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

rhinestone stud in his left ear, and it is readily apparent that he is not a local. It is not so much his clothes or features that give him away as an outsider as his anxious expression, nervous body language, and obvious desire to participate in whatever is going on, to get involved. He is looking to make new friends. Someone with a lancha — a motorboat. He has heard of Lucho.
    John Wayne is from Buenaventura, a city inhabited primarily by mothers who have lost sons and daughters to drug-related warfare. One of these women, Fabiola Rodriquez, had a son named Jeffrey, who was shot by a paramilitary. Shortly after the murder, two men came to her home and warned her that if she reported the incident to the police, they would kill the rest of her family. But soon after that, the murderer was killed. Luz-Dary Santiesteban, a mother from the Buenaventura district of La Gloria, was recently informed that the six neighbourhood boys who had left a few weeks prior to ‘work in Chocó’ were all dead. Melba Canga, who lives in the Punta del Este district, found her son Pepe’s body one day in a pile of 12 massacred youths. The murderers — five policemen were involved, according to Melba — had poked out the boys’ eyes, doused the bodies with acid, and flayed them. The process is referred to as ‘rendering unidentifiable’. But they had neglected to burn the clothes, so Melba and the other mothers — fathers are usually missing — could identify whose son was whom based on their jeans, shoes, and body parts.
    ‘My mum told me to leave,’ says John Wayne. ‘It didn’t matter where. Just to get away.’
    The cocaine industry — in the modern guise of decentralised ‘mini-cartels’, which often work in cooperation with the police or the guerrillas — has been the largest employer in Buenaventura for a very long time, and the range of available jobs is endless: hiding weapons, moving packages, fetching boats, packing, purchasing fuel, killing snitchers, recruiting workers, collecting money, bribing authorities, conveying threats, diverting guards, and so on. But it was not until a new role started to generate a large number of jobs that rumours began to make even those at the bottom of the ranks uncomfortable. As the drug squad gained more resources and a better intelligence system, drug syndicates suddenly needed young people who could act as decoys and create confusion. Successfully launching a boat with, for example, 500 kilos on board will often require dispatching several other boats with smaller amounts to distract the law-enforcement officers so that the big loads can make it out while those on guard are busy elsewhere. The people running the decoy boats are either captured and end up in prison, or are lost at sea once their fuel runs out, while the people running the big loads stand to make 25,000 USD. The problem is that the young people doing the running never know what sort of trip awaits them: death or dollar. But Rodrigo, one of the teenagers in the town, claims that half of his classmates from high school are now working in drug trafficking, and thinks that the prospective payoff is worth the risk of getting caught: ‘All the young people in Buenaventura dream of being approached by someone asking them if they’d like to take a boat to Panama for 50 million pesos [25,000 USD] for eight days’ work. Who would say no to that? Who?’
    At first John Wayne is not completely sure why he has ended up in Pozón, of all places, a little hole in the ground in a dense rainforest landscape several days’ travel from his hometown. A huge rainbow behind him forms what looks like an enormous halo around his weather-beaten face, a rainbow that ends in what could be Panama, the place where most of the drugs are reloaded and the desperate adventurers get paid. With his back to the colourful arch and the scent of wet forest surrounding him, John Wayne says that, judging by his own family’s track record, the odds are