ZeroZeroZero

by Roberto Saviano

Where I come from, you don’t join merely for the money; you do it above all in order to belong, to have a structure, to move as if on a chessboard. To know exactly which piece to move and when.

An animal senses cowardice. And respects fear. Fear is the more vital instinct, and deserves more respect. Cowardice is a choice, fear is a state of mind.

Beasts have courage and know what it means to defend life. Men boast about courage, but all they know how to do is obey, crawl, get by.

The Colombians usually paid cash for each shipment. Medellín would pay—first in pesos, then in dollars—and the Mexicans would get their load into the United States.

Now the Mexicans could aspire to have a seat at the business table too. That and more. Much more. That’s how it works in big companies too; the distributor often becomes the producer’s main competitor, and its earnings surpass the head company’s.

Kiki Camarena’s story shouldn’t hurt anymore, maybe it doesn’t even need to be told anymore, because by now it’s well known. A story one might think is marginal, which took place on an unknown, insignificant strip of land. But Kiki’s story is central. It’s the origin of the world, I’m tempted to say. It’s essential to understanding where our modern world begins, its birth pains, its principal path. What we experience today, the economy that regulates our lives, is determined more by what Félix Gallardo, El Padrino, and Pablo Escobar, El Magico, decided and did in the eighties than by anything Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev decided or did. Or at least that’s how I see it.

Various testimonies relate that in 1989 El Padrino convened all the most powerful Mexican drug lords in a resort in Acapulco. While the world was preparing for the fall of the Berlin Wall, while the past of the cold war, iron curtains, and insuperable borders was being buried, the future of the planet was silently being planned in this city in southwestern Mexico. El Padrino decided to subdivide his activity and assign various segments to traffickers the DEA hadn’t fixed their eyes on yet. He divided his territory into zones, or plazas, each entrusted to men with exclusive rights to manage his assigned plaza. Whoever traveled through territory beyond their control had to pay the ruling cartel. In this way, traffickers would no longer enter into conflict over control of strategic areas. Félix Gallardo created a model of cohabitation for the cartels.

They say that the meeting at the Acapulco resort wasn’t rowdy or loud. There was no fighting, no melodrama, no comedy. They arrived, parked, and took their places at the table. There were few bodyguards and a menu fit for an important occasion, such as a baptism—the baptism of the new narco power. El Padrino arrived after the others had already started eating. He took his place and proposed a toast. A toast with several glasses, one for each territory to be assigned. Glass in hand, he stood and asked Miguel Caro Quintero to do the same: The Sonora corridor had been assigned to him. After the applause died down, they drank. The second glass was for the Carrillo Fuentes family:

“For you, Ciudad Juárez.” A new glass, and this time he turned to Juan García Ábrego, to whom he assigned the Matamoros corridor. Then it was the Arellano-Félix brothers’ turn: “For you, Tijuana.” The last glass was for the Pacific coast. Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo, and Ismael Zambada García, El Mayo, got to their feet even before being called. They were expecting to get that zone; they’d been viceroys there, and now, finally, they were kings. The division was done; the new world created. It might be just a legend, but I’ve always believed that only a legend of this sort has the necessary symbolic force to give birth to an actual foundation myth.

So the drug cartels were born that day, and today, more than twenty years later, they still exist.

Before he was arrested, El Padrino had managed to convince the bosses to give up opium in order to concentrate on cocaine coming from South America on its way to the United States. Not that marijuana and opium poppy cultivation have disappeared from Mexico. They’re still there, and the export business carries on. They’ve become less important, though, supplanted by cocaine and later by ice or methamphetamines. The decisions made during that meeting in Acapulco a few months before El Padrino was arrested helped the organizations grow, but without the guidance and recognized authority of the boss a fierce territorial dispute broke out among those who were still free. By the early 1990s the cartels had started warring among themselves, a war waged far from any media hype, since very few people believed in the existence of drug cartels. But as the conflict gradually became more bloody the protagonists’ names became better known, acquired popularity. They are sharks who, in order to dominate the drug market, which today is worth between $25 billion and $50 billion a year in Mexico alone, are eroding Latin America at its very foundations.

Cocaine is the body’s fuel. It is life cubed. That is, before it consumes you, destroys you. The extra life that coke seems to have given you, you’ll pay for later, at loan-shark interest rates. But later doesn’t count. It’s all here and now.

