2 MOVEMENT
Juan Ramon Ballesteros cursed through his teeth and reached past his swollen beer gut for the cell phone lodged in the pocket of his cargo shorts. His sleeveless white T-shirt was already soaked in sweat, and the unlit Cohiba Behike jammed between his lips was soggy. It had been a brutal and unforgiving summer, the air so humid that it felt as though he were walking through loaves of warm bread.
Ballesteros was barely forty, but the heavy burdens of his position had drawn deep lines around his eyes, had turned his beard and curly locks gunmetal gray, and had left him hunched over with chronic back pain that struck like blows from a machete.
However, his physical discomforts were the least of his concerns: The four young men with gunshot wounds to their heads had his complete attention.
They’d been lying on the jungle floor for most of the night, and the early-morning dew had left a sheen on their pale bodies. The flies buzzed and alighted on their cheeks, their eyelids, and flew into their open mouths. Rigor mortis had already set in, and their bowels had released. The stench was ungodly and had Ballesteros turning his head away to gasp and swallow back the bile.
The team had come to set up another mobile cocaine lab, which was anything but high-tech and hygienic — only a few homemade tents covering mountains of coca leaves drying on the dirt floor. One tent was used for the production and storage of gasoline and sulfuric acid, among other chemicals necessary to manufacture at least one thousand kilos of paste per week. In years past, Ballesteros had given a few of his more powerful buyers tours of the camps, showing them the exacting and multi-stage process by which the product was produced.
While coca farmers all followed slightly different recipes, Ballesteros’s men needed one thousand kilos of coca leaves to get just one kilo of paste, about 2.2 pounds. For the tours they would demonstrate how to make one- tenth of that amount. His men fired up weed whackers to crush one hundred kilos of leaves and add to them sixteen kilos of sea salt and eight kilos of limestone. They would mix those ingredients together by vigorously stomping on them until they created a black, dirtlike mixture that was poured into a large drum. Twenty liters of gasoline were added, and the ingredients were left to sit for about four hours.
The men would turn to another drum that had already been soaking, and this liquid would be drained into a bucket so they could discard the pulp and leaves. The valuable product at this stage was the drug leached from the coca leaves and now suspended in the gasoline.
Next came eight liters of water and eight teaspoons of sulfuric acid, and this new mixture was scrubbed with a plunger for a couple of minutes, then decanted, leaving the sediment on the bottom. Sodium permanganate was added to the sediment, along with caustic soda in no specific amounts, just enough to drown the sediment. The liquid was now a milky white, the paste congealing at the bottom. The remaining liquid was filtered away via a rag, and the paste was left to dry in the sun until it turned a light brown.
The price for Ballesteros to produce one kilo was about one thousand U.S. dollars. When that kilo was processed into cocaine powder and transported to Mexico, the price jumped to $10,000 per kilo. Once that same kilo reached the United States, it sold for $30,000 or more to the street gangs, who then cut it with additives to reduce the purity and get more out of each stash. The gangs sold their product by the gram, and a single kilo could generate a street value of $175,000 or more.
Ironically, a buyer had once asked, “Why do you do this?” Didn’t he understand that some teenager in Los Angeles had just died by overdosing on the very substance he produced? Didn’t he realize that he was destroying families and ruining lives all over the globe?
He never thought about it and considered himself a farmer come full circle from his own family’s days working on the coffee plantations. He’d grown up in Bogota, gone off to college in the United States, in Florida, and had returned home with a business degree to try to start his own organic banana farm, which had failed miserably. Some of his friends in the banana business introduced him to several drug traffickers, and as they say, the rest was history. It was, for him, a matter of survival. After twenty long years as a drug producer and trafficker, Ballesteros was reaping the benefits of his high-risk occupation. His family now lived among white Europeans in a wealthy northern suburb of the city, his two sons were doing well in high school, and his wife wanted for nothing, save for more time with him. He was away most of the week on “business” but returned home on the weekends for family gatherings, church, and time to attend soccer games with his sons. In truth, he lived in his jungle house about a quarter-kilometer away from this lab and had, thus far, an excellent relationship with FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a paramilitary group that helped him distribute and export his product. He hoped his men were not killed by FARC members; there had been some tension between himself and a FARC colonel named Dios, a simple disagreement over price. Now Ballesteros’s workers had been executed in their sleep with what had to be a silenced weapon.
He speed-dialed Dante Corrales, his contact in Mexico, and waited for the young man to answer.
“You only call me when there is a problem,” said Corrales. “But there’d better not be a problem.”
“Dios,” was all Ballesteros said.
“Okay. Now try not to bother me again.”
“Wait, I’m not sure it was Dios, but maybe …”
The kid had already ended the call.
Ballesteros had met Corrales only once, two years ago, when members of the Juarez Cartel had come down to both survey his operation and offer security forces and workers to help him increase production. Corrales was an arrogant young man, the new breed of narco-trafficker with no sense of history or respect for those who’d come before him. These young
After another terse phone call with Corrales the week before, Ballesteros had learned that the cartel boss himself would be in the country very soon and that he should not delay the next shipment. He swore and went running back to his house, where he sent two more of his men back to the lab to collect the bodies.
Four old trucks whose flatbeds were covered with heavy tarpaulins had pulled up outside the house, and another team of men was loading the banana boxes filled with bananas and cocaine onto the trucks.
Ballesteros tried to hide his fury and disgust over the murdered men and shouted to his crew to hurry. The boat had already arrived at the dock in Buenaventura.
They drove over the potholed roads and were thrown hard against their seats in the hot cabs. None of the trucks had a working air conditioner, and it was just as well. Ballesteros didn’t want any of his men to get too comfortable. They had to remain vigilant, and Ballesteros himself scrutinized every passing car and pedestrian along the route.
Because this particular shipment was large (seven tons, to be precise), and because his operation had just been struck a blow by the murderers, Ballesteros was wary of another attack and opted to follow this shipment at least until the second or third exchange point.
The crew of a ninety-five-foot Houston shrimp boat hustled onto the dock when Ballesteros and his men arrived. The teams of men began the swift transfer of the cargo, using a gas-powered forklift along with the boat’s inboard net boom to move the pallets of banana boxes from dockside to the shrimper’s hold.
Not far off, near the end of the dock, stood two FARC soldiers watching the entire operation. One gave a nod to Ballesteros, who hustled up the gangway, much to the surprise of the crew. Yes, he told them. He was coming along. And how far was he going? Far enough.
They headed west for about two hundred fifty nautical miles, nearing Isla de Malpelo, a small island with fantastic escarpments and spectacular rock formations glistening in the sun. They would remain in the area until nightfall, conducting routine “shrimping” operations while tailed by a school of silky sharks. Ballesteros remained quiet for most of the day, still haunted by the images of his men.
Finally, a dark shadow swelled like a whale or great white shark off the port bow. As the shadow drew closer, the men on the deck shouted to one another and got to work readying the lines. The shadow rose from the water,
