business into a sociopolitical project of national redemption, Pablo Escobar attempted to drape himself in the mantle of populism, and to become the Caesar of Colombia: hero of the masses, conqueror of other lands. Don Pablo, as his admirers called him, made frequent public appearances, handing out cash to the poor. He built impressive new apartment projects to house the poor in Medellin, constructed a skating rink, and much more importantly, a soccer stadium, and invested heavily in the improvement of Colombian futbol (soccer), so that "Colombian players were no longer treated as objects of pity in international competitions, but with the respect due the best." (Quin~ones Nova, p. 133) For a culture impassioned by sports, this was no insignificant accomplishment, and the joy of seeing their team make it to the World Cup of 1990, and tie future world champion Germany 1-1 in a brilliant match that mesmerized the international community, was a gift that few could equal: a symbol of Colombia’s potential to emerge from the shadows of powerlessness and disrespect to become a recognized and valued member of the world. As Julius Caesar first won the adoration of the Roman masses through the games which he put on for them, so Pablo Escobar fortified his image as a "man of the people" by means of his contribution to the development of Colombian soccer. It did not matter that Don Pablo also surrounded himself with unimaginable opulence, creating a spectacular hacienda for himself replete with a private zoo, and bathrooms plated with gold, as well as purchasing numerous other luxury homes, yachts, and jets. He was not like the wealthy 19^th-century Americans noted by De Toqueville in Democracy in America, who hid their wealth and class from the masses in an effort to blend in to the democratic milieu; rather, he flaunted his wealth as a sign of his virility and effectiveness, while mitigating the possibility of envy with constant acts of public generosity, and undermining the potential of resentment with his personal charm. For thousands upon thousands, he became a role model, blazer of a path that could change their lives. He became the personal embodiment of hope; the new Messiah who would straighten out the upside-down world.

For a moment, Escobar sought to exploit his growing popularity and to openly enter the arena of politics. In 1978 he was elected to be a "stand-in" member of the Medellin City Council, and in 1982, he was elected to be a "stand-in" member of the Colombian National Congress. However, at this point, he finally ran up against the wall of official propriety, which could not let a criminal of his stature pursue a conventional political career without sacrificing the prestige of the nation, and incurring the ire of the United States, which had finally begun to move in earnest against the Medellin Cartel. Escobar was publicly denounced and forced to withdraw from the Congress. In this same year, US pressure compelled the Bahamas to begin harassing Lehder’s base on Norman’s Cay. The Colombian drug lord was forced to abandon his residence there, and by 1983, his operation on the island had been closed down. While the Cali Cartel continued to play the card of patience, concentrating on its business, developing connections with the traditional elites, and accepting the necessity of leaving the attainment of direct political power for future generations, when the guilt by which their fortune was made would have been replaced by the innocence of those who merely inherited it, the Medellin Cartel was about to become a victim of its own ambition. It wanted to kill and to be consecrated within the same generation. It wanted to be both the beast outside, and to have a place by the hearth. The insatiable egos, the incredible drive and criminal imagination of its leaders, had finally led it into an untenable level of confrontation with the State. From its achievements sprang confidence, and from its confidence arose fantasies. In its mind, it became greater than the real world was willing to let it be.

The Medellin Cartel’s war with the State was a natural result of its high-profile presence, which could not be ignored without seeming to collaborate or to abdicate; and that was not possible, with the US government breathing down Colombia’s neck, using all of its political and economic influence to pressure the Colombian State to shut down Escobar’s operation. Already, the Medellin Cartel had caused grievous damage to elements of the Colombian State, subjecting it to its famous options of plata o plomo ("silver or lead"), meaning, "Take this little bribe and look the other way, or start to make your funeral plans right now, because we’re saving a bullet with your name on it, just in case you have something against our money." Drug money did, in fact, succeed in creating a vast infrastructure of Cartel supporters, from police and military personnel who did not "detect" or interfere with its operations, and who "failed" to catch its leaders, to politicians who blocked legislation unfavorable to the drug lords, to judges who acquitted the narcotraficantes or dismissed charges against them, to jailers who let convicts come and go from prison as they wished. The plata side of the Cartel’s strategy was more than effective. On the other hand, many members of the Colombian government refused to take the bribes. These, acting courageously on the basis of their own convictions and principles, or out of political territoriality (to prevent the usurpation of the traditional elites from which they came by a rogue criminal class spawned in a day), or else out of obligation to the USA, put their lives on the line to challenge the growing power of the cocaine empire. In such cases, Escobar did not hesitate to go after them. Colombia had a long tradition of hired killers dating back to the days of the pajaros, the hit men of La Violencia. The killers of the 1980s were more commonly known as sicarios, and were often young men recruited from the slums, enticed with a dizzying taste of luxury put at their fingertips, then trained to strike ruthlessly at targets designated by the Cartel. Frequently, they would operate in pairs, traveling by motorcycle to the vicinity of the intended victim. Then, as the driver roared up beside the target, the gunman riding behind him would open fire; or else, as the driver stood by, the gunman would dismount, shoot his victim at point-blank range, and remount. In either case, the team would then speed away, using the maneuverability of the bike to weave in and out of traffic, and break clear of the crime scene before they could be apprehended. Had Escobar ever heard of the "Old Man of the Mountain" and the notorious band of assassins which he used to project his power throughout the Middle East during the 13^th Century; a man without an army, who used the threat of a few fearless killers to break the will of the those who ruled great kingdoms; a man who lacked the resources to invade foreign lands, yet who thoroughly controlled those places which he could not conquer with the shadow of his terror; a man who, though unable to occupy another country, could, nonetheless, occupy the minds of those who had the power to give it to him, with the constant questions of "When?" and "Where?" Escobar, like the Old Man of the Mountain, placed the threat of death before all who opposed them - the threat of a quiet night interrupted by gunfire; the threat of an ambush on the street, a roadblock and bullets fired through the car window; the threat of a fatal step out the door, with someone waiting. The tension and sense of powerlessness were more than most could bear. If he wanted you, it was only a matter of time…

