Bonus episode 3: Colombia - seized and stolen again
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We've had narco coffee, where coffee grains have been opened up and cocaine inserted into them. Individual grains? Individual grains. We're talking about coffee beans, you mean? Yeah. Not like the actual just, they're putting cocaine into it? The beans. Not into a packet. Hey there, Fiona here. Today, we're bringing another bonus episode from Cocaine Inc.,

My colleague Stephen Drill sat down with freelance journalist Richard McColl, who's based out in Columbia. Richard had listened to our series and got in touch with Stephen. The two got chatting about Stephen's reporting from Columbia for our series, and Stephen felt it would be great for you to hear some of Richard's insights. So, from The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia, this is Cocaine Inc., a bonus episode.

Colombia, seized and stolen again. Richard McColl is a British journalist who's lived in Colombia for two decades. For this interview, Richard spoke with me from a town called Mompos, which is about five hours drive south of Cartagena. That's the port city I visited in episode three, where authorities are seizing rooms full of cocaine bricks. Richard has reported and worked across South America and knows the continent inside out.

I started our conversation by asking him about life as a reporter in the country that's one of the world's main cocaine producers.

I kind of got wary of always opening each introductory paragraph with "Colombia, so long known for being the capital of narco-terrorism and Escobar" that I wanted to get further into the story about Colombia rather than just headlines.

You know, we have been in a civil conflict in Colombia technically since 1964. And this all feeds into...

what is going on today and what creates a continuation of, I would say, a Colombian tragedy of such violence and suffering. Well, can you give us a 50-year history in perhaps five minutes? Can you give us some of the main players now and how that came about? I know there's FARC, which is the revolutionaries in Colombia,

Who are they and why were they so entrenched?

In 1964, we're looking at the Cold War. There are revolutionary groups in much of South America, and Colombia is no different. Colombia is a country where it is not equal. The wealth is concentrated. And what starts as an uprising and then consolidates as guerrilla warfare against the state. So you have the FARC, that's the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,

left-wing revolutionary group, and they started in the 1960s. You have the ELN, the National Liberation Army, and then you have half a dozen other little groups. The FARC was, of course, the biggest group.

and over time committed heinous atrocities as the ELN did, human rights abuses, genocide and so on. Kidnapping was rife. These groups controlled much of rural Colombia because of course there was no development, no communication, no access to these parts of Colombia. And so when we talk about access,

The Colombian government have never seen the real need to invest in a significant highway system or system of transport. And so what you get are people who live in these isolated areas, usually smallholders and farmers.

hoping to sell their products at a highway or at a market nearby. And it can take them up to eight hours to get to a road. And so you've got this situation where it's an underclass that has been overlooked since Colombia has been a country. That leads us all the way up to the peace accords of 2016 signed with the FARC

gorillas. And that's one of the major, major issues and why the conflict itself continues to this day is that there has been no land reform.

So the divide between rich and poor is so extreme that it was fertile ground for communism and communist groups and these revolutionary groups. But also, I would imagine fertile ground for cocaine cartels because if they came in and said, hey, you can grow coca plants for us, that's one of the few options they have. So you've got this fertile ground, this inequality, and it can be exploited by people who want to sell drugs.

And that's it, isn't it? It's the cartels, the guerrilla groups, newly formed criminal gangs. These are all the people that get out to these distant areas and pay the farmers for their product. The state isn't getting out there to help them sell their milk or their crops anymore.

Can you explain the role of the US and the West in Colombia? Because we've got the communist groups and you said that this dispute, this war started in 1964. Now that's from my limited memory, that's the Vietnam War. So you have Americans and Australians going to Vietnam and spilling blood there to try and fight communism. Did they get involved in Colombia, the Americans? Yes.

In a short answer, yes. In the 60s, there was that great fear of the red tide of communism extending up through Latin America and then across the Rio Grande to the U.S. So there was an effort, but not as much as you had sort of like in Vietnam, but there was an effort. The U.S.'s involvement increases in the 1970s with the marijuana boom.