Mexico is the origin of everything. If you disregard Mexico, you’ll never understand the destiny of democracies transformed by drug traffic. If you disregard Mexico, you’ll never find the route that follows the smell of money, you won’t realize how the odor of criminal money becomes a winning smell that has very little to do with the stench of death, poverty, barbarity, and corruption. In order to understand cocaine, you have to understand Mexico.

Chinese merchants brought opium to Sinaloa back in the 1800s. Black poison, they called it. And since then, Sinaloa has been full of

opium. You can grow opium poppies just about anywhere; they grow wherever grain grows. All they need is the right climate: not too dry, not too humid, no frost, no hail. The climate’s good in Sinaloa; it almost never hails, and it’s close to the sea.

The cartel operates in the Golden Triangle, and with over 160 million acres under its control, it’s the biggest cartel in all of Mexico. It manages a significant slice of U.S. cocaine traffic and distribution. Sinaloa narcos are present in more than eighty American cities, with cells primarily in Arizona, California, Texas, Chicago, and New York. They distribute Colombian cocaine on the American market. According to the Office of the United States Attorney General, between 1990 and 2008 the Sinaloa cartel was responsible for the importation and distribution of at least two hundred tons of cocaine, as well as vast quantities of heroin, into the United States. Until El Chapo’s arrest in 2014, Sinaloa was his realm and he was viewed in the United States as having a significance akin to a head of state.

Fear and respect go hand in hand, they’re two sides of the same coin: power.

Los Negros made the first move. On September 11, 2004, Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes—he and his brother Vicente ruled the Juárez cartel—was killed in the parking lot outside a multiplex cinema in Culiacán, in the heart of Sinaloa territory. He was with his wife. Their bodyguard was helpless against El Chapo’s hit men, who fired from all directions, riddling the couple’s bodies with bullets. The message was clear: Sinaloa once respected the boss of the Juárez cartel, Amado Carrillo Fuentes—the eldest of the Carrillo Fuentes brothers—but it no longer respected his family. The road to open war was short, and the Juárez cartel’s revenge didn’t take long. Vicente ordered one of El Chapo’s brothers killed: Arturo, El Pollo, or Chicken, was murdered in the maximum security prison of Almoloya de Juárez on December 31. It was a tough blow for El Chapo, but it didn’t make him back down. For years the border city of Juárez was transformed into a war zone—no holds barred—between El Chapo and the Carrillo Fuentes men. But in the end El Chapo got the upper hand, undermining the foundations of his enemies in Juárez.

American presidents don’t talk much about it, but there are entire legions of narcos within their borders. During the twenty-one months of

the operation, more than $59 million in cash, more than 12,000 kilos of cocaine, more than 7,000 kilos of marijuana, more than 500 kilos of methamphetamine, about 1.3 million ecstasy pills, more than 8 kilos of heroin, 169 weapons, 149 vehicles, 3 airplanes, and 3 boats were seized in various states, from the East to the West coasts. An enormous success but a worrisome one, for its very scale was alarming. The American authorities looked the Sinaloa cartel in the eye, and what they saw was a multinational corporation with connections and branches all over the world, on whose boards sat supermanagers handling relations in every corner of the planet. Narco executives on Sinaloa salaries acted as contact points in numerous South American countries. And El Chapo was well along in conquering western Africa and making inroads in Spain.

El Chapo has a clear vision of today’s world: The West is in trouble; its ideals are in conflict with the market’s iron logic, so it needs lands without laws, lands without rights. Mexico has cocaine and the United States has cocaine users. Mexico has the cheap labor the United States needs. Mexico has soldiers and the United States has weapons. The world’s drowning in unhappiness? Mexico has the solution: cocaine. El Chapo grasped all this. He became the king of the narcos, the Steve Jobs of cocaine, with the mystical authority of the pope. Which is why February 22, 2014, will go down in history, for Mexico and the entire world. On that day, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo, the most wanted narco on the planet, was arrested. At 6:40 A.M. in a hotel in the center of Mazatlán, in Sinaloa state.

Cruelty is essential; without it you might appear weak, and your adversaries will take advantage of you. It’s like with dogs: Whichever one growls the loudest becomes the head of the pack.

Great criminal leaders often have in common the desire to create an aura for themselves, the desire to enchant, seduce. It matters little whether the objective is a woman to bed or a rival dealer to eliminate by convincing your accomplices that the bastard has it coming to him. Once you find the right opening, the way to a person’s will, you’ve won.

“In the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.” Nazario Moreno González, one of the most powerful bosses of The Michoacán Family, often quoted these words, by writer and Christian activist John Eldredge.

