Nobody has paid a higher price in the war on drugs than Colombia. The 1985 occupation of the Bogota Ministry of Justice displayed the strength of Colombia’s underworld. It left 100 dead including 11 Supreme Court justices.
Catholic and conservative in its mores but even so 60 000 Colombians have died in the drug wars which followed the occupation of the Ministry of Justice, including 3000 policeman and 1500 politicians.
... and on the streets of the city of Cali the drug money has not stopped flowing. Behind the glitter Colombia’s vast drug industry continues unabated.
The narcotics business indirectly influences almost every aspect of Colombian life and accounts for around 15% ofr Colombia’s turnover
Pepe, Drug Trafficer: I started working in drug supply when I was 13 years old. I became involved with the drug business because I had no money. It’s the best business in Colombia. If I worked in a factory I would get 100-150,000 pesos a month but in this business I cam make 2-3 million in a month, depending how things are.
The power of the drug cartels is rooted in Colombia’s endemic corruption.
... and the vast disparity between rich and poor. It’s such circumstances which have enabled the drug cartels to seduce significant numbers of the poor, many of whom see the drug barons as benefactors and heros.
The killing of Pablo Escobar in 1993, head of the Medillin Cartel, was for the state a triumph. But to many poorer Colombians it was seen as a tragedy.
At his funeral hundreds of supporters came to mourn his death. The police tried to keep them away but they forced an entry regardless.
Pablo Escobar began life as a petty thief but went on to revolutionise the refining, transportation and distribution of South American cocaine. He made millions through drugs but got recognition and respectibility by giving jobs and welfare to poorer Colombians.
Carlos Banigas, Escobar supporter: He gave people houses. He gave them land so that they could build houses and he always came to visit with presents and food to share with people. He always helped the poor by improving their communities. He liked young people and built football fields and sports grounds. He always thought about young people.’
Danelli Lopez, Escobar supporter: The ‘Medellin Without Slums’ programme was set up not for profit but for the sole purpose of providing people with an improved standard of living. These were people who had nothing at all. They were given a chance to live like human beings. We started with more or less 500 hundreds homes and that’s how this area was built.
Pepe: ‘In the eyes of the world we Colombians are nothing but drug traffickers and assassins but that’s not really the way things are. As long as their are consumers in the United States they will never stop the drug business and if they do shut it down in Colombia it will start again elsewhere.’You live through good times and I’ve lived through bad times. I’ve seen a lot of people who have triumphed and I’ve seen a lot of people who’ve ended up in jail or ended up dead.’
Drug trafficking offers a way out of the slum but it’s still dangerous and tears apart thousands of Colombian families. The Gascasilva family has lost a father and a husband and bears testament to the toll taken by the drug industry. Their father Armando Gascasilva was desperate to escape his poverty
In 1992 he boarded an Avianca flight for Berlin with 2 kilogrammes of cocaine. He was caught when his threadbare clothes raised the suspicians of Berlin’s custom’s officials.
‘How have you survived for the last 3 years?’
Gascasilva Family: ‘It’s been really bad because it’s a great strain on my mother and grandmother. As always we are always in need of a bit more help.’
‘Why is he there?
.... Tell him it’s because he went there ... he took a flight ... and they caught him.’
‘When is he going to return to Colombia?’
‘Possibly this year. Well we don’t know ... possibly.’
With one third of Colombia under the control of communist insurgents the government has no easy task ...
... subduing a trade which thrives on the vast swathes of no go jungle.The civil war against the insurgents has kept Colombia’s army pinned down for 31 years. It’s meant they’ve looked the other way as the barons put together their vast narcotics syndicates.
The soldiers try to win the support of the drug producers, in whatever way they can. Cracking down on drugs induces the population to side with the guerillas.
In the ranks Colombian soldiers hardly understand what all the fuss is about.
Soldie With Poppies: Colombia is very rich in everything. In Colombia you can get anything.
But today international condemnation is forcing Colombia to harden it’s attitude towards the drug producers. At the 9th Brigade base at Neiva bodies come back after a firefight in the hills. The officers said the bodies were those of guerillas running and protecting the drug industry. Of the thirteen dead 9 of these bodies had only bullet shots to their heads. The crackdown on drugs has made it difficult to see where the war against the guerillas ends and the war on drugs begins.
Colonel Pedraza Colombian Army: Right now you are seeing the bodies of some of the famous cultivators of opium poppies, those illicit cultivations that the government has decided to eradicate in a determined fashion. These people maintained and protected laboratories and plantations in order to sow discord among ourselves and within the international community as well.
