[CTRL] [1] Death Beat

[Kris Millegan]

 -Caveat Lector-

an excerpt from;
Death Beat
Maria Jimena Duzan©1994
Peter Eisner, translator
HarperCollins
ISBN 0-06-017057-3
282 pps. – first/only edition – out-of-print
--[1]--
7
VIAFARA'S HELL

The power plant shuts down at 11 pm. in Puerto Boyaca, bathing the town in
shifting shadows of gas lanterns and occasional car lights.

The shouts and screams would start soon after the lights went out. Bands of
vigilantes, known as "self-defense squads," would begin their rounds in
search of guerrilla collaborators. The shrieks and cries were interspersed
with the staccato sounds of gunfire. No one dared to go out at night. The
streets were deserted and houses were shuttered. And for the past month, the
bodies of murdered peasants were again floating down the Magdalena river. The
smell of rotting flesh in the night air made it impossible to sleep.

The night of January 29, 1984, Diego Viafara heard the sound of a, vehicle
pulling up to his house. He had just enough time to call to his wife, telling
her to grab their daughter and hide.

Four hooded men broke down the door and dragged him out of the house. He was
blindfolded and thrown into the back of a camper van. Soon he could hear the
sounds of the river. He must be near the banks of the Magdalena. He knew
nothing else.

After a while, the van stopped. The men dragged him out and brought him into
a hut where the smell of coffee was strong. Despite the blindfold, he could
see shadows, bathed in moonlight, of people standing around him. The men
walked him to an armchair, let him sit down, and took off the blindfold.
 He was surrounded.

"Who are you?" demanded one of the kidnappers, jabbing the barrel of his
rifle into Viafara's shoulder.

"I'm Diego Viafara. I've lived here for a few months with my wife and
daughter."

"Liar. You are M-19," said one of his captors, spitting out each word.

At first Viafara would admit nothing. But to his dismay, his captors already
knew much about him. It was true; Diego Viafara had been a member of M-19. He
was a doctor with a guerrilla contingent in Cali under the command of
Rosenberg Pabon an important rebel leader. He said he had studied medicine at
Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, an institution dedicated to sponsoring
leftists from Third World countries. Upon returning to Colombia in 1979 he
immediately joined M-19, providing health and first-aid services to peasants
and rebels in M-19 territory.

In mid-1981 he moved with other rebels to the Magdalena Medio river valley to
link up with FARC. But FARC was operating on the run, and it took him months
to establish contact. All the while he was being tracked by rightist
self-defense squads.

When these squads' periodic harassment became more menacing, he sought refuge
in a Catholic church. But even the church walls were not enough to protect
him for long. The local parish priest counseled Viafara to take advantage of
an amnesty declared by the government of President Belisario Betancur in
1983. "Turn yourself in, hand in your weapons, and all will be forgiven," the
priest told him. On December 29, 1983, he did so. Feeling a new sense of
protection, he emerged from hiding and went to live in a small house in
Puerto Boyaca.

Puerto Boyaca is nestled in the Magdalena river valley, a jungle region
located in central-western Colombia where the tributaries of the Magdalena
join, creating a web of marshlands and small islets in one of the loveliest
and richest ecosystems in the country. The majestic and impenetrable jungle
vegetation makes access nearly impossible; as in other mountainous and jungle
sections of Colombia, the government's presence and control is almost nil.

The development of the region reflects the problems that many rural sections
of Colombia suffered in the 1960s with the growth of the guerrilla movements.
One of the great problems of Magdalena Medio was that it hardly had been part
of Colombia since 1929, when oil was discovered and the entire region was
sold to Texaco. The United States-owned oil company had land and subsoil
rights, and there was little official Colombian presence. Things began to
change in the 1950s when shifting migrations within the country brought
squatters and violence. Texaco fought these squatters' occupation of its
lands for a time, and then finally sold the territory back to Colombia in
1959. Yet the government's presence was sporadic and usually came in the form
of repression via the army-officials sent troops to protect wealthy
landowners who were given rights to the best land against peasant farmers who
had no legal right to the land they tilled. The peasants had no choice but to
flee inland, where the soil was inferior and where they could grow only
enough to barely survive. The constant repression of the peasants was the
social cauldron in which guerrilla organizations like FARC were able to
establish themselves. The guerrillas were often the only organized presence
the rural poor ever saw in these parts. In the beginning the guerrillas were
well received because the peasants saw them as a buffer against the
landowners and the army. The guerrillas also protected the peasants from
cattle rustlers who frequented the jungle wilderness.

But soon FARC's tactics changed. Its increasingly repressive rule was
creating anger among the populace the guerrillas were ostensibly there to
protect. From the start the guerrillas had extorted protection money from
cattlemen and ranchers, but when these larger landowners fled the region, the
guerrillas demanded tithes from the middle class and the poor peasant
landowners. In reaction to the abuses of FARC, the peasants of Magdalena
Medio turned to the only institution they could-the Colombian armywhich in
1981 began organizing self-defense militias comprised of peasants in the
region.

At first these groups were simply armed militias out to protect their own
lands. They carried rifles that were supplied legally by the army. In
December 1983, President Betancur's amnesty for the guerrillas and his peace
accord gave the rebels the right to form a political party and run for
office. The measure, according to polls, was approved by 80 percent of
Colombians. But two groups were opposed to it: the Colombian military and the
landed gentry, including those of Puerto Boyaca.

