Hostage Nation (42 page)

With twenty-two military and National Police hostages still on the list of exchangeables, Córdoba and Botero made another trip to Washington, D.C., to try to gain support for hostage negotiations between the FARC and the Colombian government. There was little interest on the part of U.S. lawmakers or the international media. “When the rich people were still hostage, it was an important item, but now that the politicians are free, it is not important anymore,” Marleny Orjuela, director of Asfamipaz (an association of relatives of military hostages), told
Colombia Reports. “
The interest of countries like France, Switzerland and Sweden has dropped 80 percent since Ingrid Betancourt was released. We haven't heard from the Betancourt Committees ever since—nor from her.” Orjuela said that she had asked for a meeting with the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, William Brownfield, and had been waiting for months but had received no response. Although there
was little market for stories about the hostages, there was one specific reason Botero continued his trips to the mountains and the jungle to meet with FARC commanders. “It's because of the colonel,” he says. “When Mendieta is free—and I'm afraid he may be the
last
one to be freed—when this happens, I will turn the page. Only then will I be able to close this chapter of my life.”

D
uring the 1,967 days that Thomas Howes, Marc Gonsalves, and Keith Stansell remained in captivity, nearly three billion dollars were invested by the U.S. government to fight the war on drugs in Colombia. Four months after their rescue, in November 2008, a glossy State Department brochure titled
Colombia: An Opportunity for Lasting Success
(published to pump up the idea of a trade agreement with Colombia) stated, “While estimates differ, coca cultivation has declined since 2002.” The statement could only be interpreted as a twisted analysis of the State Department's own data, since the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report for 2007 (compiled by the State Department) actually reports an
increase
in cultivation every year since 2003. The United Nations found similar trends. In a 2008 survey, coca cultivation in South America was found to be at its highest level since 2001 due to a 27 percent rise in Colombia's crop. The executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, called the increase “a surprise because it comes at a time when the Colombian Government is trying so hard to eradicate coca; a shock because of the magnitude of cultivation.” The National Drug Intelligence Center, a division of the DOJ, reported that the price for cocaine in the first quarter of 2008 was up by about 22 percent from 2005 and
purity was down. Both factors pointed to a decline in the availability of cocaine on U.S. streets. The promising trend was attributed to several exceptionally large cocaine seizures, counterdrug efforts by the Mexican government, increasing intercartel violence in Mexico, and expanding cocaine markets in Europe and South America. No credit could be attributed to any U.S.-Colombia efforts.

Although the empirical data show an absolute failure of Plan Colombia to curb coca cultivation and production, the State Department's 2007 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, released in March 2008, indicated that the unsuccessful policy would remain essentially the same for 2009 and 2010: capturing and extraditing Colombian nationals, dismantling terrorist organizations and illegal armed groups that run the drug trade in Colombia, and continuing the chemical eradication efforts. The price tag for the 2009–2010 program would be $1 billion.

In February 2009, South American leaders from seventeen countries met in Rio de Janeiro to evaluate western hemisphere drug policies. The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy presented its conclusions in an op-ed piece in
The Wall Street Journal
. “Prohibitionist policies based on the eradication of production and on the disruption of drug flows as well as on the criminalization of consumption have not yielded the expected results,” the article said. “We are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs.” The commission was cochaired by former heads of state Fernando Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia (who helped bring down Pablo Escobar), and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, all of whom were once leaders in the crusade to crack down on the drug trade by using military, law enforcement, and fumigation techniques. The commission also blamed the war on drugs for a litany of dire and costly consequences: “The expansion of organized crime, a surge of violence related to drug trafficking and pandemic corruption among law enforcement personnel from the street level on up.”