But at the same time, Colombia has been seen as the most stable democracy, despite everything, in South America. And then you get the cocaine trade coming in, and then we're looking at the war on drugs. And that's where the real money comes in. We're looking at Nixon, and we're looking at

fumigation. We're looking at US advisors on the ground. I've been down to some of these areas with the Colombian military, and there are these strange buildings built on the side of the Colombian bases that we know are used by US military, but they're there in advisory. This is today. Advisory capacities, and they don't wear uniforms. But as soon as you start seeing

My best expression is corn-fed white boys out there in the Colombian nowhere, dressed in checkered shirts and jeans and not speaking Spanish. These aren't, you know, Mormon settlers. These are military advisors. You talked about fumigation or aerial spraying of coca plants. Now, have you gone through afterwards and seen where the coca plants were sort of weed-killed? Yes. Now, the fumigation...

It works to an extent, doesn't it? But it is a poison.

And there are enough studies out there to show that the after effects for generations on the jungle, on the natural environment, and then of course in the food chain and affecting the people that live in these areas. And then of course it leaves the ground barren if you're going to try and grow something else. By the same measure, the coca plant does grow back.

And it was one of the key, key issues in the peace dialogues was the agreement was built around stopping the aerial fumigation of coca crops. And that was agreed to very quickly by the government of President Santos, who was the president in Colombia at the time. The subsequent government, so the last one here in Colombia,

President Duque, they really wanted to reintroduce it. But fortunately, there was just such a national outcry. And I think a constitutional court ruled it as illegal because of the effects it has on local communities.

Is that driven by the people on the ground? Because for me, if I was a cartel, I'd be pretty happy that you could no longer fumigate plants from the air. If you look at it from when that aerial spraying was banned, the actual amount of plants that are grown now is almost doubled, if not tripled, in the past seven or eight years.

I mean, that's the million-dollar or billion-dollar question, isn't it? When fumigation began, the cartels and the people growing or the cartels buying the coca crops, they started moving their cultivations and also making them smaller cultivations, so very difficult to fumigate.

And of course, cultivations were then placed in extreme geographies, so like a mountain sides and so on. Again, even more difficult to fumigate because you've got to get a pilot in there to make Top Gun style maneuvers. And then the other thing they did is they moved their small cultivations into national parks. And it's illegal to fumigate national parks as well. So

The coca trade will find a way. It's too economically viable. The coca trade finds a way. So like that tree that's at the front of your hotel, the dog can weigh on it, you can drop concrete on it, you can cut it down, it'll still come back. What about the border we've talked about, why coca plants grow so well?

But there's another part of the coca trade and cocaine trade that is also equally important, and that's the border with Venezuela. Because when I was in Colombia, it was pointed out to me regularly, it said, any homeless people, they're not Colombian. Now, that may have been national pride, but I think there's a fair point to it. There are so many people in Colombia who are from Venezuela, and that's

such a basket case that people are willing to go out there. I mean, they're willing to walk all the way to the US border for goodness sake. So how big is that border between Colombia and Venezuela? It's huge. It runs from the Guajira Peninsula. So that's right up in the northeast of Colombia, all the way down into the bottom near to Brazil. I mean, it runs the whole way.

A lot of it is only, the border areas are only accessible by riverways. And so the Colombian Navy does not police them as much. So again, these are cocaine highways. In a small area beside the border city of Cucuta in Colombia, I know for a fact that

that in a space of a couple of kilometres there are more than 20 trochas, that's illegal crossing points.

from the Venezuela and Colombia border to get people across. We're talking less than every 100 meters, every 75 meters. One of them will be controlled by a guerrilla group, another one will be controlled by a newly formed illegal gang. And so you pay a wage, a small fee to get through and you're through. The authorities or the military in Venezuela get their cut.

