Cocaine Nation by Thomas Feiling

Author:Thomas Feiling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2009-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

When cocaine came back into fashion in the United States in the 1970s, most coca bushes were cultivated in Bolivia and Peru. After each harvest, the leaves would be picked and then flown north to be processed into cocaine in laboratories in Colombia. As the Americans’ eradication programmes took effect, and aerial surveillance made flying cargoes of coca leaves to Colombia riskier, coca cultivation also moved north. The traffickers moved down the Colombian tributaries of the River Amazon with their sacks of coca seeds, offering cheap credit to anyone who would grow coca for them. Belica is a cocalero (coca farmer) from a town called La Uribe, in the rural department of Meta. ‘I started picking coca when I was eleven,’ she told me. ‘Back in 1986, some men came to La Uribe with their families. They brought coca seeds, and they started planting them. The plants grew very well and we started picking the coca leaves for them. They would pay us with coca seeds, so 300 or so of us went off and planted our own coca bushes, and before long there were really big coca fields around La Uribe.’ In the late 1980s, more than half a million Colombians moved into the remote eastern plains, hoping to enjoy the fruit of the coca boom. Though the fumigation planes have driven coca cultivation and coca pickers from the east to the south and now the west of the country, Colombia still produces 70 per cent of the world’s coca leaves and has long been its biggest cocaine producer.7

To make a kilo and a half of cocaine, a cocaine chemist needs a kilo and a half of coca base. To make a kilo and a half of coca base, a cocalero needs a ton of coca leaves.8 ‘You have to do it by the book, or you’ll end up with gum, which is completely useless,’ Belica explained. ‘First you chop up the leaves really well with a scythe, and put them in a tub. Add cement, ammonia, lime and a little bit of sulphuric acid. They’re all easy enough to get. Get in there with your big knee-high rubber boots, and keep stirring the mixture until it goes completely black. Then transfer it all to a big steel drum, and fill it halfway up with petrol. Give that a good stir, and then let it sit for forty-five minutes. Then pour the petrol into a plastic bucket, add water and some more sulphuric acid. Drain off the petrol again. Add a bit more water to the petrol, stir it slowly for another forty-five minutes, then leave it for thirty minutes. Once the petrol has risen to the top, pour that off, and put what you’re left with through a sieve. Then put it in a cloth and wring out the water. That’s what we call the flour—coca base.’

By the 1990s, 80 per cent of the farmers of eastern departments like Vaupes, Meta and Guaviare were living off the coca business.

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