KILO A deep dive into Colombia’s cocaine underworld
As Toby Muse was conducting interviews in Colombia for his new book about the cocaine trade, he found himself in an uncomfortable position. He didn’t want his subjects telling him
too much about their business. This was particularly true when he was talking to a narco-trafficker named Alex, who is central to the book — until he gets murdered.
“I didn’t want him to say anything that he might regret later on,” Muse recalls of those encounters. “My fear was always that he would go home, look up at the ceiling and say, ‘Hey, I
wish I hadn’t said that. I should tie up that loose end.’”
Muse, a journalist who lived in Colombia for 15 years, recently published “Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels — from the Jungles to the Streets.”
The book follows the cocaine trail from the fields of eastern Colombia, where Venezuelan coca pickers, or raspachines, live under the thumb of armed groups, to the shores of the world’s largest consumer: the United States.
In the process, Muse provides an unprecedented look at the army of gangs, assassins, pimps, fixers and smugglers who are needed to put a line of white coke up a nose in a South Beach bar.
Muse talked to the Miami Herald about the cocaine trade, the drug war, and the U.S. policy failures that no one is talking about.
The questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: There are so many scenes in this book where I, as a reader, fear for your life. Looking back now, how much risk were you taking to get this story?
A: It’s not so much that people were putting a gun to my head or a knife to my throat. It was more like just constantly treading on thin ice. There was one danger out in the countryside dealing with narco-militias. … But in terms of dealing with the cartels, there was this generalized sense of dread around these men and women, it was just constant. When I finished writing this book and got out of that world, it felt like a tremendous weight had been lifted off my shoulders. These are men that kill at the drop of a hat. My constant fear was that, as long as I was in the city [Medellin] and something happened to them, like a bad coincidence, they would blame me. They trusted me up to a point, but does anyone get far in the world of cocaine being 100 percent trusting? No.
Q: The level of access you had to the underworld is remarkable. How did it come about?
A: Essentially all of this started through a person I met about 10 years ago. I was going into a famous fashion event in Colombia and there was a man with two women standing behind me, and he was also trying to get in. He was trying to get past the [public relations] woman with the clipboard … for some reason the people with the clipboards always kind of annoy me, and I just said, ‘He’s with me.’ And he said, ‘Thanks a lot, I owe you a favor now.’
It turns out he works in the social world of the narcos. He gets women for these narcos. So he’s tremendously important in that social world. … When these men are thinking about the job — the fast cars and the money — they are also thinking about the women. You cannot separate sex from the cocaine trade. And over the years I got to know more and more people through him.
Q: You mentioned that one of your motivations to write this book was to have an outlet to discuss what people told you for years but were unwilling to say on the record.
A: How many times have we had these interviews with police officers or people carrying out the drug war and everything is on the official line, but then we end the interview the recorder goes off and then they say, ‘Of course we know we can’t win this.’
There’s the official story and then there’s the unofficial story that’s closer to the truth. A lot of people know the drug war is unwinnable. What does victory even look like? I don’t have the solution. But what I can tell you is that the most critical, brutal part of the drug war is not working. That I can assert 100 percent. Where do we go from here? I don’t know.
Q: At one point in your book a drug trafficker tells you that he sees the U.S. movement to legalize marijuana as a real threat to his business.
A: They very clearly understand that the high level of risk entitles them to massive amounts of reward. They don’t want to lower the risk to lower the reward.
The underworld, the black market, takes these essentially unremarkable men and makes them millionaires. Go back to Prohibition in America. I don’t think there’s anything particularly remarkable about Al Capone. He was vicious, he was violent he was ruthless — all the qualities that made him thrive in the black market. I don’t think El Chapo or Pablo Escobar were particularly remarkable men, but they had those qualities in spades: violence, ruthlessness, mercilessness, ambition. We take these unremarkable men, set them loose in the black market and they become multimillionaires if not billionaires. It’s our policies that have created these men.
Q: Do you think legalization is part of the solution?
A: Look at how many decades it took the marijuana movement to achieve its goal. That was decades of grassroots activism, celebrity endorsements and they’re finally getting it. I don’t see the legalization movement even beginning around cocaine and heroin. … There’s no active political organizing. Even if they started next week, they’re still 30 years away from getting what they want. … And in the next 30 years I don’t know what we do to stop men and women dying in this drug war that we already know is lost.
Q: What responsibility do U.S. and European consumers have in the war on drugs?
A: On one hand, the consumer has 100 percent responsibility for this, and I think it’s important for them to know where that line of cocaine comes from — all of the misery, greed, violence that had to come together to produce that gram of cocaine. On the other hand, when we go back to looking at Prohibition, I don’t think we look back and think that the villain of that whole period were the working men and women who went and got himself or herself a beer at the end of the week. … Yes, the consumer is absolutely 100 percent responsible for the demand, and cocaine is capitalism without the veneer of any respect — it’s pure supply and demand. But it’s the policies that create the chaos, I think.
Q: As the world’s top producer of cocaine, Colombia gets much of the attention and the blame. Is it merited?
A: When you look at Colombia as the largest producer of this historically large cocaine crop … you can say that Colombia failed the world, but you would be wrong. The world failed Colombia. Who across the world is doing a major demand-reduction for cocaine? I’m not aware of a major initiative in the U.S. or the U.K. to cut down on cocaine use. Just like we demand of Colombia to go into these zones and rip out the coca, what is the U.S. doing to lower its demand for coca?
I think the Colombians can be just as ready to stand up and wag their finger at these other countries, just as these other countries have done with Colombia. I think Colombia can ask of Europe and the U.S., ‘What have you done to cut demand? It’s your demand that makes our country bleed.’
Q: As we’re talking, the U.S. has launched a massive narcotics interdiction campaign in the Caribbean aimed at stopping the drug flow out of Venezuela. What are your thoughts?
A: It’s a very strange thing when people claim that Venezuela is a narcostate even though it doesn’t produce a single gram of cocaine. I understand that cocaine is moved through Venezuela and there is obviously something there to continue to investigate and to continue to police.
But when you are talking about the cocaine that arrives to the U.S. ... the biggest cocaine corridor on the planet is the Eastern Pacific. That’s the cocaine that leaves from the west coast of South America — the coast of Colombia and coast of Ecuador. The major part of it is going up to this lawless zone between Mexico and Guatemala. ... I was out with the U.S. Coast Guard for three weeks and they were stopping all of these boats carrying three, four, five tons of cocaine. So many of those vessels were heading to the border of Mexico and Guatemala where they would be received by the Mexican cartels who did the final step of getting it across the border into the U.S., which again, is the biggest consumer of the drug on the planet.
Q: In the almost two decades you were in Colombia, did you see the drug war made a difference?
A: When I arrived in Colombia we had Plan Colombia — a $7.5 billion dollar effort by Bill Clinton. The aim was to militarily take down the cocaine industry. The goal for Plan Colombia was to cut coca crops by 50 percent by 2005. Twenty years later we have more cocaine than ever before. People think Pablo Escobar was the golden age of the cartels. Nonsense. There is more cocaine right now than ever before. Now the Colombian government has announced a new policy goal: By 2023 it wants to cut coca production by 50 percent. We just move in circles and every time people say we need to reevaluate the drug war too many people say, ‘All that is needed is a little more drug war and then we can win this.’ I don’t know what victory looks like in this war.
If you believe in the drug war go, go forth and argue that. There can be an argument there to be made. But so much of the drug war is not even questioned. It’s possibly the largest publicpolicy failure and I rarely see anything about it in the media.