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| ISBN-13: | 9780520963405 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 11/24/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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The Para-State
An Ethnography of Colombia's Death Squads
By Aldo Civico
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96340-5
CHAPTER 1
"Everything I Did in the Name of Peace"
It was pitch-dark, hot, and humid when I arrived at the ranch of the man everyone calls El Doctor, the Doctor, in 2010. The lights of the cab that had driven me here from Bogotá flashed upon a locked gate; it seemed nobody was waiting for me. I wondered if I had come to the correct place. I was only a few miles away from Puerto Boyacá, the town in the Middle Magdalena region that served as the cradle of the paramilitaries and was an epicenter of the armed conflict in Colombia. The man for whom I was looking had been a pioneer of the paramilitary movement and drug trafficking.
A few minutes had passed before a short man with a round face and short black hair came to the gate and, mistrustful, inquired who I was and whom I was looking for. "I'm here to see El Doctor," I announced. He made a few calls and finally invited me to get into his car. We proceeded at a snail's pace on an unpaved and rocky road, with the headlights fending off the moonless night. While penetrating into the heart of the estate, I spotted the dark shapes of cattle lying restfully on the grass. After several minutes, and after crossing three gates all locked with thick chains, we reached a one-story compound.
El Doctor was waiting there, surrounded by a few men in sleeveless shirts and blue jeans. In the back, there was the noise of a power generator. El Doctor greeted me in a friendly manner and introduced me to his workers, agronomists, and veterinarians, some of whom had been working for him for ten years. "These are my workers and not my bodyguards," El Doctor said, sensing my impression. "The estate does not need security, and neither do I." A sign of his self-confidence? A mark of his power and control over the territory? He repeated a similar assessment time and again. "The gates impede cattle thieves." But would anyone dare to steal the cattle of El Doctor?
We walked by a small swimming pool and entered his home. "This is not a recreational farm. Here we work the entire day," he stated. Once inside the spacious salon that served as both a living and dining room, we sat on rocking chairs for a small chat before going to rest. A large, disk-shaped wooden table, which a dozen people could comfortably sit around, dominated the space. The maid served freshly squeezed orange juice.
El Doctor explained that only recently had he returned to the estate. In fact, he had been released a few months earlier, in January 2010, after serving a six-year conviction for drug trafficking in a U.S. federal prison in Texas and negotiating a reduced sentence. Once back in Colombia, he had primarily dedicated himself to his wife and two daughters, who were denied visits to him while he was behind bars in the Texas prison. Now he was determined to take his cattle business back into his own hands.
On the day of my arrival, El Doctor had gone to a bank in Puerto Boyacá to pay the salary of his workers and buy seeds and chemicals on the black market (all smuggled in from Venezuela, I later learned) for the farming of his livestock. This was the first time since his release that he had gone to the town, and he'd been pleased by the people's warm welcome. "They recognized me and came up to say hello. Many are calling me because they would like to meet. They no longer do it to ask me favors, as in the past. They well know that I don't have those ties anymore, but they want to see me and pay their respects. But here at the ranch, I don't receive people anymore — only occasionally, and only special people." He relished the recognition and deference shown by locals in spite of his extradition and the years that he had been away. There was a mixture of nostalgia and relief in his voice. I sipped more orange juice.
"How big is your ranch?" I asked.
El Doctor lifted his gaze, now glittering with pride, and announced that he had been a pioneer in cattle genetics when he had imported the first specimens of tropical livestock from India to Colombia in the 1980s. "Today I own 4,000 head of cattle and 2,000 hectares [4,942 acres] of land, and a total of 160 people work for me," he responded. Then he paused and, with the sadness of a victim, added: "Before my arrest, I almost had 500 workers. Many lost their jobs because of my disgrace, and now I am in no condition to hire them back. Before they had a good life; now they are living in poverty." When he was arrested and extradited, the state did not confiscate all of his land, he explained without animosity. Some of that land now belongs to his daughter, while additional land is still under the names of the previous owners. "They still might confiscate some of my property. It will be a major loss, but in any case, I will give it to the state without any resentment." We turned the light off and went to bed.
The following morning, after a comfortable sleep, I met El Doctor's wife, who served me breakfast with a choice of tropical fruit, cereal, arepa — the traditional Colombian cornbread — sausage, eggs, and a fresh, tender cheese produced at the farm. The previous night, El Doctor had spoken very highly of his wife, praising her for standing behind the business while he was in prison. "More often than not, when the husband is away, women let the business fall apart. Women end up listening to people who trick them. But this is not the case with my wife. She had no knowledge of farming, but she learned and got good at it."