Those people met their demise at the hands of our forces. It was the only thing we could do to pay them their just rewards. We paid them their just rewards. And the reward for me is to see a part of my republic free from kidnapping, extortion and the planting of poppies.
The fear is that in their quest to control the drug problem the Colombian authorities continue to ignore serious human rights allegations. Summary executions, torture, and rape are a deeply engrained part of the governments dirty war.
Father Javier Giraldo Director - Commission for Peace and Justice: This dirty war is conducted in such a way that the culprits cannot be identified. So that they can avoid responsibility the state security forces are using vehicles witout number plates, private estates, and personnel who are not in uniform but in civilian clothes and secret locations where they can take people for torture. There’s a total absence of official records about detentions or the orders given to detain people.
More than anything it’s Colombia’s emergence as the 3rd largest heroin producer which has raised the stakes in this most troubled of countries. Hidden amongst maize plantations thousands of small poppy fields litter the countryside. Coca is only grown in the flat lands so the cartels introduced poppies to Colombia’s vast mountain areas.
Opium Grower: This is a red zone because the government and the guerillas are fighting here.
People came from outside and suggested that we should start growing poppies
With poppies life has improved greatly. After three and a half months you have money in your pocket If we plant yucca it takes 2 years to get a return. If you plant bananas it takes 2-3 years before you have something to eat.
The government lends us money to help us work because they don’t want us to grow poppies. But they charge us 40% interest for agricultural loans.
Anyone not directly involved in either the guerilla war or the drug industry gets pressurised to move on. Colombia’s indginous Indian community is involved in neither the guerilla war nor the drug trade but thousands have died anyway. This villages chief was recently hacked to death by guerillas. They said they wanted the community to know who was boss.
Anonymous Indian Leader: This man was a very neutral man. He wasn’t with any armed band. They came to get him one morning when he was walking to work. They took him right in front of his son and that’s where they killed him.
'We are neutral in this war. We don’t support that kind of behaviour. We call for dialogue between the government and the guerillas. When there is fighting it’s always the civil population that suffers.
And in Colombia’s torrid mix of drug cartels and communist guerilla warfare the mainstream rural economy is deccimated. What legal jobs there are offer little in the way of financial security.
Juan Batista Coal Miner: How old are you?
‘Thirteen years old.’
‘How long have you been working in the mine?’
‘What hours do you work?’
‘I work from 6-12 in the morning.’
Jairo Rodriguez Coal Miner: I’m not so frightened about going down into the mine. Sure the mine kills people but you’ve got to take care.
Anonymous Coca Processor: You weigh it, and for every fifty gallon container of water you process six bundles of leaves. First of all you’ve got to mix the leaves with water and ammonia. For that quantity you must also put in 2 pounds of cement powder.
A typical small scale cocaine processing plant deep in the Colombian jungle. This is where growers bring their coca leaves to be converted into cocaine ready for export. These producers speak disparagingly of efforts to control drug production. Their sense of security partlycomes from their relationship with the communist guerillas.
Anonymous cocaine: The guerillas don’t help us but they defend us from the government. The government attacks us and the guerillas give them some lead. The guerillas attack right back, that’s what the guerillas do. The one protects us from the other.
The government only brings aeroplanes to machine gun us. They bring nothing that benefits us.
Everybody treats us like drug traffickers and guerillas. That policy was imposed on the Colombian government by the United States so that they could attack us.
Aerial spraying is the new weapon in the war against drugs here. It relies on American herbicide, American aeroplanes, some $30 million dollars of US funding and American anti-narcotics units. The government says that aerial spraying it will illiminate 50% of the drug production in 2 years.
But spraying is also an unreliable and innacurate form of control.
Anonymous Cocaine Producer: All of that has been fumigated over there but over here they didn’t touch it.
The cocaine growers say that the policy of aerial spraying is only forcing them to burn down even more rain forest. When a crop is sprayed they say there is nothing they can do but start preparing new fields for another crop.
Anonymous Cocaine Grower:‘By cutting down all the trees we are going to run out of oxygen. The oxygen that we all breathe from Europe to Latin America comes from this forest. We are going to cut it down because we have to survive.
Prices will go up with fumigation and so will demand and so will the places under cultivation because people will start to plant in differant places.
Apart from funding the massive aerial spraying program the US is now considering imposing sanctions on the Colombian government ...
... unless they erradicate the narcotics trade. Roughly 20% of Colombia’s gross earnings are raised through narcotics but the rest is rooted in a sound economy based on fertile lands and significant oil deposits. Sanctions are contraversial and threaten to destroy Colombia’s legitimate business sector.
