The failure of Drug War is glaringly obvious to judges, cops, wardens, prosecutors and millions more now calling for decriminalization, legalization, the end of prohibition. Let us investigate the Century of Lies.
________
Hello, my friends. Welcome to this edition of Century of Lies. Today we’re going to bring you a speech given by the current Vice-President of the Nation of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon. He gave this speech to the 39th Conference on the Americas and I want to thank the Americas Society for this audio.
________
Vice-President of the Nation of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon: There’s nothing that’s affecting prosperity now, in our region, than the security issue. Not only in Columbia, I would say, all over in Latin America, and the security issue has a common element and it’s drug trafficking that has spread all over the continent and that has become a threat. This is why I want to speak about Columbia and drug trafficking, twenty years of lessons.
We’ve been at it for many, many years. We’ve learned many things. What works, what doesn’t work. So, I hope that this knowledge of twenty years of sacrifice, can help policy makers devise and use strategies and design new policies that will help Latin American deal with, what I think, is one of the problems that we’re confronting.
Let me start just by putting the issue in the right context. It’s not just a matter of personal freedom, as it’s sometimes being shown as. It’s not just a matter of recreational habit. It’s not just a matter of public health. The problem of drug trafficking has global consequences. It’s a lot more complicated and over simplification of the debate does a disservice to the solution of the gravity of the problem.
But it’s a problem that finances terrorism in Columbia and Afghanistan, just for an example. The consumption of one gram of cocaine destroys four square meters of pristine Rain Forests. It has financed the ---- in Bissau, where the President and the head of the Army was killed.
To speak more locally, it has made Phoenix, Arizona, according to New York Times, the capitol of kidnappings, of the developed world. More than three hundred, last year. So, just to try to paint the thing in such un-complete issues, is really missing the point.
Let me put five initial considerations regarding drug trafficking. The first thing is that, and quite dramatic, that the numbers of the business generate a huge debate. When you put out the number of inflation or the economic growth, nobody debates it.
I was reading, just recently, the BBC - Sol Café, “The price of cocaine in the streets of London has increased dramatically in it’s purity…” and nobody believes it. Or at least, there’s a huge confrontation, regarding it and with all the elements of the drug business, it happened, the same.
The number of hectares, it becomes - Columbia has a hundred twenty thousand / a hundred thirty thousand - how much each hectare produces, of cocaine. What is the market? For many, many years, it was seven hundred tons and we did a small study in Columbia and only Columbia was able to produce around fifteen hundred tons and a huge debate with the DEA; with all the interested sectors, that that number didn’t change.
So, numbers regarding the business has allowed the debate to become ideologically oriented and you read Wallace reports on drug trafficking, or the continual, having affairs on drug trafficking and you see how that the lack of clarity regarding the numbers; prices; kilograms; etcetera, allows such a diversity in terms of opinion, that is very difficult to find where the truth is.
I’ll give you an example. I was speaking with the head of police in Columbia who said, “When you look at the number of tons of cocaine seized, we seize more then the production of the world - all the police agencies, than it can possibly be produced. Why?” Because if a huge amount of fish is caught in the ocean, a lot of countries say “It’s mine.” So you add it. That’s just how complex the situation is and, I think, when the problem has grown the biggest, from Canada to Argentina, it affecting the ---- is when we’re studying the least of the problem.
I remember the 80’s, you had a lot of scenarios where this was a problem was being studied, that isn’t so now and I think that lack of information and that lack of clarity regarding the business, it’s undermining the decision making process.
The second consideration, is the drugs as a motivational problem. It’s ---- public health. Corruption had become a critical element. Security, in some places is a street security, in other places is a national security. Environment and political stability. Which, when you look at Africa and you look at countries in Latin America, your starting to see how drug trafficking is undermining that stability.
The third element is that, you can’t look at drug trafficking as just an isolated problem. It’s a platform of crime. When you put drug trafficking into the equation, it’s like giving organized crime steroids. Just gives them such a huge boost. Look at what happened with ’Ndrangheta, in Europe. From a mafia, with influence, in the southern part of Italy, it has ramificated all over Europe. It has become one of the main channels of distribution.
Human trafficking had become part of the deal, arm’s trafficking. You start to see all of these inter-connected in the business. Terrorism. You just can’t see drug trafficking as a small element. It’s part of a wider theme.
The fourth, is the assumption that you’re transit, you’re a production, or you’re a consuming nation and that they’re different sides of a coin. That’s not true anymore. Look at the US. The US became huge consumers of marijuana. It consumes.
Look at Columbia. Columbia was transit and now it has production, it consumes. Holland, huge hob for storage. It’s producer of methamphetamines, a big consumer. So, you have to look at it as part of the same chain. You can’t just say you have to attack this problem. You have to look at it differently.
