Photo by Arno Kopecky

This Is Your Law on Drugs

Carmen’s nephew had been killed by unknown assailants. She was in the diner across the street from Acción Social’s downtown headquarters, sitting with Carlos Mario, tears in her eyes as she told me. Her nephew hadn’t been a gangster, she insisted, but simply the victim of a violent robbery, run over with a car and stripped of his wallet. Now the body was in the morgue with no id, and morgue officials wouldn’t release it to Carmen’s family until someone showed up with some sort of identification for the boy.

“Arno,” said Carlos, “in Canada, if you freeze to death beside the highway without id, at least the refrigeration is free, right?” He laughed and Carmen half-laughed, half-cried.

Carlos had news of his own. One of his nephews, who was seventeen years old and dreamed of becoming a pilot, had been shot in the leg when a gunfight broke out between police and a local combo as he was on his way to the store in Comuna 13.

“He wound up flying sooner than he thought!” Carmen said, laughing more easily now. “Got a free helicopter ride out of it.”

“They flew him to the hospital?” I asked, surprised.

“No, Arno,” Carmen said, patting me on the cheek. “I’m just fucking with you. People like us don’t get flown to safety.”

There was more. Carlos had a niece who had just moved into their already-cramped home. Cindy was thirteen and had been living in Comuna 13 until one of Sebastian’s combos told her if she didn’t start moving packages for them, it would be all over for her.

“She’d begun dating one of the pelao’s and that’s how she got mixed up in it all. But she’s safe with us now.” Sort of safe, anyway. Although Carlos’s neighbourhood was no Comuna 13, a fourteen-year-old girl who lived a couple of blocks away had just been found dead, her body mutilated with machete hacks. Word was that it had been a revenge attack after the girl’s mother had ordered a hit on a rival gang member.

“Fucking pela’os,” Carmen said, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes.

Outside the diner, the usual mix of tourists and well-dressed paisas streamed past, going to and from the beautiful bloated statues of Plaza Botero, named after the city’s most famous artist. The plaza was filled with amateur photographers all day, every day, snapping shots of the disembodied heads with enormous cheeks and tiny eyes as though it were all an abstract dream. Nobody noticed the long line that wound from the dour seven-storey building kitty corner from the plaza, where desplazados lined up from before dawn every weekday morning. This was Acción Social’s headquarters, the final stop in the bureaucratic labyrinth that Medellín’s displaced population spent so much of their lives navigating.

I had my own appointment there that day. The higher-ups had gotten word that a gringo journalist was sniffing around, hanging out with Carlos Mario (well known to them already), and they wanted to meet with me to set the record straight. And that’s how I landed an interview with Olga Londoño, director of Acción Social, the single most powerful person in Medellín when it came to the fates of this city’s 200,000 desplazados.

The creation of Acción Social was one result of Law 387, passed in 1997, which committed the Colombian government to “creating conditions of social and economic sustainability for displaced populations within the framework of voluntary return or resettlement in other urban or rural areas.” Insofar as it acknowledges the state’s responsibility to reverse the conditions that create displacement, Law 387 is generally recognized as enlightened legislation. But as one lawyer in Bogotá told me, “our libraries are filled with the most progressive laws in Latin America. The problem is getting them applied.” Between 1997 and 2003, Colombia’s constitutional court ruled seventeen times that the desplazados rights were being violated. Only a third of them were receiving the aid they’d been promised, and fewer than 1 percent had been given land to return to.

A Kafkaesque array of government branches deals with the displaced, with services ranging from boarding houses for new arrivals to free legal advice, but Acción Social has the final say in who qualifies for state recognition and how much they get. “Out of ten people who apply, two are approved,” an official from another department told me, on condition of anonymity. “Of the remaining eight, three give up and five apply again. In the end, four out of ten are accepted—but they still haven’t received any support, so now they have to fight for their cheques.”

Each morning at eight, a clerk handed stubs out to the first 150 people in line. Those were the ones who would get inside that day; having fought for their cheques on the far side of countless other queues, they were here now to see if that cheque was finally waiting for them.

