The Underworld Podcast - Colombia's FARC Guerillas: From Revolution to the Golden Age of Cocaine w/Toby Muse

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia fought a guerrilla war against Colombia’s government - as well as against right wing militias and drug cartels - for over four decades before signing a peace treaty in 2016 and then dissolving in 2017, though splinter faction known as The Dissidents still prowls the jungles.  As the FARC were coming up, another violent group in Colombia hellbent on taking over territory was also growing: the country’s infamous drug cartels. In this episode, we’re joined by longtime cartel correspondent and frequent guest, author Toby Muse to detail the history of the FARC and what exactly was their role in Colombia’s cocaine trade.  Toby is the author of Kilo: Life and Death Inside the Secret World of the Cocaine Cartels  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Bad advice? You talking to me? Kayak, got that right.

Looking to see what's happening around your home? Ring's battery doorbell helps you track packages and see who's at your door in real time. The outdoor cam plus protects your yard at night with a wide field of view and clearer retinal 2K video. Or upgrade to 4K cameras and doorbells with retinal vision for ultra-clear zoom in detail. Your door, your yard, your home. With Ring, it's protected. Shop cameras, doorbells, and more at ring.com now. It's July 2nd, 2008 in the jungles of southern Colombia.

Deep in these impenetrable forests, there's a group of militants and they hear helicopters coming towards them. They're excited, but they're not worried. They think it's all just part of a plan to transfer away some precious cargo they've been holding. And that precious cargo is actually hostages. Some are Colombian soldiers. There's a few Americans. And there's Ingrid Bedincourt, a former senator and presidential candidate. She's been held hostage in the jungle for six and a half years at this point.

She'd been campaigning in a supposedly demilitarized zone in 2002 when she was grabbed from her car at a checkpoint. The guerrillas holding her are members of the Marxist-Leninist militia known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, as everyone calls them. At this point, they've been fighting the government of Colombia for more than four decades. While they haven't exactly threatened to take,

takeover cities like Bogota or Cali, they've held their own in the wild jungles, making the military and police forces bleed. And as the militants have been rising up over the decades, so of course have other violent territory controlling groups in Colombia who operate in the shadows. The cartels. What exactly the relationship is between the FARC and the cartels? Well, we've got a full episode to discuss that. The FARC have been accused of playing a big role in the cocaine trade. But what exactly that role is continues to be debatable. Kidnapping hostages and holding them for ransom, though, there's no debate on how that's been a favorite tactic of FARC for decades. The Smithsonian Magazine cites the Colombian special

jurisdiction for peace as attributing over 20,000 kidnappings to FARC from 1990 to 2015. Bading Corus tried to escape three times previously, but each one has failed. After the last attempt, they make her wear a chain around her neck. The Colombian authorities have also failed in their negotiations to secure her release, at one point even offering to free hundreds of FARC prisoners. Betting court, though, is a prize hostage, and the FARC often moves her and the other hostages she's being held with around to avoid detection. Still, her campaign manager, who was grabbed with her, was released six months earlier, so it's not entirely out of the question. For now, though, she's designed to the impossibly hard jungle life, beatings, being threatened with bullets, being

underfed, and grueling forced marches. These helicopters, though, they're not what the FARC members suspect. See, they think it's a humanitarian group coming to help them move the hostages to another location. Sounds kind of funny, but something similar happened with a different set of hostages months earlier in Venezuela. But something else happens months earlier too. The Colombian military manages to crack the FARC's coded radio transmissions, send some agents in undercover, and gets a bead on where the hostages are being held. That's when they start planning this daring rescue,

known as Operation Check for CheckMew. The helicopters are actually full of disguised Colombian commandos, some masquerading as journalist and humanitarian aid workers. The FARC militants don't suspect a thing. The leader, who goes by Cesar, and his body guard board the helicopter with the hostages. When it takes off, both are quickly disarmed by the commandos without a shot being fired. Quote, they closed the helicopter doors. The helicopter started flying and suddenly there was something happening, betting quartel, CNN. I saw the commander who,

during four years, had been at the head of our team, who so many times was so cruel and humiliated me, and I saw him on the floor naked with bound eyes. There's this. This isn't the end of the FARC though. They're still in the jungles in 2008, and they're not quite ready to give up just yet. This is the Underworld podcast. Every week, we've got a new story on organized crime from around the world and throughout history, brought to you by two journalists who have been reporting on these topics for a decade plus. My name is Danny Gold. I'm one of your hosts, and I'm usually joined by Sean Williams, who is not here today because he, I don't know, he's pink eye in both of his eyes or something.

