Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It by Magnus Linton, John Eason Read Free Book Online

begun to boom.
    Diego worked for an organisation that controlled drug trading in a neighbourhood of Medellín, and was just one of the many to fall prey, according to a pattern of violence that has become a nationwide trend. When one armed group reigns over a territory everything is calm, and people for the most part are happy and content. It does not usually matter, at least to the poor, whether the guerrillas, a paramilitary group, or the government is in control, as long as there is peace and stability. The real chaos begins when fighting breaks out over territories, and killing ensues on a large scale.
    It is the same with drugs. Routes, labs, growing regions, and shops are all relatively calm, and usually completely undetectable, as long as one drug lord and his military apparatus have control. But as soon as he is caught or killed, all hell breaks loose, as previously peaceful areas are quickly transformed into the worst war zones imaginable. Poverty is so widespread throughout the entire cocaine region, from Bolivia to Peru, Colombia, Central America, Mexico, and Venezuela, that when any link in the chain is broken there are always thousands of candidates ready to replace it. Some of the violence generated by the cocaine industry has to do with the murdering of police, prosecutors, politicians, journalists, and others who stand in the way of the mafia and their financial interests, but the vast majority of those dying in drug-related violence are poor young men battling over rank within their own criminal hierarchies.
    Since the death of Escobar, Medellín’s criminal elements had been kept in check by Diego Murillo, aka Don Berna, El Patrón’s one-time partner who then allied himself with the Colombian military and the United States in the war against the Medellín Cartel. As long as he ruled the city’s criminal network with an iron fist, everything was calm. Berna’s philosophy was quite simple: don’t rock the boat. The criminal world soon became the lubricant for the law-abiding one, and because it strengthened the already existing power structures, it was allowed to carry on without obstruction. Between 1998 and 2002, with the help of the military, Don Berna succeeded in purging Medellín of all guerrilla groups, a process that resulted in a temporary spike in the murder rate — in 2001 the city once again reported unparalleled statistics, with 220 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. However, when the last urban strongholds of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the FARC) were dealt the final deathblow, peace prevailed. Shortly thereafter Don Berna consolidated his rule over the 200 crime gangs in town, totaling 8000 young people. Homicide rates dropped dramatically. As long as law enforcement kept out of drug matters — along with any number of other, more sophisticated illegal activities associated with his criminal syndicate — Berna was more than willing to cooperate with the government in its efforts to combat common revolutionaries, as well as street crime such as robbery, car theft, rape, riots, and other atrocities committed against the general public.
    It looked as though Medellín was finally entering a golden age. The price tag, however, was not just the death of the guerrillas, but also of thousands of innocent people. Human-rights organisations reported finding large numbers of bodies in the shantytowns, and Don Berna would later explain that this was the unfortunate price of having to re-create the ‘necessary climate [for] investment returns, particularly foreign, which is fundamental if we do not want to be left behind by the engine of globalisation’.
    Diego Cuevas’ downfall was that Don Berna’s reign, like Escobar’s before it, came to an end. In an effort to demobilise the Colombian paramilitary groups, the government ran a demobilisation program in the 2000s. Berna, along with a number of other drug terrorists, decided to turn himself in, in exchange for a greatly