The final consideration is that it’s more and more and more becoming an issue of National Security. For Columbia certainly, it has been for many, many years. In 2002, we had more than sixty thousand guys with weapons. We were running on the verge of becoming a failed state and it just shows, to the extreme, what it can do to a country.
Obviously, today, the situation is very different. But, you look at what’s happened to Mexico and you see how quickly that can really become a huge security issue. You look at what happens to the southern part of the United States, in a country that has many resources, it’s starting to feel the brunt of the problem and here, going back to the analogy of organized crime on steroids, it gives criminal organizations such a huge capacity that they very quickly overburden the judicial system; the police system, that are built for traditional types of criminality.
Drugs generate a very big impact that produces effects that organizations or institutions, that are built to deal with in a different level cannot, when the problem grows.
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Dean Becker: You are listening to Century of Lies, on the Drug Truth Network. We’re tuning into a recent speech given by the current Vice-President of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon.
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Vice-President of the Nation of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon: I’m going to try to give you a little bit of the history of Columbia of how the drug business; we have had four generations of drug traffickers, or of the business, that I think it’s very important to understand it to see how it evolves.
In the 70’s, we use to have an import substitution economy. Obviously, there was a lot of contraband and those contraband roots were used to export marijuana to the US. That was the first generation. They needed to have a unitary total control. Those organizations, they just control the roots and the laundering was very easy. They would, with the money, contraband, televisions, refrigerators, into the country and the delinquency was very insipient. It was more, for settling accounts.
In the 80’s, when Bolivia and Peru start a big production of coca paste in Columbia, this has started to transform. When you move from marijuana to coca - we didn’t produce, we just refined and transported. We were a trans-shipment type of area. The first experiments with production started. Fifteen thousand, twenty thousand hectares, the FARC, especially in the South.
I remember the Ambassador of the US, Louis Tom saying, “This is a narco gorilla.” and everyone in Columbia think he’s crazy. He was right. He understood the problem. But, the criminality of it changes. You start seeing the cartels grow up, the Medellin Cartel, de la Costa cartel, Bogota cartel. Their territorial control becomes an issue. They needed huge amounts of land, it was a counter-reform, to put the labs.
The criminal strategy changed. It became very violent, narco-terrorism started. They killed judges. They kidnapped journalists, me included. They killed presidential candidates. The private armies - or paramilitaries - start to be built, in the 80’s. As a matter of fact, there’s a man in jail, right now in Russia, Yara Klein and he’s in jail, Israeli man, because he was a mercenary that trained those private armies in the 80’s in Columbia.
The gorilla’s kidnapped the sister of one of the cartel of Medellin’s guys and the cartels create the …; death to kidnappings. So, the origins of paramilitaries organizations were built, and they start corrupting Congress, to try to avoid extradition.
In the 90’s, certain elements change. I have an anecdote of somebody who was the head of one of the biggest state gorilla organizations in the late 80’s, that demobilized in early 90’s, and he told me about a discussion that they had. They had a discussion at the heads of the gorilla was the EPL and they said, ’What do we need, to topple the government?’ and they said, ’We need thirty thousand men, with weapons.’ Right now, at that precise moment, there were five thousand. They said, ’What do you need, to get thirty thousand men?’ He said, ’We need to get involved in drug trafficking. Massively.’
They decided not to. They demobilized. They wanted to peace process, but the FARC didn‘t. The FARC did exactly the same calculation and decided to move aggressively, into drug trafficking. Columbia becomes a producer. We go from practically fifteen to twenty thousand hectares to more than a hundred thousand hectares, in the middle of the decade. We became a full integrated industry. The cartels change. The government hits very hard the cartels, in late 80’s, early 90’s.
So, the Cali cartel, the one that rises up and it’s a cartel that has a different type of structure and it’s more of a mafia type of organization. A second generation, clean. Their son’s and daughter’s study in the US and Europe. They legalize their assets through companies in Columbia. It’s a different type of organization. They reduce the amount of visible violence. They understand that violence produces an effect in the state and they reduce the visibility of it. It’s not that they eliminated.
They start acquiring political affinity and more aggressive politically, through bribes; through financing candidates. As a matter of fact, in the middle 90’s, the presidential candidate of Columbia, there was total, you know, accepted by everybody, that he was financed by the drug traffickers. The first process of putting Parliament terrorists in jail starts, more than thirty Parliament terrorists then went to jail, because of relationship with Cali cartel. So, corruption starts becoming a bigger and bigger and bigger issue and the problem changes.
In the mid 90’s, with the capture of the Cali cartel and with the aggressive pursuit of them, the thing changes, and a new cartel was born, called the cartel of the Norte del Valle state, which is a mixture of all of them, with private armies. With a dramatic increase in production from a hundred thousand to a hundred and seventy thousand hectares in just three years, with alliances in the regions and with politicians. They change very dramatically, very violent. The use of terrorism of displacement, the fight against the gorillas for the control and that’s with the paramilitaries, that you see being written about, are born.
