NUEVA COLOMBIA / PUERTO CACHICAMO You can get almost everything you need from this village track. Nueva Colombia, with about 200 inhabitants, has a bakery, a few shops and a small restaurant.
Mixed Georginan, 32, run by a kiosk. For example, it differs from Finnish kiosks in one way:
Shopping can be paid for with money but also with cocaine. There is so much drug here that it is used as a currency.
Instead of a purse, the villagers have pieces of cocoa paste in plastic cups or small bags. They act like coins when Georgina takes a payment from a kiosk customer.
– Wash your hands after handling cocaine paste. Otherwise, the mouth may be missing, Georgina points out and places the pieces of cocoa paste on the food scale. He and other local interviewees do not appear in this story in their full names for their safety.
The small village of Nueva Colombia is located in central Colombia. A lot of cocaine produced here ends up in Europe and very likely in Finland as well.
The Finnish Central Criminal Police (KRP) estimates that cocaine use has more than tripled in the last five years. The number of new users is increasing, especially among young adults and well-off middle-aged people.
Cocaine has increasingly become a party drug. According to the KRP, many today equate it with alcohol, which young people use less than before.
This story tells about the conditions under which cocaine is produced for the Finnish party.
FINLAND HAS COCOA expensive substance. It costs, for example, between EUR 80 and EUR 150 per gram in street shopping in the Helsinki metropolitan area.
In the village of Nueva Colombia, the prices are completely different. At the Georgina kiosk, you can get a roll of toilet paper or even a bottle of beer with a piece of cocoa paste weighing just over a gram.
A gram-sized piece of cocoa paste again yields a multiple amount of finished drug, i.e., crystallized cocaine, while the cocoa paste is later further diluted, i.e., diluted with other substances such as laxatives or painkillers.
WHERE DOES THE COCAINE THEN END? Georgina’s kiosk?
From the courtyards of ordinary villagers, where both food for the family and cocaine is prepared abroad. Most of the area’s livelihoods come from growing coca bushes and processing the leaves into cocaine.
Farmer Hector45, shows how coca leaves turn into a drug step by step:
First, Hector puts the leaves of the coca bush in a shredder and sprinkles ammonia and lime on top of the leaves. The shredded leaves are placed in barrels into which Hector pours other chemicals, water and gasoline. An acid mixture is then added to the mixture to color the liquid white.
If the barrel were to fall, the mixture containing ammonia would corrode the skin in an instant.
The smell stings your lungs and your eyes sting, but Hector and the other lab workers don’t have any protective gear.
Finally, Hector strain the water out of the mixture. At the bottom of the barrel is a dough-like mass that he carries from the laboratory to the family kitchen. Hector sliced it like a cookie dough.
The cocaine party in Helsinki and other European cities feels distant in Hector’s home laboratory. However, it is the first stage in the long journey of cocaine to the consumer.
In this way, the drug is smuggled into various European countries.
During the second half of 2021, 18.4 kilos of cocaine were left in the wounds of the Finnish police. More detailed statistics are not available for the whole year. In addition, small seizures of a few grams do not appear in the statistics.
An indication of the growing numbers is provided, for example, by the pre-investigation material of the Greenlight drug operation launched by the US Federal Police and the FBI.
According to it, 115 kilos of cocaine would have been imported to Finland last year. It produces hundreds of thousands of doses.
IN NUEVA COLOMBIA residents report that the village has zero tolerance for drug use. Hector also doesn’t understand that someone wants to pay for poison.
– Why rich Europeans waste their money on this, he wonders and shows a chemical broth.
Hector says he hasn’t even tried cocaine.
But the coke he still raises as it supports the family. He gets a harvest from his fields every month and a half, all year round.
Hector will have about 200 euros left in one crop after he has paid the costs of cultivation, chemicals and wages for the workers.
The whole family lives in a wooden house without running water. Electricity is obtained from a small solar panel. That’s enough to watch TV.
– There are no postgraduate study opportunities and we do not have the money to send children to the city to study. Here, men grow coca and make cocaine, women take care of children, home and cooking.
NUEVA COLOMBIAN VILLAGE not really should even exist. It is located in the middle of a rainforest and the whole area is a protected nature park. Nothing should be lived or cultivated here.
When Hector has finished cooking the paste, he returns to the coca lab to dispose of the chemical broth and the leaf mash left on it.
– Eventually the chemicals will decay, he believes.
The rule is that the mash is poured at least 50 meters from the river from which the Hector family raises their drinking water.
In reality, the area around Hector’s home village looks anything but a protected rainforest area. There are bald patches everywhere.
As a result of felling, the living space of rainforest animals is constantly shrinking. However, according to Hector, coca farmers play a small role in destroying nature.
– The government allows hundreds of hectares to be felled in the way of palm oil fields, he says, adding that harmful chemicals have also been sown in the terrain at the behest of the country’s government.
COLOMBIA IN THE EARLY 2000S reigning right-wing president Álvaro Uribe became known for U.S.-sponsored glyphosate injections. The intention was to destroy coca farms, which were also a source of income for the Farc guerrillas who fought against the government.
Glyphosate is listed as a carcinogen by the World Health Organization.
Glyphosate attacks also took place in Nueva Colombia in the early 2000s.
Colombia’s current leadership has continued the war against coca farmers.
Last year, the government destroyed by troops (you move to another service)thousands of cocaine laboratories and more than 100,000 hectares of coca fields. In addition, the president Ivan Duque would like to resume spraying before the May presidential election.
However, cocaine production has not stopped or even slowed down.
Cocaine is in the billionth business, which revolves throughout Colombia. Both local policymakers and high-level officials and politicians have become entangled in the drug trade.
Also, attempts to get coca growers to grow other crops have failed badly.
Six years ago, the country’s government promised farmers compensation for destroying coca fields. Many planted even more shrubs in the hope of money, but most of the compensation was never paid.
The compensation program was part of a peace deal in which Farc guerrillas, who had been at war for decades, finally laid down their arms. In practice, Colombian paramilitary forces and other groups fighting Farcia gained more power in the cocaine market.
Indeed, one of the country’s largest drug cartels is the Clan del Golfo, founded by paramilitary forces and distributing drugs to Europe.
Therefore, Hector does not feel criminal. Big drug money wraps cartels that arrive in Nueva Columbia for shopping at regular intervals.
– It is the criminals who buy cocaine and export it abroad, he says.
Villagers in Nueva Colombia live under cross-pressure from government and armed groups.
The Colombian government has carried out attacks on the area to destroy laboratories and coca fields.
Government troops in the area are also chasing guerrillas who have seceded from the peace treaty, keeping the village as their base.
– If the guerrillas camp in the vicinity, it is useless to try to evict them if they want to survive. That’s why the government accuses us of protecting the guerrillas or belonging to them, Hector says.
The situation is similar in other nearby villages.
IN THESE REGIONS also a person can buy cocaine.
In Nueva Colombia, next to the Georgina Kiosk, is a billiards room that serves as a brothel. One can be found in every cooking village.
Farmers, pickers and laboratory workers head there for a long day at work.
In Nueva Colombia, the billiard bar gives the girl 20 grams of cocoa paste for 20 minutes.
That equates to about 50,000 pesos, or 11 euros.
Crime commissioner Kimmo Sainio from KRP has been interviewed in the background for the case. Sources for story maps: KRP and InSight Crime.
Did the story give you new information about the conditions under which drugs are produced in the West? You can discuss the topic until Monday 4.4. until 10 p.m.