We left the diner and Carlos and Carmen escorted me across the thoroughfare to the front of the line; the security guard wouldn’t let them past the entrance, so I pushed on alone while they went back to doing what they did almost every day: hovering among the circles of desplazados loitering outside, stoking their indignation and explaining how to word the legal complaints that occupied their lives.

A decrepit elevator transported me up three floors to a sterile antechamber, where I found myself surrounded by a knot of solemn, threadbare men and women waiting for their turn with the bureaucrats. “They killed my son,” said the first person to speak up, a slight woman whose grey hair was pulled into two severe braids. “He disappeared three years ago. I looked everywhere for him, until one day three men came to me in the street and told me to stop asking questions unless I wanted to end up like my boy.” She spoke with increasing urgency, blinking rapidly to clear the tears from her eyes. “When I kept asking around, the threats got worse: men were coming straight into my house. I moved to my sister’s house, but they followed me there. I moved eight times, but they followed me everywhere I went. Finally, I came to Medellín…” she trailed off. Other voices rose to fill the void, but suddenly the cubicles and corner offices of Acción Social opened up, and I was ushered inside.

“The reason they line up so early,” said Londoño, once we’d sat down with our coffees, “is that we paisas have the habit of rising before the sun.” A brisk blonde in her mid-forties, this was how Londoño waved off my suggestion that Acción Social was overwhelmed by the number of people clamouring for help. I’d meant it as a possible excuse for the neglect her constituents complained of, but to my surprise, Londoño seemed to feel that everything in her realm was going as it should.

“What about all the people who tell me their payments aren’t coming it?”

“Payments?” Londoño asked, perplexed. “No. What desplazados are entitled to apply for is humanitarian assistance. Not payments. If, having received one assistance cheque, they feel they deserve another, they are welcome to apply again. Then we will judge their case again. But if they are telling you that Acción Social is supposed to turn on a tap that sends an endless series of paycheques, they are simply lying.”

“Humanitarian assistance” sounded an awful lot like “charity” to me. I asked her at what point she considered to be fulfilled the state’s duty to reverse the condition of displacement, as per Law 387.

“What the desplazados need to realize,” she told me, “is they can’t rely on the state to solve all their problems. They say they’re getting nothing, but don’t their children go to school for free? Don’t they have free water to drink? Don’t we offer free hospital care?”

What these people wanted, above all, was empathy and respect.

She had a point—up to a point. The children of the desplazados did indeed have their elementary school and basic health-care fees waived, and many families succeeded in wresting a cheque from the government every three months for two or three hundred dollars. They were unlikely to starve in Medellín, a city whose public services were the envy of the nation, if not the continent, a fact few desplazados were willing to concede—whenever I asked Carlos Mario if it wasn’t unrealistic to expect a country as poor as Colombia to fully restitute four million displaced peoples, he blithely assured me the government had seized more than enough land and cash from the cartels to cough up the cash. But that was profoundly unlikely. If you accepted the government’s own conservative estimate of a displaced population of 3.5 million, and multiplied it by the US $6,000 promised them under Law 387, the bill came to $21 billion, plus administrative fees, before a single square foot of land was returned. But! What these people wanted, above all, was empathy and respect. Their government was miserly with these assets as well. When someone in Olga Londoño’s position told me the reason frail grandmothers and heartbroken widows and destitute indigenas braved some of the most violent streets in Latin America before dawn to wait in line—when Londoño said on the record that they do this because it’s in the local DNA to wake up early, and that everything is as it should be, I began to get a sense of the multiplied frustrations of the displaced. Their existence was precarious; most were illiterate and unskilled, uncertain how to survive in the city; they believed the government had a duty to help them become self-sufficient, because, after all, it was the government’s paramilitary wing that took everything away in the first place.

Carmen took one look at my face as I came out of the building and said, “You look like you need a party.”

 Woman on balcony

Photo by Arno Kopecky

The pig was dead and bled by the time we showed up, and the barrio’s kids were all piled around the porch to watch the man carving it up outside his front door. “It’ll be a couple hours before we eat,” Carmen said. “Let’s have a drink.”