Now, what do we have? We have a new generation. With the demobilization of the paramilitaries, the business has changed and here’s the fourth generation. You see smaller cartels. They have a global vision of the business. They don’t need unitary control. They need high mobility. It’s almost a criminal alliance. They work with the *FARC, they work with the **ELN. There’s no ideological ideology to it, it’s just business. They’re very keen in laundering money in the financial markets, in tax havens and their criminal strategic strategies to make themselves almost invisible.
They move labs to the regions of exports. So you see, the business in Columbia; many area’s it was in the middle of country, now it’s moved to the border of Venezuela, to the border of Panama, to the border of Ecuador. You see it moving to those areas, so it’s a change. The lesson is, they evolve dramatically, they understand lessons, they become more sophisticated and they do it very, very, very quickly.
When you design a policy, you have to be very flexible and adapt to their capability of adapting to change in circumstances.
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Dean Becker: This is Century of Lies, on the Drug Truth Network. You’re listening to a speech given by Francisco Santos Calderon, the current Vice-President of the Nation of Columbia, to the 39th Conference of the Americas.
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Vice-President of the Nation of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon: International corporation has become a critical issue and we have learned many, many things. When in the late 80’s, Pablo Escobar was putting bombs on Mother’s Day, in a shopping mall. Which he did. Killing policemen, paying for each policeman that was killed and we had that full blown narco terrorism.
President Barco, the father of our Ambassador, started putting some ads in the New York Times and then the Washington Post, showing the car bombs, the destructions, and you know, ‘What are you doing about it?‘, ‘You are fueling, with the consumption, our problem.’ and the US reacted and said, ’Yes, we got to help Columbia.’
There was the first Drug Summit in Cartagena. Alan Garcia was there, President Barco, President Bush I and what you saw was, many of the US agencies helping the institution that was dealing with the problem, with just the police. It was a very weak institution. It had a tradition that it was weak to confront the level of violence, that we were seeing and the levels of corruption that they could generate in an organization, like the Columbian police.
You saw the DEA getting involved. You saw the CIA, you saw the FBI, the Secret Service. It helping strengthen our capability. What has that produced twenty years down the road? Now? I think the best police in the Continent. The police with the highest level of counter intelegence to rule out corruption; of ‘electronic intelligence’ gathering, with judicial expertise to put people in jail; with expertise with explosives, and that’s something that’s happened over the last twenty / twenty-five years.
In the middle of the last decade and the end of the last decade, you go into a ’new’ because, most of the corporation from the 80’s till 1998 was being put through the police. Afterwards comes Andres Pastrana, and Plan Columbia starts.
By the year 2000, Plan Columbia starts delivering results. We’re speaking about 6.2 billion dollars, $4.6 billion on military aide, $1.6 on social development and it helped strengthen institutions. It helped crop substitution. It helped aero spraying. It increased dramatically, the seizures. I think when you try to measure, and again it’s over simplification, the sucsess of Plan Columbia, just by the amount of hectares we have in Columbia or not, it’s missing the point. Plan Columbia is a huge foreign policy success.
It helped Columbia come from the brink of becoming a failed state to become now, one of the promises in Latin America. You have to measure it by how it strengthened institutions. You have to measure it by how it helped decrease violence. So in that sense, you need to take a wider look, into what Plan Columbia meant to Columbia; to the region and what the lessons are.
Obviously, one of the bigger lessons is, you have to get involved and the government of Columbia has done so. We spend more 1% of our ***GDP fighting drugs. We have specialized units to fighting drugs in the Police, in the Army, in most of the agencies. We have increased, obviously, the amount of policemen and military on the field, almost by fifty percent, in the last seven years. We have increased the budget for the judicial system, around eighty percent, in the last six years.
We have a very aggressive extradition policy, up to a point when you don’t know if it’s producing the results that you need, but I think it does. We have been able to be flexible and… To be very sincere, the opposition of the US, we started doing manure eradication.
You know that ’toys’ are very important in policy making and they love helicopters and air spraying and we said, ’No. Why don’t we just do it by hand?’ and there was a huge debate and we had to go at it alone. Finally starting to show results and there’s a view, regarding manure eradication. Institutional strengthening has become very, very important.
So, we have different plans. We have, for example, the Forest Families Program, which give them money to eradicate, to whole communities and it has had some fantastic successes in terms of community development. We have now moved into a consolidation plan, in some of the most difficult areas in Columbia, where gorillas and drug trafficking are present, with some very promising results. So, there are lessons there to be learned.
How has Europe helped? Well, not enough, I would say. But certainly, they have cooperated with pee laboratories, which I don’t know what their result is as drug trafficking is, because there’s no evaluation regarding that. But they have helped indulgently, have helped in interdiction. It’s moving along.