Using the formula of plata o plomo, Escobar kept the State disorganized and divided against itself, one part sabotaging the efforts of the other part to destroy him. However, in 1984, he finally pushed past the limits which could be tolerated, even out of fear; outrage rose to such high levels that not even the instinct of self-preservation could contain it. The Cartel had just killed Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, Colombia’s Minister of Justice, and President Belisario Betancur, realizing the fragility of his police and legal system in the face of the plata o plomo strategy, reversed his position on extradition, making Colombian drug traffickers eligible to be tried for their crimes in the United States. (US warrants were already out for Escobar, Lehder, Gacha, and the Ochoas, who were all wanted for drug trafficking.) The US criminal justice system, not so vulnerable or highly damaged as Colombia’s, was deemed capable of meting out the sentences which the Cartel members deserved. As some Colombians said, "Justice in the US is as cold as a gringo’s heart. Go in a young man, come out with a cane." No Colombian wanted to end up in that Hell, where plata had lost its voice.

From this moment on, the Cartel’s relation with the State began to revolve around the issue of extradition. While Cartel members, calling themselves the "Extraditables", stepped up their violence against those who supported extradition, cartel publicists played the nationalist card against it, arguing that it was a violation of national sovereignty to allow the US to exercise that kind of power over Colombian citizens, who could not expect to receive a fair trial in the United States and would only end up victims of racism, sacrificed to North American political objectives. "To surrender [Colombian] nationals to the United States is to provide imperialism with a means to intimidate… the peoples of the [South American] continent; it could fill North American cells with Colombians who are subjected to outrages and permanently humiliated…" (Quin~ones Nova, p. 130) Many Colombians who were against the drug traffickers nonetheless agreed with their take on extradition, considering it to be an unbearable admission of the weakness of their State ("how is it that we cannot secure our own prisoners?"), as well as an unwanted act of submission to a foreign nation which had a long history of abusing its power in Latin America. On the other hand, many other Colombians believed that extradition was now the only means left to them to defeat Pablo Escobar and his cohorts.

Frightened by the specter of extradition to the US, Escobar temporarily left Colombia to go into hiding in Panama under the protection of General Manuel Antonio Noriega, military strongman and de facto ruler of the country. Noriega was at that time surviving as an opportunist working the various sides in the region, providing some support to the CIA and US interests in their contra war against the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, while also allowing radical groups some freedom of action in his country, and enabling Colombian drug traffic to pass through. Panama had also developed into a major center for Cartel money-laundering operations, accepting vast sums of US dollars made from the drug trade, no questions asked. While Escobar and the Ochoas sought refuge with Noriega as the heat was turned up in Colombia, Lehder, seeing only "betrayal" in the general’s eyes, preferred to seek sanctuary elsewhere: some say, in Nicaragua, then later, in the jungles of Colombia. Don’t tell too many secrets to a cockroach. Don’t close your eyes at night next to the one who helped you wash your knife. In spite of the temporary displacement of its leadership, the Cartel continued to run full steam ahead, directed ably by Escobar and associates from abroad, and then, once more (after things had settled down a bit), from Colombia. In 1987, during the presidency of Virgilio Barco, the extradition treaty between Colombia and the US was declared unconstitutional by the Colombian Supreme Court - an act of genuine legal interpretation, judicial nationalism, or plata o plomo? Whatever the case, it gave the Cartel more room to work with (although by that time one of them had already been captured. More on this later.)

Meanwhile, the Cartel’s war against the State continued. In 1986, Supreme Court Justice Hernando Baquero Borda was gunned down by sicarios. In that same year, Guillermo Cano, editor of El Espectador, one of Colombia’s leading newspapers, was shot down. He had been too vocal in his condemnations of the traffickers, who now expanded their list of targets to include "freedom of the press." In 1988, Attorney General Carlos Mauro Hoyos was murdered, one more victim of integrity in the war on drugs. The conflict was intense, the outcome undecided, although the possibility of an outlaw, narco-state emerging as a permanent feature of the Americas seemed hard to imagine.

In the mid-1980s, as the Medellin Cartel and the Colombian government (with the US and its Drug Enforcement Administration also deeply involved), mixed it up, a new and very important development occurred which was to change the face of the long-standing political conflict between Left and Right, which had been raging ever since La Violencia. The drug dealers began to become a part of that war, joining in on the side of the Right, while maintaining the Machiavellian connections with the Left which were necessary to keep their business operations afloat. The bosses of the Medellin Cartel were not simple people, and when success required complex strategies, they were up to the challenge. Like the mythical character Proteus, they could change their form to fit the circumstances, mutate from a bull to a lion to a bird to a fish. Look for them in the air and they will be in the water. Cast your net into the sea, and they will be looking down at you from a mountain. Who are they, whose side are they on? Their own. They did not need to make themselves be easy to understand, they were comfortable maneuvering in the labyrinth, comfortable killing yesterday’s friends and sleeping with the enemy; they did not live to be predicted, or to fit into anyone’s model of Colombia’s reality. Historians of the twisted politics and sordid intrigues of medieval Byzantium and Renaissance Florence would have loved them.

The motives for the Cartel’s entry into the war between Colombia’s Left and Right were personal, economic, and political. On a personal level, the Cartel was surprised and infuriated by the 1981 kidnapping of Martha Nieves Ochoa by M-19 guerrillas. She was the daughter the Ochoa family patriarch Don Fabio, and sister of the notorious Ochoa brothers. As one writer reported it: "It was one of the worse mistakes the guerrillas ever made." In response to this new threat against their families, the traffickers formed a death squad known as Muerte A Secuestradores ("Death to Kidnappers"), or MAS, whose objectives were to retaliate against the guerrillas for this violation of their families’ security, and to create the means to insure violent payback for any and all future transgressions of this kind.

