The Drug War in six acts

Ben Wallace-Wells reports for Mother Jones:

... On September 29, 1994, a former DEA agent named Joseph Toft, well known in Colombia for his starring role in Pablo Escobar's death the previous year, sat down with some TV reporters in Bogotá. Toft had just retired, and felt newly free to speak his mind. Escobar's takedown, he said, was a sham; the whole operation—its politics, its execution—was designed to benefit the Cali cartel, whose leaders had enlisted the government to murder their top rival. The country, Toft said, was a "narcodemocracy." American taxpayers had spent billions to transfer wealth from one thug to another.

Colombians from Gabriel García Márquez on down were outraged, but president Ernesto Samper, whom Toft had accused of corruption, was strangely, almost poetically plaintive. "Our tragedy," he said, "is that we live in Technicolor, and the United States judges us in black and white." Washington's response was similarly measured: Toft no longer worked for the government, officials explained, but they declined to address the substantive point. Over time, the reason became clear: Samper, it is now alleged, had taken $6 million in campaign contributions from the Cali cartel, while Los Pepes, the patriotic hit squad formed to hunt Escobar, was chiefly composed of Cali soldiers, who got back to business once the unit disbanded. One, a notorious enforcer called Don Berna, would become one of the world's most powerful cocaine kingpins.

Toft retired to Reno, disillusioned. His former bosses had always talked a two-prong strategy: policing to stem drug imports, and hard domestic work—rehab, economic initiatives—to cut demand. "It's not a matter of the government putting out a few booklets, sending a few CDs to the schools," Toft told me. "I've been very disappointed in the fact that we've never had a true effort where the US as a whole says, 'We're going to reduce demand.'" ...

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