What are the lessons? One of them, very important. It doesn’t matter the cost, you have to make the problem visible. By trying to hide it or not showing the problem, you’re just letting it grow and grow and grow. In Columbia, between the 70’s and the 80’s, it grew dramatically.
Second. Don’t underestimate the problem. Don’t trust short term victories. You have the capacity of adaptability of the criminals, is huge. Right now you have, every other word former, paramilitary chasing the FARC, are working together.
You have to create better numbers and I would encourage the US, the European Union, Columbia, all of the countries, to see what agency in the UN can help us deal with the number issue and I think it’s very important, we need a better line for basis and it’s fundamental to fight against corruption and in this sense the media, in ‘Freedom of the Press‘, place a critical role. You have to protect the press too.
The bubble effect; the balloon effect, is real. I look at what’s happening to Africa, where it had become a trans-shipment point and I have no doubt, in the next five to ten years, it’s going to become a hob food production and look in Mexico.
Now, from Mexico, they’re starting to move drugs, not only into the US but also into Great Britain, because Great Britain has ‘Clinton list’, has no extradition. So they’re saying, ’We’re getting thirty percent more by selling it to Europe, without the risks.’ So, they understand that they can move.
You have to adapt. You have to become. You have to be flexible. You have to learn your lesson. Don’t over invest in a policy, because you might have to change it.
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Dean Becker: This is Century of Lies. You’re listening to a speech given to the 39th Conference given on the Americas by current Vice-President of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon.
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Vice-President of the Nation of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon: Cooperation is not a gift, it’s a responsibility. I think it has to be looked upon that way. You can’t just say, ’Oh, we’re giving them five hundred million dollars.’ No, you’re generating the problem and this is part of the share of the burden, that each country has to put on the table.
You can win the war, limit the damage. In Columbia, the Cali cartel, the Medellin cartel, the work cartel and their leaders were in the business for fifteen, thirteen, seventeen years. The latest head of ----- in Columbia, lasted for eighteen months. So you can start to really making life horrendous for them and make it more difficult. It needs some multilateral answer.
Drug traffickers very clearly, very rapidly move through the holes that they see in terms of cooperation between countries. In the areas where you reach and where you’re going to deal with the problem, you have to massively go after all the problems. So, it’s a massive social investment, not only military investment.
Transit generates violence. Example is Brazil where a drug trafficker, Carlo Fernando Nandinegho was able to stop San Palo for, I don’t know, three days a few years ago, with control of the criminal gangs.
You have to look at all the problems and I think you need strong institutions and the strengthening of institutions. The permanent strengthening of institutions is fundamental in this fight.
I think another of the lessons is that, shared responsibility is always asymmetric. You see countries that are more compromised, countries that are less compromised. But you see less compromise, for example, in the fight against the precursors; in the fight against money laundering, in the fight against gun running and certainly sometimes you hear, especially from Europe, a message that I think is very wrong, that this is a fight that’s not winnable. When you look at it, it can be and you have to look at the full picture.
What about the future? Very important to strengthen formal economies, very important. That’s why the Free Trade Agreement is so critical. When you have from formal economy, you’re able to fight better, you get more taxes and you have economies that grow. You have more tools.
Speak of harm reduction, is giving our countries that produce the worst world. You increase consumption and you say nothing about production, so harm reduction is a mirage, it’s a mistake. Legalization? No. I don’t know if anybody in the world is ready to put right next to Marlboro or right next to a Miller beer, your shot of cocaine, your shot of heroin, your shot of marijuana because, that’s the only way you can really solve the problem, if you legalize it, totally. Anything different than that will not work and I think we have a very big lesson that Somalia is giving us.
The Pirate issue has put to work Pakistani’s and Indian’s together, even in the middle of their crisis. American’s, Russian’s, Chinese, big countries, small countries. I think if we look at that problem and how it’s been dealt with, it just shows of the way of how we can work together to fight the whole problem of drugs that, as I said before, is not just a matter of drugs, it’s organized crime. Organized crime on steroids that have become, to the region of Latin America, one of the biggest threats to democratic stability and to prosperity.
Thank you very much. {clapping}
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Dean Becker: I think Vice President Calderon understands the nature of this drug war beast. He, like most authorities, does not want to ‘dig up’ the bones of the past, so he can’t say ‘legalize’.
There is no truth, justice, logic, scientific fact or medical data that can validate this drug war. We have indeed been duped. The drug lords run both sides of this equation. Please do your part to end this madness. Visit our website. endprohibition.org
Prohibido istac evilesco.
For the Drug Truth Network this is Dean Becker, asking you to examine our policy of Drug Prohibition.
The Century of Lies.
This show produced at the Pacifica studios of KPFT, Houston
* FARC: Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia)
** ELN: National Liberation Army (Colombia)
*** GDP: Gross Domestic Product
Transcript
Century of Lies, May 17, 2009
The failure of Drug War is glaringly obvious to judges, cops, wardens, prosecutors and millions more now calling for decriminalization, legalization, the end of prohibition. Let us investigate the Century of Lies.
