Angry Planet - How Cocaine Fuels America’s Longest War

Episode Date: July 8, 2020

Cocaine is the second most popular illicit drug in the world and it’s controlled by a black market regulated by violence. As America’s drug war edges close to its fiftieth birthday, there is no end in sight, the conflicts it fuels have expanded to an unprecedented scale and cocaine remains incredibly profitable.Here to talk to us about cartels and cocaine is Toby Muse. Muse is a journalist and documentarian whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, and CNN. He’s just published the book Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels—From the Jungles to the Streets.Recorded on 7/6/20We’re living in the golden age of cocaineHow cocaine shaped Colombian politicsWhat happened when the FARC negotiated peaceThe myth and reality of the sicarioWhat happens with a Hitman retires“As long as cocaine is illegal, Colombia will never know peace.”It never ends. It never ever endsYou can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. There was a generation has passed, and all of the deaths, because of this futile drug war that we know we cannot win. I've asked people, what does victory even look like in the drug war? I don't know what victory looks like. And it's hard for them to describe as well, because, I mean, there's going to be. not be any cocaine left. But on the other hand, as long as cocaine is illegal, Columbia will never know peace. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Field. Cocaine is the second most popular illicit drug in the world, and it's controlled by a black market regulated by violence. As America's drug war edges closer to its 50th year, there is no end in sight. The conflict fuels have expanded to an unprecedented scale

and cocaine remains incredibly profitable. Here to talk to us today about cartels and cocaine is Toby Mews. Mews is a journalist and documentarian whose work has appeared in The Guardian, the New York Times, and CNN. He has just published the new book, Kilo, inside the deadliest cocaine cartels from the jungles to the streets. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure. as we like to do on the show, I want to do some really basic stage setting here at the top. So can you tell us, there's been some changes in the last, I'd say, five years in kind of the cartel and cocaine trade. And a lot of it centers around the internal politics of Columbia and around the FARC specifically. Can you kind of tell us who the FARC are and what has happened recently that has changed the way cocaine is produced and sold?

Yeah, I mean, the biggest change really is that there's not a lot of. enough media attention on this, but we are living in the golden age of cocaine. There is simply more cocaine on the planet than ever before. I think we tend to look back at the age of Pablo Escobar, who was running the Medellin cartel in the 1980s. He dies in the early 90s, and we tend to think that that was the high point of cocaine. No. Right now, there is more cocaine being produced and it's reaching further into more distant corners of the planet than ever. The reason for that is because of this revolutionary group in Colombia called the FARC. That stands for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

By the time they sit down with the government to sign a peace deal, so bringing an end to this 50 years' insurrection in 2016, much of the territory that the FARC controlled, let me rephrase that, much of the COCA, this is the bushes that is turned into cocaine, much of the coca was in territory controlled by the FARC. And the deal was in 2016, the implicit part of that peace deal between the government, the Colombian government and the FARC was, we will lay down our weapons. You have to come in to this territory.

And for the first time in Colombian history, bring about a minimum of law and order and basic kind of services, a little bit of education, a little bit of health. but essentially just bring in law and order. Columbia is a tremendously treacherous country. It's filled up with the Amazon rainforest. It has just countless mountains. It's the Andean mountain range. It's very difficult to control that territory.

And the Colombian state has traditionally never been able to. So 2016, the FARC laid down their weapons. The government drops the ball. It does not get into all of these zones quick enough. Who does? Other narco militias. They take over all of this territory that the FARC is handing over. They get there quickly.

and they take over and they tell the coca farmers who had been planning to abandon coca as part of this peace deal. That was part of the peace deal that all of these farmers who no one really considers a criminals. I should say this from the outset. No one considers a coca farmer a criminal. They just understand how poor the countryside is. So these coca farmers were supposed to get rid of coca but instead new narco militias turn up and say you're not getting rid of anything, if anything you're going to have to plant more. And so here we are in 2000 and 20 with more cocaine than ever. Sounds remarkably similar to what happened in Afghanistan with the Taliban and opium.

Right? Absolutely. I think there are many parallels. I mean, I think I do want to be careful about going too far in that comparison because Colombia is nowhere near as dependent upon cocaine as Afghanistan is on opium. I mean, Colombia is the impact of cocaine directly on the economy. is single digits, low single digits as well. You know, there is this whole other part of the Colombian economy. And I also do want to be clear about where the coca is. Because Colombia has this

booming tourism industry in a way that obviously Afghanistan doesn't, you have to struggle to get to the coca zones now. And I do want to make this clear because I know many people do or certainly are thinking about going to Colombia. If you travel to Bogota, you are not going to take a wrong turning, stepping out of your hotel and end up in the middle of a coca field. No, it doesn't work that way. When I went to the coca fields for this book, we were going through checkpoints of the soldiers. You had to prove that you had to have reason to be there. And these zones are continually monitored by these narco militias. What is it about Colombia that makes it the epicenter? Well, in history, there's only been really three countries that have ever produced cocaine. That's Bolivia,

Peru and Colombia. And Colombia, for some reason, had the most vicious, the most violent cocaine cartels. And they were just larger than any of those other countries. And I think that is a tradition of political violence that you see in Colombia. There's this mid-century, mid-20th century, there's this time, this era that's just simply called the violence, labulencia. And that tells this civil war between liberals and conservatives. that just devastated the country. And there has been this legacy of political violence ever since then.

So just take something that you would think, on the face of it that is separate from cocaine, Colombia has traditionally been one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a union member. It was when I was there at some point in the early 2000s. And I think even up until recently, it was one in three trade union members murdered for their work occurred in Colombia. And so there is this kind of very, politics is very, very violent in Colombia. We've had a number of presidential campaign, a number of presidential candidates killed. Again, thankfully, we're not seeing that so much in these years, but there was one election in around 1989, 1990. Three presidential candidates were killed in one season.

So politics has often been done with violence and cocaine thrives in that type of underworld. The cocaine is regulated by violence. So I think there was that overlap that has allowed cocaine to flourish. And again, it goes back to this inability of the central state of Bogota to really run the country. What happens is Bogota is often weak, unable to exert its control. So what happens is local fiefdoms take over. And it's a, people know this as well. This is not a secret. If you go to any one part of Columbia and sit down in a small town and ask a teacher who are, you know, the town intellectuals, these will be guys who work at the local high school, who were the families who control this town?