Yeah, that's what I'm going to go with. As always, we put up bonus episodes quite often at patreon.com slash the Underworld Podcast for a couple of dollars a month. You can get them, or you can sign up through Spotify or iTunes. You know, follow, like, subscribe, rate, all that good stuff. Today, I am joined by frequent guest, probably our most frequent guest, Toby Mews, who was based in Colombia for a long time and is the author of the book Kilo, which is, for my money, the best overall book on the cocaine trade.

Colombia. So yeah, once again, we've got our friend who I think has been on the show, maybe four or five times. Definitely, I think, our most frequent guest, Toby, Mews. Toby, thanks again for joining us. Thanks for inviting me, officially friend of the pod. I need to make up a t-shirt that says friend of the underworld pod. Yeah, not the other one that says that a lot. No one should be listening to that podcast. But yeah, I mean, we want to get into FARC and understanding it. I think you're definitely one of the people who probably knows more about them than almost anyone else. You guys who have read Toby's book, Kilo that I keep talking about. I think a new Spanish version is coming out.

So definitely buy that if you haven't. Best book about cocaine and Colombia out there, if you ask me. But yeah, the origins, I guess, is right, La Violencia, right? Take us through that. What was going on there? And how did it lead to the emergence of FARC? So Laelencia is a crucial part in Colombia's. Colombia's history. So this breaks out in 1948. And essentially what you have is you have this civil

war in Colombia between liberals and conservatives. And what happens is this competing vision for the country. Obviously, the liberals are looking for greater rights for the poor, for these small farmers, and you have conservatives more from the entrenched positions of power. And then this political dispute really turns into violence. So you have on both sides this the liberals will have, have their own militias that will go out and kill the conservatives. And more famously, the conservatives will set up these death squads to travel around and kill prominent liberal figures. But there's a lesser-known thing that I think I want to talk about for a second about La Bulencia, because it's there where you see the beginning in Colombia of, I think I've talked about this in previous podcast,

the spectacle of bloodshed, the theater of violence. And this is where you really see it. And the point being is, if violence and death and murder is everywhere, if you just walk up to someone and shoot them in the head, no one bats an eyelid. Yeah, it's sad and that person's family has lost that person. But people, it doesn't make an impact. Now, if you kill them with a chainsaw, if you do them like the Colombian necktie, which was allegedly invented during La Violencia, where someone's throat would be slim and they would pull the tongue out through the hole, That is the spectacle of violence. And on top of that, this is where we see the emergence in Colombia of superstars of violence.

These are men like Alma Negra, Sangre Negra. There's another one called vengeance. Sangre Negra, just as an example, means black blood. He was this legendary killer of conservatives. He was a liberal figure. And he would go around just killing conservative figures, politicians, priests. That was what he was doing. But he also became a household name in Colombia.

And that kind of figure you're going to see over the next 70 years in Colombia. In Colombia, killers for hire of Pablo Escobar will become household names. You'll also see commanders of the FARC will become household names. And it starts there in Labulencia. Going back to the FARC, what it is is whole populations of liberal communities would flee their zones because the conservative killers would come into that region. And that's what happens in the case of the FARC. We have this man, I'll call him Manuel Marilanda.

He goes by various names, but he's going to be the founder of the FARC. He's with a bunch of other liberals, and they move into the mountains with a few operatives of the Colombian Communist Party, and they set up this kind of parallel society. They just want to get away from the violence. That's what they're trying to do. They do that for a few years. And then in 1964, the army tries to invade, worry, this is the height of the Cold War,

the army invades this area, they managed to get away. And that's when Manuel Marilander says, okay, there is no space for us in Colombia. We need to set up an revolutionary organization to take power by force. And that's when he found in 1964 the revolutionary armed forces of Colombia, the FARC. Yeah, and I was reading too that it was, you know, all. these sort of self-defense groups that were independent that had been set up in the 40s and 50s. You know, you had communism spreading all over Colombia during these times, or at least in these rural areas. What were the conditions like in the rural areas where these sort of things were

sort of coming to a to a head where the genesis of FARC was? So, Colombia has always been this intensely unequal society and where the land and the political power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of facts. families and basically the poor are forced to just, you know, fight over the scraps that are left. It has an intense concentration of the power, but also not only that and riches, the wealth of the country is concentrated. Again, it's one of the most unequal countries on the planet. But on top of that, it's not that it's just impoverished because there are poorer countries. You can look at places like Bolivia, Nicaragua, and none of them are as violent as Colombia.