“Every measure of the coca and cocaine reduction effort indicates failure,” says Adam Isacson. “Whether it's the amount of coca being detected, whether it is the tonnage of cocaine being shipped, the percentage that we think we've interdicted, the price of the stuff on the
streets here in the U.S., or the size of the addict population. Everything indicates no impact.” Alfredo Rangel, a top Colombian security expert and a supporter of Álvaro Uribe, told
Newsweek
in January 2009, “We're capturing more cocaine and heroin than ever before. The bad news is that all that has done nothing.” A former U.S. Army veteran and self-described ultra-right-winger who worked closely with Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes was one of the first to capitalize on the massive influx of U.S. dollars that came with Plan Colombia. “If the drug war goes away, I might be unemployed,” he said in a June 2008 interview. “But I think that legalization is the way. It's a lie that the drug war has changed anything. The laws in the U.S. have not changed. The DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] spends a lot of money. The solution is to legalize and tax drugs in the States and in Mexico. Pablo Escobar is like a Boy Scout compared to the Mexicans.”

By 2008, it had become apparent that the illegal drug trade, manifested in a form more brutal and deadly than ever before, had landed on the very doorstep of the United States. Long-problematic drug violence in Mexico dramatically escalated in 2006 when Mexican president Felipe Calderón declared war on seven major cartels by deploying 45,000 soldiers and 5,000 police officers across the nation. In the Wild West city of Uruapan in central Mexico, traffickers tossed five human heads onto a dance floor. In Tijuana, on the border with California, decapitated bodies of soldiers and police turned up in minimarts, and gunmen blanketed neighborhoods with gunfire. Mutilated bodies appeared with written signs taunting rival cartels. In 2009, the ghoulishness reached Hollywood horror film proportions when Santiago Meza López, known as “El Pozolero” (“the Stewmaker”), admitted he'd dissolved three hundred bodies in barrels of lye for Tijuana's Arellano Félix cartel. After his arrest, hundreds lined up with photos of missing loved ones, begging police to ask López if he recognized the faces. Between January 2008 and July 2009, over seven thousand were killed as traffickers fought over territory and smuggling routes and battled often-corrupt military and police forces. Nearly one-third of the killings took place in Ciudad Juárez, on the border with El Paso, Texas. In almost all cases, there were no arrests, no prosecutions.

The violence has not been contained behind the U.S.-Mexico border.
In August 2008, in an apartment near Birmingham, Alabama, five men were tortured by electric shock before having their throats slit over a $400,000 debt to a Mexican cartel. Phoenix, Arizona, has become the kidnapping capital of the United States, with nearly four hundred known abductions in 2008 by those tied to the Mexican drug business. And in February 2009, U.S. authorities arrested forty-eight people in California, Minnesota, and Maryland as part of a twenty-one-month investigation targeting Baja California's Sinaloa cartel. In Starr County, Texas, in March 2009, the town sheriff was arrested for taking payoffs from the Gulf cartel as it moved drugs across the border. The U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center believes that Mexican cartels maintain distribution networks or supply drugs in at least 230 U.S. cities. In 2009, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said the Obama administration was considering swarming the border with agents and hadn't counted out the possibility of engaging the military. And while drugs and their problematic counterparts have flowed north, American weapons have poured south. Responding to a report that 90 percent of all arms in Mexico come from the United States, Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, said, “It's simply unacceptable that the United States not only consumes the majority of the drugs flowing from Mexico but also arms the very cartels that contribute to the daily violence that is devastating Mexico.”

To tackle the menacing problems emerging from its southern neighbor, in June 2008, the United States began a new chapter of the war on drugs with a costly antinarcotics program called the Mérida Initiative. As with Plan Colombia, much of the $1.6 billion plan for Mexico and Central America will never leave the United States. Instead, the money will go to private U.S. contractor corporations for surveillance software, computers, ion scanners, gamma-ray scanners, satellite communication networks, and other goods and services. A large portion of the first-year budget is for aircraft and includes $104 million to Texatron, Inc., for eight Bell helicopters to transport troops and support counternarcotics missions, $106 million to the Connecticut-based Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation for three Black Hawks, and $10 million for the purchase of three single-engine Cessna Caravans, training,
maintenance, and parts “for surveillance of drug trafficking areas and for a wide range of surveillance missions.”