The wife, once a bank executive, was a firm woman of average height, her long, thick hair collected behind her neck with a rubber band, and she had a vigorous gaze like that of a captain who is used to steering his vessel through storms and knows no hesitation. She wore a large white shirt, and at her neck was a wide, elegantly embroidered collar. She spoke in small sentences as if emitting verdicts, pronouncing every syllable with sharpness. "In this farm, we work very hard," she said, initiating her conversation with me by highlighting the work ethic of the house. "This is a humble estate and is not pretentious at all," she continued and provided a social analysis of the different kinds of farmhouses. Pretentious farms, she said, belong to drug barons, the so-called traquetos, the people engaged in cocaine trafficking who make a show of their wealth, with thick gold chains around their necks, large-cylinder-capacity cars, and stunning young women. "Those people are of a different class. I have to say 'those people' because I do not consider myself a part of them. They believe that belonging to a class is a matter of money, when instead it's a genetic thing," she added with a touch of disdain and irony. "Class is something a mother passes on with breast-feeding. Cali, the city I am from, has a widespread traqueto culture. They are ostentatious and pompous. They are the so-called emerging class, rooted in a culture of illegality. Colombia is shaped by such a culture and lives off it."
The veterinarian showed up, interrupting our conversation, to submit a shopping list to El Doctor's wife for review. In the meantime, El Doctor had joined us and sat down at the table for breakfast. In full light, I got a better sense of his features, his dyed-brown hair, a slightly inflated belly, the golden frame of his glasses, the watery eyes that bestowed upon him a melancholic and somehow tired mien. I observed his ability to listen, never interrupting, always calm, absent any animosity, and at the same time always ready to engage in captivating and gripping conversation. These qualities certainly contributed to his gaining the trust and respect of powerful drug lords and paramilitary leaders, as well as the fondness of the people of the Middle Magdalena region. El Doctor was a man of charm and grace, a man of council, the consigliere to whom to turn for decisions, a role that he seemed to enjoy. Like a sun, he stood at the center of a universe held together by symbolic acts of loyalty, which, in turn, were reinforced and validated by a practice of gift exchange. El Doctor proved his own magnanimity, providing jobs, food, security, intercessions, and favors. Because there is no free gift, in exchange El Doctor received respect, labor, information, protection, and, most of all, unwavering loyalty. In fact, as Marcell Mauss observed, the gift exchange's reciprocity is characterized not only by economic transition, but also by a variety of acts of politeness, from banquets to rituals to military service (1990, 5). El Doctor's power emanated naturally not only from his possessions, but also from the fact that, like a god, he held the power of life and death, of condemnation and pardon, over the people who depended on him. As Mauss remarked, what is at stake in a system of reciprocity is honor, which explains, for example, why the Mafia boss in Italy is named "a man of honor." Standing at the center of the reciprocity system, honor is not dependent on wealth, but is maintained by the obligation to give: "To refuse to give, to fail to invite, just as to refuse to accept, is tantamount to declaring war; it is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality" (ibid., 13).
I thus realized that it was the politics of honor engendered by gift exchange that conferred status on El Doctor. When his wife brought before him a chicken, struggling in a potato sack to be slaughtered, in a display of mercy he instructed her to put the sacrificial offering back into the pen for a few more days before it would be killed. A thought spontaneously sprang into my mind: How many times did El Doctor pardon an enemy sentenced to death by paramilitaries? I saw in that chicken a possible metaphor for a guerrilla sympathizer tied up and brought in front of a paramilitary leader for the final judgment. El Doctor's show of magnanimity, the capacity to grant temporary pardon, was an attribute of power that conferred upon him the mythic quality of a god.
For El Doctor, it all began in the mid-1970s. Colombia had only then discovered cocaine as a source of quick wealth. No vast coca fields yet existed in the country, or laboratories that could convert coca leaves into cocaine base, or chemists who knew the sophisticated formula to transmute cocaine paste into the white powder filling the nostrils of millions in the United States and around the world. Nor had a mythical figure such as Pablo Escobar yet appeared on the horizon. President Nixon had just announced the crackdown on drugs, but the United States was still years away from its declaration of an all-out war on drugs. El Doctor did not belong to any cartel, since there was no such thing back then. Only smugglers and cocaine freelancers such as himself existed, importing cocaine base from Bolivia and Peru.