Dr Javier Diaz, Businessman: Sanctions would be counter productive because they would threaten the legaleconomy. It would destabilise the local economy. It would result in a totally contradictory effect because it will ultimately strengthen the illegal sector, the drug trafficking, which is supposedly what they are trying to
Previously linked with drug smuggling the cut flower industry today indirectly employs 150 000 Colombians and earns around 400 million dollars a year. Given that America buys the majority of Colombia’s flowers US sanctions would almost certainly wipe the industry out.
Flower Interview: We are a group of people with many problems to face and many obstacles to overcome. But there are many people in Colombia who work hard and are very honest and want this country to succeed on different levels. We really think that there is an image of this country that we need to convey to the world that takes out the connection to the drug traffickers.
The city of Cali might be percieved as the drug capital of the world but it’s also the center of the world’s third largest sugar exporter and a vibrant economy in its own right. An outright campaign against the drugs risks plunging Colombia into further violence. Colombians insist what’s needed is well targeted investment, and crop replacement strategies.
Anonymous Coca Producer: We can only hope that the Europeans will help to check the Americans and our country as well. The only way to stop coca is not by using the armed forces but by using economic resources to show the drug growers a better way of life in terms of developement, agriculture, health and education.
In recent years several of the major drug kings have been captured or killed but deccimating the ranks of the cartel’s hierarchy is no guarantee that the industry over which they preside will disappear.
Colombians still come to pay their respects at the graves of the cartel ringleaders.
Alonzo Salazar, Journalist & Anti Narcotics Activist: This is the mausoleum for the Munoz Mosqueda family, one of the most famous families in the drug wars.’
‘In our traditional culture people celebrate the dead, they keep company with them. It’s not like in Europe where people are very distant from the dead.
In Colombia the underworld is almost a state within a state. To tackle it head on risks plunging Colombia into outright civil war.
Alonzo Salazar, Journalist & Anti Narcotics Activist: We Colombians are treated with suspician all over the world. At every airport we are taken to one side and given a meticulous examination and then X-rayed. But the Swiss, who launder all the drug money, are welcome wherever they go.
Pepe:They’ll never stop this business ... Why? Because if the Orejuelas are the heads of the Cali cartel, and I don’t know, but what do I care? If there are 10 big guys there are also 5000 little guys who are waiting. And if one big guy dies then they’ll take his place. It’ll never end.’
Catholic and conservative in its mores but even so 60 000 Colombians have died in the drug wars which followed the occupation of the Ministry of Justice, including 3000 policeman and 1500 politicians.
... and on the streets of the city of Cali the drug money has not stopped flowing. Behind the glitter Colombia’s vast drug industry continues unabated.
The narcotics business indirectly influences almost every aspect of Colombian life and accounts for around 15% ofr Colombia’s turnover
Pepe, Drug Trafficer: I started working in drug supply when I was 13 years old. I became involved with the drug business because I had no money. It’s the best business in Colombia. If I worked in a factory I would get 100-150,000 pesos a month but in this business I cam make 2-3 million in a month, depending how things are.
The power of the drug cartels is rooted in Colombia’s endemic corruption.
... and the vast disparity between rich and poor. It’s such circumstances which have enabled the drug cartels to seduce significant numbers of the poor, many of whom see the drug barons as benefactors and heros.
The killing of Pablo Escobar in 1993, head of the Medillin Cartel, was for the state a triumph. But to many poorer Colombians it was seen as a tragedy.
At his funeral hundreds of supporters came to mourn his death. The police tried to keep them away but they forced an entry regardless.
Pablo Escobar began life as a petty thief but went on to revolutionise the refining, transportation and distribution of South American cocaine. He made millions through drugs but got recognition and respectibility by giving jobs and welfare to poorer Colombians.
Carlos Banigas, Escobar supporter: He gave people houses. He gave them land so that they could build houses and he always came to visit with presents and food to share with people. He always helped the poor by improving their communities. He liked young people and built football fields and sports grounds. He always thought about young people.’
Danelli Lopez, Escobar supporter: The ‘Medellin Without Slums’ programme was set up not for profit but for the sole purpose of providing people with an improved standard of living. These were people who had nothing at all. They were given a chance to live like human beings. We started with more or less 500 hundreds homes and that’s how this area was built.
Pepe: ‘In the eyes of the world we Colombians are nothing but drug traffickers and assassins but that’s not really the way things are. As long as their are consumers in the United States they will never stop the drug business and if they do shut it down in Colombia it will start again elsewhere.’You live through good times and I’ve lived through bad times. I’ve seen a lot of people who have triumphed and I’ve seen a lot of people who’ve ended up in jail or ended up dead.’