Let's be entirely honest. Corruption pervades all levels of society, not only in this region, but let's just look at Venezuela. And that

allows the coca paste, the cocaine product to get all the way out to the ports in Venezuela and to leave. And this is what has created a lot of upturn in violence in Jamaica because cocaine that comes out of Venezuela, a lot of it goes up via Haiti. But

But there's also another border. Let's look at the southern border with Ecuador. And Ecuador has been in the news in the last few months because it was seen as the country that defied all odds as being a peaceful country, sandwiched between the two major coca-producing countries of Peru and Colombia. It wasn't majorly affected by the violence. It was only seen as a transshipment point

And as a strange consequence of the peace accords in Colombia that took two thirds of the FARC guerrillas out of the equation, well, criminal groups in Ecuador, funded in part by Albanian groups, took over the transshipment from the FARC.

through Ecuador using major violence. And that's what led to Ecuador being in the situation that it is now. The port of Guayaquil on Ecuador's coast is known as one of the major transshipment ports for cocaine. A lot of it arrives at the port of Rotterdam, which of course you covered in the podcast, and out of Venezuela, several ports going up through the Caribbean and of course,

We do have cocaine that goes straight across to Africa and then up into Europe. This is a globalized economy.

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In Ecuador now, we've seen gangs go and take over a live television studio in the past 12 months. They actually took on air one of the major morning shows and were threatening to shoot people on there. We've had a political assassination of one of their main political leaders in the past 12 months, where it was once before relatively incomparably.

quite stable. I mean, and this is the, as you said, the globalization of the drug trade is because once you get to that point, um, how do you stop it? And I think that's the hard thing as well. I've spoken to a lot of police, police have to have meetings. They talk about things. They have to have days off. They've got sick days. They've got days where they stop when one of their fellow officers died and they actually, you know, honor them. They might have a funeral. Um,

Criminal gangs don't do that. If they want to do something differently, they change in five seconds. If they don't like their rival, they shoot them. They don't stop to bury somebody. They just keep going. Life to them isn't worth anything. So you're competing with people who just don't care. And that's a really imbalanced equation. A policeman has a family. He wants to save his life. He does not earn enough money to put his life on the line.

And not earning enough money and not being able to make ends meet and seeing his friends die also makes people entirely corruptible. And I'm not saying that the police force is 100% corrupt, but of course there are corrupt actors in every level. And that's a real issue. And as we talked about the creativity of the economic model of the cocaine trade,

We've had narco bananas coming out of Santa Marta. That's on the Caribbean coast. So cocaine being packed inside bananas and packed inside boxes. And it's a preferred method of getting cocaine on big ships over to Europe because it's a perishable. And so it needs to be fast-tracked through. And so people, it's easier for people to look the other way. We've had narco coffee.

where coffee grains have been opened up and cocaine inserted into them.

Individual grains. Individual grains. We're talking coffee beans, you mean? Yeah. Like the actual just, they're putting cocaine into it. The beans, not into a packet. Just coming back to Ompos, where you are now, that's about four or five hours from Cartagena. Can you tell us about when some of the cocaine was actually seized? So even when the police and the authorities do a good job in Colombia-

How hard is it? What happened when the police seized a fair amount of cocaine and was in Cartagena? What happened there? Yeah, there was a big seizure some years ago, a container full of cocaine.

and the authorities got it. And so it was being held at the port under police watch up there in Cartagena. And it was, it was tons. Well, the cartel came in, they knew the hour or they paid people off to walk away. There was only one person guarding it when they came up. Whoever that was, the poor man lost his life. They killed him.

stole the product back, put it into several smaller trucks and vehicles, and drove it south over roads. The road checkpoints were paid off beforehand because we have checkpoints. This is Colombia. We're still a nation in conflict. There are checkpoints. They went off to their lunch times at these times. The trucks would go through.

