In Colombia, an elite unit of soldiers hunt and destroy the jungle’s most dangerous beast – hidden cocaine labs that produce billions of dollars’ worth of contraband...

Hidden in the thick rainforests of the Amazon are sophisticated laboratories where coca leaves are marinated in a toxic chemical stew then converted into fine-grained Colombian marching powder. FHM international correspondent Jonathan Franklin rides along with Junglas – an elite division of the Colombian National Police as they attack producers at their secret jungle outposts.

A Blackhawk helicopter flies low over the Colombian jungle. Packed inside are 16 commandos with automatic weapons, grenade launchers and crates of C4 explosives. Somewhere down below us is a hidden village – a secret world where drug traffickers have built a collection of world-class cocaine labs.

From above, we can’t see anything but endless treetops, wandering hills, flooded rivers and the occasional dirt road. The flight route is designed to avoid populated areas; locals occasionally call drug producers and warn them the cops are coming. But, sitting inside the chopper is the Colombian National Police’s secret weapon – an informant! His face is hidden behind a balaclava as he guides the helicopter to his former workplace – a cocaine laboratory that produces 900kg of cocaine a week – worth millions.

Why did he leave the business? How will he spend the reward money? These are questions for later, now the informant is navigating the geography, helping Junglas – a platoon of elite Colombian National Police – who will storm the coke lab, plant explosives and send a mushroom cloud 150 metres into the sky. “Many of these informants know the land, but when you put them up in a helicopter they get totally lost,” one commando explains to me as the Blackhawk banks hard and veers down. Riding parallel to us, a second Blackhawk with commandos bobs and weaves. Above us a Huey helicopter prepares to unleash cannon fire in case we’re attacked.

Uncle Sam’s Hand
The floor of the Blackhawk is covered by 5cm-thick kevlar plates, making it bulletproof from ground fire. “It’s so heavy that you have to fly with two less people, but when you hear that ´Thump! Thump Thump!´ of bullets, you are really glad,” says Nick Callahan, a retired US Special Forces Colonel who works closely with Junglas. Callahan oversees Junglas during months of specialised jungle survival training and constant live-fire exercises – and he helps administer $1 million [over R10 million] a month in funding from the United States government. 

As their advisor for the past seven years, Col. Callahan– who everyone addresses as Mi Coronel – is proud as he spouts out the latest accomplishments of the 500-man unit. In 2007, Junglas destroyed 62 labs. From the Andean foothills to the flat grazing lands of Antioqua, Junglas have a singular mission – to disrupt the orderly production of cocaine.

“These guys are impressive because they are a police unit, but they are carrying out duties that a special forces unit do,” said Chris Ryan, the former SAS member and best-selling author of |The One That Got Away. Ryan, who recently spent a week training with Junglas, said “I know the background because my colleagues started this unit in the late Eighties.” 

Though the British army founded Junglas, for the past 15 years, the unit has been a US operation, the deadly tip of “Plan Colombia”, in which the US government pour money into the Colombian armed forces and police. Tools for the anti-narcotics police include 7 Blackhawk helicopters, 52 Huey helicopters, unlimited ammunition and even reward money for informants. Since 2000, the USA has provided Colombia with as much as $2 - $3 million [R10-20 million] |a |day in security aid, most of it to the police and army. When the Colombians want to take out a bigtime enemy of the state, be it drug lord or guerilla leader, Junglas are called in.

Callahan stops talking as the Blackhawk hovers over the coke lab. The tension inside ratchets up. The gunner begins to pray. He touches his forehead and chest – his fingers lightly tracing a ritual. This he repeats four times. These are the most dangerous two minutes of the mission, even with a lethal minigun mounted in each window. It was roughly at this height that the Colombian Army lost 19 men when a sister Blackhawk was blown from the sky by a Farc guerilla firing an RPG7 (a rocket-propelled grenade). “This thing looks solid,” says Col Callahan, tapping the window, “But after they went down, all the wreckage could have fit in the back of 4x4. These things are light.”

Prepare For War!
The minigun rotates, allowing 6 different barrels to pulverize the landscape. Each minigun can unleash 2 000 bullets a minute. But a well-hidden sniper can do more damage with just a single shot. Everyone aboard the Blackhawk knows that landing and takeoff are the traffickers’ favorite moments for an ambush. “They had a sniper on the hilltop, about 800 metres away,” says Junglas First Sgt. Borman. “When the chopper was at the same height as the hilltop, he fired inside. ‘Mi Commandante’ was hit here.” Borman holds his finger to the side of his neck. “He died instantly.”
No one talks as the helicopter descends to 15 metres. The face  of the commando across from me is serious and his helmet strapped tight. The sniper tightens the telescopic site on his rifle, while the medic chews on his earplugs’ strap. Each man has his bloodtype written everywhere – a big “0+” or “A-” emblazoned onto the uniform, helmet and nametag.