On an economic level, the traffickers began to awaken to the social ramifications of the fact that they were wealthy businessmen, successful entrepreneurs, new elites in the making. Their earlier identity as rebels and outlaws had initially placed them, in their own minds, on the outside of the system, which led to a certain empathy with the guerrillas, who were also outsiders. Perhaps the kidnapping of Martha Nieves Ochoa alerted them to the fact that they were drifting apart, that more than fellow rebels, they were actually "class enemies", natural adversaries on different sides of the socioeconomic divide, motivated by different dreams, and responding to different interests. The narcotraficantes were, in the end, capitalists, not socialists, and they did not want to live in a socialist state which might limit their use of their wealth, or thwart the exercise of the power which they hoped to gain. They did not want to do away with elites, they wanted to become elites. They did not want to abolish economic inequality, which was a social necessity for the individual accumulation of extraordinary wealth, they wanted to sit in the driver’s seat of inequality. In concrete terms, as part of their strategy of protecting the money they made from drug trafficking and consolidating a legitimate economic base from which to project their influence throughout Colombia, the traffickers began to make huge investments in urban and rural real estate, providing a gigantic impetus to the construction industry which generated thousands of jobs and helped to enrich the country as a whole. In the countryside, they initiated a major campaign of land acquisition, establishing large-scale agricultural enterprises and setting up gigantic cattle ranches. In the process, they resorted to tactics long practiced by Colombian elites for taking possession of the land they wanted, using money and palanca ("connections") to turn the legal and administrative apparatus which oversaw issues of land ownership to their advantage; and failing that, intimidation and violence, to evict peasants from their farms. Once designated as a "squatter", the independent peasant could be booted off his own land; and in many cases, money and influence were all that was needed to secure a legally-binding reinterpretation of reality, which would convert a rightful owner into a "squatter."

Naturally, these aggressive dynamics of expansion brought the drug dealers into conflict with the FARC, which was committed to defending its peasant base. In the Magdalena Medio region of Colombia - an area of rich farmland along the middle Magdalena River, which is to Colombia what the Mississippi River is to the US - the conflict became particularly acute. This area, with its magnificent agricultural possibilities, and its access to Colombia’s principal oil fields and world-renowned emerald deposits, became a major focus of investment for the Medellin Cartel during the 1980s. Forging alliances with other major landholders in the region, the Cartel helped to transform AGDEGAM (la Asociacion Campesina de Ganaderos del Magdalena Medio, or "the Peasant Association of Cattle Ranchers of the Magdalena Medio") into a front for consolidating their political power in the region. Local officials and security personnel were bought off, the town government of Puerto Boyaca was co-opted, and a new and improved death squad, also known as MAS, was formed, to help evict peasants from their lands; drive away the FARC and relieve landholders of the need to pay la vacuna to the guerrillas; intimidate and root out FARC sympathizers; and quell any forms of social agitation or unrest which could possibly threaten the interests of the local elites. The region soon became home to one or more escuelas de sicarios ("assassin training academies"), and after a while, highly proficient paramilitary units, provided with weapons by elements of the Colombian military and trained by former Colombian army officers or foreign mercenaries, were molded into combat shape. These units, a special project of el Mejicano (Rodriguez Gacha), not only protected Cartel interests in the region, but soon developed the ability to exert Cartel power throughout the nation. As paramilitary activities began to intensify during the 1980s, bringing the drug dealers into violent conflict with popular sectors, such as peasants and organized labor, the Cartel fought to maintain its populist aura by continuing to perform acts of social generosity in limited environments capable of favorably projecting its image to the rest of the country. It continued to benefit poor people in some locations, while killing poor people in others. Some it cultivated as a base, others it blew out of its way.

In addition to these personal and economic motives for becoming involved in the war against the Left in Colombia, the Cartel also had important political reasons for joining in. As its war against the State, which was driven by its need to preserve space for its criminal activities, escalated, so its need for powerful allies within the State grew. By investing a part of its enormous drug fortune in the creation of a paramilitary apparatus capable of aiding the State in its counterinsurgency efforts, the Cartel hoped to make itself too useful to the State to be eliminated.

Already, on a more subtle level, of course, the Cartel was helping to combat the guerrillas. By injecting large new doses of money into the Colombian economy, the drug trade was helping to stave off recession and to prevent the kind of economic deterioration which historically has multiplied the guerrillas. By helping the capitalist system to stay on its feet, it was lessening the appeal of radical socialist alternatives, which could only be reached by walking over the hot coals of revolution. Why risk your life if there was still hope? Although Colombian government officials, and their North American allies who were opposed to drug trafficking, were sure to press ahead with their war against the Cartel no matter what, some estimates had placed Colombia’s narco-income as high as 50% of its Gross Domestic Product (Foreign Affairs Magazine, 1994), while others saw it as half that, or even less (below 10%). Whatever the truth - never easy to ascertain in such a highly-guarded, illegal field - cocaine’s economic impact on Colombian society was huge; and if there were moral "troopers" determined to eliminate it at any cost, there were also pragmatists who did not fail to recognize its usefulness in warding off the conditions likely to breed a new generation of guerrillas.

