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And I remember that when I was singing that song, I raised my hands and I said to my God, I forgive the person that did me that. And I said to my God, forgive them.
and forgive me because in this time I need you so much. On the 1st of December 1993, a short, plump, middle-aged man is celebrating his 44th birthday inside a house in his home city of Medellín, Colombia. There's cake, good wine and marijuana. The man has a wide smile and graying hair at the sides.
He owns several palatial homes, has been a congressman and for the last seven years running made the world-famous Forbes magazine list of billionaires. But right now, he's in hiding. The next afternoon, the man sits inside waiting for a boy who's been sent to fetch lunch from a local restaurant.
Outside, hundreds of police and soldiers quietly surround the building, blocking off the streets and taking up their positions. At 2:51 p.m., two of the heavily armed cops from an elite unit of Colombia's National Police approach, knock on the door, and when no one answers, they smash their way in. Hearing the noise, the man runs upstairs, climbs out through a window and jumps onto the roof of the next-door building.
Despite his wealth, he's barefoot and dressed in faded jeans and a blue polo shirt. With the police now closing in from every side, his money cannot save him. I'm Fiona Hamilton, and from The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia, this is Cocaine Inc. Episode 2, The Sweet Song. To understand what led to the death of Ellie Edwards, which you heard in the last episode...
You need to start here. In Colombia, where the cocaine trail begins. It's the world's biggest producer, where that barefoot man fleeing from police across a rooftop helped turn the cocaine trade from a local smuggling operation into a global business.
Today, we're in Bogota, the capital of Colombia, in the luxurious National Police Social Club in the city centre. There's tall glass windows, manicured grounds with palm trees, and inside, a small chapel, a swimming pool and a bowling alley. It's where some of the city's cops come to relax. My colleague, News Corp Australia national correspondent Stephen Drill, is sitting at the bar.
Okay, we're ready to go. My name is Steven, I'm a journalist from Australia. Can you please tell me your name and how old you are? My name is Jose Fernando Carvajal Rueda. I'm 27 years old.
And do you have children? No. I'm single. Single? I'm single, yes. I've spent years as a reporter covering cocaine busts and celebrity cocaine scandals. And I've started to wonder, where does this problem come from? And do we even really understand it? So I managed to convince our bean counters and a nervous HR department to send me halfway across the world for this podcast.
where one of the first people I meet is Jose, a former policeman. The first thing I notice is how young he looks, with a neat beard, pale shirt and dark suit. And unlike what you might expect for someone who's worked at the center of global cocaine production, he has an infectious enthusiasm.
I work in the mountain, in the forest, in the eradication of the illicit plants. Call it cocaína. And with the eradication, what do you actually do? Is it like spraying a chemical or cutting them down? I will answer that question in Spanish. José says the police used to spray weed killer.
Only, people criticised the damage it was doing to local farmers and their crops. The Colombian government banned the practice in 2015. There was also a concern that chemicals in the toxic weed killer would get into waterways and cause cancer. So, now the cops go in and physically pull out the coca plants by hand.
Wiping out the coca plants is one of the main ways governments around the world have been trying for decades to shut down the cocaine business. The basic idea is that by sending in cops to destroy the coca fields, you reduce the supply of cocaine. Supply goes down, the price goes up, which means that customers, and maybe that's you on the streets of say, London or Sydney, don't buy cocaine because it's so expensive.
To give you an example, there was a cyclone in Australia about 10 years ago. The banana industry is worth $400 million, but it's been brought to its knees by Cyclone Yasi. The banana plantations were wiped out. The price of bananas went to about 13 bucks a kilo. That's seven pounds, or close to nine US dollars for a bunch of bananas. I didn't eat one for a year. It's economics 101, right? Only there's a cost that doesn't get accounted for at the checkout.
When the Colombian police were sent to destroy the coca crops, Jose says it was his job to go ahead of the other officers with a sniffer dog. Jose and his dog went alone through the forest to make sure a path was clear for the rest to follow. One day I stepped on an explosive mine.
I lost my legs for that. He lost his legs. That landmine was left by a cocaine cartel to protect its harvest. And whoever set it packed the bomb with nails and glass. They also put in dog shit to make sure the wound got infected. I've seen a lot while reporting on crime, but the evil intent of that decision is hard to get over. Jose was left lying on the forest floor.