And he'll list off, or she'll list off three, four, five different families. And it can be quite feudal when you get out of those big cities into the countryside. Just to understand the situation a little bit more fully, can you tell us anything about who the users are nowadays? You say it's more prevalent than ever, but it's not just Wall Street guys, you know, having fun, like in the 80s, right? No. And so, obviously, writing this book, I had time to think on cocaine. It's bizarre. We have collectively decided that cocaine is the champagne of narcotics in popular

culture. Any legal product would kill for that type of branding. And yet we just voluntarily give it. There's no one paying for that publicity for cocaine. We've just decided that's what cocaine is. And so cocaine is this drug that's seen as aspirational. It's the, it always chases the economic boom. So if you look at London and New York in the 1980s, there's cocaine. If you look at Russia in the 1990s, there's cocaine. Where are cocaine traffickers deliberately targeting now, Asia's new generation of new millionaires? Cocaine follows the money. But it's also, we're seeing, London is constantly wrestling with this thing. The police are coming out and saying, that cocaine has become normalized in middle-class households.

The police are complaining about this constantly saying, well, the users should be more wary of the consequences of their consuming cocaine. Fair enough. And that's obviously something that it has to be stated time and time and time again. This business thrives on demand. Without demand, obviously, the cartels, they'll look for something else. And the cartels do have their fingers in other illicit industries, such as the illegal gold.

production in South America. But I do want to kind of draw a comparison to prohibition. When we look back at prohibition, I don't think we say that the villain of the piece was the working man or the working woman trying to get a beer at the end of the week. We look back at prohibition in the US and say this was a series of policies that ended up making monsters like Al Capone tremendously powerful and tremendously wealthy. If you take away prohibition, Al Capone has nothing. And that's the same with the cocaine industry. People like El Chapo. I don't think they're particularly impressive people.

Pablo Escobar, the leaders of the Kali cartel. What it is is they have the characteristics to thrive and flourish in the underworld, and that is they're vicious, they're violent, borderline sociopathic. That's everything cocaine looks for in, you know, someone to champion her. She wants those types of qualities. I have so many follow-up questions on that. Do you, so do you think cocaine then creates its own culture? And that it is, it's kind of in tune with what the drug does to you.

It's fast. It's aggressive. Are those the kind of people that thrive in the trade itself? Yes. And there is this thing that people in Latin America understand as a narco-cultura, a narco-culture. And just to give one example, Colombia has one. of the highest levels of plastic surgery amongst women in the world. Now, what historians of that, historians of the drug culture, what they believe might have been one of the reasons for, and so,

well, let me take a step back. Columbia has one of the highest levels of plastic culture in the world. And what you would see is, you would see about 15, 20 years ago, the drug traffickers, when you would go to these parties and they would have their parties in the big nightclubs, you would see these women, their bodies would just be unrecognizably human. The breasts were impossibly big, impossibly. They weren't supposed to look naturally large. They were supposed to look impossibly big. Their arses were, their rear ends were enormous. Again, they weren't supposed to look normal. Their waists were impossibly small. And one historian of the narco culture thinks that what happened is that these traffickers did their first deals in the strip clubs of Texas.

in the 1970s. And these traffickers from Columbia saw the dimensions of these Texan strippers, you know, these tall women, and went back and imposed on their women who were much shorter, said, you have to have those things. I'm going to pay for your, I'm going to pay for your plastic surgery to have exactly those similar dimensions. So you would see these five foot two women with chronic back pain. I knew a woman who was part of that world. She lived in permanent agony because of the size of her breasts that had been artificially enlarged. And then the culture changed. And that's a change we're also seeing in the narco culture.

These were the men who would come from the countryside, who were kind of proud that generation of traffickers. Often they came from the countryside, and they were proud of being outsiders. Now what we're seeing, there's a new generation of traffickers, and they call themselves the invisibles. They look for much more low-class, low-profile, sorry. and what they're demanding from their women is a kind of very specific body type, which is

the woman who spends all day in the gym. So very six packs and everything. So this woman I knew who had these tremendously large breasts, because that was her way of attracting and keeping hold of a drug trafficker, she was tossed out. She was never invited back to the parties. She was yesterday's fashion, tossed aside like unfashionable trousers. So it's this heartless world that they're all operating in, this ecosystem. system. And I think those qualities of cocaine are present there. It's hyper-confidence. Everything moves at 150 miles an hour. That's the deal of cocaine these people sign up for. It's to live 200 miles per hour, understanding that you may well die before you're 30. I interview a drug

trafficker in this book. And he constantly told his girlfriend, look, we have to make plans because I'm not going to make it to 50. Yet that's incorporated into the deal. It's the ultimate deal with the devil. You shake hands with the devil. That's the deal in cocaine. Again, interestingly, this new generation of cartel, the traffickers, they want to get away from that deal. They want the benefits of cocaine, but they want to keep on trafficking until they can retire. They're looking for that low profile. And just one final point about cocaine. Curiously, the traffickers themselves in Colombia don't take cocaine. The drug of choice is something called 2CB, which is this synthetic drug, drug, which I don't know it's popular anywhere else on the planet, but in Medellin, Bogotar Kali,

it's huge. At 2CB, it's like imagine mixing the kind of mild hallucinogenics of weak LSD with the kind of party drug of cocaine. That's what 2CB is. Right. You get this kind of, it's got a speedy effect in a light hallucinogen effect at the same time. Or you can kind of have fun and do your work at the same time. Exactly. And curiously. again, another thing, what I think as I looked at another, as I went to these parties and would just pick up on these things, I think 2CB was actually introduced to the traffickers via their girlfriends. You would hear the traffickers constantly talk about, oh my God, my girlfriend just

can't get enough 2CB. And then they themselves would end up. The trafficker I interviewed had a serious problem with 2CB. He was basically addicted. I don't know if you can become traditionally physically addictive to 2CB or not, but he had a problem. He was snorting it all day long. And his girlfriend said, you know, if we're going to have this family, you need to stop taking 2CB. And he went through this kind of a week or so of detox and then came out the other side, never took it again. As far as cocaine goes, you know, people who've never taken it probably don't have an idea of the dangers of it.