More directly, however, the Cartel’s investment in the creation of a new, high-powered paramilitary apparatus, was a tremendous gift to the Colombian Right. The Right was, by now, thoroughly frustrated by decades of civil war characterized by its inability to defeat the FARC. It believed that to win that war what was required was una guerra sucia ("a dirty war"): a war of terror against the guerrillas’ civilian support base; a war which would intimidate, displace, and destroy the "human infrastructure" required by the guerrillas to survive in the countryside, to maneuver invisibly among the people, to strike out of nowhere then disappear again, to spread their perspective ("propaganda"), to build contacts and carry out urban operations. The guerrillas, themselves, lacked major fixed targets for the military to assault, which is what made them so elusive and hard to beat: the people were their one fixed target, but they were also off-limits, due to the "rules of war", which precluded attacks against unarmed civilians. For right-wing elements of the military, the distinction between guerrillas and civilians in a guerrilla-dominated zone was a fatal mental construct, imposed upon their life-and-death struggle by international conventions and organizations outside of the line of fire. These militares hated human-rights activists, who they considered to be "agents of the subversives", or else naive pawns, used by the guerrillas to shape the contours of the battlefield to their own advantage. As time went on, rage at feeling their hands tied, grew. The same frustration that led US soldiers to act out with violent atrocities against the villagers of My Lai during the Vietnam War led to the development of a sustained strategy, in Colombia, to terrorize and punish those who provided aid and comfort to the guerrillas. The thought was, "My men are dying because you’re helping the guerrillas and not us. Why didn’t you tell us about that land mine? Why didn’t you tell us about that ambush they set up? By letting us walk into it, you are as guilty as the ones who fired the bullets. To Hell with you, you deserve to die just as much as the ones who pulled the trigger."

In fact, before the paramilitaries developed into a major presence in the 1980s, the Colombian military had been accused of numerous human rights abuses, including the torture and extrajudicial execution of civilians in combat zones, and the bombing of civilian populations suspected of collaborating with the guerrillas, a policy intended to displace peasants from guerrilla strongholds and to leave the guerrillas without a support base: or, as counterinsurgency experts put it, "to take away the water from the fish." (Colombia, today, ranks third in the world for "internally displaced" citizens, trailing only the Sudan and Angola in this regard. Since 1985, over two million Colombians have been forced to leave their homes and to resettle in other locations, due to threats and violence perpetrated by the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, and the army.)

Serious problems, however, attended any human rights abuses committed by the military in the name of counterinsurgency. Valuable public-relations ground was lost by the State in its war against the guerrillas every time it was implicated in a violation of the rules of war as the result of actions carried out by one of its official institutions, such as the military or the police. Besides this, US military aid, including weapons, training, funds for "civic action" programs, and logistical and intelligence support, was susceptible to review and suspension by the US Congress, if certain minimal standards of human rights were not observed by the recipient country. In 1977/78, for example, US military aid to Guatemala was suspended, and arms sales banned, due to gross violations of human rights that were being perpetrated by the Guatemalan army in its war against leftist guerrillas, which had degenerated into a veritable genocide of Native Mayan peoples; while, in 1983, the US Congress passed the "Boland Amendments", blocking the US government, and any and all of its agencies, from providing military aid to the Nicaraguan contras, a US-backed counterrevolutionary force aimed at destabilizing the ruling Sandinistas. Although both the Guatemalan military and the Nicaraguan contras continued to receive indirect US military aid from public and private sources, and from third parties which were invited to step into the vacuum created by the "absence" of the United States, the resulting systems of support were far more complicated and far less efficient than those which had previously existed. In the midst of a very difficult war against a formidable, time-tested guerrilla army, the last thing the Colombian State wanted or needed was for human rights abuses to provoke the US Congress, acting to save its own image and (in cases) principles, to cut off military aid.

For this reason, the paramilitaries were an ingenious invention. Not officially a part of the State, they were able to operate outside of the traditional human rights framework which binds governments, and "ties the hands" of soldiers in the name of morality; to commit horrible atrocities for which the Colombian government could not be held accountable, and to wage the "dirty war" which elements of the military wanted to wage, but could not, due to their formal association with the State. Although the fiction of "independent death squads" not connected to the State was nothing new - in fact, it was already a well-known feature of 1980s El Salvador and Guatemala - the pretense was more believable in Colombia, due to the genuine existence of a powerful, non-governmental entity already well-known for its criminal ruthlessness: the Medellin Cartel. Besides this, brilliant fiction was not required here. The US government was wholly committed to the war against the guerrillas in Colombia, and therefore willing to tolerate human rights abuses which were not brazenly traceable to the Colombian government.

With the rise of the paramilitaries, the perfect counterinsurgency machine was put into place: a government which combined the PR advantages and aid-procurement capabilities of a democracy, with the military effectiveness of a dictatorship; a likable clean face, with a hard, unsparing heart. It was truly a hybrid beast, like the mythological chimera, or some fantasy creation of geneticists: a lamb with the claws of a lion, and the teeth of a wolf; a beautiful white dove with a serpent’s soul, iron weapons grafted onto its soft body. And what made it particularly effective was the fact that thousands of Colombian officials, civilians and military alike, honestly played the part of the defenders of ideals, abhorring the inhumanity of the dirty war as they inadvertently provided moral cover for those who practiced the skills of darkness beneath the surface of the State. Their commitment to justice, as they perceived it, and to human rights, perfected the facade which the others needed to hide behind.

Typically, the paramilitary death squads, financed by drug money, trained by former military men and by foreign mercenaries (including British and Israelis), armed by the Colombian military or by sources on the black market, and made up of peasants, members of the urban unemployed, and former security personnel, all working for hire, received intelligence information and logistical support from elements of the Colombian military as they moved into position to carry out their attacks. The army and police would then move out of their way, pretending not to notice them as they advanced to strike at their common enemies; then, fail to apprehend them or engage them as they left the scenes of their horrendous crimes. More will be said about these crimes in the next section ("Paramilitary Chronicles"). For now it can be said that the paramilitaries specialized in carrying out massacres of civilian "guerrilla sympathizers", which were meant to shock and terrify the guerrillas’ support base into submission, or else frighten it into abandoning the countryside altogether, thereby isolating the guerrillas, and also opening up new tracts of land for acquisition by the narco-elites and their allies. Paramilitary actions were particularly rife in some zones, especially those which were heavily militarized and dominated by army commanders to whom the civil government had granted special powers, and where important economic assets were located. This applied particularly to the region of the Magdalena Medio, where the FARC and ELN were a threat, and to the banana-growing region of Uraba, where the EPL and FARC were active. The paramilitaries rarely confronted the guerrilla groups directly, but were, instead, utilized by some military commanders as a kind of auxiliary force, to soften up the guerrillas’ support network by waging "dirty war." Obviously, areas that were deep inside guerrilla territory, such as the FARC’s jungle strongholds, were less affected by paramilitary activity than areas that were more contested, where access to guerrilla-supporting communities was easier.