Her neighbourhood’s fútbol team had won the city championships that morning while I was at Acción Social, and this was the celebration. We were a few blocks above Carmen’s house. The roads had been blocked off for several square blocks, and several stereos were pumping out cumbia, salsa, merengue, and reggaeton. Most of the homes were two stories tall, and the second-floor balconies were filled with half-naked beauties leaning out to catcall each other. Carmen knew everyone here; she whispered in the ear of an elderly boracho, who came back five minutes later with a bottle of aguardiente and three plastic chairs. We sat in the middle of the street and had to keep our feet planted firmly on the pavement to keep the flimsy chair legs from slipping down the steep incline.

“If you see anything you like, just let me know,” Carmen said, but before I could reply, a group of teenagers circled us.

“Where you from?”

“Canada.”

“Look what I’ve brought you!” Carmen said, winking at the girls in the group.

“Ever tasted white meat?” Carlos asked them.

“Don’t be afraid,” said a red-eyed boy with sunken cheeks, “you’re safe with us.”

“We don’t see many tourists in our neighbourhood,” said a red-headed girl of about fifteen, her eyes frank and curious. “Are you staying all night?”

“Absolutely.”

“But first a drink,” said Carmen. She handed out the usual plastic thimbles and we saluted the local fútbolistas’ bravery. The old drunk who’d brought us the bottle stood close by my side, drinking two shots at a time and breathing his rancid breath into my face. “Where’d you say you’re from? Doesn’t matter, you’re safe now! Nothing to worry about.”

“I’m not worried.”

“Not yet,” Carlos said with a laugh.

Friends and strangers alike flooded past. Their faces blurred into one as they paused to speak with the blond Canadian in their midst. Everyone insisted on sharing a toast. Our bottle of guaro quickly ran dry, so I tried slipping Carmen a few bills for another, but she put her hand up; “Tonight it’s free,” she said and called to the old boracho to replenish our supply. No sooner had it appeared than a quick succession of toasts to the fútbolistas and Canadian-Colombian relations drained it, and we called for another. “Do you like her?” Carmen would ask every time a new girl stopped to chat. They were all prepagos, available, Carmen said, for $20.

“Carmen lied,” Carlos smirked, “not everything is free tonight.”

Most of the girls still looked like teenagers; they giggled and rolled their eyes just like the girls I’d gone to high school with. “Not my type,” I kept saying, with growing guilt as Carmen grew more and more exasperated.

We were all tight by the time plates of sizzling pork started passing through the street. The meat helped, but inevitably there were ten times more people than food to eat, and I barely sobered up.

“Hey!” The sullen teenager was back at my side, his eyes even more narrowed and red than before. “You having fun yet?”

“Sure am.”

He looked at me suspiciously. “But do you really want to have fun?”

“Already am.”

He grabbed my arm. “Don’t be an asshole. I’ve got some cielo inside. Come on with me.”

Carlos and Carmen were lost in the crowd, and the boy looked ready to swing a punch if I said no. I followed him inside one of the houses, and we climbed the stairs to a bedroom on the second floor.

“What’s your name again?”

“Arno. What was yours?”

“Leandro. Here, friend.” He was happy now. “Only the best for our guests.”

There was something immoral and possibly even dangerous about sniffing cocaine with an underage stranger in the midst of a volatile city’s street party where you only knew two people—and both of them had disappeared. But I was seeing triple, and the two lines that Leandro chalked up for me brought it down to double.

“Vaya,” I sighed afterwards. “Thanks, amigo.”

He clapped my back and we went back outside. I found Carlos and Carmen standing by the porch where the pig had been carved up, chewing on a few last remains. “You two,” I said, “spend more time with each other than your spouses.”

“We were wondering when you’d say something,” Carlos said.

“How do they feel about that?”

“They’ve gotten used to it,” said Carmen. “How do you feel about it?”

“I lost all feeling about an hour ago.”

A light rain started falling then, turning within minutes into a downpour. “City of eternal spring!” Carlos shouted. “Let’s get the hell inside!”