You know, because, as you said, it's the champagne of drugs, right? It's glamorous in some cases. I remember watching Miami Vice as a kid and was pretty sure that they were in favor of the drugs. I mean, it was honestly almost confusing. Miami in the 80s, man. So, I am just, you know, could you describe what cocaine does to you? Sure, absolutely. So, and this is another thing, another reason I wanted to write this book,

because I wanted to have an honest conversation about cocaine. So I think at the extreme end of what can happen with someone who consumes cocaine, it can just cause a heart attack, an overdose and just kills that person. In compared to, again, that's compared to heroin, the risk of overdose is nowhere near as large as the risk of the risk of an overdose, a fatal overdose. It's much lower with cocaine, but it does happen to certain people. I remember, I think there was a whole generation of Americans, I think, who were traumatized by a basketball star, if I'm not wrong, who died after consuming cocaine in the 1980s.

Lenn bias. Right, yeah, he was this. University of Maryland. Yeah, exactly. So it was this going to be star. So I remember a lot of my friends actually having that just fear. They're like, oh, no, no, no, no way. Then if, obviously the next step is heavy addiction.

And this is the interesting part about cocaine as well, because if we look at it, there's a duality there. So on the one hand of cocaine, it is the champagne of narcotics. It's, you know, people in the roaring 20s that, what's that song that I get a kick out of, some people get a kick out of champagne, I get a kick out of you. One of the lyrics is some people get a kick out of cocaine. So it was involved in that kind of decadern party scene in the 20s and it was an accepted part. But then on the other hand, we also understand that, you know, some of the kind of, certainly when I was growing up, you would see some of the most pathetic cases. the most, the rawest cases of drug addiction on the streets were often addicts to crack. Now, crack is obviously a form of cocaine. So is this kind of cocaine can inhabit both ends of the

spectrum. It can be the grimyest, poorest version of it, or it can be the kind of most elite version of this drug. So I think people can fall into addiction. You do hear this many stories about people who have just lost everything because they cannot control their consumption of cocaine. certainly in Colombia, you know, there was these old open-air drug markets and you would go there where people were basically homeless and they just wouldn't leave this open-air drug market. They would just consume. It was very common to meet famous, not famous, but architects who had been very successful, lawyers who had been very successful and they just started consuming drugs and just gave it all up.

But I think those are minority cases and I think, again, one of the reasons to write this book was to speak honestly about it. I think the vast majority of people consume cocaine with no problem. Because again, as you said in the introduction, this is the second most consumed drug on the planet. And there's just a long list of people who have consumed this drug and who have openly admitted. Sigmund Freud was a huge fan of the drug until he turned against it completely. What led him to turn against it, he basically thought cocaine was this wonder drug. then he met this man who was suffering from an addiction to morphine, I believe it was.

So Freud convinced this man that the solution to his addiction to an opiate was to become addicted to start taking cocaine. So obviously this poor man ends up with two addictions and basically dies shortly after. That turns Sigmund Freud away from cocaine. But if you look at all of the, certainly in the media, how many people consume cocaine in the media in Hollywood, Barack Obama talked about his use of cocaine when he was young in his autobiography. It's been this drug that many, many people have been able to take for a few years of their life and then move on. One of the things that I think is really interesting about this book is that it kind of has these two main characters or two perspectives. One is you and the other is a kilo, literally a package of

cocaine, that you are kind of following through the supply chain. Why was it important to you to write it from this kind of grounds-eye view, what do you think you get presenting the story in that way that might get lost in a more top-down, more academic, you know, kind of style? The academics do crucial work in trying to understand the cocaine industry. You know, it's invaluable. The charts, the graphs, the percentage changes to understand coca increase, where coca crops are going up in the country, where it's going down, where the smuggling routes are. All of that can come through these academic studies. But I felt that it become too academic and there wasn't that, there wasn't that side to really understand that cocaine thrives on the darker passions.

This is an industry that moves on sex, betrayal and murder. And I set out to write a book and at first I wanted to write a book with zero statistics. The aim of this book actually was to write an updated version of dispatches. Michael Hurst did. dispatches, but not for Vietnam, but for the drug war. I wanted to take the reader and put them there. This is what it feels like to be at the center of this unwinnable, insane war on drugs, on the ground level. So throughout the book, there is not one expert interviewed. There are only traffickers, there are only people who are on the front lines of the war on drugs. So if it's a police person, it's not someone sitting in an office. I'm interviewing the police person who is carrying out their job at that moment trying to destroy cocaine. If I'm interviewing someone on the other side, I interview a contract killer who is currently working in that world of working for the cocaine cartels.

I interview a drug trafficker who is working. I didn't want to get into that thing of interviewing these drug traffickers who are now behind bars who, you know, start making stuff up. This is just famous how they just start talking about this and that. And there had also been this move recently to try and, I would say, put too much of a corporate stamp on the cocaine industry to explain everything and say, oh, look, just like corporate. America. Here's how the, and I think that's an interesting, insightful comparison up to a point, but it had gone too far. And again, it was ignoring these passions. And I felt like if you looked at the cocaine industry too academically, it would be like learning about sex through a biological textbook. It's not wrong what you're reading there when you read about sex in a high school

textbook, but it's not the full picture. And this picture is, the cocaine industry is made up of bandits. It's made up of people who are rebelling against society. It's made up of desperate people pushed to their limits. And I wanted to tell these human stories. And I also felt that every single step of cocaine, this chain of cocaine, so taking it from a bush in a distant field in Colombia, out to the Coast Guard in the Pacific Ocean, trying to stop this kilo of cocaine as it heads towards the largest consumer market on the planet, the USA. I felt that every single, single step of that chain had fascinating human stories to tell and about their relationship with cocaine. And it also helped to show the differences amongst these different people. So,

for instance, at the beginning, you do have these farmers who are just desperately trying to just get by. No one makes money from cocaine in the countryside, really. Well, sorry, the farmers don't make money. They get by. No one's getting wealthy. They get by. Also to introduce these coca pickers, all from Venezuela looking for a better life. And to contrast those people with a trafficker who really has crossed some line and is now essentially irredeemable, a contract killer, a man who kills for money. And that is, you know, that is someone very different. But I also wanted to say, how did someone like this come into being? And what does someone like this?

What do they think about? How do they see life? More about the, is it, Sakharias? and is it Cachote in particular? Cachote, exactly. So essentially because of cocaine, one of cocaine's legacies is to make being a Sicario, a contract killer, a profession.

