Toby Muse: "Politicians will be afraid to attack the mafias because of the harm it could cause to the economy"

BarcelonaCapitán Swing has translated into Spanish the 15 years of work of journalist Toby Muse in Colombia reporting on drug trafficking. In Kilo: The Secret World of the Cocaine Cartels, this London-born reporter attempts to recover – with the help of translator Victoria Pradilla – the English journalism of American authors from the 70s, such as Joan Didion, Michael Herr or Tom Wolfe.

Óscar Martínez, in his book The Dead and the Journalist, says that El Salvador is the bloodiest corner of the world. You expand on this: a third of today's deaths occur in the part of the planet between Chile and Mexico.

— The American continent is incredibly violent. I have covered the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and you don't see the level of homicides that has been normalized in places like Colombia, El Salvador, or Mexico. There is a tradition of political violence and organized crime. Furthermore, class warfare is brutal. It is the perfect territory for cocaine cartels to take root.

For the mafia, life is worth nothing. In Colombia, a hitman can kill for $100.

— You cannot understand Colombia without Pablo Escobar, but if you don't understand Gabriel García Márquez, you also don't understand the country. It's beauty and good people trying to create a new country in the face of those who live in violence, covered in blood. In Colombia, killing someone is incredibly cheap. Violence has become normalized even among ordinary people. The most common thing if someone sees a dead person in the street is to walk past and say: "They must have done something." All the major cities in Colombia have an Oficina, which is an organized office of hitmen. It's madness. Hitmen are no longer only used by the mafia: they have become so normalized that if two partners have a disagreement in a business, one of them might hire a hitman.

Is this violence exportable to Europe?

— It won't reach the levels of Caracas or Cali, but I fear a wave of violence is reaching Europe. Cocaine has a lot of money to corrupt people. I've lived in Europe and I read news like "A 15-year-old hitman in Marseille". This looks like El Salvador. Or a judge threatened in France over a drug trafficking case. This is Latin American-style violence. There's no war yet because all these mafias are making money, but the history of Ecuador or Mexico teaches us that when you pressure mafias a bit, they go to war with each other. What have they done with all the profits? Recruit men and buy weapons. I think we'll see something similar to what happened in Colombia when Pablo Escobar killed Minister Lara Bonilla. I fear that in Spain, Rotterdam or London, a judge will be murdered while investigating a drug trafficking case and then we'll say: "We have a huge problem".

It is already happening in some parts of Europe. With the Mocro Mafia in Sweden, for example.

— And this is just the beginning. It will get worse because they have a lot of money. In Colombia, you can buy a kilo of cocaine for $1,000 or $2,000. If you take it to Australia, you sell it for $250,000. People kill for this money.

In the book you say that the war on drugs "is lost".

— If you sat down in Colombia at a dinner party with politicians and said that you could win the war on drugs, they would think you were a lunatic or drunk. In the United States they still think they can win. It's absurd. We lost that war just as we lost the one on alcohol with prohibition. We have turned mediocre men into characters like El Chapo. El Chapo was no genius, for God's sake! Pablo Escobar was a murderer who stole cars, and now he seems like a business genius. Al Capone was a criminal. But we've made these monsters millionaires because we took their product and made it illegal and therefore more expensive. The black market of prohibition creates the problems we suffer. I don't know what the solution is, but I know that what we are doing isn't working.

Talking about legalizing cocaine?

— I have a somewhat libertarian philosophy: your body is yours and you decide what to do with it. You know better than Donald Trump or Keir Starmer what suits you. If you want to spend the day smoking weed, that's your decision, even though I don't think it's a good idea, just as I don't think it's a good idea to drink whisky on a Tuesday at 11 in the morning. The idea is that if you treat an adult like an adult, they will act like one. If you treat them like a child, they will act like a child. I live between England and Washington D.C. In Washington we have decriminalized marijuana and now the city smells of weed all day, everywhere. I go into Starbucks and half the people are stoned. They don't act like adults. What would happen if we sold cocaine or heroin at the corner pharmacy? Maybe that's the solution.

A second quote, by Patrick Radden Keefe: "In the 20th century, power was proclaimed. In the 21st, the surest way to identify power is the lack of pretension." The narcos have understood this perfectly.