In Puerto Boyaca news of the amnesty was immediately dismissed by regional
power brokers who saw the guerrillas as Communists who had to be stamped out.
>From that point on, patrols of rightist militiamen regularly prowled for
guerrillas and were prepared to deal harshly with those who sympathized with
the amnesty.

Viafara had been captured by such a group.

"Fucking liar. Let's see if we can't make you confess, you son of a bitch,"
one of Viafara's captors screamed. As they began to twist his arm out of its
socket, Viafara felt excruciating pain. He began to sputter, "I was in M-19,
but I'm not anymore. I promise, I promise."

"We're going to kill you," his captor said. Viafara heard three shots and
grimaced, shutting his eyes tightly; his heart racing, he wondered with
resignation what death would feel like.

There was silence. And when he opened his eyes, the only sound was the
cackling of his tormentors.

"Not this time," a voice said. "But you will tell us who your friends are.
Guerrillas are not welcome here in Puerto Boyaca. We kill them."

"I have no friends here," Viafara said. "I came here to start over. Look, I'm
a doctor. I want to help people. Can I work for you?"

Before daybreak, Viafara was back home. He saw his wife and his daughter,
thanking heaven and unable to believe that he was still alive. He understood
that it all had been a test-that to stay alive and to protect his family, he
would have to show that his guerrilla past was dead and buried. He would have
to work with the men who had tormented him.

A month went by and nothing happened. But each night Viafara went to bed with
the fear of being spirited away again, at any moment, by the same captors
who, acting on some whim or misstep, might not spare him a second time. He
could not sleep, he could not rest, and he scarcely left his house. In the
fifth week they came for him, again barging through the door and dragging him
away blindfolded to the same hut along the river. This time he stayed with
them for five years.

Despite their public posture, the self-defense groups were engaging in
activities that were far more dangerous. In 1984, when Viafara was brought
into the organization, these groups were already becoming a private army at
the service of the wealthy ranchers of the region. The ranchers in turn were
in the process of establishing the Colombian Cattlemen's Association of
Magdalena Medio. The association became the legal facade under which the
private militia would garner political and military might. Seen from a
distance, the "nonprofit" association was a benign entity dedicated to
providing social welfare to the people of the valley.

However, the cattlemen's association also was the bulkhead for the creation
of a private army organization whose aim was to wipe out the guerrillas in
the name of anticommunism. At first the cattlemen and farmers contributed
money to the group for guns that were purchased clandestinely from the army.
Later they contributed in a more substantial way, sending their children and
ranch hands as recruits for military training.

The first training site was at a camp dubbed El Tecal in Puerto Boyaca.
Organized by the cattlemen's association in mid1984, the militia units began
a crude and disorganized fight against FARC battalions based in the valley.
But they quickly went beyond the guerrilla encounters, turning their
attention to anyone they suspected of collaborating with the guerrillas. The
militias diverted attention from their actions by blaming the killings on
MAS, the death squad formed by the drug traffickers. In that way, they
figured, they would be able to keep the social welfare image of their
organization unblemished. Moreover, they had strong support from the
Colombian army, which shared the landowners' desire to counteract the power
of the guerrillas.

At times the militias seemed to be an extension of the military. Militia
recruits played football with their counterparts in the armed forces. And
they were allies in the battle to stop the guerrillas; it was common for the
antiguerrilla units of the army's Barbula Battalion, under the command of
Major Velandia, to send out patrols in the region with members of the
self-defense groups. This campaign was, in the words of the militias, a
crusade "to reclaim democracy in the Medio Magdalena valley from the hands of
international communism."

The militias controlled military roadblocks, confiscated peasants' food
shipments-saying that these shipments were being sent to feed the
guerrillas-and established a new pseudo-government structure by setting up
checkpoints and demanding that travelers identify themselves in an effort to
detect guerrilla collaborators. Although it has never been established how
many innocent peasants were killed in 1984, decaying bodies, all murder
victims, began appearing by the dozens along the banks of the river. Few were
ever identified, and none of the crimes was ever punished.

By 1985 the violence reached such a magnitude that it could no longer be
ignored in Bogota. Something had to be done. Attorney General Carlos Jimenez
Gomez, under the government of President Betancur, announced that he would
investigate charges by human rights groups of a nascent dirty war. Despite
his release of a report implicating key members of the military in a
conspiracy to aid and arm the private militias, no action was taken. There
was widespread sentiment among influential landowners and businessmen that
what was going on in Magdalena Medio was justified. "The peace model in
Magdalena Medio" was considered a success, thanks to the self-defense groups.
These groups had, after all, achieved the goal of dislodging the FARC
guerrillas; kidnappings and extortion by the guerrillas ceased. And many
other parts of the country that were plagued by guerrillas had already begun
to seek the services of the militias.

Viafara was placed under the tutelage of Henry de Jesus Perez, the chief of
military operations for the self-defense groups of the Magdalena Medio
region. Perez was a tough, tightly drawn figure of a man and one of the
wealthiest landowners in the valley.

In mid-1985 Perez told Viafara to prepare for a trip to the southern part of
the country to establish a traveling health program. By this time, as was
their goal, the militias were reaching out to other parts of the country. In
the guise of public action, they really were seeking to establish an
anti-Communist guerrilla network throughout the country.

