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

BarcelonaCaptain 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 tries 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.

Oscar 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. They are beauty and good people trying to create a new country in front of those who live in violence, covered in blood. In Colombia, killing someone is incredibly cheap. Violence has been 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 Office, which is an organized hitman's office. 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 for a drug trafficking case. This is Latin American-style violence. There is no war yet because all these mafias are making money, but the history of Ecuador or Mexico teaches us that when you pressure the mafias a little, they go to war with each other. What have they done with all the profits? Recruit men and buy weapons. I think we will 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 will 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 the war on drugs could be won, 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 have 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 your day smoking weed, it's your decision, although I don't think it's a good idea, just as I don't think it's a good idea to drink whiskey on a Tuesday at 11 a.m. 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 walk into Starbucks and half the people are high. They don't act like adults. What would happen if we sold cocaine or heroin at the corner pharmacy? Perhaps 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.

— The Colombian narcos learned much faster than the Mexicans. They learned that if your name appears on the front page of the newspaper, your expiration date has begun because the CIA and the DEA will look 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 at 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 damage it 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 failure to finish the job. The world should help Colombia, but we treat it as if it were solely its problem. We throw them a few million euros or dollars and tell them: "Solve it." Meanwhile, Colombia produces more cocaine than ever because more is consumed in the world than ever before. Colombia produces because we consume. We are to blame. We are the engine of this industry.

How did you manage to get a drug trafficker or a hitman to confess to you?

— The mafia doesn't like strangers. I made friends in that world many years ago, when I was young, going out to parties in discos. 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 expendable 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, whereas for Colombian journalists, on the other hand, it is extremely dangerous; they are killed 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 drunken 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 precipice and that one 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 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 destined for it, 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 out of a lack of options.

Is all this people destined to die young?

— They entered this world thinking they could control it, but suddenly they hear 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 who 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 life 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 most stupid way possible.

The sex-drug binomial is inseparable.

— Absolutely. And I am very cautious about that: I detest the mythologization of narcos. I hate people walking down the street in Pablo Escobar t-shirts. I think Hollywood and television are very much to blame because they present them as the bad guys, 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 television presenter, their point of view is confirmed: that everyone is for sale.