Roberto Saviano - ZeroZeroZero

But Julio holds the trump card. He takes out a Colombian passport and passes it around to his former rivals and allies. The gringos have given him a new identity and a regular visa. Thanks to the United States, Julio Fierro no longer needs to hope for a tomb in Colombia. His gesture sets off a chain reaction that will change everything. But the big news in Natalia’s life is something else: Mariana, born in Miami, is a U.S. citizen.

• • •

These negotiations between the DEA and the drug lords — which sound like something right out of a novel — are less unbelievable than they first seem. The situation in Colombia is extremely complicated. The government’s credibility is lower than ever, incapable of holding any sway at home or of representing it abroad. In some respects, the United States takes advantage of this weakness. During the last year of President Ernesto Samper Pizano’s term, he was under investigation for having been elected through Cali cartel support, and Article 35 of the constitution is altered so as to reintroduce the long-awaited — or feared — policy of extradition. The Colombian president knows he has nothing more to lose.

For the moment, that’s all the United States can obtain through official channels. Unless they’re considered in this new juridical context the “under the counter” meetings the DEA promoted don’t make much sense. The concrete threat of extradition with no possible sentence reduction all of a sudden makes the alternative of near impunity in exchange for collaboration and the restitution of large sums of illegal money quite attractive. The DEA’s real objective is to corrode the trafficking organizations from within, to use the information obtained to prepare the decisive blow and to foster a climate of suspicion that generates exhausting internal feuds. Giovanni Falcone, the Italian judge killed by the Mafia in 1992, noted that pentiti , or criminals turned informers, were the legal weapon the Mafia feared most. In Italy it was possible, albeit with notable resistance, to strictly regulate the way criminals turned informers were handled. But for the United States the problems are many: Its widespread Law & Order culture; its international hegemony, which cannot be openly compromised; the very fact of approaching non-U.S. citizens; and finally, the urgent need to do something to reduce the power of cocaine, which, despite the dismemberment of Colombia’s drug-trafficking dinosaurs, continues to grow. The DEA targets every exponent of real power: bosses who still control the old cartels; high-ranking members of rising clans; and narcos for all seasons, such as Julio Fierro. But also members of Mancuso’s and the Castaño brothers’ Autodefensas, who are becoming an increasingly formidable threat.

After the Cali cartel’s fall, paramilitary groups started receiving many more requests for their protection services from emerging groups, such as the Norte del Valle cartel. But their own involvement in drug trafficking is reaching a level of systematic autonomy in direct relation to the increase in their territorial dominance. By now they manage every step, from cultivation to transportation routes to negotiations with buyers. Half the department of Córdoba cocaleros are under their control, half under the control of leftist guerrillas. They can now take each other on with the force of two opposing armies. In 1997 the self-defense groups formed a federation, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), or AUC, headed by Carlos Castaño. The Monkey was a cofounder, in command of AUC’s largest military formation, the Bloque Catatumbo, which would come to include forty-five hundred men.

The conflict is becoming less of an ideological clash and more of a full-blown war of conquest. Once the outer shells of extreme right nationalism and revolutionary Marxism are removed, events in Colombia prefigure the current postmodern barbarity in Mexico. The AUCs are the “founding fathers” of the Familia Michoacana and the Knights Templar, and they increasingly descend on villages in areas controlled by the guerrillas, wiping out the inhabitants. They use primitive tools, such as machetes and chain saws, to behead and chop peasants to pieces, but they plan their operations with cold military calculation, flying military planes hundreds of miles to the place of action and then flying out once the killing is done.

The situation has become intolerable. Public opinion no longer buys the rationalization for the killings, which merely repeats the same old story about the victims having supported the guerrillas. The strategy of balancing opposing forces has proven to be a disaster: Just over six months after the AUC is founded, the Colombian constitutional court declares the part of the decree that regulates surveillance and private safety co-ops illegal. Paramilitary groups are supposed to hand over the military weapons they’ve been issued and to respect human rights.

But it’s too late. Carlos Castaño has more than thirty thousand men under his command, and the income from cocaine trafficking is more than enough to supply them with all sorts of military equipment. Declaring them outlaws has only made them more ferocious. In old Hollywood westerns the pistol-carrying hero never turns into a ruthless outlaw. But in the land of coke, that and much worse happens. The Monkey has mutated into one of Colombia’s principal strategists of horror.

El Aro is a tiny village of sixty houses, which are more like shacks than homes, with zinc roofs and rotting doors. Compared to his fellow villagers, Marco Aurelio Areiza, who owns two grocer’s shops, is a rich man. But because El Aro is in FARC-controlled territory, he also risks his life every day. Because Marco Aurelio also sells food to the guerrillas. He’d be crazy to refuse: Who would ever dream of saying no to armed men who emerge from the forest? In the tormented land of Colombia there’s an unwritten law: Collaborate with whoever is holding a gun, regardless of what uniform they’re wearing. In fact, Marco Aurelio also collaborates with Salvatore Mancuso’s army, which comes and accuses him of supporting the guerrillas. It’s a bogus interrogation, because the village and its inhabitants had already been condemned to death days before. El Aro is like a bridgehead, an outpost that must be conquered in order to get to FARC-controlled areas. Its fate is also meant to serve as a warning to all the other villages.

The 150 men of Mancuso’s Bloque Catatumbo torture and kill 17 people, burn down forty-three houses, steal twelve hundred head of cattle, and force 702 villagers to leave their homes. Marco Aurelio is tortured, his body broken. When the police arrive they find his wife, Rosa María Posada, sitting vigil over her husband’s body. She doesn’t want their children to see his mangled flesh.

• • •

Everyone is convinced that drastic change is needed in Colombia. An election campaign is starting up, reigniting the hopes within the country as well as in the White House. One candidate’s résumé boasts not only of his defeat in the previous election because of the handful of votes the Cali cartel bought, but of his miraculous survival — he was kidnapped in the late 1980s while running for mayor of Bogotá, a post he held after his liberation. This politician, so unpopular with the drug lords, seems to be just the man to lead the country.

Andrés Pastrana promises pacification and tight collaboration with the United States. When he wins he opens the doors to the Great Alliance for Change, inviting congressmen from all parties to participate. The wave of optimism and grand negotiations has finally reached Colombia.

As promised, the new president negotiates simultaneously with FARC and the United States. That this does not generate immediate opposition in Washington is probably due not so much to the Democratic Clinton administration as to the global receptivity to negotiations. In war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina the 1995 Dayton Accords are put into effect. The peace process between Israel and Palestine is slowly picking up again, in the wake of the Oslo Accords. But the most encouraging example is probably that of the United Kingdom: Opposing governments are successfully negotiating a permanent truce and IRA disarmament. The end of the lengthy and devastating conflict in Northern Ireland is close at hand. “Peace” is a word that now flows freely from people’s lips.