— Colombian narcos learned much faster than Mexicans. They learned that if your name makes it to the front page of the newspaper, your expiration date has begun because the CIA and DEA will be looking for you and you will not survive. Now we call them the invisible ones. They look like international executives sitting next to you in business class in a dark suit. They are much harder to detect and are much smarter when it comes to injecting money into the legal economy. This is another fear for Europe: there will come a time when politicians will be afraid to attack these mafias because of the harm this could cause to the economy. When the Cali cartel was captured in the 90s, construction in the city fell by 80%.

¿Can Colombia abandon cocaine and seek economic alternatives?

— They must be capable. As long as Colombia has cocaine, it will not know peace. The 2016 peace process was a historic opportunity, but the Colombian government botched it due to corruption and for not finishing the job. The world should help Colombia, but we treat it as if it were only its problem. We throw them a few million euros or dollars and tell them: "Solve it." Meanwhile, Colombia produces more cocaine than ever because the world consumes more than ever. Colombia produces because we consume. We are the culprits. We are the engine of this industry.

How did you get a drug trafficker or a hitman to trust you?

— The mafia doesn't like outsiders. I made friends in that world many years ago, when I was young, going out to parties in discotheques. Partying is central to narco culture: it's where they show off the girls, the new watch, the $500 shirt... It's an absurd consumerist culture. Through some traffickers' girlfriends, I ended up meeting the boyfriends. But it was a 15-year process. At first, when I said I wanted to do a story about a hitman, they would give me the most dispensable person, a young hitman they didn't care about. Since I did the report and no one went to jail, I gradually gained their trust. Being a foreign journalist gives you a certain shield: killing an American or an Englishman is a big problem for them, while for Colombian journalists, on the other hand, it's very dangerous; they kill them with total impunity.

However, in the book it is seen how he fears for his life.

— I have experienced moments of great fear. I remember a party in the countryside with coca plants and a drunk FARC dissident started shouting things... It was 30 km from the nearest city, it was the middle of the night and I had nowhere to go. I knew I was dancing on the edge of a cliff and that a wrong step could turn out very badly for me.

One of the protagonists ends up dying. If he were alive, could he have written the same about himself?

— I had the freedom to write about him. Obviously, I had to change some details because his family is still there, but if I hadn't published the book as I wrote it, what would have been the point of risking my life? I'll give you an example. I wrote about a hitman. I tried to be fair, but in the end, these people are a cancer. They kill people without thinking twice. I hope that if any of them read the book, they feel bad. If they like what I've written about them, maybe I haven't done my job well. If the mafia likes how you portray them, it means you've made a mistake. They are murderers.

Is violence inherited?

— There are people who grow up in societies or areas with a deeply rooted criminal mentality. One thing I learned from interviewing hitmen is that almost all of them told the same story: they were 13 or 14 years old when a trusted adult told them, "Do you want to do a job?" And that’s how the process began. It's a form of manipulation and child abuse: taking innocent children and turning them into monsters, into hitmen. Many of them seem predestined, especially if you grow up in neighborhoods of Medellín totally controlled by gangs. On the other hand, the narco I interview in the book, Alex, had no need to do what he did: he wanted to be a narco; he chose evil out of ambition, not lack of options.

Is all this people destined to die young?

— They entered this world thinking they could control it, but suddenly they feel the door close behind them. For most, there is no way out. You can't be a hitman who has worked for ten years, who has killed all these people and knows who the bosses are, and expect someone to let you go. It's not feasible. There was a narco, El Químico, who collaborated with the Americans and had about 35 family members killed as punishment for testifying. It's an extraordinarily nihilistic world. If you're a hitman, you think you won't make it to 30, so you go out and spend all your money, live to the fullest. That's why there's so much drugs and so much sex: there's no hope for tomorrow, so we spend money in the stupidest way possible.

The sex-drugs binomial is inseparable.

— Absolutely. And I'm very careful about that: I detest the mythologizing of narcos. I hate people walking around with Pablo Escobar t-shirts. I think Hollywood and television are very much to blame because they present them as the villains, dangerous but attractive at the same time. When you go to the clubs where the cartels throw parties, you can smell sex in the air. There are models, all drugged up, in sex and party sessions that last three days. There are the most famous actresses in Colombia. When these guys start in this world, they want to buy their mother a house, they want a fast car and expensive clothes, but they also want a model partner. Sex is there from the beginning, and that's why it's such a seductive world: it offers you the idea that you can have it all. When they get the model or the TV presenter, their point of view is confirmed: that everyone is for sale.