Warren Buffett’s son helping Colombia kick cocaine curse
With Colombian military snipers in position, Howard Buffett descends from a helicopter and trudges through the wet grass in steel-toe boots chewed through by his dog’s teeth.
Waiting under a tin-roofed shack is a small group of coca farmers. They’ve never heard of multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett, but after decades of neglect by their own government, they’re grateful for the outstretched hand of his eldest son, whom they refer to simply as “the gringo.”
“There’s a saying here: The less you know, the better,” said Rubén Morantes, his leathery skin and calloused hands a testament to a lifetime of tillage in one of Colombia’s most dangerous territories, where outsiders are mistrusted.
For nearly two decades Buffett has crisscrossed the world, giving away part of his father’s fortune to promote food security, conflict mitigation and public safety. But his latest gamble is one of the most daunting yet: helping Colombia kick its cocaine curse.
He is focusing on Tibu, heart of the remote, notoriously lawless Catatumbo region bordering Venezuela where Buffett accompanied President Iván Duque.
Tibu has the second-largest coca crop in Colombia — 28,200 acres, according to the United Nations. Drug production as well as violence has skyrocketed in the area since armed groups filled the void left by retreating rebels who signed a peace deal with the government in 2016.
The Howard G. Buffett Foundation has committed to spending $200 million over the next few years to transform the impoverished municipality into a model of comprehensive state building. Plans include strengthening security forces and helping farmers secure land titles and substitute coca — the raw material for cocaine — with legitimate crops such as cacao.
The first component is building 185 miles of roads to connect the municipality’s 37,000 residents for the first time with national and international markets. It’s a challenge made more difficult by lurking guerrillas who last year detonated a homemade bomb as army engineers were working on the road, killing five people and injuring several.
“The only way we have confidence that farmers can grow legal crops is if they can get those crops to market,” Buffett told farmers during a visit last month with Duque to La Gabarra, a rural outpost in Tibu. It was the first time any Colombian president had visited the blood-soaked hamlet.
The plan envisions subsidies and training for farmers as they switch crops, as well as helping them find buyers. It also aims to strengthen infrastructure for local law enforcement.
But some experts worry Buffett’s enthusiasm for speeding Colombia’s development is no match for entrenched corruption in rural areas run like political fiefdoms. There’s also the challenge posed by thousands of Venezuelan migrants who lack roots in the community and are being targeted for recruitment by criminal gangs.
Like his father, Buffett, 65, has a reputation for folksy, Midwestern plain speech
and self-effacing humor. Although he’s a three-time college dropout, his father wants him to succeed him as the non-executive chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the $550 billion conglomerate that owns companies such as Duracell, Dairy Queen and Geico insurance as well as major stakes in leading U.S. airlines and banks.
But he’s spent much of his adult life roving the world taking wildlife photos and writing books. He’s also a corn farmer, and made headlines in 2017 by briefly serving as the sheriff of Macon County, Ill., where he lives and his foundation is based.
He began exploring the world as a teenager on a trip to Soviet-controlled Prague in 1969 to visit one of the many exchange students his mother hosted at their home in Omaha. But his love of travel hasn’t been matched by culinary curiosity: In Catatumbo, he carried around a blue, insulated lunch pack containing his requisite PB&J sandwich and a Dr Pepper.
As a philanthropist, his priority now is helping Colombia and El Salvador, whose fight against drug trafficking has a direct impact on the U.S. Between the two countries, he has spent or committed $310 million, including the funding in El Salvador of a new police forensics center and a modern system to help the country’s prosecutors track criminal investigations.
As a volunteer police officer who logged 678 hours on patrol last year, Buffett has seen the human toll caused by drug addiction. A few weeks before traveling to Colombia, he and a partner were staking out a motel in Decatur, Ill., at 1 a.m. when they arrested a man possessing crack.
With him was a woman who said she had a drug problem, so Buffett paid for her to stay at the hotel two nights. Later, he referred her to a county rehab facility paid for with a gift from the Buffett Foundation in the hopes that she would get help.
“These are people who need our help,” he said. “They’re not criminals.”
He has turned to Latin America after years of focusing much of his attention on Africa and especially Rwanda, where he works with the government on sustainable agriculture. He spent so much time at his farm in South Africa during the 1990s that he obtained permanent residency.
Buffett began working in Colombia in 2008 helping pop star Shakira set up schools in her hometown of Barranquilla. He’s also funded an army unit removing thousands of land mines strewn across conflict zones.