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"As
long as we pay our taxes the guerrillas leave us in peace. They
don’t even come round here," said one lab foreman, who
gave his name as Elver Gómez, 42. "This is still a very
risky business. But as long as there’s hunger in this country
this trade will not stop."
The United States has backed Colombia’s supply-side battle
against illegal drug plantations since early 1993. But those efforts
have had no effect at all. Cocaine and heroin output has increased
dramatically. The CIA estimated Colombia’s potential cocaine
output last year at 580 tons and seven tons of heroin. The area
under drug crops is now calculated at more than 340,000 acres, despite
intense aerial eradication.
Colombian and U.S. officials accuse the FARC of stepping in to fill
the vacuum left after the break-up of the Medellín and Cali
cartels in the early and mid-1990s. U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson
stated publicly in April that the rebels were "up to their
heads in drug trafficking." Colombian army chief Gen. Jorge
Mora accused the rebels of controlling the cocaine trade from the
seed to the street.
The Colombian government’s National Planning Department estimates
the FARC earns upwards of $290 million yearly from the drug trade.
That, however, would represent less than 2.5 percent of the value
of Colombia’s estimated annual cocaine output of 580 tons--even
at Miami wholesale prices, where a kilo fetches around $20,000.
Last April when the army captured Brazilian capo Luis Fernando de
Costa in the rebel-held jungles of eastern Colombia, authorities
insisted it proved that the FARC was dealing internationally. According
to the army, Da Costa confessed to receiving protection from the
rebels and paying the insurgent force $10 million a month for drugs
and on occasion swapping cocaine for weapons.
Da Costa, "alias Freddy Seashore," rose from allegedly
controlling 60 percent of the drug trade in Rio De Janeiro’s
notoriously violent shanty towns to becoming a major international
drugs and arms smuggler, according to Brazilian and Colombian police.
After breaking out of a Brazilian prison where he was serving time
on narco-trafficking charges, he fled to Paraguay and later Colombia.
The FARC concede that they tax all stages of the drug trade in their
zones of influence, but reject accusations that they are a cartel.
"We only collect a simple tax," said rebel warlord Fabián
Ramiréz, No.2 commander of the FARC’s Southern Bloc
fighting division which holds sway across Caquetá and Putumayo
provinces.
Whether or not the FARC is in fact a cartel, the notion of a war
against drug production is eminently more marketable to U.S. politicians
and voters than a post-Cold War crusade against South American Communist
guerrillas.
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