While these paramilitaries participated in a brutal campaign of civilian massacres designed to undermine guerrilla power, without triggering an international response which could severely damage the Colombian government, they and smaller groups of mafia-spawned sicarios also carried out a relentless series of assassinations against Leftist activists and politicians in general. For the Colombian Right, the Left was nothing more than the FARC with many heads, one big monster of guerrilla sympathizers, agents, and front men, mixed with equivalents and deadly ingenues, whose lethal naiveté was almost worse than bullets. Together, they were part of a human ocean of dissatisfaction that threatened to crash over the shore of what was, and what the Right wished to preserve. Trade unionists, peasant organizers, progressive teachers, students, and intellectuals, community activists, indigenous leaders, and left-wing politicians of various affiliations, were all considered suspect according to this worldview , and depending on specific circumstances, in need of intimidation or elimination. Not only was this campaign of terror meant to isolate the FARC politically, it also seemed designed to impede the development of any significant social challenge to major landholders and business owners, to keep down the cost of labor, increase elite access to land, and enforce a monopoly on ideas, putting blinders of fear over alternative visions that might arise, shooting down the social imagination of a nation. During the 1980s, thousands died as a result of this wave of assassinations. Particularly hard-hit was a leftist opposition coalition formed by the PCC, FARC, and various democratic-left groups, which sought to combine their constituencies to create a new political party capable of challenging the traditional domination of the Liberals and Conservatives. The Union Patriotica (Patriotic Union", or UP) as this new party, created in 1985, was known, arose during the "democratic opening" pursued by President Belisario Betancur, who wished to pacify the country by promoting the idea of inclusion, and reintegrating rebellious elements of society into the political process. For the FARC, participation in the UP was a way of testing the ground of peace, to see if it was solid. Could gains truly be made in the electoral arena? Could the FARC truly come out of the jungle without being shot? Until it was sure, it was not going to give up its weapons. Of course, it is very possible that the FARC was only interested in participating in the UP as a way of expanding its political influence, as a means of enhancing the future possibilities of its armed struggle. Why not exploit the opportunity to operate legally and openly in the public arena while it lasted? Certainly, this is the way that enemies of the FARC perceived the UP. For them, the UP was nothing more than a guerrilla front meant to subvert society by taking advantage of its democratic institutions. Determined to save the nation from President Betancur’s ingenuousness, they took it upon themselves to begin shooting the UP into oblivion, caring little for the fact that many UP members did not belong to the FARC at all, and had simply gravitated to the party in order to begin to try to form a leftist alternative to the current state of affairs. "Birds of a feather flock together," was the philosophy that ruled the loading of the guns. During the 1980s and 1990s, the UP lost 2,000 - 3,000 members to assassination (some say 5,000), including its leaders and presidential candidates, Jaime Pardo Leal (1987) and Bernado Jaramillo Ossa (1989). Pardo Leal’s death was directly attributed to the planning of Medellin Cartel crime boss Rodriguez Gacha, who was not successfully prosecuted in the case, however. When it came to acts of violence perpetrated by the paramilitaries and the sicarios, the culprits were rarely found, and even less rarely prosecuted and convicted. "Impunity" was king in the land of blood. Decimated by violence, the UP eventually faded from the political stage. The FARC used its destruction as an argument for the continuation of the armed struggle; as proof of the impossibility of peaceful change in Colombia, where democracy was either a game, or a killing field.

In addition to these campaigns of political terror, the death squads created by the drug lords also began to engage in ruthless acts of limpieza social (or "social cleansing"). Comparing themselves to fumigators of insects, they took it upon themselves to "beautify" their cities by getting rid of the homeless, the gamines (street children, many of whom had turned to thievery and drug addiction), beggars, transvestites, and homosexuals. These moves were partly designed to increase the economic value of their real estate by improving the general quality of the cities they sought to dominate; to deny the guerrillas potential urban recruiting grounds (the guerrillas were said to sometimes abduct the gamines in order to integrate them into their forces); and to woo socially conservative elements of society, which might begin to see the narcos as defenders of "family values", rather than as untrustworthy outlaws. It might help to create common ground between them. And yet, these killings were cold-blooded and close-minded, turning the stomachs of the sensitive. To some, it seemed as if the underlying philosophy of the limpiezas was the same as that which lay behind the famous graffiti detected on a wall in La Paz, Bolivia, ever since a symbol of the heartless logic of the rich: "End poverty, kill a beggar." Although the Cartel had not given up on its populist image, its politics were becoming steadily more fascist, with the people subsiding into servitude, just as they had under Hitler: enthusiastic and adoring slaves, or else enemies in the gun sights.

The narco strategy, at this point, was complex, as intellectually amazing as it was morally repulsive. By assuming a vital role in the State’s defense, undertaking to wage the "dirty war" that the State could not wage without crippling itself, as well as pumping badly needed narcodollars into the economy, the Cartel had made itself useful to the State, and imbedded itself into the very fabric of its survival. It hoped to be so valuable that it could not be torn out of this fabric. While some elements of the State opposed the traficantes, as they must, many others were bought off, intimidated, or won over by the Cartel’s usefulness. Most likely, Escobar, now that he realized he would never be able to openly pursue a political career in Colombia, hoped to create a kind of shadow body politic under his control, consisting of government and security officials who were drawn to his side. Using his influence, he would engineer a kind of "invisible coup" backed by politicians and by military men who welcomed his aid in the war against the guerrillas. The legitimate government would be left in place to provide cover for the reality that was replacing it in the shadows, but ever larger portions of its control would be deactivated over time, leaving it an emitter of empty directives that would not be carried out, even as they appeared to be obeyed. No one would find Escobar, no one would stop Escobar, no one would destroy his empire of cocaine, until he was finally left as the Maker of Kings, the Will inside a hollow State.