At ten metres, the rotors are so powerful they snap healthy trees. Gunners hang out the windows and scan the jungle for signs of a trap. The side doors slide open. “Jump, jump, now!” orders Esteban, a goofy looking lieutenant with glasses and complete poise. Six of us leap into the high grass. No incoming rounds or mortars – a good first step. The platoon fans out, commandos dive to the ground, their heads low, their M4s and sniper rifles ready. Rotor blades rip the jungle canopy apart. A cloud of leaves swirls like a mini tornado, then the Blackhawk surges away. A slow green rain of leaves welcomes us into the jungle.

Welcome To The Jungle
We remove our earplugs, and using a handheld GPS, head west. Not at a run, but with stealth and intent. The air assault has been heard for miles around. Every minute of delay allows the traffickers to pack up the evidence (hundreds of kilos of pure cocaine), melt away into the jungle, and crucially, plan ambushes against us. Handmade landmines – known here as “Quita Patas” [Leg Snatchers] – are the most lethal. At a 6am briefing in a hanger in Bogota, the mission commander cited landmines as your most likely way to leave the jungle in a body bag. “Four people were killed by landmines in this area last year,” he said. “Stay on the path and don’t touch anything.” 

The platoon is led by a three-man detachment that slides forward and follows a rutted trail. Horses and mules have ground away the dirt and carved a deep path through the muddy jungle. Then the radio crackles. Scouts have found a suspicious bakkie on a nearby road.

The bakkie is abandoned, doors wide open as if the driver slammed the brakes and, together with the passenger, sprinted into the jungle. The police catch one of them and lay him out spread-eagled on the ground while they run a check on his documents. The pickup is loaded with green and blue barrels, filled with acetone – a chemical used in beauty salons… |and the final stages of cocaine production. Even in fashion-conscious rural Colombia, a campesino is going to have a hard time arguing that 208 litres of acetone is for anything except a massive batch of devilpowder.

Jungle Pharmacies
“These labs often stockpile thousands of kilos of chemicals used to turn the coca leaf into refined cocaine,” says Callahan, as he explains the difference between a base lab which produces a thick yellowish paste, and the HCL lab where the paste is converted into fine white powder. “When you take out a base lab you are halting not only cocaine production, but also money for the FARC.” 

Cocaine production in this corner of Colombia is organized by the FARC – a guerrilla army that has morphed from preachers of Marxist ideology into marketing wizards for the multi-billion dollar, black-market cocaine industry. Years ago their targets were Colombia’s youth. Today they target a billion consumers in America, Europe and, of course, South Africa.

Profits from the FARC cocaine business (estimated to be at least R200 billion annually) are used to finance attacks on police stations, kidnap rich Colombians and purchase weapons for the shadow army’s 8 000 troops. An estimated 700 Colombians kidnapped by the FARC are still hostages hidden in the jungle – sometimes to be sold back to their family, other times traded as bargaining chips in exchanges to free their jailed comrades.

The Politics of Power
Five years ago the highway connecting Bogota with Medellin was controlled by criminals. For civilians, travel inside Colombia was too dangerous for all but the most essential journeys. They feared that FARC guerrillas would set up “fishing” posts, where entire families are ripped from nice cars and hauled into the jungle. Chained to trees and sent on forced marches, prisoners of war often spent 5 to 6 years in the jungle, their skin yellow, with weird jungle insects literally |hatching from their skin. “I had this red infection that moved from below my knee to just above the ankle,” recalls Ryan, a former commando who spent 3 months in the jungle. “Then one day as I was in the bath, I couldn’t stop scratching it. Finally the skin broke – 15 bloody spiders came out!”

Today the Colombian economy is booming at 6% annual growth, while the murder rate has fallen even faster. “Colombians felt kidnapped in their own country, you couldn’t move,” recalls Guillermo Galdos, the legendary Peruvian journalist who has a deep understanding of the cocaine business. “The days of Pablo Escobar are over.” Escobar, was, in the 1980s, the epitome of the Colombian cocaine cartel. Equal parts playboy, pothead (he rarely used cocaine) and psychopath, he turned the informal cocaine business into an organised industry. Then he poured millions in profits into buying community support, building schools, neighborhoods and public swimming pools. That he murdered hundreds of his enemies seemed to dampen his popularity only slightly. At his height of power, Escobar even offered to pay off Colombia’s entire foreign debt – a staggering $10 billion [over R100 billion]!