What Viafara found surprised him. In Guaviare, the region to which he was
sent, there was a full training camp with wooden barracks, a giant kitchen,
and signs everywhere with antiguerrilla slogans. "Communists need not apply,"
read one such sign. The camp had a vast stockpile of automatic weapons,
including imported AK-47s, hand grenades, and rifles. After a time, Viafara
also realized the real reason he was needed in Guaviare. The camp was
protecting a cocaine laboratory. There had been recent skirmishes with the
FARC guerrillas, and the militias needed doctors under Viafara to treat the
wounded. As the fighting spread and increased in intensity, Viafara found
himself making more frequent visits to the south, treating the wounded in
makeshift tent hospitals and carrying away the dead. He despaired of his life
as a paramilitary medic, but he couldn't figure out how to escape.

"Four times they repeated that they were going to kill me," Viafara told us.
"They shot at me, but the bullets glanced by me. It was hell."

It took five years in the field, working for the drug bosses and their
military consorts, before Viafara summoned the strength to bolt. When he
walked into the city room of El Espectador on February 17, 1989, he was
nervous and sweating. He wanted protection; he wanted to talk.

His testimony would reveal the scope of a crime organization with
still-untraced tentacles around the globe. His memory of details and his
position as the doctor in the militia organizations brought information so
unique and precise that it was still being tapped two years after his arrival
at the newspaper.

"I'm not doing it for money; I'm doing it because my conscience won't leave
me alone. That's why I've come to El Espectador. I want to tell everything
I've seen for the past five years in the Magdalena Medio valley. You've got
to understand, I'm not doing this for the money. I just want the attorney
general's office to protect me. I need help.... When they find out I'm gone,
they'll try to kill me-and my wife and daughter."

Fernando Cano and Ignacio Gomez, one of my partners on the newspaper's
investigative team, were the first to meet with Viafara, who was chain
smoking and crushing the butts in a large ashtray that he held close to him;
he had already gone through half a pack of cigarettes and five cups of coffee
in the short time he had been in the office. Viafara's hands were cold and
trembling, and his handshake was that of a worker; his hands were calloused,
not smooth like one associates with the hands of a physician. Viafara was
scarcely five feet five and was probably not even forty years old. He had a
dark complexion and wore a blue aviator's jacket. His left eyelid was swollen.

Fernando offered him a shot of whiskey. He declined. They brought him lunch,
but he left it untouched. All he wanted to do was talk.

The scope of Viafara's information was astonishing. At first he didn't want
to speak until he made contact with the attorney gen
 eral. But Fernando scolded and conned him into opening up: "Listen, let's
talk a bit to find out if what you have to say is really important. If it is,
I'll call the attorney general right away."

This statement upset Viafara, but he started talking anyway. At first he had
little to say; he was feeling out the turf. But little by little the
conversation became more fluid. Most striking was his photographic memory. He
began to provide intimate details of where and how the militia training was
conducted, where the cocaine laboratories were, who took care of finances,
who the bosses were, and who was responsible for which massacres. It soon
became obvious that Viafara was speaking from experience. And it became
equally evident that it would be necessary for him to be placed immediately
under heavy security. Viafara's information not only provided the first
detailed look at the militia apparatus, but it revealed the names of corrupt
members of the military, policemen, and politicians who were involved.

Viafara witnessed the formation of a squad of murderers-for-hire whose
allegiance was to a band of increasingly wealthy drug dealers. By 1988 the
scale of bloodshed was reaching unimaginable heights. Every time there was to
be an attack, Viafara was well aware of it. It was his job to examine the
members of the hit teams to certify that they were not stoned on basuco. And
then he would send them on their way, knowing that these men would soon be
murdering peasants for their presumed collaboration with guerrillas and that
they would be dumping the bodies in common graves or chopping off lifeless
limbs and tossing the torsos into the currents of the Magdalena river. The
horror rose within him; the sickness caught in his throat. He would watch
these same men march back from their missions, muscles quivering and
adrenaline flowing after having killed a medical examiner or an ex-mayor
whose crime had been to refuse to collaborate with them.

Viafara also revealed that the militia organizations were receiving their
training via a network of foreign mercenaries, mostly from -Britain and
Israel. These mercenaries would introduce a dangerous element of violence in
Colombia-training in the kind of terrorism never before seen, providing the
drug bosses with a degree of sophistication that had never been contemplated,
with a level of impunity that threatened the integrity of the Colombian state.

While Viafara was speaking to Ignacio Gomez, Fernando left the meeting room
and went to his office, somewhat nervous from the import of what he had been
hearing, and finally called the attorney general. Horacio Serpa, a committed,
veteran Liberal politician, immediately realized the significance of
Viafara's testimony. He had spent twenty years in Magdalena Medio and had
seen the violence firsthand; ten members of his own political group had been
murdered by the death squads. Serpa sent an aide to talk with Viafara. That
interview lasted several hours more, confirming for the government what we
already knew: This man's testimony was the key to entering the depths of the
drug organization.

"We have to get him out of here, with protection, if possible," the envoy
said. "If you use bodyguards, don't let anyone know who I am," said Viafara,
who knew well the penetration of the drug cartels. "Take it easy, man, they
won't know who you are. You're in good hands," Fernando Cano replied. Soon
Viafara and Serpa's aide were on their way to the attorney general's office
with Cano's personal security detail.