And then when you used to come down to near to where Montbos is, we didn't have any bridges. We now have bridges. They've been built. We just had-- and I'm sure you have them in Australia, and I know I've seen them in the US-- just sort of like barges, almost like homemade barges where your truck drives up onto it, and they almost have just got an outboard motor and a punt. And they just sort of push it across a river, and then you drive off again.

Well, the trucks came up, they drove onto the barges and they paid every single one of these boat drivers to go home for the day. So they paid them a day's wage and more, and they left all of the barges on the other side of the river. So the military chasing this product suddenly couldn't get across the river.

So they were stuck. The military was stuck on one side of the river. And then out here, it's huge farms, huge areas. And for the government to then sort of, let's say, deploy the airplanes or radars or what have you, this takes time. You don't just scramble them. So they just drove these trucks off into farms, into warehouses, and hid them there until the dust settles.

And then we're able to take it back up to whichever port. It's kind of cheese going pops. This was cocaine that was stolen. This was cocaine that was seized by the police. It's gone to Cartagena and then it's been taken back. And then it still got out. It raises the other question, which we've talked a little bit about in the podcast. Not a great deal, but we have...

I had some questions about it in our bonus episode. Listeners got in touch with questions and one thing that came up a lot was legalization. Basically, if we were to legalize cocaine, would that be the silver bullet to stop all the bloodshed associated with the trade? Where do you sit on this?

It's the question I ask myself all the time. As a father, all I think about, obviously, in this perspective, my two kids, it would be hard for me to imagine them going down to a cafe. Our dad, we're just going to do a couple of lines. At the same time, all of the offcuts of cocaine, so like the low quality stuff that are down and out smoke here, like a type of crack,

That can't be legalized. We had an area of Bogota known as the Bronx, which was four square blocks of anything goes.

And the police just kind of had a ring around it to make sure that nothing came out of there. I know that a local politician, a left-wing politician, has talked about why doesn't the government buy all of the coca, the coca plants, for traditional things to use it in fabrics and fibers? But that would never pick up the slack of the money. So I tend to veer towards some sort of regulation.

It needs to be an entirely international agreement, because if the US aren't on board, then it just collapses completely. Well, this is the thing, because I actually spoke to someone in Colombia about and asked them the same question. And they said, well, if they did that, if we go alone and say, right, we're going to legalize or we're going to regulate cocaine, America can just

dump Colombia out of the banking system. Yeah. And they would. Because if you get, they could lose all the support and the international support that happens. So it has to be a worldwide agreement. But even if it was legalized, what's to stop it being grown in the next field? The government buys all the cocaine. Yeah.

And then, well, that's just from, you know, field A. They can go to field Z and put it there and maybe make a stronger version. There was an experience I had on the Colombian Pacific coast where

where a whole society was entirely altered by the cocaine trade. And this is not a single case. This is other cases as well. Traditionally, the communities on the Pacific coast, they're fishermen. There are small airports near these towns. They sell the fish to buyers that then, let's say, fly them in to Medellin for the fish markets or Bogota.

But they were getting more money by finding the, let's say, those bundles of cocaine thrown overboard when the Colombian Navy would come along and find the narco subs, so the narco submarines or fast boats shipping north to Central America. They were getting more money from that because they would then get an anonymous number to call or send a message to

with obviously a code to say that they'd found a bundle of cocaine and the cartel themselves would buy it back from them. So you'd see people living in abject poverty, fishermen, but suddenly they had, you know, 50-inch TVs and a sound system to rival a nightclub because that's where the money got spent. But this changed society because

The airplanes going to Medellin or Bogota with the fresh fish were no longer going with the fresh fish. When they returned to Medellin back to these towns, normally they would take things to stock up the pharmacies.

Well now the planes weren't traveling because they weren't returning with anything so then the pharmacies were running out of the medicines and you started seeing people like the schizophrenics wandering around town because they weren't getting their medicines and at the same time women, the traditional communities, got tired of never having any fish to prepare for their families so

the whole society flipped, whereas men would go out looking for the bundles of cocaine thrown overboard and women would start fishing, which is not traditionally a women's job, to ensure that the whole economic model once again returned to how it was previously. I mean, there are stories like this all over Colombia. There were parts of the country where selling cocaine paste was legal tender.