________
Hello, my friends. Welcome to this edition of Century of Lies. Today we’re going to bring you a speech given by the current Vice-President of the Nation of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon. He gave this speech to the 39th Conference on the Americas and I want to thank the Americas Society for this audio.
________
Vice-President of the Nation of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon: There’s nothing that’s affecting prosperity now, in our region, than the security issue. Not only in Columbia, I would say, all over in Latin America, and the security issue has a common element and it’s drug trafficking that has spread all over the continent and that has become a threat. This is why I want to speak about Columbia and drug trafficking, twenty years of lessons.
We’ve been at it for many, many years. We’ve learned many things. What works, what doesn’t work. So, I hope that this knowledge of twenty years of sacrifice, can help policy makers devise and use strategies and design new policies that will help Latin American deal with, what I think, is one of the problems that we’re confronting.
Let me start just by putting the issue in the right context. It’s not just a matter of personal freedom, as it’s sometimes being shown as. It’s not just a matter of recreational habit. It’s not just a matter of public health. The problem of drug trafficking has global consequences. It’s a lot more complicated and over simplification of the debate does a disservice to the solution of the gravity of the problem.
But it’s a problem that finances terrorism in Columbia and Afghanistan, just for an example. The consumption of one gram of cocaine destroys four square meters of pristine Rain Forests. It has financed the ---- in Bissau, where the President and the head of the Army was killed.
To speak more locally, it has made Phoenix, Arizona, according to New York Times, the capitol of kidnappings, of the developed world. More than three hundred, last year. So, just to try to paint the thing in such un-complete issues, is really missing the point.
Let me put five initial considerations regarding drug trafficking. The first thing is that, and quite dramatic, that the numbers of the business generate a huge debate. When you put out the number of inflation or the economic growth, nobody debates it.
I was reading, just recently, the BBC - Sol Café, “The price of cocaine in the streets of London has increased dramatically in it’s purity…” and nobody believes it. Or at least, there’s a huge confrontation, regarding it and with all the elements of the drug business, it happened, the same.
The number of hectares, it becomes - Columbia has a hundred twenty thousand / a hundred thirty thousand - how much each hectare produces, of cocaine. What is the market? For many, many years, it was seven hundred tons and we did a small study in Columbia and only Columbia was able to produce around fifteen hundred tons and a huge debate with the DEA; with all the interested sectors, that that number didn’t change.
So, numbers regarding the business has allowed the debate to become ideologically oriented and you read Wallace reports on drug trafficking, or the continual, having affairs on drug trafficking and you see how that the lack of clarity regarding the numbers; prices; kilograms; etcetera, allows such a diversity in terms of opinion, that is very difficult to find where the truth is.
I’ll give you an example. I was speaking with the head of police in Columbia who said, “When you look at the number of tons of cocaine seized, we seize more then the production of the world - all the police agencies, than it can possibly be produced. Why?” Because if a huge amount of fish is caught in the ocean, a lot of countries say “It’s mine.” So you add it. That’s just how complex the situation is and, I think, when the problem has grown the biggest, from Canada to Argentina, it affecting the ---- is when we’re studying the least of the problem.
I remember the 80’s, you had a lot of scenarios where this was a problem was being studied, that isn’t so now and I think that lack of information and that lack of clarity regarding the business, it’s undermining the decision making process.
The second consideration, is the drugs as a motivational problem. It’s ---- public health. Corruption had become a critical element. Security, in some places is a street security, in other places is a national security. Environment and political stability. Which, when you look at Africa and you look at countries in Latin America, your starting to see how drug trafficking is undermining that stability.
The third element is that, you can’t look at drug trafficking as just an isolated problem. It’s a platform of crime. When you put drug trafficking into the equation, it’s like giving organized crime steroids. Just gives them such a huge boost. Look at what happened with ’Ndrangheta, in Europe. From a mafia, with influence, in the southern part of Italy, it has ramificated all over Europe. It has become one of the main channels of distribution.
Human trafficking had become part of the deal, arm’s trafficking. You start to see all of these inter-connected in the business. Terrorism. You just can’t see drug trafficking as a small element. It’s part of a wider theme.
The fourth, is the assumption that you’re transit, you’re a production, or you’re a consuming nation and that they’re different sides of a coin. That’s not true anymore. Look at the US. The US became huge consumers of marijuana. It consumes.
Look at Columbia. Columbia was transit and now it has production, it consumes. Holland, huge hob for storage. It’s producer of methamphetamines, a big consumer. So, you have to look at it as part of the same chain. You can’t just say you have to attack this problem. You have to look at it differently.
