Cocaine Confidential Read Free Page A

It’s been calculated that the capacity for making illicit cocaine in the Andes is now 150 times theregion’s peak capacity when the drug was a legal medical product at the start of the twentieth century.
    Control of the trade itself still rests firmly in the hands of the Colombians. Their traffickers and coke barons finance much of the coca cultivation throughout the Amazon basin, and it is estimated that as much as 60 per cent of the continent’s cocaine output passes through the country’s borders to be refined. In recent years, the much-feared Colombian cocaine ‘cartels’ have substantially changed their operating methods, gradually dispersing into hundreds of streamlined entrepreneurial groups who are constantly on the lookout for new cocaine production ‘bases’. As one South American cocaine expert says, ‘Their power has been diluted but that has made them even more lethal in many ways because they are much more desperate for business.’
    Right from the earliest days of the first big cocaine trafficking boom in the early 1970s, the Latin America countries that grew coca realised that the drug had the potential to provide the region with a lucrative homegrown product that could create a worldwide market. As a result, few foreigners were involved in the production of the drug and that has remained by and large the same to this day. It is without doubt these Andean historical roots that have also made the cocaine trade so difficult to infiltrate – and stamp out.
    The coca plants themselves have always grown virtually everywhere in the moist tropical climate of the Andes in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Today, much of the upper Amazon is still dotted with plantations where steep terracesclimb the mountainsides as high as 2,000 metres. Some stretch blatantly across the lowland plains, others are hidden in the forest. But the really good quality plants tend to come from areas not too high above sea level.
    The leaves of the coca plant are processed in jungle laboratories using kerosene, methyl alcohol and sulphuric acid. The resulting powder is dried, cut into blocks and transferred to ports in Colombia and Venezuela, routinely these days, for shipment to the US, Europe and beyond.
    The small growers at the start of the cocaine food chain – often indigenous people encouraged by shadowy South American criminals to expand their production in exchange for guns, machetes and clothing – rarely make much money. Pickers in the Amazon region might expect to receive £1 for a kilo of leaves.
    A family unit processing the leaves is likely to make little more than £9 profit on each batch of 40 grams of cocaine paste, and assuming all goes well, can produce three batches a week.
    Further up the scale are the carefully integrated operations in the eastern plains and jungles of Peru and Colombia, which can produce over 10 tons of cocaine a month. They can rely on a large labour force, a constant supply of chemicals, clandestine airstrips and enough weaponry to equip a small army.
    Ever-higher mark-ups are introduced at every stage. A kilo of cocaine in Bogotá currently averages around $8,000 when sold in bulk. On delivery to the United States the price jumpsto about $30,000 a kilo. In other countries it is higher. If the approximate value of South America’s cocaine export trade, before distribution, is $5 billion, the full commercial value (taking into account the fact that it will be ‘cut’ – i.e. its purity reduced by being mixed with extraneous substances – often by more than 50 per cent by the time it hits the streets) is over $25 billion.
    These days, cocaine shipments from South America to the US (despite steadily declining cocaine usage statistics, the most powerful nation on earth remains the world’s leading consumer of the drug) are often transported through Mexico and Central America over land or by air via staging sites in