No financial investment in the world gives better returns than cocaine. Not even the record upward trends on the stock exchange are comparable to the “interest” coke offers. In 2012, the year the iPhone 5 and the iPad mini were launched, Apple became the most valuable company in terms of market capitalization ever listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Apple shares shot up by 67 percent in just one year. If you had invested €1,000 in Apple stock in the beginning of 2012, you would have €1,670 in a year. Not bad. But if you had invested €1,000 in cocaine at the beginning of 2012, after a year you would have €182,000.

The Rockefellers of cocaine know how their product is created, every step. They know that in June you sow and in August you reap. That the sowing must be done with seeds from plants at least three years old, and that harvest is three times a year. That the harvested leaves have to be laid out to dry within twenty-four hours; otherwise they’re ruined and you can’t sell them. That the next step is to dig two holes in the ground. In the first, along with the dried leaves, you have to put in potassium carbonate and kerosene. That you have to pound this mix really well, so as to obtain a sort of greenish dishwater—cocaine carbonate—which, once filtered, is transferred

to the second hole. That the next ingredient is concentrated sulfuric acid. That is how you get cocaine sulfate, the base paste, an off-white paste that then needs to be dried. That the final steps call for acetone, hydrochloric acid, and pure alcohol. That you have to filter it over and over, and then let it dry again. They know that’s how you obtain cocaine hydrochloride, commonly known as cocaine. The Rockefellers of cocaine know that to obtain more or less half a kilo of pure cocaine, you need 300 kilos of leaves and a handful of full-time workers. The cocaine entrepreneurs know all this, just as any company head would. But more than anything, they know that the majority of the peasants, dealers, and transporters who have found jobs that pay a little better than those they could hope to get somewhere else still have both feet firmly planted in poverty. It’s unskilled labor, a sea of interchangeable subjects, that perpetuates a system of exploitation of the many and enrichment of a few. Those few at the top of the heap are the ones who had the foresight to realize that, in cocaine’s long journey from the leaves of Colombia to the nostrils of the casual consumer, the real money is made through sales, resale, and price management. Because if it’s true that a kilo of cocaine in Colombia is sold for $1,500, in Mexico for $12,000 to $16,000, in the United States for $27,000, in Spain for $45,000, in Holland for $47,000, in Italy for $54,000, and in the UK for $77,000; if it’...

average 1 kilo of pure cocaine is cut to make 3 kilos that are then sold in single-gram doses; if all this is true, it’s also true that whoever controls the entire chain of pr...

The complexity lies precisely in not believing that everything is hidden or decided in secret chambers. The world is more interesting than a conspiracy between sects and secret agents. Criminal power is a mixture of many elements.

Ferocity is learned. You’re not born with it. As much as one may be born with certain inclinations, or have inherited rancor and violence from his family, ferocity is taught, it is learned. Ferocity is passed down from teacher to pupil. The impulse isn’t enough; it has to be channeled and trained.

By their own definition, Kaibiles are “killing machines.” They are put through gruesome tests, their courage challenged constantly, day after day, horror after horror. Drinking the blood of an animal he has just killed and eaten raw makes a Kaibil grow stronger. Guatemala’s Historical Clarification Commission has been taking an interest in these practices and drafted a document entitled “Memory of Silence.” It states that 93 percent of documented crimes in Guatemala in the thirty-six years of civil war were committed by law enforcement or paramilitary groups, in particular the Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil and the Kaibil special forces. The report also states that Kaibiles committed acts of genocide.

It works fast, in just a few seconds, and it’s highly addictive: The drug dealer’s dream and the drug addict’s nightmare, is what they say about crack.

The unpronounceable Latin name of this family of plants is the common denominator for all forms of cocaine consumption. This plant family has more than 250 species, but two in particular interest me, because they’re where cocaine comes from: Erythroxylum coca and Erythroxylum novogranatense. The leaves of these plants contain from 0.3 percent to 1.4 percent alkaloids, including the tropane alkaloids that produce the effects of cocaine on your brain. Erythroxylum coca is native to the Peruvian Andes, but it now flourishes even in the tropical zones of eastern Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Its main variety—which is also the most common one—is Huánuco, Bolivian coca. It’s also the most prized: Its leaves are big and firm, dark green with yellowish tips. The second species, Erythroxylum novogranatense, comes from the mountainous regions of Colombia, the Caribbean, and northern Peru,

areas that are drier, more arid. Erythroxylum novogranatense has two principal varieties: Colombian coca and Peruvian coca, the latter is called Truxillo; its leaves are smaller and more tapering than Huánuco’s, light green with grayish tips. But you don’t need fancy lab tests to identify these two species. Just put a bit in your mouth and chew: If you feel a slight numbing effect, you’ve got a good one, one that contains alkaloid. Huánuco and Truxillo, the protagonists of global commerce.

