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Colombia DRUGS AND SOCIETY
In the 1980s, Colombia achieved international notoriety
as a
major narcotics trafficking center
(see Interest Groups
, ch. 4).
Nonetheless, the country's involvement with drugs was
rooted
farther back in history. As in Bolivia and Peru, although
on a
smaller scale, Colombia's indigenous populations had grown
and
chewed coca for thousands of years. Marijuana cultivation,
in
contrast, was a much more recent phenomenon. It arrived in
Colombia
along the Caribbean coast via Panama during the first
decade of the
twentieth century. By the 1930s, limited cultivation had
begun
among the Costeño black population centered on
Barranquilla; urban
criminals there routinely smoked marijuana. During World
War II,
experiments with hemp cultivation designed to increase
fiber
production for the war effort substantially expanded its
cultivation.
The real takeoff of Colombian marijuana production
began in the
mid- and late 1960s as a result of the growing demand
generated by
the United States market. By the early 1970s, Colombia had
emerged
as a major United States supplier, although most of the
market
remained in the hands of Mexican traffickers. When in the
early
1970s the United States tightened up drug enforcement
along the
United States-Mexican border and the Mexican state
launched a major
drive against its domestic producers, the epicenter of
marijuana
production in the hemisphere rapidly shifted to Colombia,
especially to the Guajira Peninsula and the slopes of the
Sierra
Nevada de Santa Marta. By the end of the decade, Colombia
accounted
for about 70 percent of the marijuana reaching the United
States
from abroad. Between 30,000 and 50,000 small farmers along
Colombia's Caribbean coast came to depend directly on
marijuana
cultivation for their livelihood, while at least another
50,000
Colombians--including seasonal pickers, transporters,
guards, and
bankers--made a living from it
(see Crops
, ch. 3).
The trade proved to be an important source of new
wealth for
the Caribbean coast, providing the population with income,
comforts, and a degree of economic stability that they had
never
before enjoyed. The Caribbean port cities of Barranquilla,
Santa
Marta, and Riohacha, in particular, experienced
unprecedented
prosperity. At the same time, however, the Guajira
Peninsula
experienced a dramatic upsurge in drug-related violence
and a
concomitant disintegration of local police and judicial
institutions as the result of corruption and bribery.
Local food
production declined as tens of thousands of hectares were
converted
to marijuana cultivation. Farmers engaged in growing
traditional
crops such as bananas found labor more expensive and in
short
supply. Inflation was stimulated, especially in land
markets, as
drug barons bid up prices. Many legitimate businesses,
including
banks, hotels, airlines, restaurants, and casinos, were
bought up
by the mafiosos and used for laundering illicit
profits.
The Colombian cocaine trade followed in the footsteps
of the
marijuana traffickers. In the late 1960s, a relatively
small
cocaine smuggling network, largely under the control of
exile Cuban
criminal organizations based in Miami, sprang up. Coca was
cultivated in small plots by Paez Indians in the San Jorge
Valley
in the department of Cauca in southwestern Colombia and in
the
Cordillera Occidental. Smuggling was carried out largely
by
individual carriers, or "mules," who transported a few
kilograms at
a time using commercial airlines.
In the early 1970s, as demand for cocaine expanded
rapidly in
the United States, the limited raw coca supplies produced
in
Colombia were augmented with coca paste imported from
Bolivia and
Peru, refined in "kitchen laboratories" in Colombia, and
smuggled
into the United States. The 1973 Chilean military coup
that deposed
President Salvador Allende Gossens also proved to be a
severe blow
to the Chilean criminal gangs involved in the cocaine
trade in that
country. When the military government of General Agusto
Pinochet
Ugarte clamped down, many Chilean "chemists" fled Chile
and ended
up swelling the ranks of the nascent smuggling and
refining
networks in Colombia and Miami. In addition, two
Colombians--Carlos
Lehder Rivas and Jorge Luis Ochoa Vásquez--worked with the
Medellín
criminal networks in the mid-1970s to transform the
cocaine
transportation system from small-time mule activities into
huge
airlift operations.
By late 1977, the United States Drug Enforcement
Administration
(DEA) had opened a file under the name "Medellín
Trafficking
Syndicate." Violence was an integral part of the
operations of the
Medellín syndicate from the start. As the organization
grew in
size, power, and wealth, it also grew in ruthlessness and
violence.
After first establishing their dominance on the South
American side
of the market, in 1978 and 1979 the Medellín drug bosses
turned
their attention to control of wholesale distribution in
the United
States. Thus began a period of violence in South Florida
known as
"the Cocaine Wars." It peaked in 1981 with a reported 101
drug-
related murders in that year.
