Shared Responsibility

Cocaine's Ecocide in the Daily Mail

Written by Jonathan Green, Daily Mail Saturday, 28 February 2009 00:00

Daily Mail journalist Jonathan Green visited Colombia last December, eager to witness the environmental devastation caused by coca cultivation and cocaine production in the South American country's highly biodiverse jungles. His in-depth report was published February 28.

A few of the many evocative sections from the piece:

"The death and bloodshed meted out by the drug barons obscures the huge environmental damage being caused by the cultivation of coca. Ironically, the demand for cocaine is being fuelled by middle-class professionals – social drug users who shout their green credentials with Greenpeace stickers on their Toyota Prius hybrid cars, but are unwittingly aiding the destruction of the jungle. For every gram of cocaine bought in the West, 4.4 square metres of this diverse forest are lost forever."

"Neat rectangles have been torn out of the forest. Hectares of land that contained 750 types of tree and 1,500 species of plant have been razed to the ground. Irreplaceable trees, many more than a thousand years old, lie dead on their sides in hazy brown patches. As we dip and roll, we can see clearings where only one type of electric-green plant is growing."

Here is the text of Mr. Green's complete story:

In a drone of Bell Huey turbines we clear the razor wire and sandbagged machine-gun emplacements of the base, flying low while casting a racing black shadow over the landscape. We head north-west into hostile territory. The machine gunner on my left flicks a red switch on the 7.62mm six-barrelled minigun and a green LED shows the system is armed. Belts of dull brass bullets stretch back into the bowels of the chopper.

Sitting behind an inscrutable black visor, which reflects the topography below, he begins to scan the forest and ramshackle houses nestling on riverbanks for snipers lurking in the jungle drifting 500ft beneath my feet, as the chopper blades emit a pulsating whump.

Twenty minutes earlier, as we pulled on flak jackets, pilot Captain Carlos Suarez Amador of the Colombian anti-narcotics police had warned, ‘We were shot at today and yesterday. In Colombia, it all looks nice and everything is OK, then all of a sudden it changes and trouble happens.’

He gestured to the hangar behind us, containing one of the police force’s battle-scarred aircraft. A machine gun had torn through the left wing, ripping apart the aileron. Amador is a kindly, fresh-faced man who believes earnestly in what he’s doing, but he doesn’t underplay the risks. ‘Every day we’re taking fire now. In a second we could lose the gunner or the pilot.’

The brutal 40-year war in Colombia, the world’s biggest exporter of cocaine, is intensifying. The damaged plane was being flown by an American pilot as part of a US-financed initiative known as Plan Colombia.

More than $6 billion has been spent over the past eight years in an attempt to destroy the coca crops that keep the guerrillas and drug cartels in business.

The military base is in the dusty town of San José del Guaviare, a cocaine-trading hot spot deep in the south of the country. Until recently, it was controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (aka the Farc), left-wing guerrillas who currently hold an estimated 700 hostages and are waging a brutal insurgency against the government. Last year, 900 civilians were killed in the fighting.

Not so long ago, you could buy your groceries or fill up your car by paying with cocaine paste in San José. Around 40 cocaine traffickers were caught in the town by police last year alone. But the army has driven the guerrillas out of town and into the jungle bordering Ecuador and Venezuela.

Nevertheless, rebels still ambush patrols and plant roadside bombs. One improvised device, made from a gas cylinder packed with explosives, killed a policeman last August; another was discovered just before Christmas. One pilot told me there’s a rumour swirling around the base that the Farc pays a reward for anyone who shoots an American in the town…

As San José fades beneath us, the countryside changes into an endless, lush rainforest. Hot, sweaty jungle air blasts through the open door of the helicopter and an aroma of fertile earth seeps into the cabin. The jungle is so dense that when US special forces tried to sweep it for hostages with thermal-imaging cameras, their hi-tech systems couldn’t penetrate the canopy.
The territory we’re flying over is controlled by right-wing paramilitaries led by notorious drug trafficker Daniel ‘El Loco’ Barrera. His lieutenant is nicknamed ‘Cuchillo’, meaning ‘knife’, because he used to be a butcher and enjoys dispatching his victims with a blade.