Drug trafficking offers a way out of the slum but it’s still dangerous and tears apart thousands of Colombian families. The Gascasilva family has lost a father and a husband and bears testament to the toll taken by the drug industry. Their father Armando Gascasilva was desperate to escape his poverty
In 1992 he boarded an Avianca flight for Berlin with 2 kilogrammes of cocaine. He was caught when his threadbare clothes raised the suspicians of Berlin’s custom’s officials.
‘How have you survived for the last 3 years?’
Gascasilva Family: ‘It’s been really bad because it’s a great strain on my mother and grandmother. As always we are always in need of a bit more help.’
‘Why is he there?
.... Tell him it’s because he went there ... he took a flight ... and they caught him.’
‘When is he going to return to Colombia?’
‘Possibly this year. Well we don’t know ... possibly.’
With one third of Colombia under the control of communist insurgents the government has no easy task ...
... subduing a trade which thrives on the vast swathes of no go jungle.The civil war against the insurgents has kept Colombia’s army pinned down for 31 years. It’s meant they’ve looked the other way as the barons put together their vast narcotics syndicates.
The soldiers try to win the support of the drug producers, in whatever way they can. Cracking down on drugs induces the population to side with the guerillas.
In the ranks Colombian soldiers hardly understand what all the fuss is about.
Soldie With Poppies: Colombia is very rich in everything. In Colombia you can get anything.
But today international condemnation is forcing Colombia to harden it’s attitude towards the drug producers. At the 9th Brigade base at Neiva bodies come back after a firefight in the hills. The officers said the bodies were those of guerillas running and protecting the drug industry. Of the thirteen dead 9 of these bodies had only bullet shots to their heads. The crackdown on drugs has made it difficult to see where the war against the guerillas ends and the war on drugs begins.
Colonel Pedraza Colombian Army: Right now you are seeing the bodies of some of the famous cultivators of opium poppies, those illicit cultivations that the government has decided to eradicate in a determined fashion. These people maintained and protected laboratories and plantations in order to sow discord among ourselves and within the international community as well.
Those people met their demise at the hands of our forces. It was the only thing we could do to pay them their just rewards. We paid them their just rewards. And the reward for me is to see a part of my republic free from kidnapping, extortion and the planting of poppies.
The fear is that in their quest to control the drug problem the Colombian authorities continue to ignore serious human rights allegations. Summary executions, torture, and rape are a deeply engrained part of the governments dirty war.
Father Javier Giraldo Director - Commission for Peace and Justice: This dirty war is conducted in such a way that the culprits cannot be identified. So that they can avoid responsibility the state security forces are using vehicles witout number plates, private estates, and personnel who are not in uniform but in civilian clothes and secret locations where they can take people for torture. There’s a total absence of official records about detentions or the orders given to detain people.
More than anything it’s Colombia’s emergence as the 3rd largest heroin producer which has raised the stakes in this most troubled of countries. Hidden amongst maize plantations thousands of small poppy fields litter the countryside. Coca is only grown in the flat lands so the cartels introduced poppies to Colombia’s vast mountain areas.
Opium Grower: This is a red zone because the government and the guerillas are fighting here.
People came from outside and suggested that we should start growing poppies
With poppies life has improved greatly. After three and a half months you have money in your pocket If we plant yucca it takes 2 years to get a return. If you plant bananas it takes 2-3 years before you have something to eat.
The government lends us money to help us work because they don’t want us to grow poppies. But they charge us 40% interest for agricultural loans.
Anyone not directly involved in either the guerilla war or the drug industry gets pressurised to move on. Colombia’s indginous Indian community is involved in neither the guerilla war nor the drug trade but thousands have died anyway. This villages chief was recently hacked to death by guerillas. They said they wanted the community to know who was boss.
Anonymous Indian Leader: This man was a very neutral man. He wasn’t with any armed band. They came to get him one morning when he was walking to work. They took him right in front of his son and that’s where they killed him.
'We are neutral in this war. We don’t support that kind of behaviour. We call for dialogue between the government and the guerillas. When there is fighting it’s always the civil population that suffers.
And in Colombia’s torrid mix of drug cartels and communist guerilla warfare the mainstream rural economy is deccimated. What legal jobs there are offer little in the way of financial security.
Juan Batista Coal Miner: How old are you?
‘Thirteen years old.’
‘How long have you been working in the mine?’
‘What hours do you work?’
‘I work from 6-12 in the morning.’