I think the difference is, is that there are two key differences, in fact. A, that when you've had these demands that have come from below, from the poorest sections of Colombia, have kind of come together to demand more of their piece of the pie from the wealthiest classes of Colombia, the wealthiest classes of Colombia have tended to respond with political violence. They, you know, there are famous cases of that Gabriel Garcia-Marquez wrote about, for instance, the banana strike during the...

the 20s in Santa Mata where banana workers went on strike and the army went in and possibly hundreds of banana workers were killed. And that's the kind of reaction often that the Colombian elites would respond to. And then the other part is you have to remember that Colombia, no one has ever been able to control this uncontrollable terrain. It's too big. You've got this weak central government and then you've got this vast country with massive jungles where there may still to this day be uncontacted, uncontacted indigenous tribe. That's how lawless much of Columbia is. And with that inability to control the society,

that often means that there's local fiefdoms, rife for corruption, rife for political violence. And it just makes all of the local politics that much sharper. And agriculturalism, like the sort of, land was a big part of this, right? Like they wanted to take land from these bigger ranchers and farmers and give it to the peasants?

Exactly. And what we saw was often this kind of almost, they've called it the reverse land reform, where in fact, where instead of land being more equally shared out amongst these small farmers, in fact, land was over the course of the 20th century, in many cases being concentrated into the hands of more and more of these Catoa farmers, these big landholders. If you get on the highways of the Caribbean coast, it's a thing I would recommend doing it. If you go to a city like Monterea, which is a beautiful city there on the Caribbean coast, and you drive, say you drive east or west, you can drive for like two hours, and the highway just goes alongside one farm.

You are just looking at one man or one woman's land. And this is a site you'll see time and time and time again over your time in Columbia. I remember one woman who told me she went to a drug traffickers party. she said that they were driven to the front gates of the farm there a small plane picked them up at the front gates of the farm in order to actually fly to the house itself that's how large this drug traffickers property was and this again is a common site in in columbia so we missed all this sort of upheaval in the 60s we have we have the FARC generating coming to be where do they go from there what happens with them in like the late 60s early 70s what are they are they

sort of fighting in the mountains? Are they training? Are they doing bigger attacks? Yeah. So really, actually, I mean, there's not much they're growing in the 60s. They're growing in the 70s. And they're sort of, you know, it's, it's not the major change that's actually going to come in the 80s. But the 60s and the 70s is the height of the Cold War, as we all know, there's many other groups are created in Colombia. The EPL, for instance, the Popular Liberation Army, the EPL, that was a Maoist-inspired revolutionary group. Then you, you have the ELN, the National Liberation Army, that is the Cuban-inspired. Then you have the FARC, which is always considered itself a Marxist, a Leninist organization.

They're growing, but it's really the 80s where the major change not only for the FARC, but also Colombia and, in fact, the world is going to happen. What happens is there's a moment in the early 1980s when the Colombian authorities find the famous Trankylandia. Trankilandia was this complex where Pablo Escobar was overseeing massive amounts of cocaine production. And what this is in terms of the war on drugs, when they find Trankilandia, it's in Southern Columbia,

they seize 14 tons of cocaine, and they realized that this is much bigger. The cocaine industry in Pablo Escobar is much bigger figure than they had anticipated and almost it's like that film jaws do you remember that scene in jaws when the chief brodie they're on the boat the three of them are hunting the shark and he's throwing the chum into the water and the shark and the jaws i guess is its name comes out of the water and kind of uh and he stumbles back and he walks back and he says we're going to need a bigger boat that's when columbia understands the size of the this parallel universe of this cocaine industry

But it's also the moment that the FARC is about to get into cocaine. Because what happens there is the FARC, Pablo Escobar, is running this part of Southern Columbia. There, the FARC have their own people. Drug traffickers are always insanely right-wing. It's that's the way that they see the world. They see the world like an entrepreneur but on steroids. They always believe might is right. Whatever I can take is, you know, the correct way.

I have more balls than anyone else, so I deserve the rewards, more risk, more reward. So they always hate these kind of left-wing positions, such as environmentalists, people who are campaigning for land rights. So what Pablo's people were doing is they controlled these parts of Columbia, they started killing these left-wing activists. And this was told to me by a member of the Falk himself. And he said, we watched from outside, and we said, we can't take this anymore. And we're not going to. So they invaded this part of Colombia in the 80s, where Pablo Escobar and his men were in control. And this is an absolutely unknown part of Colombian history. I've never read an account of this. It was hearing it directly

from the FARC themselves. Imagine the heavyweight bout of the Medellin cartel going at it with the FARC in Southern Colombia, just brutal. The FARC were telling me it was one of those situations where checkpoints were set up on lonely roads. And if you drove up to the checkpoint, no one knew you at the checkpoint, they just shot you and threw your body to one side. It was that level of savagery. But eventually, the FARC are able to push Pablo Escobar's people out of this zone. They take control of this zone. And he said, so this is sometime in the 80s.

And this was a famous gorilla called Fabian Ramirez told me this. And he was there. And he said, so we take over these villages and we're looking. As the Krispy Chicken Sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect.

Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet, no. Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very.

Only at 711. Valley through 62326, participating stores only while supplies lastly out for full terms. The jurors sat in a dark room, hands resting on a Ouija board. They weren't guessing. They were asking the victim who killed them. Sounds unbelievable, right?