Shaken by Viafara's revelations, we agreed to hold back all the information
that Viafara had given us. Two days after Viafara entered official custody,
the attorney general called Fernando: "I just want to tell you that Viafara's
testimony is monumentally important. I'm sending him over to General Maza
(Maza Marquez, the head of DAS, Colombia's equivalent of the FBI), so he can
hear what Viafara has to say. This is a bombshell."

Several days later Fernando received another call, this time from Maza
Marquez himself. The general said he was debriefing Viafara, confirming the
enormous importance of the information. He asked Fernando to withhold
publication of any report about Viafara, saying that the government was
working on a case based on Viafara's information. He wanted to avoid any
chance of a leak.

"What about Viafara's family? What's going to happen to them?" Fernando asked.

"We're working on it. We've got a rescue mission under way in Puerto Boyaca
to try to get them out," the general said. "I'll let you know what happens."

The information obtained from Viafara was so momentous that Maza Marquez
called in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). U.S. officials were
contributing satellite photographs and AWACS spy-plane intercepts of
communications over the area. All the intelligence they gathered confirmed
the material provided by Viafara. The DEA suggested that the only way to
protect Viafara and guarantee the flow of information
 was to take him out of the country under the auspices of the United States
and place him in the U.S. Witness Protection Program. Within a week of his
appearance at El Espectador, Viafara, without knowing what had happened to
his wife and daughter, was spirited away on a plane to Miami and then to a
secret location with a new identity. Ever since then he has wandered from
state to state, without money, sleeping in the open or in abandoned cars.

"The only thing I want is to be able to go back to Colombia," he told a
Colombian diplomat. "Here, the DEA promised me lots of money, but the truth
is that I'm dying of hunger." Homesick, feeling betrayed, he appeared at the
presidential summit in San Antonio, Texas, in February 1993, where he
attempted to speak. His wife and child were never located and are presumed
still to be somewhere in Magdalena Medio.

El Espectador broke Viafara's story on April 6, 1989, as soon as Viafara got
safely to the United States. The series started a chain of reports on
corruption and paramilitary activity that rocked the country.

The relationship of the militias in Magdalena Medio with the drug
organization began in early 1985. Following the decision by the Betancur
government to use the extradition treaty-after the assassination of Minister
of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla-much of the narcotics hierarchy left in a
stampede to seek refuge in Panama and waited for things to cool off. Such was
the case with Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa family, who were welcome in Panama,
which was under the control of General Manuel Antonio Noriega. At that time,
Noriega was still an asset to the Central Intelligence Agency, and John Lawn,
head of the DEA, was sending him letters lauding his successes in the fight
against drug trafficking.

Not everyone left the country, however. Drug dealers who were less known at
the time took the opportunity to establish ,themselves in the hinterlands of
Colombia, seeking refuge where the terrain made access and detection
doubtful. It was not difficult to hide out in the jungle regions of the south
and central ,parts of the country, trackless zones where they could establish
'their cocaine-processing laboratories with little trouble. That was the case
with Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha.

Rodriguez Gacha, the onetime street hustler, had by the end of the 1980s come
to be the single force to be reckoned with in drug-dealing circles. He used
his militias and his money to create a machine that was far more dangerous
than the threat of selling noxious drugs. Ultimately, he had political
aspirations; he sought no less than to bend the Colombian state to his will.

Rodriguez Gacha was born in the village of Veraguas, a town not far from
Pacho, and as a boy, it is reported, he shined shoes to make change. Of
medium stature, he was the son of a peasant family in a region where family
and tradition are all-important. He never advanced beyond primary school.
Instead, like many others his age, he went off in search of his fortune; in
the case of most of the young men of this region, that meant going to work in
the mines of Muzo, where some of the world's most valuable emeralds have been
found.

Rodriguez Gacha eventually rose to be second in command to Gilberto Molina,
King of the Emeralds, entering the nether world of illicit emerald smuggling.
He had chosen a good patron. Molina had seized control of mining activities
by forcing out or killing other mining families, and a peace enforced by
violence reigned in the zone. He had even been awarded the government
contract for processing emeralds. He enjoyed excellent relations with the
Conservative party and he supported its candidates from Cundinamarca and
Boyaca in state and national elections. Nevertheless, Rodriguez Gacha decided
to leave the emerald mines at Muzo and go out on his own. He chose the
Guajira coast, where many Young Turks were heading in the 1970s, a dangerous
region that was flourishing because of a bonanza marijuana trade-marimba they
called it. Rodriguez Gacha soon began to amass a considerable fortune, making
contacts that would later grow in importance. He hooked up, for example, with
Pablo Escobar, another young man in search of a fortune, as well as others
who would later join them in the Medellin cocaine trade.

But within a short time the market for marijuana crashed. Prices dropped as
more and more marijuana was being produced in the United States. Soon the
marijuana growers shifted their attention from marijuana to a much more
lucrative product, one that was more compact and worth many times its weight
in "Colombian gold." If he earned hundreds of thousands in the marijuana
trade, Rodriguez Gacha was making many millions soon after he began selling
cocaine.