Of course, one great difficulty in his strategy was that, in order to win the support of the army, which could shelter him from his foes, he needed to become its ally in their war against the guerrillas - and yet the guerrillas were becoming increasingly important to the defense of his jungle laboratories and zones of coca production in Colombia. How was he able to navigate this paradox? First of all, it must be understood that the Cartel’s drug trafficking operation was huge, international, and diversified. It was able to draw on coca supplies from Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia, meaning that it did not depend exclusively on coca-growing zones in Colombia for its PBC (pasta de cocaina basica, or "basic cocaine paste"), the semi-processed material which it brought to its Colombian laboratories for refinement before final shipment to the US. Whereas guerrilla support (in both Colombia and Peru) was very useful for keeping the State out of the large swaths of territory needed to cultivate coca in significant quantities, less space was required to maintain the laboratories which refined the coca - and therefore, less overall resources were needed to guard them. This meant that the Cartel, itself, was capable of guarding some of its labs with its own private bodyguards and paramilitary units. Although deals were cut with the guerrillas to guard some of its laboratories, and although the drug traffickers continued to buy coca produced in guerrilla-controlled zones, the Cartel felt that it held a strong-enough hand to be able to risk conflict with the guerrillas over the paramilitaries, without jeopardizing its business. In other words, its options were so robust, that it felt it could survive a breakdown in its business relations with the FARC, if need be, in order to pursue its strategy of ingratiating itself to right-wing elements of the State.

Besides this, however, the Cartel shrewdly anticipated the pragmatism of the FARC. It correctly guessed that the FARC - once the cocaine trade had aroused the interest of peasant cultivators and become a part of the culture of the Colombian frontier, an economic ray of light in the wilderness - would not be able to suppress the trade without alienating its peasant base. Peasants had learned the power of the illegal crop, and would not readily part with the opportunities it provided. This knowledge, which was one reason the FARC decided not to move against coca, even though coca profits were being used by the narcos to fund the "dirty war" against them, was not only applied by the guerrillas in Colombia, but also temporarily (during the late 1980s) by the military in Peru to aid in its war against the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas of Peru’s middle and upper Huallaga Valley. There, in the heart of Peru’s coca-growing region, the highly controversial counterinsurgency expert General Alberto Arciniega decided to suspend government operations against peasant coca cultivators, and to allow the drug trade to go on, for a very simple reason: government efforts to ban coca production, to fumigate coca fields, and to arrest coca cultivators were only alienating the peasantry from the government, and driving them into the arms of the Sendero Luminoso rebellion, which offered to provide protection to the trade. Combining sympathy and support for peasant coca cultivators in the region, with hard-core military operations against the guerrillas, Arciniega succeeded in achieving substantial victories against the Sendero, until US anti-narcotics lobbyists finally intervened, leading to his transfer. What Arciniega and the FARC both realized, from their different perspectives, was that la coca was now a reality in their environment; it was like a dye poured into a pool of water, that changes the color of everything that existed before. You can either work with the reality, or deny it; look it in the eyes, know it and use it, or bury your head in the moral sand, and let it devour you, in the hands of others. You can try to ride it, like a horse, towards dreams you dreamt before you knew it, even though it may throw your soul to the ground, or let others ride it over you.

But, of course, the FARC’s acceptance of la coca was not merely passive. Besides not wishing to alienate its peasant base, which in some areas came to depend on coca cultivation, the FARC must also have succumbed to the Faustian temptation that many other sectors of Colombia were succumbing to, including elements of the government and the military which opposed it. La coca translated into power, and power was necessary for survival. Ringed by weapons on all sides, no one fighting for his life in Colombia could disdain the weapon of la coca, it was becoming an essential presence on a battlefield where morality was suicide. Concretely, the FARC could turn profits made from taxing the coca trade and demanding protection money for guarding drug-related facilities into weapons purchases, to enhance its ability to fight against the army, and to further its long-term objectives. On the contrary, if it sought to shut the trade down in territories under its control, it would lose a valuable source of income without necessarily denying income to its paramilitary enemies, since the drug trade could probably adapt to its actions, and reconfigure, basing itself on other locations, both at home and abroad. The FARC’s enemies would continue feeding, while it fasted. Bullets would keep coming, while few would be left to answer with.

Perhaps the following metaphor can make this bizarre relationship between mortal foes comprehensible. Imagine two enemies. One controls the land above a gigantic gold mine. The other has the technology to extract the gold. They need each other to get the gold. They therefore make a bargain. The one lets its enemy come in to mine the gold, for a share of the profits. The other pays its enemy for access to the mine, in order to get at the gold. The gold they reap together is used to fuel their war against each other, but neither side retracts from the oddity of the situation, because each believes that it will gain the most advantage from the relationship. Like two duelists with pistols, each believes he is the better shot.