Just as an aristocratic lady would never step foot in a discount store on the outskirts of town, there are pushers for every type of customer, pushers for gentlemen and pushers for down-and-outs, for rich students and day laborers, for wallflowers and extroverts, for space cadets and scaredy-cats.

There are pushers who get their goods from a “base,” which is usually made up of four or five people. Bases are independent cells with strong ties to organized crime, because that’s where the drugs come from. Bases are intermediaries between criminal organizations and street pushers; they’re the ones who supply the stuff already cut, ready for retail, and they’re an insurance of sorts for the organizations: If the base fails or its members get arrested, the next level up doesn’t feel the effects, because those down below don’t know enough about them. The bourgeois pusher, on the other hand, has a direct relationship with an organization affiliate, but he doesn’t get a regular paycheck. He has a sort of deposit account instead. The more he sells, the more he earns. And it’s rare that he ends up with any unsold goods. The bourgeois pusher’s strength lies in the fact that he can create his own personal workforce over time. He uses fake names with his clients, or if he’s already known, he’s selective about who he sells to. When he can he prefers to hire people who have their own circle. The circle is made up of people whose day jobs are something other than dealing: The pusher supplies them, and they use their own contacts to create a regular clientele, usually made up of friends, girlfriends, lovers. The bourgeois pusher’s workers never sell coke to someone new.

It’s a layered organization in which th...

only the people closest to him and can never grasp the whole chain. That way, if someone were to talk, only one person would pay. That’s the way it always is in the world of ...

Cocaine can be altered—cut, or stepped—with various substances, which get added to the drug either during production or, more simply, mixed with the final product, with the white powder. There are three kinds of cut: active cuts, done with substances that produce the same psychoactive effects as cocaine; cosmetic cuts, with substances that reproduce some of cocaine’s collateral effects; and inert cuts, with products that increase volume without creating damaging effects. People may think they’re snorting good quality stuff, but they’re really paving their nostrils with concrete. Active cuts are made with amphetamines or other stimulants, such as caffeine, that enhance and prolong the effect of the drug, as in the case of Chalk—low quality cocaine that’s dressed up with amphetamines. Cosmetic cuts use pharmaceuticals and local anesthetics, such as lidocaine and ephedrine, that reproduce some of the same collateral effects as coke. When you just want to increase the volume to get more doses and make more money, you use innocuous substances, such as flour and lactose. The most commonly used substance for inert cuts is mannitol, a laxative gentle enough for children and the elderly that, other than in appearance, has nothing in common with cocaine.

Over the years I’ve seen just about everything there is to see in drug distribution. In Europe the average ranges from 25 percent to 43 percent; some countries come in lower, Denmark at 18 percent and England and Wales at 20. But these figures could change at any time.

The cut is where the real money is made, because it’s the cut that makes a line of coke precious, and it’s the cut that ruins nostrils. In London some bourgeois pushers hide quality coke in garages to put on the market when drug seizures make for a shortage of goods and as a consequence everybody starts cutting it, lowering the quality. At that point you can sell the really good stuff for four times as much. In an economy in which supply and demand fluctuate so rapidly, the cut becomes the discriminating factor.

The distributor can cut it, with the approval of the Mafia family. The base is allowed to cut only in extreme cases, and only with the authorization of the distr...

It acts on your neurons, makes your nervous system go haywire, and over time it damages it. In other words, it pisses your brain away. And that’s not all: It’s dangerous for your heart too; all it needs is an extra chaser to make it collapse, and if the product’s washed down with a Long Island or a Negroni or a Jack Daniel’s, or accompanied by little blue pills, well, then it’s like stepping on the gas on a curve. You also have to consider that cocaine is a vasoconstrictor; it constricts your blood vessels, anesthetizes you. All these effects happen pretty much right away, depending on how you do it: If you shoot up, it starts taking effect before you even realize it; if you smoke crack or freebase, it’s a little slower but still really fast; and if you snort, it hits you a second later.”

