Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It Read Online Free PDF Page B

marimberos ). In this environment, it stood to reason that influential landowning families — and often the young males, in this patriarchal hierarchy — gained control over the commerce. This dynamic, between an isolated and illiterate agrarian population and an elite class who had easy access to the coast and its infrastructure, either by owning it themselves or because they were able to bribe those who administrated it, was fundamental to the export success.
    Initially, trafficking only involved small cargo boats and light aircrafts departing from docks and landing strips located on private estates. But as global demand increased, the need for new and more efficient departure routes arose. The cannabis lords invested in larger aircraft, DC-3s in particular, and made nightly departures from the commercial airport in Santa Marta. Air-traffic controllers, guards, and the management of the Colombian Civil Aviation Authority (CCAA) were bribed to ensure that the airport’s identity remained secret, instigating intentional ‘blackouts’ whenever planes carrying cannabis took off.
    Ever since then, the position of director of the CCAA — a role that would prove even more crucial during the next boom period — has played a pivotal role in the nation’s drug trade; but it has often carried fatal consequences for the incumbent. The CCAA and its management have been a buzzing epicentre surrounded by murder and political scandals, and it is still the centre of attention for those attempting to shed light on the role that present-day politicians played in the drug trafficking of the past. Álvaro Uribe, the revered right-wing president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010, was director of the CCAA from 1980 to 1982, and, according to César Gaviria, president from 1990 to 1994, Uribe was forced to step down for having turned a blind eye to the actions of his closest subordinate: a politician and civil servant by the name of César Villegas, who had collaborated with the mafia for many years, making airports available to emerging cocaine cartels. It is Uribe’s word against others about his role in past narcotics transactions, but regardless of the truth in his particular case, the drug lords’ way of dealing with the Civil Aviation Authority speaks volumes about how the marimba bonanza was the launching pad for a corrupt political culture that would soon become permanent reality — a milieu of nepotism and a system in which landowners, politicians, director-generals, and drug dealers spun an increasingly large, entangled, and bloodstained web.
    The fact that the marimba boom had its origins in the aristocracy made it, in some absurd way, the ‘nice guys’ bonanza — as opposed to the coca boom, run by Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel, with its roots in a much rougher, urban middle class. Los marimberos already had the power Escobar and his men had to gain by murdering those in their way, and today Colombian literature and folk music is replete with depictions, often satirical, of the cultural contrasts between marimberos and coqueros . One of the nation’s most famous television celebrities, who had connections to both worlds, wrote about this contrast when she recounted meeting the Dávilas — one of the largest landowning families on the coast, who had control during the cannabis boom and were also, incidentally, close friends with Colombia’s beloved president Alfonso López Michelsen. She wrote:
    Unlike the coca guys, who are, with few exceptions, like the Ochoas, poor or lower middle class, the Dávila family is an integral part of the coastal aristocracy. Los coqueros are short and ugly, whereas the cannabis kings are tall and handsome. A number of women from the Dávila family have married powerful men, such as President López Pumarejo; President Turbay’s son; and Julio Mario Santo Domingo, the wealthiest man in Colombia.
    Another aristocratic element inherent in the green bonanza was impunity. Colombia was and is