In the end, it is the many U.S. defense contractors who are the only clear winners of the unrelenting war on drugs. A 2009 State Department report showed that Virginia-based DynCorp International earned $164 million for fumigation missions in Colombia in 2007—a quarter of all aid intended for Colombia's military and police. The amount was double what DynCorp got five years earlier, in 2002, when it cited in its annual report that a “primary responsibility” of its mission would be to train Colombians to do the work themselves. Maryland-based Lockheed Martin, which subcontracted the SRS missions that Stansell, Howes, and Gonsalves performed, tripled its share over the same four years to eighty million dollars, even as Plan Colombia failed to return its promised results.

In summer 2009, changes were under way in the U.S. government's military relationship with Colombia. In August, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa expelled U.S. antinarcotics personnel from the Manta military base on Ecuador's Pacific coast, making good on a campaign promise to end ten years of “subordination.” The fifteen American troops at Manta were transferred to Colombia, where deals were in the works between the Obama and Uribe administrations to give the U.S. military long-term access to seven Colombian bases. The move created an immediate backlash from several South American leaders. “You are not going to be able to control the Americans,” Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa warned Álvaro Uribe during a special summit in Argentina on August 28, calling the act a “grave danger for peace in Latin America.” Bolivian president Evo Morales and Argentinean president Cristina Kirchner were also harshly critical. Even the Brazilian and Chilean governments—normally on friendly terms with the United States—called upon Barack Obama to better explain his administration's objectives. The response was predictably hostile from Hugo Chávez, who called the action a “step toward war.” The following month, the Venezuelan president returned from a shopping trip to Moscow, where he purchased (with a $2.2 billion loan from the Russian government) the advanced S-300 missile defense system, Smerch missiles, and ninety-two T72-S tanks. A gleeful Chávez pored over diagrams
and charts on his television show,
Aló Presidente
, showing off his purchases and addressing the United States and Colombia with a provocative call: “We're ready for you.” The U.S. government said that the new arrangement was only to support Colombia's fight against drug traffickers and guerrillas involved in the illegal trade. President Obama (whose administration officially ended the use of the term
war on drugs
in May 2009) accused the detractors of “trying to play up [the use of the bases] as part of a traditional anti-Yankee rhetoric” and assured them that his government had “no intent in establishing a U.S. military base in Colombia.” Uribe was under immense pressure at home, including from many of his political allies in Congress, who argued that such a deal needed congressional approval. Uribe staunchly defended the plan: “Securing agreements with countries like the United States, in order for them to help us in the battle against terrorism and drug trafficking, is the best thing for this country.”

Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, the war on drugs has continued to ignite fervor among its supporters. Billions of dollars have been spent, thousands of people have been killed, and the protagonists, buoyed by the ideal of right versus wrong and ignoring the evidence of failure, continue to push on in search of the absurd: a utopia where drugs no longer exist. The business of illegal drugs continues its course—as it has for decades—stimulated by the law of supply and demand. Like the war on terror, the war on drugs is abstract, difficult to define, and constantly morphing into another form or taking a new path. The battlefield is now global and the possibilities are limitless. And for those who profit from the war on drugs, it has become the perfect war—a war against an enemy that has no ability to surrender.

The creation of this book was an eight-year journey that began in 2002 and would not have come to fruition without the help of many people. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to our agent, Peter McGuigan, at Foundry Literary + Media, who, along with his assistant, Hannah Brown Gordon, read through many drafts of our proposal, offered essential guidance, encouraged us to keep the project alive year after year, and patiently waited for us to come back to him when it was finally ready. We couldn't have done it without you, Peter. Hannah, thank you for dealing with the many details of a book with three authors, for tirelessly answering our questions, and for giving us feedback on many fronts. We also appreciate Foundry's wonderful foreign rights director, Stéphanie Abou. Thank you, Stéphanie, for your invaluable expertise in the international market. To our editor, Edward Kastenmeier, at Knopf: We greatly appreciate that you found the value in this complicated story, even when we all had no idea what the ending would be. Your insight, thoroughness, and probing questions challenged us to dig deeper, to create a work of narrative nonfiction that we are very proud of. You are an incredible editor, and we are honored and fortunate to have worked with you.