‘Now, it’s not my job to tell you fellows how to carry on,’ he began, ‘but I do suggest very strongly that you don’t get involved in drugs of any kind. You’re bound to be offered them in towns, but for God’s sake don’t touch them. The vendors may easily be trying to set you up; they may even be plain-clothes police.
‘As I’m sure you know, pure cocaine comes in the form of fine white powder. But in Colombia there’s also stuff called basuco, the base from which cocaine is refined. It’s coarser and greyer — looks a bit like granulated sugar. Another drug to be aware of is burundanga, which removes your will to resist. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s just what it does. Villains put it into food or drinks, and then, when they ask for your wallet or your car keys, you just hand them over. As burundanga has no taste or smell, the only way to make sure you avoid it is to keep reasonable company.’
He paused, took a drink of water, and went on: ‘Fortunately, you’re going to be working with, and for, DAS, the secret police. They’re by far the most powerful official organization in the country. Everyone else lives in fear of them — they do what they want, and they can even order the army about. They’re a bit like the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, or the Savak in Iran under the Shah.
‘The sheer scale of the drug problem is difficult to grasp. If I say that Colombia controls eighty per cent of the world market in cocaine, it doesn’t mean much. But look at it this way: the drug barons are so rich and powerful that they have their own ocean-going ships, their own jet aircraft, their own islands, even, for moving their products around the world. If they want to eliminate some enemy, they don’t hesitate to blow up a civilian airliner in flight and kill everybody on board. A hundred and fifty innocent people murdered — that’s nothing to them, provided they get their man. On the ground, by the way, a favourite method of dealing with an opponent is to give him the Colombian necktie: they cut his throat, and leave him with his tongue hanging out through the slit.’
That made all the guys pay attention. This was getting interesting. It reminded me of the day at LATA when Morrison began to talk about the PIRA and its methods.
The drug business, our visitor went on, was controlled by a few regional mafias, known as cartels. During the 1980s the strongest of these had been the Medellin cartel, centred round the city of that name to the north-west of Bogotá. When the government tried to take it on, the cartel responded with a long-running campaign, during which the Minister of Justice, the publisher of the leading newspaper El Espectador, and the Attorney General were all assassinated.
When the president declared all-out war in 1989, government forces seized nearly a thousand buildings and ranches, more than 350 aircraft, numerous boats, over a thousand weapons and 30,000 rounds of ammunition. The cartel retaliated by downing an aircraft belonging to the national airline Avianca on a scheduled flight from Bogotá to Cali, with the loss of everyone on board. They also blew up the newspaper offices and police headquarters in the capital. Eventually a colossal man-hunt ended with the death of one of the Medellin leaders, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, known as ‘El Mexicano’. Subsequently most of his former colleagues gave themselves up, including the notorious Pablo Escobar.
That name rang a loud bell for me. I remembered being fascinated by a newspaper picture of a sleek young guy with thick black wavy hair and a lazy right eye, described as the richest criminal in the world.
‘As usual in Colombia,’ said the speaker, ‘it was a colossal fix. In effect the drug barons surrendered on their own terms. They were given token sentences, and allowed to serve them in a purpose-built prison at Envigado, Escobar’s home town, where they’re living in luxury.
‘When they were put away, the power of the Medellin cartel declined, and narco-terrorism subsided for some time. But all that happened was that the Cali cartel came up in its place, and the drug trade kept on growing. Cocaine paste continued to pour in from Peru and Bolivia. The Colombians refined it at clandestine laboratories hidden deep in the jungle, and exported pure cocaine to countries all over the world, but mainly to North America.
‘In the early days, couriers called mulas — mules — were used to smuggle the drug out in small quantities, but now that’s all gone by the board. Today, it’s big time. The Cali cartel has developed a system of flying planeloads out to islands in the Caribbean, then loading ships destined for Europe.
‘As I said, the scale of it defies imagination. In the mid-eighties Escobar alone was reckoned to be worth two billion dollars. The funny thing is, he grew up the happiest kid you could imagine, in a strongly religious home. But then he got expelled from school and drifted into crime — stealing tombstones, stealing cars. Before he was twenty he was into contract killing. Then he started driving coca paste from the Andes to the laboratories in Medellin. He made so much money that by the time he was thirty he’d bought a hacienda for over sixty million dollars.
‘The irony of it is that at the height of his criminality he was seen as a great philanthropist. He built hundreds of new houses for slum-dwellers in his area, and they all thought he was a saint. A very complex guy, by the sound of it: with one hand he was building hospitals for the poor, and with the other he was having whole families assassinated. One of his favourite methods of killing a man was by forcing a red-hot spike into his brain.’
He paused, looking round at our group of ten. Then he added, ‘That’s Colombia for you. Of course, none of this is directly relevant to your mission. You’re not going to be fighting the Cali cartel or chasing Escobar. At least, I hope not.’ He laughed.
‘Apart from the drug cartels, there are a number of terrorist organizations battling for purely political ends. In other words, Colombia is not an easy country to govern. The president, Cesar Gaviria, has just announced an entirely new constitution, but that doesn’t by any means guarantee stability. In fact, he has every need of a highly efficient bodyguard — and no doubt that’s why he’s called upon your Regiment for assistance.’
The next couple of weeks were pretty hectic. I was still on the SP Team, of course, and still training every day, half-expecting a call-out. In the intervals, I was working out what we needed in the way of stores and equipment, and the other guys on the team were going up to the Team Tasks’ Cell in camp to sort out the materials they would need for teaching the various lessons. Videos, slides, diagrams, paperwork — everything was stored in made-up packs, stacked in pigeon-holes that stretched from floor to ceiling. We also had a talk from the MO on the various filthy diseases to which we might be exposed: yellow fever, typhus, tetanus and rabies, to say nothing of AIDS.
In the evenings there was a special refresher course in Spanish, and the teacher from Cardiff who’d helped us earlier came up a couple of times to give us a flying start. In particular, she put us right on some of the ways in which Colombian Spanish differs from the language on the mainland — for instance, that ll is pronounced as y, rather than ly, and that a c before an i or an e sounds like 5 rather than th. She also produced some cracking local expressions, like carajo (shit), jincho (pissed) and cabron (arsehole or jerk). Of course, Tony could have told us these and a lot more, but coming from old Maria, they made a great impression. I told everybody to get stuck into their Spanish, because I knew that an important element in Operation Bluebird would be winning the hearts and minds of the Colombians. If we could communicate with them properly on a person-to-person basis, and establish good relations, the chances of their government ordering British arms and equipment some time in the future would be that much greater.