We followed a crowd into one of the houses where both music and alcohol flowed. It was dark and loud inside, with a bar set up at the back that was manned by a pock-marked viejo and his equally weathered wife; they were pouring free rum and colas, shots of guaro, and cracking beer bottles open at a furious pace, hollering at each other as they went. A brunette with braces I’d apparently been speaking to earlier asked if I knew how to dance, and I lied, and soon I was dancing with her and three of her friends while Carlos and Carmen sat in a corner laughing at me. I couldn’t tell if any of the girls I was dancing with were attractive or not, so I slipped away to order a beer and went to stand beside Carlos.

“Some party,” I said.

“No kidding. Look who’s joined us,” he said, pointing with his chin, “but don’t look now.”

“Who?”

“Sebastian.”

“Who’s Sebastian?”

“You know who. El Alias. You can look now; he’s busy talking.”

And there he was, the biggest deal in town. Alias Sebastian, the man with a $1-million bounty on his head, leaning against the wall like he was just another paisa. He wore Converse shoes, grey stonewashed jeans, and a button-down silver dress shirt. His hair was dirty blond, his cheeks flushed with alcohol and spotted from childhood acne. He fit right in with the other fifty people flirting in close quarters. An updated version of Pablo Escobar, whose pot belly and mulleted hair had made him a populist hero precisely because he looked like the guy next door.

A few bruisers stood close by Sebastian, noticeably not talking to anyone. I saw them see me and tried not to rush my glance away. “Fucking booze,” I said to Carlos. “If I wasn’t so cut I’d go say hello.”

“Might not be the best idea anyway,” Carlos said. “But then again, you never know.  Guys like him appreciate balls.” Sebastian was laughing now. A row of girls was leaning against the wall beside the one he was talking to, waiting their turn. The men around him were all alert and sober, but Sebastian, though he kept his back to the wall and the entrance in his sight line, seemed not to have a worry in the world, unbowed by being the subject of a manhunt carried out by municipal, federal, and American security forces, as well as half the gangsters in town.

Excuse me, Sebastian, went the voice inside my head, don’t you think it’s interesting that your business model is so similar to the one being promoted by our neoliberal governments? No tariffs, no regulations, just a tax-free export to America with thousands of jobs created along the way. I know! And isn’t it an injustice that they want to arrest you for being a savvy, business-minded paisa, just because your product gives the occasional rookie a heart attack? So it’s addictive—is that any different from oil or gold? I bet you spend a lot of money on charity, like Pablo did, like every smart corporation does these days. Whatever you’re doing, it’s working, because it’s never been so cheap and easy to score a gram of coke in Vancouver or Berlin or New York. Congratulations for winning the war on drugs. But there’s something I’ve been wondering about: Where do you stand on legalization? It seems to me you wouldn’t be in business if it wasn’t for that crazy war. Anyway, as soon as Valenciano’s out of the picture you’ll have the market cornered, and there’ll be no more need for shootouts with anyone except the cops, right?

“Does everyone here know who he is?”

“Obviamente. Who do you think paid for all this?”

I looked at Carmen. “Did you know he was coming tonight?”

“Nobody knows what that guy’s doing till he’s done it.”

“Aren’t you worried that he’s here? What if bullets start flying?”

“His boys have the whole neighbourhood locked down. They won’t let anything happen.”

Forgive me, reader: I fled. Everywhere I looked, I saw assassins. Carmen and Carlos walked me out the door and accompanied me a few blocks down to the nearest streetlight, where we waited for a cab.

“Sorry I couldn’t find you a pretty enough girl,” Carmen said when one finally stopped. “Maybe next time. 


Excerpted from Arno Kopecky’s, The Devil’s Curve (Douglas & McIntyre, 2012). Kopecky is a Vancouver-based journalist and travel writer whose work has appeared in The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, Reader’s Digest and Foreign Policy. He is currently at work on a second book, The Oil Man and the Sea, about his experiences sailing along British Columbia’s oil-threatened coast.

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