ONE man stood out from the crowd of peasant farmers waiting for a truck to travel up the steep mountains of south west Colombia. He wore a gold watch and expensive boots, and most people nodded respectfully in his direction.
The well heeled traveller was a wealthy, white skinned Colombian who, I was quickly informed, was there to make his weekly checkup on the progress of coca and poppy plants sown in this isolated mountain region.
The drug plants have invaded the Colombian mountain sides, easily outstripping corn and yucca subsistence crops. The farmers are paid six times as much as they make on any local crop: there is little maintenance involved and no transport costs as the buyer personally takes the harvest away.
Low world prices for coffee and other cash crops have left farmers with little choice. For the traffickers, production costs are minimal and the profits run to billions of dollars.
The drug is processed in sophisticated laboratories in jungle clearings and within a maze of poor neighbourhoods in Cali and Medellin, strictly no go areas for the police.
The drugs leave Colombia and travel overland and in small planes to trans shipment points throughout the Caribbean, where they are collected by agents on small islands with lax security. It has been estimated that for every kilo of cocaine seized, 10 more slip by unnoticed.
The implementation of free trade agreements has eased border controls between the US and Mexico and, by extension, the entire region.
Such is the sophistication of business that the top Colombian drug traffickers have handed themselves over to the authorities, receiving short prison sentences in return for confessing to a single drug related activity.
The infamous Orejuela brothers, heads of the Cali cartel, which controls an estimated 80 per cent of cocaine exports to the US, will be out of prison within three years, a state pardon in their pockets. Meanwhile, their children were sent to first class business schools in Europe, creating a new business elite that returns home to oversee the family finances, now tied up in thousands of legitimate businesses.
The Colombian government, to placate US critics, has tried a programme of eradication, offering farmers grants to destroy drug crops and replace them with legal ones. Research has shown, however, that many farmers simply destroy the drug crop, take the money and plant elsewhere.
The army is paid off by the traffickers according to the value of upcoming shipments. In Colombia, the drug traffickers take no chances, paying off everyone, from the communist guerrillas roaming the mountain sides to the president himself, who received $64 million for his 1994 election campaign.
The US government's well publicised and totally ineffectual "War on Drugs" strategy resulted in Colombia receiving equipment and weaponry to combat the traffickers. However, to satisfy another political agenda, this weaponry has been diverted for counterinsurgency.