That profession exists in Colombia in a way that it just simply doesn't in the United States. People are professional hitmen. And so I wanted to kind of, that was a legacy of the kind of the time of Pablo Escobar by in the 1980s. Essentially, what the contract killers do is they regulate the industry. If two traffickers have a dispute, they can't go to the courts like normal business people. They regulate it via violence, essentially. That's what happens.

If you stiff someone on a deal in cocaine, that person will then go to the, to the Sicarios. it has now become so institutionalized, there are things called the Collection Office. And that essentially is a euphemism for a company of hitmen. You go there and say, look, I've had this problem with this person. I'll sell you the debt. They'll take the debt and they'll go get the money or they'll kill the person if they can't get the money. Or sometimes some people would just go straight up to them and say, look, I need this person

being killed. And you can have someone killed for $100 or depending upon the target. It goes much, much, much higher. And in fact, there's even a term in Colombia, which is called the Swiss. Un Suiso. And that's basically when a Sicario is sent on a mission that is a suicide mission, but they don't know that. So, again, when we've had these high-profile politicians being killed, sometimes they've been killed in the act of killing the politician themselves.

Or other times, in a very high-profile hit, it's quite common that the hit will occur, the assassination will take place during the day, and then the actual killers will be found dead in another part of the city. That's the way that they're tying up loose ends. So it's the merciless industry, but they are this constant presence. So when you go out to these narco parties where the traffickers are partying, you'll see the Sicario's there. They're often, the Sicario I interviewed, served as a bodyguard for his boss as well. That was a dual job he did. He did. He was a bodyguard for his boss, but he would also take care of anyone to kill any of his boss's enemies. But they are, again, it's kind of hard to describe.

They're just this constant presence when you're moving in that underworld. So one question I had is about dispute resolution. You mentioned that the Sicario's are often the way that a debt is collected or that things are settled. So there's nothing like, you know, in the movie The Godfather, and actually in reality, you know, the five families who get together and have a council and try to deal with things on that level. That's actually interesting. No, there is rumored to be something called in Medellin itself. Just to be clear, there's two historic centers of the cocaine industry in Colombia, Kali and Medellin. I did much more of my work in Kali. I don't really know how Kali works operates as much as much as me. Medellin. In the city of Medellin, there is rumored to be this thing called the commission,

which are people who are one step higher, who when we've had clashes between the cartels, so we've had, Medellins essentially, there are three cartels in there. In the city at the moment, you have the cartel of Bejjou, which represents a part of the city. You have the Gulf Clan Cartel. Now, that's not to be mistaken for the Gulf Clan out of Mexico. This is a Colombian narco militia, the Gulf Clan cartel. And then you have something called the Office of Enbigado. The Office of Enbigado was the lone remaining part of Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel. And the Office of Enbegardo was also his armed wing of the Medellin cartel. That was where his Sicario's worked. When Pablo Escobar was destroyed and the Medell fell, his successor, a hugely

important cocaine trafficker. I would say perhaps even more important than Pablo Escobar, a man who went by the name Don Burner. He took over the office of Embigado. Don Berner is currently still in prison in the United States. He's due to be sent back at some point. But he took over the office of Ambigado. So the office of Embigado basically controlled Medellin for probably around, let's just say, 15 years after the death of Pablo Escobar. And then this new, ferocious narco militia came in from the outside, the Gulf Clan Cartel, and there were,

what happens is, in a city like Medellan, the city has been cut up into small fiefdoms where these gangs operate. Each gang will control a territory. They're called Comboes. Each comboor answers to a certain cartel. That's where they get their drugs for, and when

there's a war, the Comboes are expected to be the frontline soldiers. So, essentially, as the office, as the Gulf Clan cartel moved into the city, they started fighting there was a cartel war with the office of Embigado. This war was dragging on and on and on. And so it's rumored that the commission stepped in. That, again, these people who are one step above the cartels who stepped in and said,

this needs to end. And there was a negotiated a truce. And so there's this uneasy truce at the moment. And as I said, there's this third cartel that's been growing in the shadow coming out of Bejjor. So there's this uneasy moment. Now, again, I do want to be clear, when you would have a drug war 25 years ago, that was setting off bombs in shopping malls. Now it's much more targeted the violence. They want to only kill each other. They're not interested in that widespread, that widespread massacres, because it draws too much attention to you. I think when you would

see these drug traffickers 30 years ago, sometimes it could be a point of pride that they were the front page of a newspaper, showed how powerful they were. The drug traffickers today in Colombia know that if you are on the front page of the newspaper, the countdown has begun. Your demise is a matter of time. And just to give you an idea of what that can mean, the leader of this cartel, the Gulf clan cartel, is a man called Otoniel. Now, we know that the CIA is helping the Colombian security forces to track down Otonyell. What we understand O'Doniel's life is, he lives up in the most, one of the rainiest points on the planet, which is this place, which is this place called Urabah, up in northwestern Colombia. We understand his life is being transported daily on the back of a

donkey to different wooden shacks just trying to keep ahead of the Colombian army and the Colombian anti-narcotics police. That's his life. He's one of the richest men in the country, and he lives the life of the most miserable peasant. Because he's just, that's it. That's his life. His entire life is just trying to stay free. So back to your point, there can be moments when cocaine can find a way to regulate these disputes. But sometimes it's impossible. The cartel that took over after the Kali cartel, which was instrumental in taking down Pablo Escobar, was a cartel called the Northern Valley cartel. Now, what's so interesting about that is, it becomes almost like, I don't know what you want to call it, like a Greek tragedy.

You have these three traffickers who are on top of the world. They have everything. And then they start fighting amongst each other. And the Northern Valley cartel just implodes. They can't regulate it. Because again, there is no final voice sometimes. So they just throw Sikarios at each other, just armies of Sikarios going at it, trying to kill each other.

And yeah, everybody ends up dead in the end. And that's what happened with the Northern Valley. They just destroyed themselves. We're going to pause there for a break. We are on with Toby. talking about his new book, Kilo, and how cocaine fuels a never-ending drug war. Welcome back to the show War College listeners. We are on with Toby Mews talking about his new book, Kilo. What is it the legacy of Pablo Escobar? Is it learning from his mistakes?