“The good moments? It wakes you up right away, raises your attention level, gives you energy, you’re less tired, you don’t even feel the need to sleep, eat, or drink. But that’s not all: It improves your sense of self, you feel happy, you want to do things, you’re euphoric, and any pain you might have disappears. And you lose your inhibitions, so it ups your sex drive, makes you more daring. And what’s more, coke doesn’t make you feel like a drug addict. A cocaine addict’s nothing like a heroin addict.

“If you do it a lot, you heart goes crazy, you have panic attacks, it’s easy to get depressed, you become irascible for no reason, even paranoid at times. Since you don’t sleep or eat much, you tend to lose weight. If you snort a lot for several years, you risk fucking up your nostrils. I know people who had to get their nasal septum redone because they snorted so much. I also know people who died: One dose too many and you have a heart attack. It’s common knowledge, after all; it’s not like I discovered hot water or something, but when I heard them say that if you use my product you can’t get it up anymore, I was, I mean, it’s not like I have that sort of problem, but a good chunk of my customers come to me precisely for this reason, and they all keep coming back; they’re really charged up, they tell me they fuck for hours, they have orgasms that electrify them from their heads to their toes, they do things they’d only ever seen in porn movies, things they’d never even dreamed of doing—a whole tribe of horny customers who, before they met me, would come after two minutes, and now they’re really having a grand time. I had to understand, but it’s not like I could ask them flat out, guys don’t talk willingly about certain things, and so I asked a woman friend of mine, she’s real tough and asks me for a bit of blow every now and then, but only because she’s finishing up med school and has to study all night, because she works as a cashier during the day to pay the tuition.

A shitty job that he knows how to do. He talks about it as if he has already weighed the pros and cons of his profession in his head and has decided to keep the cons to himself. Paranoia, for instance. There are pushers who change cell phones and SIM cards once a week. All it takes is one customer to be a little careless and you’re screwed. There are pushers who live like cloistered nuns: no contact with the outside world except when absolutely necessary, and a drastic reduction of one’s private life. Girlfriends are particularly dangerous; they can easily guess what your day job is and can easily take revenge by telling someone about it. Some pushers are even more angsted: They spend their free time erasing all traces of themselves—no credit cards or bank accounts, no ATM cards, and never a signature on a piece of paper. Angst and paranoia. Some pushers, in order to quell the anxiety, do the same blow they push, but only end up feeding their angst. And there are pushers, like the one I’m sitting with, who sound like stockbrokers: “I sell Ferraris, not economy cars. You crash sooner in an economy car; in a Ferrari you last a little longer.”

“The problem’s not the amount of money you earn, though; it’s that any other job seems impossible, because it would feel like a waste of time. You earn more just by brushing someone’s hands than you would working for months and months, no matter what sort of job it is. And knowing that you’ll be arrested isn’t enough to make you change professions. Even if I were offered a job where I could earn as much as I do now, I don’t think I’d take it, because it would undoubtedly take up more of my time. The same is true for those poor souls who deal on the streets. They’d have to put in a lot more time to earn the same amount of money.”

Or your gaze might get stuck in the past: Since “cocaine” and “Colombia” are still synonymous—a denomination of origin as inherent as Scotch whiskey or Russian caviar—the imagination continues to picture Colombian drug lords as the most powerful, the richest, the most terrifying in the world. But no regular person knows the names of the big traffickers anymore, or of the major organizations operating in Colombia. And yet, despite decades spent battling the Colombian narcos, the market share the country has lost is much less than one might expect in this era of global commerce. This apparent paradox makes it extremely difficult to grasp the current reality, to see its actual dimensions.

The alleged Lilliputians are no longer the absolute lords of cocaine, but it’s calculated that Colombia continues to produce around 60 percent of the cocaine consumed worldwide. And coca plants continue to take root in every cultivatable clod of Colombian soil. How can this be? What does it mean? The first answer is elementary, the basic principle of capitalism. If demand holds, if, in fact, it continues to grow, it would be absurd to cut off the supply, or even to reduce it significantly. The second answer is that the decline of the Colombian cartels corresponded to the rise of the Mexican cartels and of all the new, powerful players in the criminal economy. Today the Sinaloa cartel directs the cultivation and production of coca plants, cocaine paste, and cocaine in Colombia just as multinational corporations direct the cultivation and processing of fruit. But all this does not fully explain what happened in Colombia. It’s important to understand, though. Important because Colombia represents a matrix of the criminal economy, and its transformations reveal the full adaptive capacity of a system that has one fixed constant: white powder. Men die, armies disintegrate, but coke remains. This, in short, is the story of Colombia.

in. He said as much himself: “Everybody has a price. The important thing is to figure out what it is.”