But can it work? Will Colombia free itself of the mayhem associated with the international cocaine trade? After spending a week in-country, interviewing everyone from judges to prisoners - the answer is a suprising yes. Junglas are the fine point of a very long spear jointly held by the Pentagon and Colombian government. Entire regions like Putumayo, which for years were under the yoke of guerillas, are now under government control.

The hard line taken by current Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is apparently a conversion from his early career as high-level collaborator with the cocaine cartels. A 1991 report by the US Defense Intelligence Agency describes Uribe – then a little known senator – as “a Colombian politician dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin cartel at high government levels” and even more damning “a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar.”

Uribe´s tight military relationship with the US has earned him enemies throughout South America, but inside his own battle-weary nation, the locals love him. With approval ratings bumping up to 80%, Uribe has made history as the first Colombian president to take out the FARC guerillas which for 40 years have beseiged Colombia with kidnappings,

Tall Grass and Hot Lead
Because the jungle area where the Blackhawk dropped us is a known FARC stronghold, Junglas only operate until 2pm. No one, not even these elite fighters, wants to spend the night on the guerillas’ home turf, even though they’re well equipped to catch and eat jungle animals. I presume this is just talk until they start chopping the heads off iguanas, laying the pieces over the lunchtime campfire. By 08h30 we’re already well into our march towards laboratory targets.  
The masked informant guides us straight to a lab on a ridge, under a barn-sized roof. As we approach, people enter a large house next to the laboratory. “Stop moving,” Private Lopez yells out. A young man ignores the warning.
“Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap! Braaaaaaaaap!” Forty rounds from M249 (the SAW) – a huge gun – stop him dead in his tracks. Private Lopez fires only warning shots, aimed high into the jungle canopy. But everyone tenses. The suspect doesn’t move. It looks like he’s stopped breathing.

Our patrol surrounds the lab, setting up a security perimeter of snipers, scouts and combat infantrymen. Built like a rural barn, the structure is two stories high, with sleeping quarters above and cocaine production below. Barrels filled with liquid cocaine are scattered around the jungle site, bushel bags of leaves are stacked outside, ready for processing. A half-eaten banana on the table is proof that the other workers have escaped – barely. On a far wall, rows of microwave ovens and electrical generators defy gravity. How did they haul that machinery in here? On horses and mules, the police tell me, as they begin to photograph and register the scene. No one touches or moves the lab much – booby traps are possible. Also, they are counting up the cocaine. Pressed into one-kilo blocks, the coke looks like tightly packed bags of flour. But each bag has a symbol – a brand. In this case, the traffickers are using stencils that say “Coke Cola”, identifying their own (not very original) marketing technique.

In total, the lab holds an estimated 500 kilos of pure cocaine – enough to produce millions in profits and fund a half dozen other coke labs in the region. Knowing that Junglas are on their trail, the traffickers often produce 200% or 300% of what they expect to export. That way they keep a steady flow of coke heading north, accounting for the near-inevitability that Junglas will get a huge percentage.

Up In Smoke
Junglas take inventory of the lab – hundreds of gallons of gasoline, acetone and other toxic, highly flammable liquids. Hauling the evidence out of the jungle is impossible without an army of horse or mules and Junglas has neither those nor patience, so they choose a more direct solution – C4 explosives! But first they soak the entire structure in gasoline – the thatched roof, the cement floor, the scales for weighing leaves and the massive blender used to chop the leaves into a fine paste. 

Just before detonation, a woman emerges from the jungle and strides straight towards the Junglas. Instead of looking scared, she asks for a favor. Could she remove the workers’ clothes from the lab? I expect the commandos to slap her silly for such a stupid request. Instead, they give her five minutes to clean out personal belongings, ranging from sleeping bags to razors. They briefly consider torching the house – which obviously has no other function than to shelter and feed the cocaine workers – but decide that would be a little too much like Vietnam, so they chat with the women and try to convince her to look for legal work. “This is the sad part of the job,” says one commando. “Many times they do not even know it is illegal to grow coca leaves and besides, what else are they going to make such good money?” He gestures to the jungle canopy as if to say, “What would you do?”