When he started out, El Doctor was not a major player in the drug business; he was no Carlos Lehder, Pablo Escobar, Benjamín Herrera, or Gilberto Rodríguez-Orejuela — whom historian Paul Gootenberg labeled the "Schumpeterian heroes" of the wholesale cocaine trade (2008, 4). Rather, he was one of the many Colombians who in the early 1970s would travel with cash to Bolivia and Peru, buy cheap cocaine paste, and resell it in Colombia. "I did so between 1975 and the beginning of the 1980s," El Doctor confessed. Born into a Conservative family in a small mountain town of the department of Antioquia, he witnessed the sectarian violence between Conservatives and Liberals during the 1950s, while he was still a child: "For the past twenty years, my hometown has witnessed cruel violence, and I consider myself a person displaced by violence." While attending law school in Bogotá, he shared with other students a small apartment in an alley of the Chapinero neighborhood, which is today booming with clothing stores, small restaurants, and gay clubs. After graduation, El Doctor moved to a town in the southern department of Nariño, at the Ecuadorian border, where he opened a money exchange office. His clients considered him as a trustworthy and loyal man, and that's why they started calling him El Doctor: "It was during this time that I got to know all those implicated in drug trafficking and who later became the bosses of the cartels." Though he did not volunteer any details, it is during that period that he opened his own cocaine business, accumulating the wealth that he later invested in mining, property, and estates, such as the one where I was sitting, listening to his stories and meeting his wife, workers, clients, and friends:
I had gone to work at the border with Ecuador, where I owned three bureaus of exchange. Everyone trusted me and gave me their cash, and I was making money from the exchange. I was a currency exchanger. But that's also where I got involved with the issue, because I also got to know those who sold [the cocaine base]. So I got involved little by little. I was a kid, on my own, and filled with ambition. Therefore, instead of continuing to make money with the exchange, I also made money on the side [with the cocaine base] until I stopped in 1982. But I continued to be linked to everyone because they knew me, and I was doing them favors. They became my clients in the livestock business — very special clients indeed. They liked me because I had served them. For being a fool, I became stuck with them. One commits much bullshit, and, as my father always said, we don't stop being a bratty child and fool in life. But that's history for me now. I already paid [my penalty] to the United States. When one pays to the United States, one pays to the entire world. Neither Italy nor Colombia nor Spain nor the U.K. comes after you. [The United States] are the world police, aren't they?
Successful with the money exchange bureau at the border, El Doctor branched off to Cali, where he eventually fell in love and married the woman who would become his second and current wife. In 1985, he acquired 17 percent of the airline Intercontinental de Aviación, which, according to Colombian and U.S. authorities, was created to camouflage drug shipments and launder money, a fact that El Doctor contested. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), El Doctor had turned into one of the major leaders of the powerful North Valley Cartel. The indictment papers called him the consigliere responsible for mediating the cartel's internal conflicts and the interests of members and associates of other cartels. According to the DEA, he conspired in the "illegal trafficking of cocaine, money laundry, extortion of state agents and Colombian politicians, kidnapping, torture and killing of enemies of the cartel" (quoted in López López 2008, 217). In a U.S. State Department report, El Doctor is mentioned as an attorney and counselor to the North Valley Cartel, someone "viewed as an elder statesman and highly respected intermediary," and as "a major investor in cocaine shipments ... and was involved in the laundering of millions of dollars of drug proceeds between Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Vanuatu, and the USA."
"My mistake," El Doctor explained, "was that I was not able to keep a distance from those people, and I let myself get involved in their dealings." While he was perceived as a powerful and wealthy man by the people turning to him, El Doctor perceived himself also as a cog, almost trapped in a system that he himself, and in no minor way, had contributed to bring about and strengthen. He described himself as being increasingly drawn in, almost as if falling into a state of trance, and eventually possessed by the ambitions and desires awakened by cocaine and its trades. In marginal areas of Colombia, as I will explore in chapter 4, cocaine has become a key material symbol, which has turned individuals such as El Doctor into a part of a larger social system that, together with wealth and its own apparatus of repression, has accumulated social power.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Para-State by Aldo Civico. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Prologue: From the Field JournalIntroduction
1 • "Everything I Did in the Name of Peace"
2 • Fragments from the Shadows of War
3 • Limpieza: The Expenditure of Spectacular Violence
4 • An Ethnography of Cocaine
5 • The Intertwinement
6 • Demobilization and the Unmasking of the State
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index