I’ve never forgotten what America’s senior agent in charge of the drug war in South America once told me. Holding his thumb and his forefinger horizontally in front of my face, he said, “We stay just this far ahead of the drug cartels.” The thing is, his thumb and forefinger weren’t an inch apart. They weren’t a millimeter apart. They were touching. There was no daylight between them.
That interview at the American embassy in Bogota was part of an hour-long program we were shooting in Colombia about the drug war. It shaped my opinion about the U.S. war on drugs. Each side has its wins. Each side has its losses. But the big picture is, it is a stalemate. It was then, and when you look at current statistics about drug use and drug deaths in America, it still is today.
That’s why I felt more than a touch of skepticism when I read this statement late last week from Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser: “Today, the United States is taking significant and historic actions to disrupt the trafficking of synthetic drugs, representing a major contribution to a government-wide effort to save lives and pursue justice and accountability.”
The trouble is, when we disrupt the cartels’ operations in one place, they pop up in another. When we disrupt one form of transport to the United States, they find another.
It’s not that we should throw up our hands in defeat. Deaths by overdosing on the latest plague, synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl, are going up all over America. However, we have to be realistic. By arresting drug lords and indicting their collaborators and sanctioning the suppliers who contribute to the crisis, we sometimes slow them down. We don’t stop them.
Yet if we don’t fight the drug war, then the stalemate ends, the cartels win, and the importation and infestation of drugs to the U.S. gets even worse.
And make no mistake, it’s a real war.
In Colombia we spent several days going along on raids in the jungle with the nation’s drug police, known as the “Junglas.” They are a swat team on steroids. We train them, we arm them, and we pay for everything they use, from combat helicopters to M-4 assault rifles to uniforms to canteens. As one American agent told me, “Everything is ours, right down to their lip balm.”
They need our heavy help because the drug producers shoot back. The year we were there, the Junglas lost almost 200 men. Some were killed in gunfights, some were lost to land mines that the drugmakers plant around their jungle labs. It’s the mathematical equivalent to the New York City police losing an officer to gunfire every eight or nine days.
I saw how that can happen. On several days the Junglas took a camera crew and me on helicopter raids against drug labs deep in the southern jungles.
This is where coca leaves are soaked in cement powder, sulfuric acid, ammonia, and gasoline to create cocaine paste, the last step before it is refined into pure cocaine.
The labs are built on the jungle floors, concealed by the trees. But U.S. pilots fly light aircraft— with armor protecting their underbellies— low above the treetops, and when infrared sensors detect heat down below, they mark its coordinates to identify the site of the lab. That’s when the Junglas go in on their helicopter gunships.
Here’s how one raid worked: we landed in an opening in the trees, with a second gunship circling overhead and firing on the ground below to protect us, then on the run we followed the Junglas through a barely discernible trail that had been cut with machetes by the narco-traffickers. We reached the primitive lab, just a collection of stoves, firepits, and barrels of cocaine paste, and the bare belongings of the workers.
The officer in charge put his hand in the paste and told me, because it was still wet, the drug workers had probably only run away when they heard our helicopters approaching.
We hadn’t even finished videotaping everything we saw when another soldier ran in from the perimeter and shouted in Spanish something like, “They’re coming back, and they’re firing.” So along with some of the soldiers, we ran double-time back to the landing zone, our helicopter came back down to get us, and we lifted off.
That’s when we saw a dramatic sight from the air. Not thirty seconds after we left the ground, a fireball exploded toward the sky. The lab we’d just left was blown up. The soldiers who’d stayed on the ground had thrown grenades into the barrels of gasoline-infused chemicals. The second helicopter then swooped back in to pick them up.
That was a win. But what officials told me was, there would be a new lab set up someplace nearby by the very next morning. That is the stalemate.
In another part of the country, near the Pacific coast, some agents with the DEA took us to see a fiberglass vessel they had captured, something they called a “one-way” boat. It was built only to carry cocaine. It’s not a submarine, it’s a “submersible,” visible only about a foot above the water’s surface, driven by only one man and designed, depending on its size, to smuggle up to ten tons of cocaine to Central America, ideally as far as Mexico, from which it then makes its way to the United States.
It is estimated that between the cost to build these one-way boats, plus paying the people who man them, plus the security, the bribes, and the production of the cocaine itself, a typical boatload that makes it out of Colombia represents an investment of about a million dollars. But depending on the quality of the cocaine, a single ton can have a U.S. street price between $50-million and $200-million dollars. So after a single trip, the vessels are deliberately sunk. Moving up to ten tons of drugs closer to the U.S., they have more than served their purpose.
That’s just one of many ways the cartels move their fatal freight. The Department of Justice says they see “cargo aircraft, private aircraft, submarines and other submersible and semi-submersible vessels, container ships, supply vessels, go-fast boats, fishing vessels, buses, rail cars, tractor trailers, automobiles, and private and commercial interstate and foreign carriers” employed by the cartels to transport their products.
Sometimes, they aren’t even moving consumable cocaine. To conceal it, they’ve been known to mix it with various powders and extract it on the other end. They even fabricate it into porcelain dolls and fiberglass benches and bricks. They’ve figured out how to extract it from those too.
The American agent who held his fingers squeezed tightly together told me, “The success picture for us is not that (drug) trafficking will completely end in Colombia. That’s not a reasonable end-state, there will always be some drug production.” But he justified the drug war by rhetorically asking, “How many thousands of metric tons of cocaine and hundreds upon hundreds of metric tons of heroin never reached the United States because of it?”
All true, but thousands of tons of cocaine and other drugs still make it out of Colombia. Realistically, no one expects to altogether stop it. And that’s because, if we are fighting to a stalemate down there, we are losing the war here at home.
When we got back to a forward jungle base after that helicopter raid on the drug lab, the Colombian major who led the raid said to me, “Tell your American people we are doing all we can. But we cannot fight consumption in your country. You have to do that.”
That part of the war is beyond the Colombians’ reach. And so far, beyond our control.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
And stemming the "consumption" is the only way that this war has a chance of ending. If there is the enormous demand there will always be someone to fill the order, and they will devise ever more clever ways of getting the product to the customer.
I see a separate aspect of the vast income that the drug cartels have in their investment in "legal" enterprises, from fabulous vineyards on La Ruta del Vino to multi story high rises in Acapulco. I'm sure that I have dined at one of their high end restaurants, here in Mexico. They are eagerly taking the snorted and otherwise consumed profits of their wares and are making vast fortunes in legitimate enterprise, across the world.
To end this war we must interdict on the end of the consumer. Al Capone knew how it works. Not an easy task, now that the addiction quotient is so far flung.
Great piece and unfortunate reminder. Thanks Greg. It's true world wide, if you have unlimited funds there will be ample numbers of folks you can corrupt to help you.