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Since then, an ultra-conservative and reactionary oligarchy has remained in power in Colombia. What this candidate stood for was some shake-up in the system. Gaitain was assassinated, conservatives were blamed for the assassination, and from there on we saw a civil war that dragged on up until 1958, when you saw the nucleus of the main body of armed resistance, which is now the FARC, take shape.

Ideologically, the Cold War was seen as a way to justify the state repression which continued. Something like 300,000 people were killed in “La Violencia”. But not much changed afterward. After 1958, there was no end to the class war. This was basically a war between those with land and those without land, which is important to understand in the political economy of cocaine in Colombia: that’s the land, the problem of land. And this dragged on after 1958. So rather than viewing it as a problem that’s historical involving land, they saw it as a problem of communism, but of course, once the Cold War ended there needed to be a justification to drag on this repression.

Conveniently, we increasingly heard terms like the “war on drugs”, “narco-terrorism” – and that provided ideological ammunition for the United States and the Colombian state and its ruling class to target the same revolutionary and main forms of resistance in Colombia. This included trade unions, student associations, peasant organization, and the same kind of what are considered subversive elements in Colombia.

So the “war on terror” you could say is a continuation of very much the same rational that the state was using during “La Violencia”. It is a continuing problem, which continues to be resolved by the state with force, which means to treat the security problem through military repression. So it’s a serious problem in the wake of this political economy because violence becomes the means in which this political economy can be maintained.

LS: When did the cocaine business actually begin big time in Colombia? According to the book Cocaine: Global Histories, before cocaine was made illegal by the single convention of the United Nations in March 1961 it came primarily from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. [5] Why was the shift taking place then from Asia to Colombia, Peru and Bolivia?

OV: In the context of the Cold War, it wasn’t just simply an ideological war, it was also very much a real war in where there was resistance to capitalist and financial arrangements that were implemented throughout the world financial system at that time.

In Asia we know, of course, there was the Vietnam War; we also had the Chinese Revolution beforehand, as I have mentioned before, and we know that drugs became a way to finance much of the counterinsurgency operations that were going on. We know for example that Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Kuomintang who fought Mao Zedong in the Chinese civil war and the Chinese Revolutionary process, was a drug trafficker himself. Many of the contacts that the CIA had in Vietnam, particular in South Vietnam, were also deeply enmeshed in the drug trade.

What was known as the World Anti-Communist League at that time drew much of these alliances and organizations together in order to finance much of their operations. But when the Vietnam war eventually draw to a close, what did we see? We began to see a shift, not only with counter-insurgency operations against what was seen as communist insurgencies, but also in drug trafficking operations.

This was essentially the time where I noticed, and this was of vital importance for the book, that the same kind of arrangements were emerging in Latin America. The regional section of World Anti-Communist League was the Confederation in Latin America, which was then headed by Argentina, particularly the military junta of 1976, and they saw by learning from lessons in Asia that by allying themselves and by managing drug operations themselves, and so forth, and by using the same elements to finance these operations against the communists, they could do the same.

From there we saw some very important unfolding of history, which was the great concentration of operations within the drug trade, in Bolivia in particular with the Cocaine Coup of 1980, where you even had former Nazis who were employed and used with their experience to undergo these operations. [6] The Colombians, long before they became the main cocaine production center, saw this as an opportunity to get involved and take advantage of the situation. From there we saw the beginnings of the modern cocaine trade in Latin America which is now global, and has reached a global scale.

LS: What function had in their time famous drug lords like Pablo Escobar? What was the secret of his success in particular?

OV: As an entrepreneur he did see the events, particularly in Bolivia, I think, as an opportunity. Before then it was marijuana, not cocaine, that was the main drug at that time in the late 1970′s. He saw a great opportunity to actually invest. He was the first to really begin to use small planes to traffic and smuggle cocaine into the United States. He became famous and a pioneer because he saw the opportunities at least from a capitalist perspective – what this would bring for what would became the Medellin Cartel.

He became after the Bolivian chapter the clear cocaine monopolist from the 1980s and so on. I think it had to do with his experience in the marijuana trade which allowed it to happen. He also made contacts with the very Bolivians who were providing him with the supply of coca. It was his far-sightedness to take full advantage of the situation.

LS: Despite the US claims that it is engaged in a war against drugs in Colombia, it is in fact engaged in an anti-insurgency war against the left-wing FARC guerillas, is this correct?

OV: This is correct. What is known as “Plan Colombia” was a program first devised by president Bill Clinton, and, as I explained, from the Cold War onwards we had that growing drug problem in Colombia. What Clinton saw as the solution to deal with the insurgency was to say: Let’s give it a drug package. What “Plan Colombia” did though was under the mask of the war on drugs it actually made it into a military package itself. Most of the money had military operations and training in focus. So what this did since the late 1990s is in fact make it a war against the FARC guerrillas.

You have to take into account that the FARC have been there long before the cocaine trade appeared in the 1980s or the cocaine decade when it became big time. And so by focusing on the FARC, they can also be blamed for the drug trade. The New York Times is good at that, they see them seen as narco-terrorists. So the Colombian state can say: Well, we are fighting a war on drugs and terror, and the United States can also say: Well, they are our key partners in the Western hemisphere in this war. And they can also gear themselves to deal with the broader politics in the region, to deal with Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and other nations which are fast becoming much more independent and left-leaning.

So it brings in a whole lot of other politics into question, but by fighting the FARC as the main threat to the Colombian state it deals with it in a very military way. They are a threat indeed, because they are not simply as they are called narco-terrorists, they are a group that has been indigenous to the history of Colombia, which past presidencies have actually acknowledged. But since September 11, 2001, there has been this increasing radicalization by the ruling class in Colombia to see no other alternative but finally to destroy the FARC once and for all.

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