So when you had cocaine paste, you would pay your doctor's visit with cocaine. And then the doctor would then sell it on to a cartel. And a great friend of mine who was a conflict photographer has a book where guerrilla fighters would come into town and go to the local brothel.

with cocaine paste and pay the women for their services in cocaine paste. And you can go to these towns today and they will talk about it. Oh yeah, back before we actually had the Colombian peso. This is how it's done. So it was actually currency. It was like tender. It was legal tender in a way because there wasn't, it was such an isolated area that they couldn't get the pesos. That's extraordinary. Yeah.

So what you're talking about there is development that would take not just years but decades and decades without corruption and decades with persistence and that's really hard because here in Sydney and here in Melbourne there's just so much demand for cocaine and it's almost laughed about. It's not even seen as a negative anymore. It's almost like passing a joint. So I think we've got a long way

There's no easy answer to any of these problems, but that's, I think in some ways, why the podcast has been so worthwhile to do because it is such a complex issue and we are all playing a significant part in it. It's, yeah, I mean, as you say, it's decades, it's generations and Colombia will always be tied to

with the stigma of this conflict, the stigma of Pablo Escobar, the stigma of being the number one coca, cocaine paste producer. The government will continually make bold declarations and statements about the seizure of coca. The cartels now have more than they know what to do with it. That's why coca seizures keep increasing.

But really, does it actually even make a dent in the cartel's profit? I mean, that's the big question. Well, the prices largely remain the same of the cocaine market. What has gone on is there's a more pure and more concentrated product out there now. The purity has gone up. That's the thing. People are still using the same amount of cocaine, but instead of getting

20 to 60% purity, which is what you get here on the streets of Sydney and Melbourne, it goes up higher. And in some ways that can make it more addictive because if you're getting better Coke, then you're going, this is great. I'll get more. And that's, so the market's always going to be in demand. One thing that,

You mentioned, and something that I noticed in my travels as well, was we were actually, I was with some police in Colombia in a hotel, and there was four of us that went up to the room. And then someone knocked on the door. They were worried that we were there and were going to bring prostitutes into the rooms. I mean, how big is the problem there?

or the industry of prostitution and also how willing or how are these women doing this by choice or or is it a little bit more sinister than that well prostitution is legal in colombia but the pimping so anyone as an in-between in business is illegal but prostitution is a massive massive industry there is a

huge hangover from the, let's say, the heady days of the narco cartels, the opulence of these narco cartels, where women were very much seen as objects and prizes for the cartels.

When you have a society where it takes, I think it was statistically, it's 13 or 15 generations to pull yourself out of poverty, you're always going to get

those who look for anything to get out of a situation that they were born into. And lots of, I would say, sexual tourists coming down from Europe and North America to take advantage of the strong dollar and pound with people from a very precarious background.

And this is a bleak way to sort of end it, but it's also reality because if you think about it, you've got people coming in with the strong doll, the strong pound to be sex tourists. And...

That, in a way, is a sort of paradigm for what's happening with the cocaine trade, where the rich people in the West, in America, in the UK, in Australia, they're using their dollar. They're not directly going there to actually participate, but they are changing the economy of Colombia, and that's having real negative effects on people. Look, it is sort of just a real...

sad story of what's happened to a beautiful country. Colombia is known for its amazing people, amazingly friendly society. And every single family here, without exception, rich or poor, has been affected at some level by the conflict and the conflict which has been extended due to the cocaine trade itself. That's a good note to end on. Thanks so much, Richard, and appreciate your time.

Thank you.

And as always, thanks for listening. Do leave us a review, a nice one ideally, and please get in touch if you have any questions. Our email is in the description notes.

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