His wealth brought independence and an infrastructure that enabled him to
return to Pacho, where he built a headquarters and became one of the
principal employers and benefactors in the region. He joined up once more with
 Gilberto Molina. It was a time of planning and building. Little by little,
Rodriguez Gacha created one of the largest criminal enterprises in history.
He adapted the infrastructure of the illicit emerald trade, with its
laborers, foremen, enforcers, and chiefs, into an extensive narcotics
network. He bought up extensive pieces of land in well-positioned sections of
the country, where he set up laboratories and built airstrips. He also
brought in men who specialized in transporting the drugs along all sections
of the circuit, from plantations in Peru and Bolivia to the laboratories and
onward to markets outside the country.

His thirst for power brought him into conflict with Molina, his old friend
and patron. The final break came following the kidnapping of Andres Pastrana.
Molina was vocal in his opposition to the kidnapping and enraged that it was
carried out regardless of his protest. Rodriguez Gacha ordered him killed. In
January 1989 several of Rodriguez Gacha's men, wearing military uniforms,
appeared suddenly at one of the many ranches owned by Molina. Molina was
giving one of his well-known, extravagant parties where the drinks were
abundant. There were music and dancing, entertainment, and beautiful women.
Rodriguez Gacha's men came as honored guests, dancing and eating with the
rest. Without warning, they stopped and mowed down twenty people, including
Molina.

Rodriguez Gacha set up his first laboratories in 1982 in Guaviare, one of
Colombia's comparatively small coca-planting areas. The coca plantations were
protected by FARC militia units.

At first Rodriguez Gacha sought to avoid conflict with FARC. He accepted the
same rules that the guerrillas imposed on other large landowners: The
guerrillas would protect his enterprise-in this case, the cocaine-processing
laboratory; in return, he would pay them a levy to guarantee the security of
the laboratories.

It was an agreement governed by the monetary interests of the moment. It
worked because both sides made money on the deal. And the arrangement would
collapse not because of ideological antagonism, but for the same reasons that
led to the creation of self-defense militias in Magdalena Medio: The FARC
guerrillas, in the view of Rodriguez Gacha and his Medellin colleagues,
overstepped their bounds.

By 1986 Magdalena Medio had become Rodriguez Gacha's operation center, from
which he directed his entire cocaine production and shipping business. It
also was the major area for recruiting his private army of assassins who
guarded his laboratories, ranches, and clandestine airstrips. The main
laboratory was La Azulita in Putumayo, on the Ecuadoran border. At the outset
the complex was controlled by the rival Cali cartel and protected by FARC
guerrillas. But Cali lost it in a raid by Medellin militiamen, who killed six
guerrillas and seized $10 million in cash and an adjacent airstrip.

Under Pablo Escobar and Rodriguez Gacha, the processing center at Putumayo
prospered. It contained four laboratories, each with twenty microwave ovens
to speed up the process by which raw coca base is crystallized into pure
cocaine. By the mid1980s, La Azulita was producing about two metric tons of
refined cocaine per week. (At a street price of $20,000 per kilo, that meant
that La Azu1ita, far from being the largest cocaine laboratory, shipped $40
million in cocaine at retail prices a week, or $2 billion a year.)

The chemicals, mostly ether and acetone, without which cocaine hydrochloride
could not be made, were readily imported from Ecuador in fifty-five-gallon
drums by a sixty-foot riverboat that made weekly trips up the San Miguel
river. The raw coca base came from throughout the coca-growing region. Peru
is by far the largest grower of coca, Bolivia is second, and Colombia is a
distant third. But the laboratories were receiving consignments of dried leaf
and base from all three countries. Power was supplied by huge electric
generators. At any given time, the facility housed thirty to forty workers
who served as cocaine cooks under the supervision of the most important and
esteemed people in any cocaine operation, the house chemists. The chemists
were there to ensure quality control and to keep the processing plant
operating at peak efficiency.

La Azulita was guarded by one hundred militia patrolmen who were trained in
Magdalena Medio under the command of a retired army sergeant. The cartel
always feared a guerrilla counterattack. Late in 1987 the guerrillas did
attack, but failed to dislodge the Medellin drug operation. Viafara said that
fifty guerrillas and ten members of the drug dealers' army died in the
counteroffensive, which was never reported to and thus perhaps never even
known by the Colombian government.

 Farther to the north was the processing center at Caqueta owned by Rodriguez
Gacha and Perez. The center, on a ranch known as El Recreo, was really a
central receiving base for other laboratory shipments. Another seventy to one
hundred men from Magdalena Medio guarded this regional shipping point.

By 1988, however, El Recreo was abandoned for fear it was too well known. The
drug bosses were already working on an even more sophisticated replacement.
They called it New Tranquilandia, and it was at the same site where officials
working with the DEA had dismantled the Tranquilandia laboratories four years
earlier.

The earlier raid on Tranquilandia had been the most important one to date.
The Colombian-United States team seized nine tons of cocaine, a record at the
time, and the police were astonished at the sophisticated network of
processing centers with airconditioned housing, electronic equipment, and
airstrips. The raid was a result of tips from informants and high-tech
sleuthing by the United States. Super-secret U.S. military satellites,
controlled by the National Security Agency, pinpointed the location of the
laboratory by marking a barrel of chemicals shipped by a Pennsylvania
chemical company to Colombia, which informants said would end up at
Tranquilandia. The ensuing raid was heralded as a major success in the war on
drugs, though in truth it did nothing to stop the cocaine enterprises.