It's really interesting that you would ask that, because I think there's a number of ways to answer that. When I first moved to Colombia, I moved to Colombia in the year 2000. How to phrase this? there's always two conversations about the drugs industry, I think, in Colombia. I think when the conversation is in English, it's basically this. It's, well, that was in our past. We're learning from it. Cocaine is not the way it once was. Everyone hates Pablo Escobar. We're united about this. We're trying to forge a new Colombia, and we all want to get rid of the cocaine industry. When you start speaking in Spanish, it becomes much more nuanced.

And there is a minority, I would say a large minority. of people who were alive at that time and who will tell you after the first beer, oh, when Pablo was alive, everything was much better, there was work for everybody, everybody, those who didn't work, that's because they didn't want to. And so when I first went there, it was inconceivable that you would see someone wearing a Pablo Escobar t-shirt. It was just inconceivable. And again, actually, now I think about it, one of the reasons was when I first arrived

to Colombia in the year 2000, Don Burner, was fully in control of Medellin. And we understand the rumors of the underworld is Don Burner had a standing order that anyone from the Medellin cartel court was to be killed and then he would pay off a bounty for that. So now if you go to Median, you will actually see young people wearing Pablo Escobar T-shirts. It's not common. But I think for many in the underworld, he is seen as the inspiration. Because a lot of these kids are coming out of utterly nihilistic slums where they have no expectation that they can move forward in their life. I should have mentioned this before,

but Colombia is one of the most unequal countries on the planet. And for far too many of these kids, you're born poor, you will die poor. The social mobility in Colombia is so small. It's the same families as always just control so much of the political power, so much of the land, so much of the wealth. So these kids grow up in the slums and sometimes they just don't see any other options. to make money. And, you know, these kids sometimes have to bring home money because it's very common as well. These are single parent households in Medellin. That's a real culture as well there. And it's even got this phrase, which is quite funny, but it's also quite sad. There's a phrase there of your mother, there's only one. Your dad, it could be any old son of a bitch. And that you hear that

constantly there because there's just such a phenomenon, there's such a tendency for men just to abandon their families. So you have these mothers struggling with a 16 year old kid and saying, hey, look, son, I need you to help me out. And so sometimes these kids just drift into the life of the gangs. I interviewed gangs and one of the gang members was profoundly, was profoundly just tired of the whole gang system. And he said he was trying to make sure none of the young kids got involved in it because he said it's all a, it's all a scam. And he wished he could have, he wished he could have found another course. And he said, all I want to be is just if I could have one motorbike, I could be a messenger. And that would be, then I could provide for my family.

I wouldn't have to do this. He told me as he's selling drugs. So I think that was a constant thing in my book as well, people regretting getting into this, but finding the door behind them shut. I think in terms of Pablo Escobar's legacy, I think that the drug traffickers today have learned from that being too much too larger than life. Again, they don't want that. They want. They want to keep trafficking for as long as possible. And I think Mexico is behind the curve in that sense. Mexico, I'm not an expert by any way in Mexico, but you still have these drug traffickers who are being on the front cover, who are giving orders, who are saying this is being done in my name. None of the Colombian traffickers want that anymore. They just want to go low profile and keep trafficking.

Right. In Mexico, they still want to be celebrities on top of being drug traffickers. Exactly, and it's this kind of old thing of like the kind of, you know, the jokes there of the kind of golden toilets that people would joke about in Colombia. Colombian society has a really interesting relationship with these traffickers. At one point, they're feared. I mean, and they are feared because obviously these are terrifying men. They tend to be men. But on the other hand, they're also the butt of jokes because these were men who did. They became too wealthy, too quick, and the Colombians would mock their bad taste.

You know, they would buy these horrendously, just awfully bad-taste things. That's what the traffickers would do. Again, gold toilets, gold revolvers. And so the trafficker is the butt of the joke, but at the same time, a fearsome figure as well. Sort of the ultimate Nouveau Rij. Absolutely. And one of the funniest, there's a legendary Colombian comedian comedian called Jaime Gasson, who ended up being assassinated by.

a very, very famous band of killers called La Terrace, but they had actually been hired by the far-right death squads who had been organized to traffic cocaine, but also to fight the FARC, who we mentioned at the beginning. So this was a huge militia. They had Jaime Garsohn. I'm trying to remember his exact phrasing.

I think he would call them the lump and narco or something, and it was referring to their taste. And again, it was all part of that image of this man would, It was a frequent site. A man would come into the restaurants of Bogota, the biggest, most expensive restaurants, and he would be five foot one, he would have a six-foot woman next to him with just countless plastic surgery all over her. And that was a common sight. Again, now they opt for a low profile.

Now these traffickers actually want to give the impression that they're, you know, they're businessmen. And that they could be sitting next to anyone in business class, flying to Katahena, flying to Miami. But yeah There's a small story in the book I want to touch on just because I thought it was very interesting and a little surreal. What happens to a Sicario that is old enough to retire? Is that something that's even possible?

Yeah, I don't think it's possible. I mean, I can't say that there's never been a Sicario who's retired, but these are men of blood and violence and that they've killed many, many people and you don't go through life killing people and not making enemies. And this is the handshake with the devil part of cocaine, that you do all of these bad things. And people have long memories.

Well, you're untouchable as long as you're part of a crew. And that was the dilemma my trafficker. Not my trafficker, but the trafficker I interview you as well. He's in this dilemma because he knows he has the power as he keeps on trafficking. But he'll be food for the wolves if he tries to step down. And the cicarios are in the same, or in the, same boat. They, they, they, they've made so many enemies. Um, so these guys are, if a, if a life in cocaine is going 200 miles an hour, these men are going 400 miles an hour because their job is

inherently dangerous. They're pulling out, they're pulling off midday, um, assassinations. And often they're killing other people involved in the underworld, which is as dangerous as you can imagine. So the chapter begins with Kachote, preying. to the virgin of the assassins. They have this superstitious belief in this particular shrine that is their virgin. She is the one who will protect the assassins and they pray for success. They pray that they will be, they will come back alive from these missions when they're sent to kill people. And failure is not an option. There was, he tells me at one point how he screwed up a, Katjota tells me he was sent to kill someone. He planned it wrong. So he tries to

kill this, I think it was a traffic. He tries to kill this traffic. He doesn't quite manage it. They get away. He has to go back to his boss and say, and his boss said, well, this is on you now. That if you fail to do this, you will be killed. Those are the stakes daily for these people. And so if your daily life is constantly just struggling to survive, or if the possibility of death is in your daily life. I think that explained how they have these wild hedonistic parties of sex, drugs, these parties that can go three, four, five days, because this is what they're working through. There's a deep, dark nihilism at the heart of that world. And I think that's how it expresses itself. Take all of the drugs, have all of the sex, buy all of the consumer goods you

can today, because you're not sure that you're going to be around tomorrow. And I think that infuses the whole of that world. So old Sikarios who retire, man, I don't know. That's not a job you retire out of. That's a job that you're killed. And that's how you get out of being a Sicario. Someone kills you one day. Tell me about the one that became a YouTuber.