Jairo Rodriguez Coal Miner: I’m not so frightened about going down into the mine. Sure the mine kills people but you’ve got to take care.
Anonymous Coca Processor: You weigh it, and for every fifty gallon container of water you process six bundles of leaves. First of all you’ve got to mix the leaves with water and ammonia. For that quantity you must also put in 2 pounds of cement powder.
A typical small scale cocaine processing plant deep in the Colombian jungle. This is where growers bring their coca leaves to be converted into cocaine ready for export. These producers speak disparagingly of efforts to control drug production. Their sense of security partlycomes from their relationship with the communist guerillas.
Anonymous cocaine: The guerillas don’t help us but they defend us from the government. The government attacks us and the guerillas give them some lead. The guerillas attack right back, that’s what the guerillas do. The one protects us from the other.
The government only brings aeroplanes to machine gun us. They bring nothing that benefits us.
Everybody treats us like drug traffickers and guerillas. That policy was imposed on the Colombian government by the United States so that they could attack us.
Aerial spraying is the new weapon in the war against drugs here. It relies on American herbicide, American aeroplanes, some $30 million dollars of US funding and American anti-narcotics units. The government says that aerial spraying it will illiminate 50% of the drug production in 2 years.
But spraying is also an unreliable and innacurate form of control.
Anonymous Cocaine Producer: All of that has been fumigated over there but over here they didn’t touch it.
The cocaine growers say that the policy of aerial spraying is only forcing them to burn down even more rain forest. When a crop is sprayed they say there is nothing they can do but start preparing new fields for another crop.
Anonymous Cocaine Grower:‘By cutting down all the trees we are going to run out of oxygen. The oxygen that we all breathe from Europe to Latin America comes from this forest. We are going to cut it down because we have to survive.
Prices will go up with fumigation and so will demand and so will the places under cultivation because people will start to plant in differant places.
Apart from funding the massive aerial spraying program the US is now considering imposing sanctions on the Colombian government ...
... unless they erradicate the narcotics trade. Roughly 20% of Colombia’s gross earnings are raised through narcotics but the rest is rooted in a sound economy based on fertile lands and significant oil deposits. Sanctions are contraversial and threaten to destroy Colombia’s legitimate business sector.
Dr Javier Diaz, Businessman: Sanctions would be counter productive because they would threaten the legaleconomy. It would destabilise the local economy. It would result in a totally contradictory effect because it will ultimately strengthen the illegal sector, the drug trafficking, which is supposedly what they are trying to
Previously linked with drug smuggling the cut flower industry today indirectly employs 150 000 Colombians and earns around 400 million dollars a year. Given that America buys the majority of Colombia’s flowers US sanctions would almost certainly wipe the industry out.
Flower Interview: We are a group of people with many problems to face and many obstacles to overcome. But there are many people in Colombia who work hard and are very honest and want this country to succeed on different levels. We really think that there is an image of this country that we need to convey to the world that takes out the connection to the drug traffickers.
The city of Cali might be percieved as the drug capital of the world but it’s also the center of the world’s third largest sugar exporter and a vibrant economy in its own right. An outright campaign against the drugs risks plunging Colombia into further violence. Colombians insist what’s needed is well targeted investment, and crop replacement strategies.
Anonymous Coca Producer: We can only hope that the Europeans will help to check the Americans and our country as well. The only way to stop coca is not by using the armed forces but by using economic resources to show the drug growers a better way of life in terms of developement, agriculture, health and education.
In recent years several of the major drug kings have been captured or killed but deccimating the ranks of the cartel’s hierarchy is no guarantee that the industry over which they preside will disappear.
Colombians still come to pay their respects at the graves of the cartel ringleaders.
Alonzo Salazar, Journalist & Anti Narcotics Activist: This is the mausoleum for the Munoz Mosqueda family, one of the most famous families in the drug wars.’
‘In our traditional culture people celebrate the dead, they keep company with them. It’s not like in Europe where people are very distant from the dead.
In Colombia the underworld is almost a state within a state. To tackle it head on risks plunging Colombia into outright civil war.
Alonzo Salazar, Journalist & Anti Narcotics Activist: We Colombians are treated with suspician all over the world. At every airport we are taken to one side and given a meticulous examination and then X-rayed. But the Swiss, who launder all the drug money, are welcome wherever they go.
Pepe:They’ll never stop this business ... Why? Because if the Orejuelas are the heads of the Cali cartel, and I don’t know, but what do I care? If there are 10 big guys there are also 5000 little guys who are waiting. And if one big guy dies then they’ll take his place. It’ll never end.’