The new laboratories were to operate under the cover of a cattle ranch,
complete with modern breeding techniques, veterinarians, and an aggressive
sales program. The cattle were merely a front. About one hundred of the
wranglers at the ranch were militiamen who had been sent to guard the new
laboratories by the drug bosses from their training sites in Magdalena Medio.

Planes loaded with bags of cocaine, marked with brand names such as Colombian
Coffee, El Centavo, and La Reina to identify their producers, were routed
from the new site to collection centers'—in Putumayo, Yari, and Puerto Boyaca
and then to a staging point at an airstrip at Puerto Escondido, a ranch owned
by Rodriguez Gacha and Escobar on the Caribbean coast. At the airstrip,
called El Martillo, teams of traffickers fitted airplanes for the journey to
the United States. The planes would arrive at around 6 pm. They were filled
with fuel, the pilots were given their flight plans, and the bags of cocaine
were loaded on the planes. The pilots also brought with them graphic artists
who were ready to change each plane's tail number and other markings along
the way and then change them back on the return trip.

The location and size of the processing plants varied considerably. The drug
bosses, receiving a constant flow of military information on police
antinarcotics efforts, could quickly move their cocaine stocks and switch
venues if a raid was imminent. Little cocaine was ever lost; when it was, the
drug dealers wrote off the loss as part of the price of doing business.

By 1987 Rodriguez Gacha had consolidated his supremacy over the self-defense
militias of Magdalena Medio, converting them into a private army that he
could deploy throughout the country to protect cocaine laboratories and,
increasingly, to wage an anti-Communist crusade.

At the outset, these militias received all the training and weapons they
needed from their army benefactors. But as the alliance with the wealthy
landowners and the drug bosses grew, that training was not sufficient. So
members of the cartel increased their contributions, and two new training
centers were formed, code-named Zero-One and Fifty. The centers were well
stocked but always prepared to break camp and move if a police raid was
imminent. This time the pretense of self-defense was evaporating; it was
evident that the training would produce the dreaded sicarios—professional assa
ssins who traveled around the country and occasionally overseas to do the
bloody bidding of the drug bosses.

Viafara witnessed all this in his role as health director. Some of the new
recruits he examined, who were usually teenagers, were obviously high on
basuco; others were covered with scars usually marking an array of knife
wounds that they displayed like badges of honor. Others, hungry and
malnourished, confessed to having eaten gunpowder, which they said gave them
energy and made them high.

Prospective militiamen were brought before a panel of highranking members of
the cattlemen's association. They were asked such questions as "Have you been
personally affected by guerrilla activities?" "Would you know what to do if
you were captured by authorities?" and "Are you capable of killing your
father, mother, or brother if they were proved to be guerrillas?"

Of course the answers to such questions would invariably be yes. But Viafara
knew that many of these aspiring zealots really had no ideology; they were in
it for the good money they expected enabled him to return to Pacho, where he
built a headquarters and became one of the principal employers and
benefactors in the region. He joined up once more with Gilberto Molina. It
was a time of planning and building. Little by little, Rodriguez Gacha
created one of the largest criminal enterprises in history. He adapted the
infrastructure of the illicit emerald trade, with its laborers, foremen,
enforcers, and chiefs, into an extensive narcotics network. He bought up
extensive pieces of land in well-positioned sections of the country, where he
set up laboratories and built airstrips. He also brought in men who
specialized in transporting the drugs along all sections of the circuit, from
plantations in Peru and Bolivia to the laboratories and onward to markets
outside the country.

Once they were accepted, these young men were chosen, according to their
education and skills, to be planners or managers, technicians, or foot
soldiers of the drug war. Basic training was much like that in the regular
army, with an emphasis on special operations. The recruits learned camouflage
techniques, personal defense tactics, communication, and counterintelligence.

There were four branches of the security apparatus, each with separate
courses of study. First were the so-called patrolmen, who guarded against
guerrilla incursions in the countryside. They disguised themselves as cowboys
and day workers on farms, where the drug bosses installed laboratories, and
had orders to kill any unidentified person who stumbled upon the laboratories
or warehouses. When in the field they wore blue or olive-drab uniforms
similar to those used by the Department of Prisons and the National Police.
Like all members of their organization, they had false documents obtained
from local registries in Magdalena Medio. These men earned about $200 a month.

Next were the bodyguards who protected individual cartel chieftains and
leaders of the self-defense commands. They earned about $300 a month.

Third were the technical workers at the cocaine laboratories who mixed the
chemicals and produced the finished cocaine hydrochloride product under the
supervision of the chief chemist at each laboratory. These men were chosen
from the cream of the patrolmen's group. They earned $400 to $500 a month,
more than the average salary of a captain in the Colombian army at that time.

Last were the "elite commandos," by far the most highly trained in all
aspects of warfare. These special forces would carry out attacks against
members of the leftist Patriotic Union and other representatives of the
government or political parties who opposed the drug bosses. They were the
best paid, with a monthly salary of $4,000 to $6,000.

Members of the elite commandos carried out their death raids under the names
of other organizations to give false leads to the police. In addition to MAS,
they used such colorful names as the Smurfs, the Orphans, the Cats, or Black
Hand. Sometimes they left sayings on their victims' bodies like "This guy
won't have anything else to say" or "For being a snitch."