Oh, God, you're right. There is one who did make it out. Yeah, Popeye. So Popeye was, they would call him Poppella, but it's Popeye. He was one of one of the most famous of Pablo Escobar's, Sicarios. So essentially what happens is he's one of the sole remaining members of the Medellian

cartel. He was a Sicario. He was involved in many of the atrocities that Pablo Escobar carried out. I don't think in the US, in the English language, we're not so well aware. We're aware of Pablo setting off a number of bombs. But at one point, he also had a number of important journalists and politicians kidnapped. And Popeye was involved in that. This is when Pablo Escobar was fighting over extradition. He launched basically a war on the government of Colombia, on Colombia itself, in a fight to strike down extradition. So he couldn't be sent to America to face charges. He said, look,

if I've committed in crimes, I need to be charged here and serve my time here. Well, of course, he also wants to do that because he knows he can bribe people in the Colombian prison system, which he did. But their entire songs were devoted to this idea of, there's one really famous song called I Prefer a Cell in Columbia, sorry, I prefer a tomb in Colombia to a prison cell in the United States, inspired by Pablo Escobar's words. So Popeye is one of the, one of his leading killers. The Medellin cartel collapses and Popeye's, Popeye is captured. He goes to prison. So, and again, this goes back to why I'd mentioned before. Don Burner is now in charge. So Don Burner is the enemy of anything related to Pablo Escobar. Again, he's got this standing bounty. If you find anyone who

worked with Pablo Escobar, just kill him. Go and see Don Burner. He'll give you some money. So all throughout the beginning of the 21st century, Popeye would give these interviews in prison. And he would say, oh, you can't let me out. I'm a bandit for life. If you let me out of prison, I promise you, I'll be right back robbing and stealing. I'm a bandit. It's in my blood. It's in my blood. As soon as Don Burner is extradated to the United States, Popeye starts demanding to be released from prison because he knows now that his big enemy can't get to him, or at least he hopes that.

So Popeye comes out, he becomes a YouTuber, very far-right politics, as everyone in the Mafia has, by the way. All of the mafia, they're all the most far-right because they believe that they're entrepreneurs and they believe in all of this. It's this very far-right vision of the world that they have. So he has this whole this YouTube channel,

which is very successful. I think there was like a million subscribers. But he would also continue to hang around in the underworld. So he was caught at one famous traffickers, 50th birthday party. He had also got involved in kind of trying to threaten people, extort people. And so he was sent to prison.

And then it was announced he had cancer. And he died very, very quickly. And now he's dead. There's no need to cry over that. He was a despicable person. But yeah, he was one of the very, very, very few who could retire out of it. How does all of this shape the politics of Colombia? So I feel like we're talking about this stuff that happens on the ground level.

And I don't hear us talking much about the politicians and all of that stuff. Are they involved in any way? Is there anything they can do to stop this? Are they trying? What's the deal here? Well, the kind of artificially narrow consensus of Colombia over the past two decades has been to work with the United States to treat cocaine as a military mission. that's been the kind of narrow confines of what's acceptable what's acceptable again to say in public and again another reason for this book is I was tired of having interviews with people who would say oh well yeah of course we're winning we just need a bit more aid from the

United States but the path to victory looks good we just need a big more push it's not going to be easy but we're on our way to victory as soon as I press stop on the recorder and they said all right interview over they would say well of course we can't win this. And people in, I would say the majority of Colombians, I take that back. Not the majority, but so many people in Colombia will say, we cannot see how we can win the war on drugs. And yet we keep rolling forward. When I first moved to Columbia, it was in the year 2000. As I said, there was something then called Plan Colombia. This was this $7.5 billion plan when that was a lot of money, right? It was pioneered by Bill Clinton.

he leaves office, George Bush proudly takes it on. And yeah, so it sets out. What it's going to do is it's going to be used to militarily destroy coca. At the beginning, because of fears of another Vietnam, these were the conversations they were having before 9-11. Because of fears of another Vietnam, it wasn't going to directly attack the FARC. It was just going to be used to militarily attack Coca.

The goal was to cut coca crops by 50% in five years. Fast forward 20 years. We now have more co-cut than ever. The Colombian government is announcing its new goal that by 2023 it will have cut coca crops by 50%. We don't move forward in the drug war. We just keep moving in circles.

But that's an entire generation of people. There was a generation has passed and all of the deaths because of this futile drug war. that we know we cannot win. I've asked people, what does victory even look like in the drug war? I don't know what victory looks like. And it's hard for them to describe as well, because there's going to not be any cocaine left.

But on the other hand, as long as cocaine is illegal, Columbia will never know peace. And I think there's a growing recognition of the futility of this drug war, but understand Colombia's position in the world. It cannot do this by itself. It needs the world.

help and to his credit because there's so many politicians try to start this conversation when they step down. Juan Manuel Santos, the former president of Colombia who oversaw that peace deal in 2016, tried at least twice to get a genuine international conversation going on the war on drugs. He described the war on drugs as being on an exercise bike in a gym. You pedal for half an hour, you sweat, you sweat. After half an hour, you get off, you look, you haven't moved. forward one centimeter. He said that's what the war on drugs feels like. And he said, which every Colombian is right, he said, no one has paid for the war on drugs higher than Colombia. Because again, the war on drugs in the United States is an abstract. It's like declaring

the war on poverty. In Colombia, the war on cocaine is being fought with attack helicopters, with Blackhawks, with missile strikes on narco militia camps deep in the jungle. So my book is just a plea for us to rethink this. But Columbia, again, cannot do this. It's not a powerful country on the international stage. It needs help. And this is a global problem. We shouldn't be throwing all of this responsibility on Colombia.