As the violence subsided in late 1981 and afterward,
what
emerged was a loosely organized criminal organization
known as the
Medellín Cartel. In effect, by installing their own
middlemen in
Miami, the Colombians "forward integrated" their
operations and
thus were able to capture additional profits. By
reinvesting their
profits in the business, they were able to expand and
streamline
production in Colombia and farther south in the Andes
(see The Judiciary
, ch. 4). They also purchased bigger and better
airplanes
and boats for transporting drugs, purchased more
sophisticated
electronic communications devices and radar to escape
detection,
and paid huge sums in bribes for protection to law
enforcement
officials in Colombia, the United States, and elsewhere.
By the early 1980s, the marijuana traffic was already
being
eclipsed by the cocaine trade in terms of the wealth and
power
associated with it. Cocaine also generated criminal
organizations
that were more profitable, more vertically integrated,
more
hierarchical in structure, and more ruthless in their
systematic
use of bribery, intimidation, and assassination than the
marijuana
traffickers. Although Colombia had long been accustomed to
extraordinarily high levels of violence, the rise of the
drug mafia
provoked a qualitative change. Relying on paid assassins,
locally
known as sicarios, Colombia's drug lords not only
fought
among themselves but also launched a systematic campaign
of murder
and intimidation against Colombia's government authorities
intent
upon extraditing them to the United States. In the
process, they
effectively paralyzed the country's system of justice and
drove
scores of prominent Colombians from all walks of life out
of the
country and into self-imposed exile. They also contributed
significantly to the "devaluation" of life throughout
Colombia and
converted murder and brutality into a regular source of
income for
some sectors of society.
Unlike marijuana money, which was concentrated along
the
Caribbean coast, cocaine money made its way into the major
metropolitan areas, especially Barranquilla, Medellín,
Cali, and,
to a lesser extent, Bogotá.
Along with their enormous economic power, the drug lords
reached
out for a larger quota of political power. Several, like
Lehder,
bought interests in local radio stations and newspapers.
Others,
like Pablo Escobar Gavíria, sought to create patron-client
followings in the cities by handing out cash to the poor,
building
low-income housing in the slums, or purchasing sports
teams and
constructing sports stadiums. A number contributed to
political
campaigns. Lehder went so far as to create his own Latino
Nationalist Party and to publicize his hybrid political
ideology (a
combination of Colombian and Latin American nationalism,
leavened
with elements of fascism) through his newspaper,
Quindio
Libre. In 1982 Escobar was actually elected as an
alternate
congressman on a Liberal Party slate in his home
department of
Antioquia.
In addition to corrupting the political and economic
systems,
narcotics trafficking generated a growing domestic drug
problem. In
the early 1980s, there developed among Colombian youths a
widespread addiction to basuco. A highly
contaminated,
addictive, and damaging form of cocaine normally smoked
with
marijuana or tobacco, basuco was dumped by the
cocaine
smugglers on the Colombian market because it was not of
"export"
quality. Sold cheap, it soon became more popular in many
cities
than marijuana, leaving hundreds of thousands of addicts
in its
wake, many suffering from permanent nervous disorders.
* * *
For readers interested in scholarly works in English on
Colombian society, T. Lynn Smith's Colombia: Social
Structure
and the Process of Development provides an overview of
the
profound changes in the country's traditional agrarian
social
structures during the twentieth century up to the
mid-1960s.
Orlando Fals Borda's Peasant Society in the Colombian
Andes
is a classic case study of the impact of modernization on
Colombia's rural communities in the 1950s and early 1960s.
In
Internal Colonialism and Structural Change in
Colombia, A.
Eugene Havens and William L. Flinn bring together a set of
essays
that probe the causes and consequences of Colombia's
accelerated
transformation from a rural to an urban society during the
1960s.
Rakesh Mohan's The People of Bogotá provides a case
study of
the changing internal structure of the nation's burgeoning
cities
and the problems associated with rapid urban growth at the
end of
the 1970s. The World Bank's Colombia: Economic
Development and
Policy under Changing Conditions presents an
authoritative
synthesis of Colombia's principal socioeconomic
characteristics,
trends, and public policies as of the mid-1980s. R. Albert
Berry
and Miguel Urrutia's Income Distribution in
Colombia
explores how the benefits of Colombia's rapid economic
growth in
the post-World War II era were distributed by regions and
strata in
the mid-1970s. Urrutia's Winners and Losers in
Colombia's
Economic Growth of the 1970s revises and updates his
earlier
work with Berry through the end of the 1970s. The changing
role of
the Catholic Church in Colombia in the 1980s is discussed
by Daniel
Levine in Religion and Politics in Latin America.
On public
health conditions and trends in the 1980s, Volume II of
the Pan
American Health Organization's Health Conditions in the
Americas, 1981-1984, is informative. Bruce Michael
Bagley's
"Colombia and the War on Drugs" gives an analysis of the
scope and
impact of illicit drug consumption and trafficking in
Colombia in
the 1980s. (For further information and complete
citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of December 1988
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