Militia training lasted thirty to sixty days, after which the commandos went
out on missions designated by the organization. The men had an array of
weapons at their disposal—FAL rifles, Israeli Galils, and Soviet Bloc and
American armaments—all available in the international legal and illegal arms
bazaar.

Viafara provided details on the daily routine of these training courses. This
was training for true believers, training steeped in military esprit de
corps. The trainees were taught that they were foot soldiers in a holy war to
defend Colombian democracy against the onslaught of communism. In reality,
the teaching was a subterfuge for training professional assassins to defend
the interests of the drug bosses.

The daily routine of the training school and in the paramilitary bases began
with reveille at dawn, followed by physical training. Time was set aside for
singing spirited, patriotic hymns and prayer, along with military formation
and the order of the day. One song that Viafara could remember went like this:

I have a comrade
I'll never find another as true
He is constant at my side
Marching at the same pace and
Toward the same goal
A bullet fired at him or at me is one
If it strikes him, it has struck me as well.

And they would recite the motto of the organization:

Our motto is to defend our children, our home, our possessions, our lands and
we will succeed.... We are a self-defense group and we are fighting for the
defense of honor and the good of the people of Colombia. We fight against the
Communist party, the FARC, and the subversive groups in Colombia....

>From these ranks came the men who would be responsible for thousands of
deaths in a wave of violence that challenged the heart of the Colombian
government.

When Viafara met Rodriguez Gacha for the first time in Colom-bia's southern
plains of Yari at the end of 1985, relations with FARC had been broken
because of the guerrilla raid the previous year on the cartel's drug
laboratory. Rodriguez Gacha, of course, was furious. For him there had to be
an immediate and total break with the guerrillas. He wanted the rightist
militias to take control not only at the laboratories, but also in his
growing land holdings in the south. It was certainly a beneficial deal for
the militias in Magdalena Medio. Rodriguez Gacha guaranteed them large
amounts of money for this burgeoning paramilitary enterprise.

As important as Rodriguez Gacha was, he had a shadowy partner in his
multibillion-dollar operation. The partner was a secretive international
financier, identified as a brain trust behind the operations. The police
never learned his name; they knew him only by the code name 28.

Sometimes addressed as Pascual, other times as Alejandro, 28 was in his early
thirties, about six foot two, thin, dark, and elegantly dressed; he was
married to a woman named Clara, with whom he had a two-year-old daughter. It
was his task to coordinate drug shipments overseas and to work with Rodriguez
Gacha on establishing quantities and prices. His authority spanned all facets
of the operation. He determined the number of aircraft necessary to keep the
operation moving efficiently, designated foreign airstrips where the
airplanes were to land, and assigned the pilots who were to conduct these
clandestine flights. It was 28 who collected the funds received in foreign
drug sales and paid the employees' salaries. When new operators stepped
forward offering to open new cocaine trade routes, 28 evaluated the
worthiness of their proposals.

In addition, by managing the books, 28 was able to direct a portion of
operating revenue to maintain the self-defense groups. The per-kilo price of
Rodriguez Gacha's shipments was raised and lowered to reflect the additional
cost of supporting the death squads. 28's method of operation went like this:
If, for example, he was planning to send ten planes with a capacity for
transporting seven tons of cocaine (700 kilos in each plane) at a cost of $70
million on the international market ($10,000 a kilo), he would charge $70,000
more. He would then deliver the extra amount to the national chief of the
paramilitary squads, who would distribute the money among regional commanders
of the defense squads.

By this time Rodriguez Gacha lived a life of wealth and privilege. His love
of soccer had led him to buy a number of national soccer teams. By the
mid-1980s, drug money owned the most important soccer teams in the country
and players of international status. And in his many jungle-shrouded
hideouts, alongside a cocaine laboratory or a coca plantation, there was sure
to be a soccer field. Viafara often watched Rodriguez Gacha practicing his
skill with volunteers, who always got a tip from the boss when the match was
over.

Viafara said that Rodriguez Gacha was relatively Spartan in his personal
life-he got up early, drank little, never touched drugs, and avoided foul
language. But he dressed elegantly, with the proper attire for every
occasion. In the jungle, he wore Bermuda shorts and short-sleeve shirts like
those available at a Safari outfitters' store. At formal field lunches he was
regaled in cotton suits.

Rodriguez Gacha had various code names, such as "the doctor" and "Don
Andres," but eventually he would become known as "the Mexican," in
recognition of his affinity for things Mexican and his ability to capitalize
on the lucrative trade route that uses Mexico as a transfer point on the way
to the United States. His many ranches and contact points were named after
cities and states in Mexico. One time he even pushed to change Pacho's name
legally to Chihuahua.

The details of Rodriguez Gacha's private life are sketchy. Although the
identity of his wife is not known, it is known that he had a daughter and a
two sons. His teen-aged son Fredy quit school to join the drug enterprise
full time, often working with the paramilitary squads.

Little by little, Viafara, who was now called "the veterinarian" by his
comrades in the militias, was getting to know Rodriguez Gacha's inner circle.
Most were retired military men who maintained links to the army that helped
Rodriguez Gacha's enterprises. Rodriguez Gacha boasted of having prime
contacts among there military men. "The government gives them medals," he
boasted. "I give them money."