I was so bad. And I remember that I looked in the sky and I answered to my god, "God, why?" And the helicopter arrived three minutes later. His fellow cops dragged him out under heavy gunfire from the cartel. Jose was taken to hospital. Both his legs were amputated.
He lay in a coma for 18 days. Finally, he opened his eyes. I remember that the film that I see was my younger brother. In that moment, I thought in my family, I lost my legs. But in any moment, I lost my dreams. And I fight for my dreams with effort, with a smile, because I love...
Jose says his fellow police officers are warriors who fight all day, every day, against the drug gangs. Losing limbs, losing their lives, leaving behind their homes and families. And it's that human cost that doesn't get accounted for at the checkout. Yes, when I lost my legs, I arrived at the clinic immediately
I cried so much, but I take a decision so important for my life. Despite the cost he paid in the drug war, Jose says he's come to terms with what happened to him. One day I wake up so sad and I remember that I hear a nurse hearing music, Christian music, musica cristiana.
there is a part of the song that I would like to sing to the people. Yes. Yeah.
And I remember that when I was singing that song, I raised my hands and I said to my God, I forgive the person that did me that. And I said to my God, my God, forgive them.
and forgive me because I need you in this time. I need you so much. Jose forgave the cocaine gang who set that landmine. Today, he's living in Bogota, studying law. I will be an excellent lawyer. And somehow, he's still managing to smile.
Given what happened to him, you might have thought Jose would be pretty down on the practice of cops pulling out cocaine plants. Except he isn't. It's a difficult job, but he says it's important, which is where we get back to what I was talking about with the bananas. According to economists...
By reducing the supply of the coca crop, you would think it would drive up the price of cocaine. Jose says something similar. It's all about supply and demand. Except, as I was about to discover, in the cocaine business, it doesn't work like that at all. We finish talking and head out of the police social club together, Jose walking slowly on his prosthetic legs.
God bless you and never forget that the life will be better with a smile, with a laugh. Maybe it's a message for you. Afterwards, I join up with some of Jose's former colleagues in the National Police and together we travel by helicopter deep into the Colombian mountains.
The police are armed with M16 rifles as we fly over the thick forest. We land and climb into heavy-duty 4x4s and drive along muddy tracks heading deeper into the jungle. We're about 1,000 metres above sea level but among the mountains there are plateaus where the local farmers have planted fields. Alright, we won't.
Among the trees, I see neat fields with row after row of coca plants with their flat green leaves and bright red berries, the source of the global cocaine trade. They're handpicked by local farmers, only here there's no farmhouse, just some ramshackle buildings made from timber and corrugated iron sheets. Leaving the car behind us, we walk closer and are standing there in silence when suddenly
the forest erupts around us. Heavily armed police charge forward, but this time it's a training raid on a mock cocaine production lab. But the noise and the threat of violence feels real. The men pretending to be cocaine farmers are forced to lie face down, hands outstretched in the dirt, and the cops are soon seizing assault rifles, clearing rooms, hauling their suspects off at gunpoint. It all happens in seconds.
What's left is a stack of brick-sized blocks of white powder. Cocaine lying in the jungle sun. Watching the police, I see a lot of bravery, but not a lot of evidence the strategy is actually working. Here in Colombia, as acre after acre of coca plants are destroyed by the police, the farmers just go out and plant more. And even if half the harvests are ruined every year by cops, which is pretty much what happens,
The price paid on the street for cocaine has actually stayed the same, or fallen in real terms, over the past 30 years. Which is where we come back to economics. Economics says that that shouldn't happen. A supply reduction shouldn't mean a price fall. The coca farmers should be able to charge more, and the drug cartels should have to pay it.
When I was trying to understand this, I read something by The Economist magazine's Central America correspondent, Tom Wainwright. Picture this: you're at the supermarket buying a two-liter bottle of milk. It's pretty cheap. In fact, in real terms, the price of this bottle of milk has fallen over the past 30 years. Part of the reason it's cheap is because the big supermarket chains dominate the market.