So in one point of my book, I say, sure, people can look at Columbia and say, well, you know, you've failed because you. you're now producing more cocaine than ever in history, so Colombia failed. I would say no. Colombia can turn to the rest of the world and say, what have you done to curb the consumption of cocaine? What serious program do you see here in the United States that is genuinely getting to the heart of why people consume drugs and getting them to stop doing it? Nothing. We've got nothing. We've got some after-school specials that 95% of kids, will think is the uncoolest thing ever. And we'll, you know, it's Nancy Reagan is the one campaign I remember. How many people listen to Nancy Reagan just say no? The UK is the same. There's no serious,

serious anti-drug program. So Columbia can say to the world, you failed us, because as long as the world keeps consuming cocaine, Colombia is going to have a cocaine industry. On the left, you do have a recognition that the drug war has completely failed and just what cost it has has. but there is this kind of Colombian politics, I guess like everywhere in the world, can be vicious. And I think people are wary of being tarred with the word legalization, legalizer, because in the in Colombian politics, that has been an insult to say, oh, well, you must be in favor of the drug cartels. You know, it's a way of shutting down that conversation. Obviously, it's nonsense because in my book, when I'm speaking to this drug trafficker, he gets

angry at the idea of further drug legalization. He doesn't want it. He said because he understands if drugs are legalized, the risk goes down. If the risk in trafficking cocaine goes down, that means his potential reward goes down. He wants the high risk, the high reward. So in the end, you have the DEA and drug traffickers united in wanting the drug war to keep going. Because as long as the drug war keeps going, the DEA, you know, they have their mission, they have their jobs and the drug traffickers get to reap the rewards. Well, so let's talk a little bit about the people who are trying to stop the drugs from coming in.

In the book, you talk about the Coast Guard. I mean, what do you think about their effectiveness? And, I mean, I think we know how you feel about whether they should be tasked with this. But what do you think of the efforts? Well, I mean, the Coast Guard's job is, it was to me, a complete eye-opener about the Coast Guard. So I think I write in the book that if I had been asked before going out with the Coast Guard, what the Coast Guard did, I imagined some old guy with white hair, a kind of blue blazer, a mug of rum, you know, kind of Moby Dick looking out on a storm and, oh, volunteers, let's go out and save some people.

That's what I thought the Coast Guard was. It's been heavily militarized since 2001 because their job. was, okay, can terrorism or can threats to America, can they bring things in via the sea? So it's a serious job, obviously, that they're carrying out. Obviously, they carry out the rescue jobs, rescuing people who are caught. They're also, I think they're, without doubt, the agency that seizes more cocaine than any other US agency, because I was with them when they're taking down three, four tons of cocaine in a single shipment. It's wild. out there. It's the loneliest spot on the planet, the Pacific Ocean. And we're out there.

The eastern Pacific is the biggest, most important cocaine corridor on the planet because it connects the biggest producer, Colombia, with the biggest market, the United States. Where these traffickers like to drop it off is the Mexican Guatemalan border. That's where a lot of these shipments are going. And it was really interesting to be with the Coast Guard because, again, they're kind of aware of just how much damage they're doing to individual shipments. You know, there was one moment when these coastcards were taking a break. And one of them says, you know, I've got a buddy on the force back home. And they get excited when they get one kilo.

And everyone starts joking, everyone starts laughing because behind us is two, three tons of cocaine sitting on the ship's deck, getting ready to be stored. So they are having these huge impact on individual shipments. But I'm not sure if it's changing things in the end, because I don't hear any reports of people not being able to get cocaine if they want cocaine in the US. So I think it is this job that they're doing, and they're doing extraordinarily well. I was really impressed by the Coast Guard, seeing them out there. you know, how they would interact with the traffickers. You know, it was really dignified.

It was just absolute respect towards these people who were taken into custody. I thought that it's a tough job. They're going out, chasing down these speedboats. One part of it, if the speedboat won't stop, because these guys know they could be facing 20 years in American prison. So some of them just keep going. So what the Coast Guard will do is they'll send out a helicopter. and the sharpshooter has to get in position of a speeding speedboat taking a shot from a helicopter

that's moving fast at night in order to take out the engines. I mean, just imagine the level of skill. Oh, and he has to do it in such a way that if there is any problem, that the bullet will continue into the sea and not injure any of the crew. So it's a level of skill that's just astonishing to me. And these sharpshooters will make the shot every time. Just incredible. So I think they're trying their best, but they're trying their best in the situation of an unwinnable drug war. And they disagree with this. And that's fine.

And they would say, and I have a lot of sympathy for this. I remember one person there on the coast card saying, look, to me, every time we get even one kilo, that's one kilo less in the city. And that's absolutely true. But it just seems to me they're winning battles, but we're losing the war. But you think that their commitment is really sincere. These are guys who really don't want to see drugs on the streets. Absolutely. Oh, sorry, I should have been much clearer about that.

These guys are really proud and committed of the job they're doing. They do it excellently. I was really impressed. I cannot state how impressed I was by the Coast Guard professional. The ship itself, the James, was just a beauty. It was a half a billion dollar ship. The James patrols around the whole, the whole of the Eastern Pacific.

These men and women are on these missions for three months. I mean, it's a genuine commitment to be out there. And I think they do it to the absolute best of their abilities. I saw them really invested in the mission as well. And there is this kind of up and down that I noticed with them because when I first get on the boat, they picked me up in a town in Costa Rica. And we are 12 hours.

outside of poor, and they've caught someone with cocaine. And I'm thinking, my God, how much cocaine is out there. And they just spend this week just knocking down, taking down shipments. And remember, there's all of the narco submarines that go through the Eastern Pacific as well. Now, when I was there, we didn't actually get these. These are not homemade, but these are semi-submarines made in these jungle factories. They cost about a million, two million, and they can hold five, six, seven, tons of cocaine, and they go on these missions of like, can be eight days as they deliver the cocaine. Now, we didn't pick up any when I was on the boat, but they picked up all of these various different shipments, and then it stops, and then they can't find anything for a week or so.