While the drug traffickers were addicted to the idea of the wealth which their business could generate, to the point of being willing to strengthen their enemies in order to promote it, the guerrillas felt that money from the drug trade could facilitate a major upgrade in their military capabilities, and provide them with the clout they needed to actually challenge the government for control of the Colombian State. They probably felt that their power could grow faster than their enemies’ power to destroy them, and may have felt that international human rights groups would eventually succeed in limiting the impact of the paramilitary groups which the drug traffic was spawning. The FARC, therefore, permitted the cocaine trade to develop and expand within its territory during the 1980s. Within its territory, the trade was strictly regulated. Drug consumption was heavily discouraged, the FARC wanted economic benefits, not social disintegration. Bullying tactics often used by the mafias to secure land and to control the coca supply were not tolerated in guerrilla territory; instead, the FARC imposed a high degree of law and order over a frequently violent and unruly enterprise; and the guerrillas also insisted on a steady price for the leaves and PBC which dealers bought from peasants. The mafias, when able to, attempted to vary prices paid to peasant cultivators for their product, in order to reflect price drops in the international market whenever these occurred; but the guerrillas believed that the dealers, who made most of the money from the business, should absorb those losses, and they enforced "fair prices" for their cultivators. At the same time as the FARC made the decision to accept the reality of coca in Colombia, and to work with it, it is also possible that it explored various means of escaping from its reliance on the mafias which were becoming increasingly committed to a right-wing agenda, and using drug profits to finance paramilitary massacres of FARC supporters. Most likely, it began to seek contacts with some of the surviving smaller drug-trafficking organizations in the country, to try to develop independent, non-Cartel alternatives to the problem of refining, trafficking, and marketing the coke; while some speculated that it may have attempted to form, or encourage the development of, a third major Cartel which could connect it to the international market without nourishing its enemies in the process. This was, in fact, a conjecture which appeared in the Colombian magazine Semana on February 20, 1989, which was struggling, at the time, to get a handle on the overwhelmingly complicated and baffling dynamics governing the relationship between the guerrillas and the narcos. Whatever the case, it seems that the guerrillas, to this date, have remained primarily defenders and regulators of coca-growing regions in Colombia, relying on outside criminal organizations to traffic and market the coca which their peasant base produces. Although, as of 2002, there were indications that the FARC had engaged in some trafficking operations of its own (seeking to barter drugs for weapons in neighboring countries), it still does not appear to have developed major, if any, inroads into the US.

While the FARC undoubtedly reaped major economic rewards from its paradoxical and double-edged involvement in the drug trade, it also incurred substantial public relations damage, and in some ways played directly into the hands of its enemies. With the softening of the Soviet Empire during the days of Gorbachev, and then its utter unraveling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cold War justifications for US-supported counterinsurgency operations in Latin America were rendered obsolete. That, in turn, left North American policy-makers in a quandary. If Latin American revolutions could no longer be seen as projections of Soviet Strategy, meant to extend the global power of the "Evil Empire" (as President Reagan called the USSR) into the Western Hemisphere, then on what basis could US military intervention there be justified? Eisenhower’s intervention in Guatemala in 1954, Johnson’s intervention in Santo Domingo in 1965, and Reagan-era involvement in Central America during the1980s (as well as his invasion of Grenada in 1983) were all explained to the North American public as necessary engagements of the Cold War; as efforts to uphold the Monroe Doctrine and prevent an expansionist and threatening outside power from taking control of key Latin American regions and turning them into bases in its global confrontation against the US. Without the menace of the Soviet Union to inflate the danger of Latin American revolutions to the US, how could approval for massive expenditures of military aid and other forms of military assistance or direct involvement against Latin American guerrilla groups be procured? The people of the US, through the Congress that represented them, would be likely to question the use of their tax dollars for conflicts that seemed marginal to their security, especially given the fact that counterinsurgency usually takes place in a morally-ambiguous environment disturbing to the conscience, in which the "good guys" are often just as tainted as the "bad guys." When one feels threatened, one is more likely to tolerate the abuses committed by one’s defenders, on one’s behalf. It is easier to look the other way, to believe in excuses, or in fictions like the "independent death squad that has nothing to do with us." The less tangible a threat, however, the less our self-image is able to endure demolition by our brutality. If blood is being spilled, not for our survival in a war against ruthless enemies, but only to protect the profits of our businesses operating in a foreign land, we cannot help but feel a certain revulsion at our cynicism, a certain self-contempt and disappointment which undermines the quality of our life. In the face of this intense discomfort, we seek to extricate ourselves from the predicament by pressuring our representatives to put an end to the upsetting stimulus. US government policy-makers, aware of this tendency, are aware of the corresponding need to find a concrete moral way in to military actions which they believe are necessary, but which the general public would never favor on purely material or abstract grounds. In the case of seeking to maintain high levels of US military aid to the Colombian government in its conflict against the FARC, in spite of growing human rights abuses by that government and its shadowy paramilitary apparatus, the drug trade offered the perfect way in; the perfect answer to the fall of the Soviet Union, and the perfect replacement for the dissolution of the Soviet threat. By emphasizing the FARC’s involvement in the drug trade (and downplaying the simultaneous importance of the drug trade in the war being waged against the FARC), US policy-makers were able to construct the highly emotional image of the narcoguerrilla - the drug-trafficking guerrilla - and implant it in the consciousness of the North American public.

The "narcoguerrilla", a magnificent myth which was able to maintain the relevance of the Colombian guerrilla to North American citizens in a post-Cold-War era, was built upon realities extracted from their context. Yes, the guerrillas were involved in the drug trade; but so, too, were their enemies, and so, too (some claimed), was the US (see "Conspiracy Theory: Colombia"). While pro-business sectors representing industries dedicated to the production of oil, bananas, coal, coffee, flowers, etc., in Colombia, definitely perceived the FARC as a threat to the continued success of their operations - and while geopolitical strategists still feared the danger of a powerful socialist state directly adjacent to the Isthmus of Panama and potentially able to spread its revolutionary influence to other South American countries - for the average US citizen, there was little motivation to become involved in what seemed to be a long-term civil war of Colombians against Colombians. However, by connecting the guerrillas to the drug trade in the mind of the North American public, US policy-makers were able to portray the guerrillas as a direct threat to the USA, even without the Soviet Empire to inject into the equation. Not since Pearl Harbor (1941) had there been a direct attack by a foreign power on US soil; but now, according to fomenters of the "narcoguerrilla" myth, America was actually being invaded by a foreign enemy known as COCAINE, which was killing thousands in the streets, destroying neighborhoods, disintegrating families, ripping apart the heart and soul of the US with violence, crime, social chaos, and moral collapse. Lehder’s "atom bomb of Latin America" was being dropped on New York, Chicago, Miami, LA, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and hundreds of other cities and towns; Hiroshimas of white powder, and Nagasakis of crack rocks were exploding everywhere, and blowing apart the future of the nation. And behind it all was a deadly conspiracy of ruthless Colombian drug lords and their guerrilla allies: one face, one force, one enemy. This simplistic formula for perceiving reality was absolutely imprecise, and for that reason, politically powerful. In one bold stroke, it obscured the social roots of the guerrillas, obliterated the history of the civil war in Colombia, disappeared the social objectives of the revolutionaries, and transformed the FARC into merely a band of criminals, a worthy target of US military action. From an unjustifiable act of international meddling (as opponents saw it), US military involvement in Colombia had been successfully reframed as a necessary act of self-defense. The FARC, a captive both of unavoidable circumstances and its own ambition, had cooperated beyond the State Department’s wildest dreams in its own villainization.