Think Tesco, Sainsbury's, Coles, Woolies or Walmart. Those big supermarket chains account for a huge amount of the food we eat and the milk we drink, meaning the dairy farmers have a little choice over who they sell to. That means the supermarkets can squeeze their suppliers.
telling them they're only prepared to pay so much, keeping down the cost to the customer while maintaining their own profits and leaving any increase in the cost of producing the milk itself to be picked up by the farmer. And while Western farmers might say they feel like they're being held at gunpoint, the farmers in Colombia actually are. Those cartels set the prices.
Meaning, the whole strategy of destroying the coca plants, something governments have spent billions on, doesn't work. You see, the amount of land used to grow coca plants worldwide has roughly trebled during the past decade. Production is now at a record level. The crops do get destroyed, but that just makes it harder for the farmers. It doesn't affect the cocaine gangs that are shipping and selling the drug.
The podcast Faith on Trial looks into Hillsong, both in Australia and the U.S., and takes both the listener and hosts on unexpected twists and turns in the story of Brian Houston and the singing preachers. There are two incidents involving Pastor Brian. The Australian journalists uncovered a litany of alleged criminal behavior in the megachurch. Financial gifts were being given to the leaders of the church. Listen to Faith on Trial.
Looking back at what I've seen so far in Colombia, it's the sheer violence of the drug trade that stands out. Jose's injuries from a landmine, the police training for a raid with both sides armed with submachine guns. Who created this business model? There's really one place to go to find the answer. From the mountains, I travel north to Medellin.
where Pablo Escobar helped build the world's first major drug cartel during the 70s and 80s. The Medellin Cartel, a small group of men that in the last few years has formed a near monopoly on the processing and sale of cocaine. The Medellin Cartel changed everything in the cocaine business. They were the first to industrialize the process, shipping and flying cocaine in vast quantities out of the country.
According to American officials, controlling as much as 80% of the world's supply. With that control came huge profits. You're talking about a business that probably makes a couple of billion dollars a year.
In 1981, Time magazine ran a front page story calling cocaine the drug of choice for millions. A few years later, Forbes magazine put the Medellin cartel's leader, Pablo Escobar, in its annual list of billionaires. "Cocaine Inc. A huge international business run by a relatively small band of smugglers operating out of Colombia. This cocaine cartel in many ways is as sophisticated as a Fortune 500 company."
And it was sophisticated. Just like any other business, the cartel had to manufacture, transport, market and sell its product. The people running it also became sophisticated. Just like other business leaders, they wore the same expensive watches, went to the same expensive parties and had the same expensive problems as those running legal businesses.
like managing their employees, navigating regulation, finding reliable suppliers and dealing with their competitors. The 44-year-old Escobar was accused of waging a terror campaign. Hundreds of people were killed by Escobar's assassins. Looked at this way, cocaine might be the ultimate capitalist product.
The businesses that have the most success selling it are dynamic, innovative, ruthless, loyal only to the pure, unfettered free market. Pablo Escobar had been a fugitive for more than a year and a half after escaping from this prison where police say he still ran his cocaine empire. Until, of course, it ended.
An elite Colombian police unit killed Pablo Escobar in a shootout, cornering him here in this house where he had been hiding in the city of Medellin. Escobar was the barefoot man who tried escaping across the rooftops that Fiona was talking about at the beginning of this episode. He'd vowed to go down fighting rather than surrender and was true to his word, firing at the police with a 9mm pistol in each hand. They shot back
hitting him 12 times. Escobar fell dead on the terracotta tiles. The police posed for photos, smiling, holding their guns over his bloodied body. It looks like a trophy photo taken by a hunting party. Colombian authorities say its message to other drug lords is to surrender or you will be killed. But that message didn't seem to get through. In the year after Escobar's shooting, his cartel broke up into factions.
And so did the control it had over the cocaine business. In Medellin, I visit a suburb called Comuna 13. It's high in the hills on the outskirts of the city, but near the main highway, a crucial combination for the cocaine trade. But while the drug bosses make millions, Comuna 13 is one of the poorest areas of Colombia. Escobar ruled it as his personal kingdom. Walking through its narrow streets, to get out of the rain, I duck inside one of the houses and sit down with a local woman.
Her name is Rose. She doesn't speak much English, and I don't speak much Spanish, so we talked through a translator. Gracias for letting us speak in your home. We're in a very small room, about two metres by three metres. It's the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room and the bedroom.
