Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It by Magnus Linton, John Eason Page A

has been ruined, but it has nothing to do with the occasional white catch making the fishermen rich overnight or turning them into alcoholics. It is because of the arrival of production facilities here — both plantations and labs. That is entirely new. Trafficking by boat has been around since the days of Pablo Escobar, though on a smaller scale, but now the entire malignant social and political cancer that spread warfare to the poorest corners of Colombia has taken root here as well. Just eight years ago there were no plantations in Chocó at all. Today, they are everywhere.
    Chocó is the latest chapter in the story of how most of the cocaine production in the world — from cultivation to processing and exportation — came to be concentrated in one specific nation, but it begins in the province that has played a greater role than any other in the production of and battle against cocaine: Putumayo. And the story has several layers: about how a war over drugs became a war financed by drugs, about how the cultivation of coca became the guerrillas’ most effective weapon, about why the US war on drugs failed, and finally, about how the white powder fuelled one of the worst refugee disasters of all time.
    Leo lets the waves sweep the canoe to shore. It is 10.00 p.m., and he is back on land. His daily work is done, and now he will see what is on television. Have a beer and a chinwag. Not very different from what he would have been doing had he been a millionaire. And when he turns his dugout upside down and the last of the bloody water gushes out, he says two sentences, and it’s not clear whether he is alluding to his catch that day or to his life in general, but either way they presuppose that he and his family can go on living here. Which applies to fewer and fewer people. Because the problem with the arrival of all facets of the drug complex is that the profits are now individualised while the costs are collective. What comes in the wake of this industry, people have learned, is always violence, war, guerrillas, corruption, massacres, and environmental degradation, and the price tag ends up pretty much even for the Leos and Luchos of society — even though these days it is mostly the Luchos, the guys with the motorboats, who stand to reap the benefits of the floating drums in the sea. The long collective tradition in Chocó has been cut short, and today the only thing that is divvied out in equal amounts is misery.
    What Leo says is that until he gets his miracle catch, he will just try to ‘stand aside’. To think of his family’s interests, not those of society. ‘I’m doing alright. As long as I can fish.’
    THREE MONKEYS ARE playing in the mango trees when Edgar starts the lawn trimmer, which causes a steel-blue smoke cloud to shoot out of the engine. His son quickly puts away his toy cars and his daughter hides behind an oil drum. Dad is off to work.
    ‘I have nine bags today. That’ll make 300 grams.’
    He straddles the mound of coca leaves as he runs his trimmer in them. The machine causes the leaves to spin as it chops them to tiny shreds, and in just a quarter of an hour the pile has shrunk to less than half its size. You don’t have to shred the leaves, but shredding saves space as it cuts down on the amount of air in the raw material.
    The lab is just a stone’s throw away from the shack Edgar and his family live in, and consists of a simple wooden floor, seven by seven metres, built on stakes and covered with a thin tin roof to keep out the tropical rain. In addition, there are four rusty oil drums, six cans of fuel, three plastic barrels, two bags of cement, a small bag of fertiliser, and some buckets with all the other necessities: sulfuric acid, sodium hydroxide, and potassium permanganate. On one side is the corrugated-iron chute, the most defining feature of a lab.
    There is now a 111-kilogram pile of raw material on the floor, like a heap of freshly cut grass, waiting to be processed and