Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

It was clear that Javier was anxious to get away from the riverbank, so Art walked back with him to “safe” territory. The government controls Puerto Asis and the north bank of the river around the town, but just west of here, even on the north side, is the FARC-controlled town ofPuerto Caicedo.

But Puerto Asis is AUC country.

Art knows all about the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia. The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia was started by the old MAS cocaine lord Fidel Cardona, aka Rambo. Cardona used to operate a right-wing death squad from his Las Tangas ranch in northernColombia, back in the days when everything was fat and happy in the Medellin cartel. Then Cardona turned against Pablo Escobar and helped the CIA track him down, a deed for which all his cocaine crimes were forgiven. Cardona took his shiny new soul and went into “politics” full-time.

AUC used to operate just in the northern part of the country; its move into thePutumayo district is a recent development. But when it came in, it came in strong, and Art sees evidence of that everywhere.

He saw the right-wing paramilitaries all over Puerto Asis-with their camouflage fatigues and red berets, cruising in pickup trucks, stopping peasants and searching them or just brandishing their M-16s and machetes.

Sending a message to the campesinos, Art thought: This is AUC turf and we can do what we want with you.

Javier was hustling him to a convoy of army vehicles on the main street. Art could see John Hobbs standing by one of the jeeps, tapping his foot impatiently. We need a military escort to go out into the countryside, Art thought.

“We need to hurry, Senor,” Javier said.

“Sure,” Art said. “I just need something to drink.”

The heat was oppressive. Art’s shirt was already soaked with sweat. The soldier led him to a little street-side stand where Art got two cans of warm Coke, one for himself and one for the soldier. The stand’s owner, an old lady, asked him something in a rapid local dialect that Art didn’t understand.

“She wants to know how you want to pay,” Javier explained. “In cash or cocaine?”

“What?”

Cocaine is like money here, the soldier explained. The locals carry little bags of powder the way you would carry change. Most people pay with cocaine. Buying a soda with cocaine, Art thought as he pulled some rumpled, wet bills from his pocket. Coke for Coke-yeah, we’re winning the War on Drugs here.

He handed the soldier one of the sodas and then joined the tour.

Now he stands in a ruined coca field and rubs the surface of a leaf with his thumb. It’s sticky, and he turns to the Monsanto representative who’s hovering around him like a mosquito and asks, “Are you mixing Cosmo-Flux with the Roundup?”

Roundup Ultra is the trade name for the defoliant glyphosate, which the Colombian army, with American advisers, sprays from low-flying airplanes protected by helicopter cover.

The more things change, Art thinks… firstVietnam, then Sinaloa, nowPutumayo.

“Well, yes, it makes it stick to the plants better,” the Monsanto rep says.

“Yeah, but it also increases the toxic risk to people, isn’t that right?”

“Well-in large amounts, maybe,” the flack says. “But we’re using small dosages of Roundup here, and the Cosmo-Flux makes the small amount a lot more effective. A lot more bang for your buck.”

“What amounts are they using here?”

The Monsanto guy doesn’t know, but Art won’t quit until he gets the answer. He holds the whole junket up while they stop one of the pilots, open up his tank and find out. After tenacious questioning and some browbeating of the guys who load the tanks, Art finds that they’re using five liters per acre. The Monsanto literature recommends a liter per acre as the maximum safe dosage.

“Five times the safe dosage?” Art asks John Hobbs. “Five times?”

“We’ll look into it,”Hobbs says.

The man has aged. I guess I have, too, Art thinks, butHobbs looks ancient. His white hair is finer, his skin almost translucent, his blue eyes still sharp even though it’s plain that they can see the approach of sunset. And he’s wearing a jacket, even though they’re in the jungle and it’s sweltering. He’s perpetually cold, Art thinks, in the way that only the old and the dying are.

“No,” Art says. “I’ll look into it. Five times the recommended dose of glyphosate, and you’re mixing in Cosmo-Flux? What are you trying to poison here, a crop or a whole environment?”

Because he has his suspicions that he’s not looking at ground zero in the War on Drugs so much as he’s looking at ground zero in the war against Communist guerrillas-who live, hide and fight in the jungle.

So if you defoliate the jungle…

As his hosts show him their “successes,” thousands of acres of wilted coca plants, Art peppers them with endless aggravating questions: Does it kill just coca, or does it poison other crops as well? Does it kill food crops-beans, bananas, maize, yucca? No? Well, what am I looking at in that field? It looks like it was maize to me. Isn’t corn the mainstay of the local diet? What do they eat after their food crops are destroyed?

Because this isn’t Sinaloa, Art thinks. There aren’t any drug lords who own thousands of acres here. Most of the cocaine is grown by small campesinos, who plant an acre or two at most. FARC taxes them in its territory, AUC taxes them on the land it controls. Where the campesinos have it the worst, of course, is on territory that both sides actively claim-there they pay double the taxes on the cocaine they harvest.

As he watches the planes spray, he asks, How high are they flying? A hundred feet? Even Monsanto’s own specs say that spraying from anything higher than ten feet isn’t recommended. Doesn’t that increase the risk of drift onto other crops? There’s a stiff breeze today-aren’t your defoliants being blown all over the place?

“You’re way off base,”Hobbs tells him.

“Am I?” Art asks. “I want you to get a biochemist out here and test the water in a dozen village wells.”

He makes them take him to a refugee camp, where the campesinos have gone to flee the fumigation. It’s little more than a clearing in the jungle with hastily built cinder-block buildings and tin-roof shacks. He demands to be taken to the clinic, where a missionary doctor shows him the kids with exactly the symptoms he was afraid he’d see-chronic diarrhea, skin rashes, respiratory problems.

“One-point-seven billion dollars to poison kids?” Art asksHobbs as they get back into the jeep.

“We’re in a war,”Hobbs says. “This is no time to go wobbly, Arthur. It’s your war, too. May I remind you that this is the cocaine that empowered such men as Adan Barerra? That money from this cocaine bought the bullets used at El Sauzal?”

I don’t need a reminder, Art thinks.

And who knows where Adan is now? Six months after the raid in Baja and the subsequent massacre at El Sauzal, Adan is still in the wind. TheU.S. government put a $2 million reward on his head, but so far, no one has stepped forward to collect.

Who wants money you’d never live to collect?

An hour’s drive later they come to a village that’s totally abandoned. Not a person, a pig, a chicken, a dog.

Nothing.

All the huts look untouched, save for a larger building-the communal storage bin by the looks of it-which has been totally gutted with flame from the inside.

A ghost town.

“Where are the people?” Art asks Javier.

The boy shrugs.

Art asks the officer in charge.

“Disappeared,” he answers. “They must have run from FARC.”

“Run where?”

Now the officer shrugs.

They spend the night at a small army base north of town. After a dinner of steaks grilled over a petrol-fueled fire, Art excuses himself from the party to get a little sleep, then slips off to take a look around the base.