Rose actually pulls down a chair off the bunk bed so we can sit down. She said, you know, this is my humble husband. How long have you lived here for? She was 14 years old when she arrived here and now she's 59. 59, okay. And so you were here when...
the drug lords and the guerrillas were in charge? - She said yes. - Rose tells me how Communa 13 could be a deadly place, even for people with nothing to do with the drugs trade. - She said the guerrillas almost killed one of her sons.
Rose stood up to the drug gangs and her son survived. Neither of them had anything to do with the cocaine business.
But that's how close life and death got in Medellin in the 1990s. After Escobar's death, his cartel crumbled. Other gangs stepped in, fighting over the cartel's business. And while Rose's family managed to escape the violence, plenty of her neighbours weren't so lucky. For a time, Medellin had a reputation as the murder capital of the world. Life in the city has gotten safer, Rose says.
Looking back, I ask what she thinks about the drug trade. She said, I wish that would be gone, because, you know, that's definitely not good for the kids. So she would like never see that again around the streets, but it's impossible. It's part of the Colombian economy, so, yeah. MUSIC
Rose and I don't chat for too long before I leave and make my way back to my hotel to the narrow streets of Medellin. But what she says stays with me. What she said is that the cocaine business isn't just a criminal enterprise. It's bigger than that. So big that it's part of the Colombian economy. Just like, say, the oil industry or mining. Huge, multinational industries with power to change the lives of millions.
and in some cases, more powerful than individual governments. I'm still thinking about it months later. Do you speak Spanish a little? Ah, poco. Which is how I ended up on a video call to another person who's witnessed the rise of the cocaine industry in Colombia. This is Dr. Luis Velez. Today, he's a law professor. He actually teaches Jose, who you'll remember from earlier in this episode. It was Jose who suggested we speak.
Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you interviewed him. He's a wonderful human being. But before taking up his teaching post, Dr. Velez was a judge who oversaw the state's investigation into the drug gang that took over the cocaine trade from the Medellin cartel. They were called the Cali Cartel. And we're talking about Cali Cartel? It means corruption. And then the Cali Cartel took over after Escobar? Yeah. But
The judges here had bodyguards, he tells me. He had a bulletproof vest and a bulletproof car. His family also had to have protection. This was the mid-1990s.
The Cali cartel spread throughout Colombian society. I saw how drugs money corrupt the Colombian society. The point is drugs trafficking becomes a new form of employment in one of the most unequal countries in the world.
Let me repeat that. Drug trafficking became a form of employment in a poor country. But what's driving that economic engine, according to Dr. Velez, is not supply. It's not the coca plants growing in the jungle. It's demand. And that demand is coming from those rich countries where people pay a fortune for cocaine. Colombia is the country that has been the
Highest cost in the war in the fight against drugs. It's not doable. He says Colombia is the country that's paid the highest price of any in the drug war. Or at least it was until recently. Because like any modern business, the cocaine trade is always changing.
And when the authorities, like Dr. Velez, cracked down on it here in Colombia, it moved. And I get strong advice from the government about this terrible, terrible crime in Mexico. Dr. Velez is now working as an advisor to the government of Mexico, where countless thousands have been murdered by the drug gangs. Mexico is terrible.
Mexico is terrible, he says. And that's coming from a man who had a bodyguard for his one-year-old daughter. Hearing that, I know that Mexico is where we must go next. The problems between the different cartels, normally they solve that through killing people. And unfortunately we have lots of corpses and we have not been able to identify those people properly.
belong to that and there are lots of clandestine graves. That's next time on Cocaine Inc. Cocaine Inc. is a joint investigation from The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia. The reporters are David Collins, Stephen Drill and me, Fiona Hamilton. The series is produced by Sam Chantarassack.
The executive producers are Will Rowe and Dan Box. Audio production and editing is by Jasper Leake with original music by Tom Birchall. Additional recording by Jason Edwards. And if you want to get in touch with any questions or thoughts on the series, email cocaineinc at thetimes.co.uk.
The podcast Faith on Trial looks into Hillsong, both in Australia and the U.S., and takes both the listener and hosts on unexpected twists and turns in the story of Brian Houston and the singing preachers. There are two incidents involving Pastor Brian. The Australian journalists uncovered a litany of alleged criminal behavior in the megachurch. Financial gifts were being given to the leaders of the church. Listen to Faith on Trial.
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