And the whole mood on the ship changes, because that's what everyone's out there to do. They're out there to take down these huge cocaine shipments. And, yeah, as I say, I think that every time they're winning the battle. But we collectively, myself included, everybody is losing the war, I would say. So say the drug war does end. America drastically changes its policies around drugs. What happens to this existing infrastructure, do you think? Of the drug war. Yeah, of the cartel specifically. I think about this a lot. Like what happens to, like, It obviously would take massive, massive political change in America, I think. But say we move to more of a, not even just legalization, but like a decriminalization stance,

it becomes, like, as you said, a business where the risk is not so high. What do you think happens to this cartel infrastructure and to Colombia? I mean, it would give Columbia a chance. Again, the cartels are involved in many different, many different illicit industries, as I said, illegal gold extraction, which is horrendous for this beautiful pristine landscapes of Colombia, one of the most importantly biodiverse countries on the planet. So they could focus on that. But I think it would be an undeniably huge hit to the cartels. And by the way, not all the cartels are some people are just dedicated to cocaine trafficking.

I think if you shut down that black market, it would be as devastating to the mafias as when we ended prohibition in the United States. Sure, some will continue in the underworld, but the market for the underworld just overnight got that much smaller. And so it's not, I'm not going to be naive to say that every single person in the underworld is going to get a nine to five job. But if you take away opportunity, to work in the underworld, that can only benefit to us.

I think, and I think we can, it chimes in as well, I think, interestingly enough, with the current debate over this idea of defund the police. Defund the police taking as one definition I've heard of taking just a part of the budget to the police and taking just a part of that budget that had been traditionally going to the police and invest in ways to avoid the police being necessary. So investing in education, investing in mental health, investing in healthcare. We could possibly see transformations there as well. Well, right now we are actually doing an experiment in the United States with the legalization of marijuana in so many places.

Absolutely. I mean, do you see – I mean, the parallels there seem obvious. It doesn't take away the problem with cocaine. marijuana is even more widespread. And people used to kill each other over marijuana, too. Absolutely. And, you know, this is on the DEA. The DEA sat there and told us that marijuana was highly dangerous.

It was a gateway drug. And they just told us that for decades. And now you see places, again, interesting. I think it's been interesting to see where the people who were most pushing for this. It wasn't New York. It wasn't Washington, D.C. It was places like Colorado. And that's interesting that it was places like that,

who actually had the courage to really push this farther and faster than anyone else. But I do think as well, when we talk about even decriminalization or legalization, I think about this because, you know, obviously a lot of libertarians are interested in this idea of the drug war, and they talk about how drugs should be legal. And, you know, people can offhand say, oh, well, legalize. is the solution. Okay, great. That's what you believe. Fantastic. I understand, and I'm probably quite sympathetic to that and the idea of you should be able to dictate what you can ingest. But I'll note that marijuana activists, what we are seeing today is the result of 40 years of

work. They found high-profile celebrities who would advocate for them. Do you remember when Willie Nelson was considered a weirdo because he would do this? This was a punchline, right? Yeah. He had to leave Nashville, essentially, because people thought he was so strange. The epicenter of country music. Right. And then contrast that with Snoop Dogg, I mean, who is, I mean, famous for just how high he is all the time. And they would, exactly. And then, but also marijuana activists were smart. They had these grassroots groups. They would talk about, oh, hemp. And then they kind of, you know, I think now, I think it's basically, I'm not an expert on marijuana, but it seemed to me a bit of a scam, the whole thing of medical marijuana,

because it was a way of pushing through marijuana to get. And fair enough, you know, they opposed the law and they tried to chip away at the law that banned marijuana any way they could. Good for them. That's the way, you know, sometimes politics can operate. Who is that person who is out there today, just one celebrity who is advocating for cocaine? When you talk about legalization, and I have this discussion with people, I say, have dinner with your uncle and your aunt and say, hey, by the way, I believe heroin and cocaine should be legally available on a street corner in your local pharmacy. And look at their jaw drop to the floor, because people haven't done the political legwork. They just want to jump to the end result. Oh, legalization. That's not going to happen if you don't do the political legwork. and marijuana is an example of how long it takes to do that political legwork, 30, 40 years.

So my question is, how do we stop all of these people in Latin America who are dying because of this drug war? What do we do in the meantime? Because it's just a shredder that these young men and women are being thrown into. Latin America has, I think, something like 5% of the population of the world, I think it's about 500 million. One in three homicides on the planet occurs somewhere between the Latin America and the Caribbean. A lot of that, a lot of that is somehow to do with drugs because it's this massive drug-producing area and also huge problems with very violent gangs. If you look at Brazil, if you look at Colombia, look at Caracas, Guastamale, El Salvador, Mexico. All of that is tied in with this drug war.

So I don't know what we do. That's great. In 40 years, we'll all have legal drugs. Okay, great. But my book was written to, how are we going to stop the people dying tomorrow? And unfortunately, I don't have the answer to that. I'm just a journalist. All I can do is just report from the scene and hope that smarter people than me can actually come up with the solution based on my observations.

Well, I feel like that's the kind of depressing note that we like to go out on in the show. No, but it's not. I mean, I don't think, one thing because, yeah, one thing I do want to say about the book is that I think that the sense of Colombians themselves come through. I really wanted to capture one thing I wanted to really capture as the beauty of Columbia itself and the Colombian people. I know this wouldn't be for many Colombians, their preferred prism through which to view parts of the country. But there's a dynamic. dynanism of the Colombian people. There's a poetry in how they speak. There's a sense of humour that Colombians bring to everything, even though they've lived through this phenomenally violent past 70 years. Obviously, things are much better today than they were, say, 20 years ago. But still, there's just a vitality there in Colombia that I hope I've captured

that doesn't make it an overwhelmingly depressing book. No, I didn't find the book depressing, but I found the end of our conversation and slightly depressing. There's always tomorrow. Anything but despair, right? Isn't that what the Revolutionary said? Any sin is forgivable except despair. Yeah.

It's a really easy way to just go inside and not do anything, which I guess we're all kind of doing. I'm just going to stop talking, because I'm just going to talk myself into despair. Toby Mews, the book is Kilo. Thank you so much for coming onto the show and walking us through this. Hey, guys, I've really enjoyed it.

conversation. It was a pleasure to be here. That's all for this week, War College listeners. War College is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, you can reach us at the show at Warcollegepodcast.com. We are on Twitter at War underscore College. We are on Facebook at Facebook.com forward slash warcollege podcast. And we have our own website at warcollegepodcast.com. We'll be back next week. with more conversations about conflict on this angry planet of ours. Stay safe until then.