The final consideration is that it’s more and more and more becoming an issue of National Security. For Columbia certainly, it has been for many, many years. In 2002, we had more than sixty thousand guys with weapons. We were running on the verge of becoming a failed state and it just shows, to the extreme, what it can do to a country.
Obviously, today, the situation is very different. But, you look at what’s happened to Mexico and you see how quickly that can really become a huge security issue. You look at what happens to the southern part of the United States, in a country that has many resources, it’s starting to feel the brunt of the problem and here, going back to the analogy of organized crime on steroids, it gives criminal organizations such a huge capacity that they very quickly overburden the judicial system; the police system, that are built for traditional types of criminality.
Drugs generate a very big impact that produces effects that organizations or institutions, that are built to deal with in a different level cannot, when the problem grows.
_________
Dean Becker: You are listening to Century of Lies, on the Drug Truth Network. We’re tuning into a recent speech given by the current Vice-President of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon.
________
Vice-President of the Nation of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon: I’m going to try to give you a little bit of the history of Columbia of how the drug business; we have had four generations of drug traffickers, or of the business, that I think it’s very important to understand it to see how it evolves.
In the 70’s, we use to have an import substitution economy. Obviously, there was a lot of contraband and those contraband roots were used to export marijuana to the US. That was the first generation. They needed to have a unitary total control. Those organizations, they just control the roots and the laundering was very easy. They would, with the money, contraband, televisions, refrigerators, into the country and the delinquency was very insipient. It was more, for settling accounts.
In the 80’s, when Bolivia and Peru start a big production of coca paste in Columbia, this has started to transform. When you move from marijuana to coca - we didn’t produce, we just refined and transported. We were a trans-shipment type of area. The first experiments with production started. Fifteen thousand, twenty thousand hectares, the FARC, especially in the South.
I remember the Ambassador of the US, Louis Tom saying, “This is a narco gorilla.” and everyone in Columbia think he’s crazy. He was right. He understood the problem. But, the criminality of it changes. You start seeing the cartels grow up, the Medellin Cartel, de la Costa cartel, Bogota cartel. Their territorial control becomes an issue. They needed huge amounts of land, it was a counter-reform, to put the labs.
The criminal strategy changed. It became very violent, narco-terrorism started. They killed judges. They kidnapped journalists, me included. They killed presidential candidates. The private armies - or paramilitaries - start to be built, in the 80’s. As a matter of fact, there’s a man in jail, right now in Russia, Yara Klein and he’s in jail, Israeli man, because he was a mercenary that trained those private armies in the 80’s in Columbia.
The gorilla’s kidnapped the sister of one of the cartel of Medellin’s guys and the cartels create the …; death to kidnappings. So, the origins of paramilitaries organizations were built, and they start corrupting Congress, to try to avoid extradition.
In the 90’s, certain elements change. I have an anecdote of somebody who was the head of one of the biggest state gorilla organizations in the late 80’s, that demobilized in early 90’s, and he told me about a discussion that they had. They had a discussion at the heads of the gorilla was the EPL and they said, ’What do we need, to topple the government?’ and they said, ’We need thirty thousand men, with weapons.’ Right now, at that precise moment, there were five thousand. They said, ’What do you need, to get thirty thousand men?’ He said, ’We need to get involved in drug trafficking. Massively.’
They decided not to. They demobilized. They wanted to peace process, but the FARC didn‘t. The FARC did exactly the same calculation and decided to move aggressively, into drug trafficking. Columbia becomes a producer. We go from practically fifteen to twenty thousand hectares to more than a hundred thousand hectares, in the middle of the decade. We became a full integrated industry. The cartels change. The government hits very hard the cartels, in late 80’s, early 90’s.
So, the Cali cartel, the one that rises up and it’s a cartel that has a different type of structure and it’s more of a mafia type of organization. A second generation, clean. Their son’s and daughter’s study in the US and Europe. They legalize their assets through companies in Columbia. It’s a different type of organization. They reduce the amount of visible violence. They understand that violence produces an effect in the state and they reduce the visibility of it. It’s not that they eliminated.
They start acquiring political affinity and more aggressive politically, through bribes; through financing candidates. As a matter of fact, in the middle 90’s, the presidential candidate of Columbia, there was total, you know, accepted by everybody, that he was financed by the drug traffickers. The first process of putting Parliament terrorists in jail starts, more than thirty Parliament terrorists then went to jail, because of relationship with Cali cartel. So, corruption starts becoming a bigger and bigger and bigger issue and the problem changes.
In the mid 90’s, with the capture of the Cali cartel and with the aggressive pursuit of them, the thing changes, and a new cartel was born, called the cartel of the Norte del Valle state, which is a mixture of all of them, with private armies. With a dramatic increase in production from a hundred thousand to a hundred and seventy thousand hectares in just three years, with alliances in the regions and with politicians. They change very dramatically, very violent. The use of terrorism of displacement, the fight against the gorillas for the control and that’s with the paramilitaries, that you see being written about, are born.
