Patience and peril: filming Colombia's drugs trade

When Matthew Bristow began chronicling the Colombian drugs trade, he was a freelance journalist fitting in trips to the jungle between paid assignments. Equipped with a Sony Z1, a small but broadcast-quality video camera often used by documentary makers, plus – just as importantly – a lot of patience, he aimed to make a film showing leaf-to-nose the cocaine chain that starts in the Andean jungle and ends in European or North American nostrils.

That film was never made; Bristow ran out of cash. What he did make -- in two years and for, he estimates, between $5,000 and $10,000 -- is a series of films on the Colombian end of the operation. The growing of the coca plant, the jungle labs where coca paste is refined to cocaine, and the river ports from where kilo packs hidden in speed boats are taken along the Pacific coast to Mexico or out into the Caribbean. Ever-present are the guerrillas, members of groups such as Farc (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), who exercise control over the coca lands and profit from the trade.

Bristow's films are going up this week on guardian.co.uk (some footage from the first, with the coca growers had previously shown on BBC Newsnight).

Bristow brushes aside suggestions that it was as dangerous as it may sound. "It's time consuming," he counters. "You can get there in two days but then you hang around waiting. Then they won't let you film the first time." But finding the guerrillas has become harder as Plan Colombia, the US-backed effort to rid Colombia of its cocaine trade, has pushed them further and further from the cities.