The Drug War Is Corrupt and Criminogenic, Part 2

Eyes Wide Shut in 1980s Colombia

Envigado, departmente de Antioquia, Colombia, early 1980s:

They were convent girls, sixteen or seventeen years old. After saying goodbye to the nuns at the end of the school day, they would walk out of La Presentacion, which was the most prestigious girls’ school in Envigado, and make for the street corner. There they were met by glossy, extra-large landrovers whose drivers’ plans did not include assistance with their homework. Still in their blue pleated skirts, the girls were whished out of town. Their destinations were the innumerable ranches of los mafiosos, men who in exchange for a few favours bathed them in gold, jewels, dollars, and perica (cocaine.) Not only was it profitable, but a lot more fun than double equations or the letters of St. Paul. And it gave them status among their peers.

The girls were paid to satisfy the traffickers’ every whim. Although they were sworn to secrecy, the mafia’s orgies became the stuff of legend. Envigado’s moral upper crust muttered darkly to itself about prostitution, sodomy, and lesbianism. A mafia driver described one party with the school girls: “They were made to strip at the top of the staris then to slide naked down the rail. Everybody took it in turn to meet them at the bottom of the rail with their tongues.

Envigado, the former model of old-fashioned Catholic values, the formerly prosperous and elitist town whose vigorous democratic tradition had yielded some of Colombia’s finest intellectuals, was sucked into a whirlpool of moral decline…

The carnival bullying and abandon of ill-educated and cash-engorged delinquents was modeled on the mafia leaders. The same man who ordered convent girls to slip naked down his stair-rail had a famous Brazilian transvestite forcibly stripped on his underwear in the middle of his act. ‘J M’ and his guests wanted to check out the genitals. The wife of the congressman Rene Masa, Cecilia, who was also suspected of murdering her husband and was eventually murdered in turn by Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha (The Mexican) as a favor to his orphaned daughter, was famed for snorting cocaine, organizing orgies, and appearing naked whenever and wherever she could. “It was Bacchanalia”, said one woman. “What had been a good Christian community was sodomized by the devil.”…1

Meanwhile, in Medellin:

Alfonso Lopez Trujillo was made a cardinal in February 1983. A student friend of Camillo Torres, the Colombian priest who was killed fighting with the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) of which he was a leader, Lopez Trujillo was at the opposite extreme. Yet, by the end of the 1970s, with his scaremongering about the Communist menace in the Church’s midst, was widely seen as a means to ingratiate himself with the new Pope as much to intimidate the Catholic Church into bending to his will…

So hated was Lopez Trujillo that 280 priests threatened to resign from their parishes if he were made archbishop of Bogota. Around the same time, in 1977, the archbishop whom Lopez Trujillo was trying to ease out, Cardinal Anibal Munoz Duque, reportedly told a group of priests in Rome: “Don’t speak to me about that son of a prostitute; [consecrating Lopez Trujillo as bishop] is the biggest sin I have committed in my life…”2

Alfonso Lopez Trujillo eventually failed upward: having been blocked in his ambition to become archbishop of Bogota, from his post in Medellin he became archbishop, and then cardinal. From that lofty position, he seems to have made the extortion of cocaine traffickers something of an avocation:

…Although the cardinal always denied that he had any contact with Pablo Escobar, or any other drugs traffickers, there was abundant testimony indicating the contrary…according to priests in Medellin, the pectoral cross [allegedly a gift from Escobar] was made of ebony. It was said to be studded with emeralds, pearls, and diamonds. Although the cardinal claimed it was a present from the Pope, Escobar’s mother, Hermilda, confirmed to me that it was a gift from her son…

Escobar was by no means the only drugs trafficker with whom the cardinal was implicated. According to Father Sierra and another priest related to the family, the Ochoas acceded to several of his requests for money…

1.(Whitewash, by Simon Strong. 1994. pp.66-68.)

2. (Whitewash, by Simon Strong. 1994. p.78.)

3. (Whitewash, by Simon Strong. 1994. p.79-80.)

(to be continued)