Rodriguez Gacha's activities thrived on more than just contacts with retired
military officers, however. Viafara was there when active members of the
military came to visit the drug boss. One Christmas the Medellin chiefs held
a Christmas party at a ranch near the army's Barbula Battalion. Among the
mirth and good cheer were the requisite payoffs. Each military officer got a
bonus for another year's work well done. One officer kept Rodriguez Gacha
abreast of the government's antinarcotics operations, quickly delivering
secret briefings to him.

In Magdalena Medio, Rodriguez Gacha had direct radio contact with the local
police headquarters and the military command center at the army's Barbula
Battalion. And whenever Pablo Escobar came to the area-he had a ranch in
nearby Doradal—the local police backed off, giving him free access. Although
air traffic in Puerto Boyaca was supposedly under military restrictions,
these restrictions did not extend to private planes and drug flights managed
by the two drug bosses.

Rodriguez Gacha made occasional efforts at self-promotion. Once he sought an
interview with a friend of mine, Hernando Corral, who was an investigative
reporter for the television news program "Noticiero de Las Siete." Corral was
a seemingly meek, scraggly person whose moustache overwhelmed his gaunt face.
But his friends knew that his mild manner went only so far; he was quite
flirtatious and could salsa long into the night. He was also a former
guerrilla; in his younger days, he had been a member of the National
Liberation Army.

Corral met with Rodriguez Gacha on August 7, 1988, at the Mexican's ranch
along the Magdalena river. The idea, Rodriguez Gacha said, was just to have
an initial chat-no interview. "You people have not realized that this is an
anti-Communist struggle," he told Corral, defending his work with the
paramilitary squads. "I am doing this in order to defend democracy in
Colombia."

Few people found out about this meeting while Rodriguez Gacha was alive; it
was the only known meeting any journalist had with him. Corral did speak with
Rodriguez Gacha again but by telephone, about a week after the assassination
of presidential hopeful Luis Carlos Galan. In a sometimes rambling monologue,
Rodriguez Gacha refused to talk about the assassination, though he complained
bitterly about the government's crackdown following the killing. He also
clearly realized that security forces were closing in on him.

In their conversation he warned repeatedly that he would never surrender to
be tried in a judicial system that he didn't trust and, that he considered
Communist-controlled. "How can we let them try us in court if the judges are
Communists?" he asked.

The violent tactics he and his colleagues in Medellin employed were a matter
of self-defense, he said. "What would you do if they told you they were going
to kill you? What would you do if they were hassling your children, your
family? What would you do? ... if they are going to try to kill you, you have
to defend yourself."

He told Corral that he considered himself a "patriot" who has "fought for the
people of Colombia.... I have dedicated myself to investing in this country;
I love this country. Nobody believes this, but I am a patriot.

"They have taken everything. We have nothing left to lose here," he said.
"But they haven't taken the money and the coca business." He joked about the
United States' inability to halt the cocaine trade, saying "if we don't keep
sending cocaine, the gringos will get mad at us." He said that he and his
associates had large sums of money deposited in U.S. banks. (The United
States and European countries have since frozen millions of dollars in bank
accounts believed to be controlled by Rodriguez Gacha's organization.)

Although he refused to discuss Galan's assassination, at one point he said,
with an air of disgust, that while some politicians are worth dealing with,
GaIan "always tried to screw us." Other politicians, he stated, always came
to the drug bosses at election time asking for money. "You give it them, and
then they forget all about you."

Rodriguez Gacha declared that the drug wealth reinvested in Colombia, often
estimated at $5 billion, had kept the nation afloat financially and
politically while surrounding countries floundered. Seventy percent of the
nation's wealth, he noted, came directly or indirectly from the drug business.

"We are defending the people; we are fighting for the people. Had it not been
for the drug traffickers, we would have had a civil war five years ago,"
Rodriguez Gacha said. "They aren't going to catch me easily; they'll catch me
fighting, because this is a struggle to the end."

Speaking in simple language, often repeating the theme of his persecution and
humble origins, Rodriguez Gacha explained that as a child, he wanted to work
in farming. "I went to a vocational school to study agronomy. Economic
conditions did not permit [me to finish]." However, he said he had provided a
good education to his three children. "Let me tell you something. I am a man
of the people; I am a humble man. With all this money, if I was from one
Gacha abreast of the government's antinarcotics operations, quickly
delivering secret briefings to him.

He had chilling and passionless words about his relations with the news
media. More than thirty journalists had been killed by drug traffickers in
the past four years. "War is war," Rodriguez Gacha said. "If they don't
bother with us, we won't bother with them. It's the intense types that are
going to have problems."

The drug boss lashed out at General Maza Marquez, his principal foil in an
Elliott Ness-style crusade against him and Pablo Escobar. "I have a tape
intercept that proves that Maza accepted $10 million from the [rival] Cali
drug cartel," Rodriguez Gacha said. The general, who had heard and confirmed
the authenticity of the conversation with the drug boss, denied the charge,
saying it was part of a defamation campaign against him. Asked repeatedly how
the violence and bloodshed in Colombia could end, Rodriguez Gacha kept bringin
g up the proposal for negotiations. "This could all end if the government
would negotiate. If they would think a bit they would send a messenger to
talk to us," he said. "And if they are going to kill us one day, let them get
it over with."

pps.93-114
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End

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