Across the Americas

Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom: Tales of Drugs, Mules, and Gunmen
by Alfredo Molano
Translated by James Graham
Columbia University Press, 2004, 158 pp.



The Dispossessed: Chronicles of the Desterrados of Colombia
by Alfredo Molano
Translated by Daniel Bland
Haymarket Books, 2005, 250 pp.

These two books by Alfredo Molano, one of Colombia's foremost journalist-commentators, are treasures for those who care about Colombia not as a cause or an issue but as a beautiful and battered land, a home for struggling human beings. Each book is a series of stories by Molano's informants, told in the first person. Both sets of subjects struggle to survive in situations of injustice and the particular scarcity-amid-plenty that is Colombia.

In Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom Molano has assembled remarkable accounts of cocaine transporting and dealing -- stories gathered from Colombians jailed in other Latin American countries and in Spain. The settings of their tales range widely, as they travel in Spain, Peru, Bolivia, the United States, Ecuador, and Cuba, as well as of course Colombia. They tell not only of their cocaine-related exploits but also of their struggles in prison. We learn, for example, that Colombian nationalism holds sway in certain Spanish cellblocks dominated firmly by Colombian prisoners (pp. 114-15).

From Molano's informants we learn of numerous ways that mules (drug carriers) are recruited -- sometimes directly, sometimes through deceit. Often they are admirers of the United States. Those we meet here include an elderly woman, a nun, a woman making a delivery to fund surgery for her small daughter. Hiding places for cocaine are varied and sometimes quite elaborate: the drug packages arrive strapped to legs, rolled up in rugs, inside coconuts, in false bottoms of suitcases, and of course in mules' intestinal tracts, as shown in the film María Full of Grace.

Police collaboration, in Colombia and other countries, enables the trafficking to continue. There are fixes: traffickers deliberately betray the identity of one mule, or several at a time, as needed so that police can make their arrest quotas while the flow of drugs continues (p. 143).

One of the most fascinating stories is told by a man who joins a Marxist cell in Medellín in his youth. His involvement proceeds from reading to painting graffiti and leafletting to jumping police to take their guns, to further violence. After two good friends are killed, he becomes disillusioned and avoids the group. He is recruited, however, to deliver some boxes of tools -- which turn out to be guns -- to another town. Coming upon an army checkpoint, he and his companion shoot their way through but soon have to dump the guns in the Cauca River and abandon the car. Since the car's title is in his name, there is nothing for it then but to make their way to the guerrillas in the remote countryside. After the guerrillas permit him to depart, he finds his way to a man who owes him a favor and is introduced to a reclusive German, a Nazi official from World War II, who gets him involved in drug dealing, sometimes descending into real brutality.

The translation from Molano's original Spanish is generally strong, but the final editing of the English version can't be called meticulous. The name of Colombia's southern department (province) Putumayo is generally misspelled "Putamayo," Arauca in the east is rendered as "Aruaca," and the country's name itself appears once as "Columbia"! Such lapses are truly unfortunate in a book that is so focused on place.

The voices of The Dispossessed are more plaintive and draw us in more naturally because they are unequivocally the voices of victims. At times they speak with heartbreaking eloquence.

* Of the terror that causes families to flee the towns taken over by right-wing paramilitaries: "I was scared of living with death always hovering around me, afraid the kids would have to grow up seeing more bodies like that. . . . That was life in the town -- times of blood and killing that would come and go -- and you could always get caught in the middle by mistake" (p. 127).

* Of generations growing up orphaned: "The wars between drug cartels in the cities had left many kids on the streets without parents or brothers and sisters or anyone else to look out for them. I heard many sad stories from them, children who had seen their parents and their whole families murdered. They all harbored that pain in their souls, pain so terrible that none spoke of it" (p. 93).

* Of the reason that victims and survivors of state crimes often resist giving testimony: "Where do you demand justice when the authorities who pick up the bodies are the same ones who kill them? Who do you denounce the crime to if the authorities are all smeared with blood?" (p. 159). "No one knew what had happened, they said, and no one had seen anything. The police looked at us like you look at a dead animal" (p. 92).

* Of the tormented uncertainty suffered by those whose loved one has been disappeared by security forces or paramilitaries: "You need to see the body of a person who dies, so you can cry for him and put the rage that death makes you feel inside to rest. Without a body, the dead person stays alive, hovering around the living like horseflies around cattle" (p. 108).

* Of the loss of history and identity suffered by the displaced: "My last visit to Apartadó saddened me more than I can say. It was so hard to leave, knowing that this time it was for good! That all I'd spent on the house and all the work I'd put into it over the years was for nothing. . . . I looked at the walls, I got down and felt the floors, and poured some water on my plants for the last time. I went into every room and sat down on the beds. . . . I stopped in front of a mirror and stared at my reflection.

"'Goodbye, Osiris,' I said. Then I walked out, leaving all my dreams there once and for all" (p. 173).


The Dispossessed is buttressed by a foreword by Aviva Chomsky, introduction by Lance Selfa, and appendix by Mabel González Bustelo, all of which help orient the reader to the political and economic dynamics behind the raw stories of displacement the book tells.

--Ruth Goring