Now it´s time to leave – and to leave a message. Commando Reyes pulls a grey block of high-explosive C4 from his rucksack, slices off a chunk the size of a deck of cards and places the explosive inside a barrel of gasoline. With detonation cord conveniently marked off in one-minute segments, Reyes creates a four minute fuse and prepares to destroy the site. Other Junglas quickly move hundreds of litres of chemicals across the wooden floor... fuel for the fire. “Get lost, move it!” Commander Esteban of the 2nd Junglas platoon yells to his men, who are exhausted and resting on the benches. The men don’t move. “Out of here!” he repeats, and the men are still slow as the push their way back into the jungle.

The thick jungle makes for slow moving and we are barely 50 metres away when the detonation shakes the ground. The inferno makes a whooshing sound, as the air is sucked away. Then orange flames, 50m high, consume the building. Black smoke rises above the tree line – a well-known signal to |campesinos and the drug lords – Junglas are here.
As we wait for the Blackhawk, the guys chomp cereal bars, clean their weapons and munch on mangos that adorn every second tree in this corner of Colombia. The intelligence reports begin to stream in from the other three Junglas units. First the casualty reports arrive. One soldier badly burned when chemicals at a lab exploded in his face. A landmine ripped the leg off one policeman and killed another. My head is slightly banged up as a beam fell atop me in the explosion, whacking my skull and flattening me until the commandos pulled me from a rubble.

Then the good news – the Tulua Jungla unit hit the jackpot! Over 12 700 kilos of cocaine in a hidden bunker! While detectives in London or Moscow might celebrate a 20-kilo bust, for Junglas, that is only a crumb, a sliver. Junglas typically destroy 900kg-caches of cocaine, making it a good day for the commandos and a nightmare for the cartels they are trying to crush.

The History of Cocaine
For over 1 000 years, South American natives have chewed the coca leaf not only for for the cocaine alkaloid – which improves energy and respiration at high altitudes – but also for several other nutrients that the plant contains. Invading Spanish conquistadores originally banned the practice as “the Devil’s work”, but reversed their decision when it was discovered that without their chewing habit, the locals were too lethargic to work as slave labourers in gold mines.
Pure cocaine was first isolated in a laboratory in 1855 – creating a product that retained its brain-stimulating effects, with none of the leaf’s nutritional value. From the 1880s, it was used as a local anesthetic in eye, nose, and throat surgeries because of its ability to provide anesthesia as well as to constrict blood vessels and limit bleeding. Cocaine quickly became a stimulant used in many tonics and elixirs developed to treat a wide variety of illnesses.

“A teaspoon of cocaine a day, keeps the doctor away.” That was Dr. Sigmund Freud’s advice to patients in the 1890´s. Ever wondered how the staid Austrian was such a prolific writer, lecturer and investigator? That little spoonful of powder might be the clue to his legendary energy levels. “In my last serious depression, I took cocaine again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion,” wrote Freud. “I am just now collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance.”

Massive use and distribution of cocaine flourished in the late 19th century as the “white gold” was transformed into liquids, powders, soaps and even mouthwash. Cocaine was immediately heralded by European doctors as a wonder drug that cured fatigue, toothaches, headaches and a variety of other ailments. Vin Mariani – a distillation of coca leaves in wine – was endorsed by no less than two popes.

By the late 1880s, cocaine was being used both in Europe and the United States as an anaesthetic. By the turn of the century, it had become an ingredient in everyday items in the United States, such as hay fever elixirs and nerve tonics. These patented tonics could be bought without prescription for the relief of many common ailments, including, of course, chronic fatigue. Even Coca-Cola contained cocaine until 1903, when the ingredient was replaced with caffeine. By some estimates, the US public was consuming as much cocaine in 1906 as it would in 1976 – with only half the 1976 population.

Then cocaine took a break – from the 1920s to 1970s, coke was the drug of artists and outsiders. Few people considered it a drug of choice. But during the drug experimentation of the late 1960s, it roared back into the frontlines of popularity.

During the disco Seventies, coke was it! In the Eighties it spawned a stronger cousin – crack cocaine. Crack devastated the underclass in several cities of the United States, although experts still debate whether this was due to direct negtive effects of the drug, or to the violence spawned by its criminalisation. Despite the heightened crackdown of the past 20 years, under the so-called “War on Drugs”, cocaine continues to be as widely available as coca cola itself.
 
This article first appeared in the FHM March 2009 issue.
Words: Jonathan Franklin
Photographs: Morten Andersen


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