Some lawmakers in the US, at first, refused to part with distinctions, however. They did have enough of a grasp of history to recognize the complexity of things, and as the US War on Drugs escalated - as new air bases, radar stations, and intelligence-gathering networks were constructed in the Andean region to interdict airborne drug traffic, and as increasing numbers of US military personnel, DEA operatives, weapons, and helicopters found their way into the area - they sought to impose legal safeguards which would insure that those resources were only used to combat the drug trade, and not to engage in counterinsurgency operations which might degrade an already atrocious human rights situation, and draw the US closer to a new Vietnam in Colombia and Peru. As time went on, however, and the carefully-crafted misperception of the guerrilla as "narcoguerrilla" became more and more ingrained into the North American mindset, it became possible for policy-makers to argue that, in order to defeat the epidemic of drugs in the US, the guerrillas, themselves, must be confronted. The spaces that they controlled, which (by the 1990s) harbored the major coca-growing regions in Colombia, must be "opened up" to the State and its anti-narcotics efforts, and this could only be achieved by defeating the guerrillas in combat, and driving them out of their strongholds. The distinction between anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency was artificial, it was argued; la guerrilla and la coca were inextricably bound together, in a knot that could not be untied, only cut with the same knife. By 2000-2001, this philosophy had gained ascendancy in the highest places. US President Bill Clinton and Colombian President Andres Pastrana cooperated to form an initiative known as Plan Colombia, an ambitious plan to improve the Colombian economy, promote new economic opportunities to wean peasant cultivators away from coca, strengthen the Colombian military, enhance the anti-narcotics capabilities of the State, improve the nation’s human rights record, and work towards a peaceful settlement of the armed conflict. 78% of the US $1.3 billion aid package that went to Colombia as part of this plan, however, was military in nature, and President Clinton waived human rights requirements for the release of that military aid. The defeat of the FARC had finally become an integral component of the US agenda of destroying the international supply of coca, and perhaps an objective of equal importance, since most experts realized that as long as North American demand for cocaine remained, there would always be too great an incentive to produce for the supply to be eliminated. (Instead, the temporary drop in supply created by successful anti-narcotics operations would catapult street prices sky-high, drawing new players, and new locations, into the business.) While the War on Drugs could truly only be won on US soil, by defeating the monster of demand (which is what generates supply), the supply-side approach to the War on Drugs was useful in justifying the insertion of an elevated US military presence into the region, in spite of the end of the Cold War - more bases, more troops, more agents; and in creating a valid context for the support of counterinsurgency operations. But, as some Colombians imagined US officials saying: "Why deal with your own problems, when you can make someone else deal with them?"

I cut off the hydra’s head, and there grew two.

And victory turned into a bad dream:

seven snarling dragons

became fourteen.

The hydra will never lose,

till you follow him home

and fight the seeds of his many heads

which are inside of you.

Hydra, hydra,

you are me

and I am you.

I am your master

and I am your slave.

I broke my mirror

and laid the world in a grave.

But all of this is getting ahead of the story. Back in the mid-1980s, as the complex and barely comprehensible relationship between the guerrillas and the drug traffickers, who were simultaneously allies and enemies, was developing, Pablo Escobar was hoping to save his criminal empire by becoming too useful to the State to be destroyed by it. Hence, the creation of the paramilitary apparatus: to ingratiate himself to the Colombian Right, and to crucial elements of the military which, in turn, could shelter him from still functioning elements of the State.

However, Escobar’s brilliant effort to win friends was not enough. He and his Cartel were too visible, too well-known, to be simply left in peace. Even if he could turn the State’s war against him into a mere charade, the charade still needed a body, a captive, to assuage its foes, and play convincingly on the world stage. Somebody had to fall. Whether by accident or design, that somebody turned out to be Carlos Lehder, who was captured by the National Police in February 1987 in one of Pablo Escobar’s safehouses in Colombia. Was he set up, thrown to the Colombian government as required proof that they were serious about shutting down the Medellin Cartel, which would then make it easier for Escobar to corrupt and deter the government from carrying out further actions against him? Was Lehder the most expendable member of the Cartel, due to some of his lingering connections with the Left, which may have unsettled the Right with whom Escobar was attempting to build a relationship? Or was he the most dangerous to Escobar, due to his brilliant mind and free spirit; a potentially unreliable ally? Or was he simply the unlucky one among friends, the one who happened to be at the wrong place, at the wrong time? It seems that the police surrounded the house where Lehder was staying while a party was going on; and that after some preliminary exchanges of gunshots, the traffickers and their friends, who had been taken by surprise and were not in the mood to go down fighting, surrendered. At this time, the hated extradition agreement with the United States, implemented after the assassination of Lara Bonilla, was still in effect, and Ledher was promptly shoved onto an airplane bound for the US. Aboard the plane, a US agent is said to have offered him a cigarette, but Lehder refused it, saying, "I only smoke pot." Unlike most of the Cartel leaders, who scrupulously avoided their product in order to maintain the cool and calculating focus needed to stay on top of such a dangerous game, Lehder was known to enjoy the products which he plied to the world. Maybe he was a little foggy that night, f