Now, what do we have? We have a new generation. With the demobilization of the paramilitaries, the business has changed and here’s the fourth generation. You see smaller cartels. They have a global vision of the business. They don’t need unitary control. They need high mobility. It’s almost a criminal alliance. They work with the *FARC, they work with the **ELN. There’s no ideological ideology to it, it’s just business. They’re very keen in laundering money in the financial markets, in tax havens and their criminal strategic strategies to make themselves almost invisible.
They move labs to the regions of exports. So you see, the business in Columbia; many area’s it was in the middle of country, now it’s moved to the border of Venezuela, to the border of Panama, to the border of Ecuador. You see it moving to those areas, so it’s a change. The lesson is, they evolve dramatically, they understand lessons, they become more sophisticated and they do it very, very, very quickly.
When you design a policy, you have to be very flexible and adapt to their capability of adapting to change in circumstances.
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Dean Becker: This is Century of Lies, on the Drug Truth Network. You’re listening to a speech given by Francisco Santos Calderon, the current Vice-President of the Nation of Columbia, to the 39th Conference of the Americas.
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Vice-President of the Nation of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon: International corporation has become a critical issue and we have learned many, many things. When in the late 80’s, Pablo Escobar was putting bombs on Mother’s Day, in a shopping mall. Which he did. Killing policemen, paying for each policeman that was killed and we had that full blown narco terrorism.
President Barco, the father of our Ambassador, started putting some ads in the New York Times and then the Washington Post, showing the car bombs, the destructions, and you know, ‘What are you doing about it?‘, ‘You are fueling, with the consumption, our problem.’ and the US reacted and said, ’Yes, we got to help Columbia.’
There was the first Drug Summit in Cartagena. Alan Garcia was there, President Barco, President Bush I and what you saw was, many of the US agencies helping the institution that was dealing with the problem, with just the police. It was a very weak institution. It had a tradition that it was weak to confront the level of violence, that we were seeing and the levels of corruption that they could generate in an organization, like the Columbian police.
You saw the DEA getting involved. You saw the CIA, you saw the FBI, the Secret Service. It helping strengthen our capability. What has that produced twenty years down the road? Now? I think the best police in the Continent. The police with the highest level of counter intelegence to rule out corruption; of ‘electronic intelligence’ gathering, with judicial expertise to put people in jail; with expertise with explosives, and that’s something that’s happened over the last twenty / twenty-five years.
In the middle of the last decade and the end of the last decade, you go into a ’new’ because, most of the corporation from the 80’s till 1998 was being put through the police. Afterwards comes Andres Pastrana, and Plan Columbia starts.
By the year 2000, Plan Columbia starts delivering results. We’re speaking about 6.2 billion dollars, $4.6 billion on military aide, $1.6 on social development and it helped strengthen institutions. It helped crop substitution. It helped aero spraying. It increased dramatically, the seizures. I think when you try to measure, and again it’s over simplification, the sucsess of Plan Columbia, just by the amount of hectares we have in Columbia or not, it’s missing the point. Plan Columbia is a huge foreign policy success.
It helped Columbia come from the brink of becoming a failed state to become now, one of the promises in Latin America. You have to measure it by how it strengthened institutions. You have to measure it by how it helped decrease violence. So in that sense, you need to take a wider look, into what Plan Columbia meant to Columbia; to the region and what the lessons are.
Obviously, one of the bigger lessons is, you have to get involved and the government of Columbia has done so. We spend more 1% of our ***GDP fighting drugs. We have specialized units to fighting drugs in the Police, in the Army, in most of the agencies. We have increased, obviously, the amount of policemen and military on the field, almost by fifty percent, in the last seven years. We have increased the budget for the judicial system, around eighty percent, in the last six years.
We have a very aggressive extradition policy, up to a point when you don’t know if it’s producing the results that you need, but I think it does. We have been able to be flexible and… To be very sincere, the opposition of the US, we started doing manure eradication.
You know that ’toys’ are very important in policy making and they love helicopters and air spraying and we said, ’No. Why don’t we just do it by hand?’ and there was a huge debate and we had to go at it alone. Finally starting to show results and there’s a view, regarding manure eradication. Institutional strengthening has become very, very important.
So, we have different plans. We have, for example, the Forest Families Program, which give them money to eradicate, to whole communities and it has had some fantastic successes in terms of community development. We have now moved into a consolidation plan, in some of the most difficult areas in Columbia, where gorillas and drug trafficking are present, with some very promising results. So, there are lessons there to be learned.
How has Europe helped? Well, not enough, I would say. But certainly, they have cooperated with pee laboratories, which I don’t know what their result is as drug trafficking is, because there’s no evaluation regarding that. But they have helped indulgently, have helped in interdiction. It’s moving along.
