The Cocaine Trade

The Stranger's feature on the politics and mystery of levamisole tainted cocaine, part two, by Brendan Kiley.

The Colombian cocaine trade has been tangled up in the country's guerrilla wars for decades: FARC fights the government, the government fights FARC, and the right-wing paramilitaries fight FARC on the government's behalf with an extra measure of savagery. FARC and the paramilitaries constantly jockey for territory -- to gain not only political power, but access to rivers, coastal mangrove swamps, and other secret routes where they can smuggle weapons and cocaine to fund their decades-old war.

The paramilitaries, according to Diego and his family, are the worst of the bunch. FARC at least tends to pay its workers, they say. The paramilitaries, on the other hand, have a reputation for stealing coca leaves from farmers at gunpoint and making their cocaine workers labor for months for little or no pay. Sometimes, Diego said, they pay you in lead -- a bullet to the brain.

"You can't talk about FARC or the paramilitaries ever, because you don't know who's working for who or who they've recruited," Diego said. "Even people you know are on both sides, so you can't be drunk at a bar and bring up anything -- your cousin's girlfriend might be working for the other side. People disappear and get killed all the time. It's very dangerous to talk, to do anything."

Read more about the cocaine factories, gangs, DEA intervention, corruption, and, of course, animal dewormer. No story about cocaine would be complete without animal dewormer.