What are the lessons? One of them, very important. It doesn’t matter the cost, you have to make the problem visible. By trying to hide it or not showing the problem, you’re just letting it grow and grow and grow. In Columbia, between the 70’s and the 80’s, it grew dramatically.
Second. Don’t underestimate the problem. Don’t trust short term victories. You have the capacity of adaptability of the criminals, is huge. Right now you have, every other word former, paramilitary chasing the FARC, are working together.
You have to create better numbers and I would encourage the US, the European Union, Columbia, all of the countries, to see what agency in the UN can help us deal with the number issue and I think it’s very important, we need a better line for basis and it’s fundamental to fight against corruption and in this sense the media, in ‘Freedom of the Press‘, place a critical role. You have to protect the press too.
The bubble effect; the balloon effect, is real. I look at what’s happening to Africa, where it had become a trans-shipment point and I have no doubt, in the next five to ten years, it’s going to become a hob food production and look in Mexico.
Now, from Mexico, they’re starting to move drugs, not only into the US but also into Great Britain, because Great Britain has ‘Clinton list’, has no extradition. So they’re saying, ’We’re getting thirty percent more by selling it to Europe, without the risks.’ So, they understand that they can move.
You have to adapt. You have to become. You have to be flexible. You have to learn your lesson. Don’t over invest in a policy, because you might have to change it.
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Dean Becker: This is Century of Lies. You’re listening to a speech given to the 39th Conference given on the Americas by current Vice-President of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon.
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Vice-President of the Nation of Columbia, Francisco Santos Calderon: Cooperation is not a gift, it’s a responsibility. I think it has to be looked upon that way. You can’t just say, ’Oh, we’re giving them five hundred million dollars.’ No, you’re generating the problem and this is part of the share of the burden, that each country has to put on the table.
You can win the war, limit the damage. In Columbia, the Cali cartel, the Medellin cartel, the work cartel and their leaders were in the business for fifteen, thirteen, seventeen years. The latest head of ----- in Columbia, lasted for eighteen months. So you can start to really making life horrendous for them and make it more difficult. It needs some multilateral answer.
Drug traffickers very clearly, very rapidly move through the holes that they see in terms of cooperation between countries. In the areas where you reach and where you’re going to deal with the problem, you have to massively go after all the problems. So, it’s a massive social investment, not only military investment.
Transit generates violence. Example is Brazil where a drug trafficker, Carlo Fernando Nandinegho was able to stop San Palo for, I don’t know, three days a few years ago, with control of the criminal gangs.
You have to look at all the problems and I think you need strong institutions and the strengthening of institutions. The permanent strengthening of institutions is fundamental in this fight.
I think another of the lessons is that, shared responsibility is always asymmetric. You see countries that are more compromised, countries that are less compromised. But you see less compromise, for example, in the fight against the precursors; in the fight against money laundering, in the fight against gun running and certainly sometimes you hear, especially from Europe, a message that I think is very wrong, that this is a fight that’s not winnable. When you look at it, it can be and you have to look at the full picture.
What about the future? Very important to strengthen formal economies, very important. That’s why the Free Trade Agreement is so critical. When you have from formal economy, you’re able to fight better, you get more taxes and you have economies that grow. You have more tools.
Speak of harm reduction, is giving our countries that produce the worst world. You increase consumption and you say nothing about production, so harm reduction is a mirage, it’s a mistake. Legalization? No. I don’t know if anybody in the world is ready to put right next to Marlboro or right next to a Miller beer, your shot of cocaine, your shot of heroin, your shot of marijuana because, that’s the only way you can really solve the problem, if you legalize it, totally. Anything different than that will not work and I think we have a very big lesson that Somalia is giving us.
The Pirate issue has put to work Pakistani’s and Indian’s together, even in the middle of their crisis. American’s, Russian’s, Chinese, big countries, small countries. I think if we look at that problem and how it’s been dealt with, it just shows of the way of how we can work together to fight the whole problem of drugs that, as I said before, is not just a matter of drugs, it’s organized crime. Organized crime on steroids that have become, to the region of Latin America, one of the biggest threats to democratic stability and to prosperity.
Thank you very much. {clapping}
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Dean Becker: I think Vice President Calderon understands the nature of this drug war beast. He, like most authorities, does not want to ‘dig up’ the bones of the past, so he can’t say ‘legalize’.
There is no truth, justice, logic, scientific fact or medical data that can validate this drug war. We have indeed been duped. The drug lords run both sides of this equation. Please do your part to end this madness. Visit our website. endprohibition.org
Prohibido istac evilesco.
For the Drug Truth Network this is Dean Becker, asking you to examine our policy of Drug Prohibition.
The Century of Lies.
This show produced at the Pacifica studios of KPFT, Houston
* FARC: Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia)
** ELN: National Liberation Army (Colombia)
*** GDP: Gross Domestic Product
Transcript provided by: C. Assenberg of www.marijuanafactorfiction.org