But it happened. And that's just one of thousands of stories waiting for you on Morning Cup of Murder. Hi, I'm Karina B. Meesterfer. And every single day on Morning Cup of Murder, I bring you a real, chilling, true crime story connected to that exact day in history. From Killer Cannibal Brothers to the Boy Scout who was obsessed with the occult, and the strange story of the bloody hammer in the frozen cabin. These aren't the cases you've heard.

a hundred times. They're the ones that make you stop and think, how have I never heard this before? With over 2,500 episodes and a brand new story each and every single day, morning cup of murder becomes part of your routine fast. If you like your coffee hot but your bones chilled, then sit back and start your day with a morning cup of murder. Go listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. Around. And it was, he described it, it was like, it was the weekend when all of the farmers had come into town to sell their coca paste, which we all know is, you've turned the crops of coca into this substance that is one step shy of becoming pure cocaine.

They come in, they're going to sell it. And he says that the FARC were patrolling around the town, and then two coca farmers started fighting each other. They had to calm them, separate them, and sort of, you know, he couldn't even remember what the argument was. Then there was another fight between two more. And the FARC said that they looked at each other and said, well, if we're going to to be spending our time acting like policemen, then we need to get paid. And this is where they

institute the famous Gramaha. The Gramahi is basically the FARC saying that they are going to take a cut of every sale of coca paste that's in their territory. It's about 12, 15%. This is what the FARC will say for the rest of their life was the limit of their involvement in the cocaine. trade. That yes, in territory they controlled, they took a percentage of the sales, but they never directly got involved themselves. Other people are going to say that's not the case. But just to put it into context and just to, even in the early 90s, there are reports from the CIA and the DEA that suggest that the FARC were not involved in producing or distributing cocaine themselves, that they were just sticking with the grandma here. And that's funny because the term,

According to the FAR, they say that the term narco-terrorista, narco-terrorist, was invented for them. They say it was an ambassador to Bogota, U.S. ambassador to Bogota, who coined the term in the 80s, knowing for well it was going to be black propaganda to use against them. Did they eventually get more involved in the production and distribution of cocaine? It's a tricky question, but yes, I believe they did.

And I think they did it in, I'm almost certain they did. And you can see that they developed relationships with traffickers. So, for instance, there was this big thing around the turn of the century with this very, very famous Brazilian trafficker who was being hosted by the FARC. Freddie Seashore was his name. And he went on the run and he had set up this deal where he was bringing them guns and they were giving him drugs. I think that what the FARC were doing is that they were, the FARC were keeping the production and trafficking of drugs. to certain fronts. I think that's what they were doing and they were keeping the hands free of lots of the organisation. Because I've spoken to FARC people who absolutely swear up and down.

These were university types who were the intellectuals from the urban, from the cities, who fled to the jungle to join the FARC. These people would not have done that if they thought that the FARC really was a drug trafficking organisation. And I think there's an important difference as well, compared to the FARC's enemies, that the FARC really did seem to put the money back into the revolution. When you compare them with their enemies, I'm sure we'll come across in some time later in this conversation, their biggest enemy becomes the far right death squat, who were called the AUC, which stands for United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia. They were run by men who had been drug trackers before they joined the AUC. They were remnants of the people who had destroyed Pablo

Escobar in Medellin, people like Don Burner, they were drug traffickers and they spent the money like drug traffickers on parties with Colombia's most famous actresses. They would buy farms. They would buy SUVs, jewelry. The FARC on the whole, the only thing I ever saw that these commanders would treat themselves to would be a watch. That was it. The cars they drove, they were stolen. They can't buy property because, you know, they just can't. They can't. They can't get into the legal financial system. And in fact, you're going to see this time and time again. The FARC are excluded from the legal financial system. So they have to bury money. Time and time again, the FARC end up burying these crates or containers of money. I was in one part of Columbia. This was about

10 years ago. And it was funny because this woman who had these diggers, these industrial diggers, she said, oh, my God, the FARC seized them. I said, oh, what's going on? She said, no, they're just having them for three or four days. They bury. some money and they can't remember where it is. So they're digging up all of one mountain. And that was how they spent like three or four nights searching for the money because someone was going to get shot if they couldn't produce that money. So even when they got more involved in the in the producing and the distribution of cocaine, it was, you know, to fund the ideology. Like they weren't doing it just to make money. Exactly. I mean, but, you know, once all of this money is swishing

around, it's going to corrupt people. People who have been involved in these countries, Everybody knows who's, you know, aware that cocaine has this tremendous ability to corrupt. And this is why you will see other left-wing revolutionary groups like the ELN throughout its whole history never touched cocaine. That's only changed recently and you're already seeing a change in that group's behavior because they have decided to get involved in the drugs business. Because once you get involved in cocaine, that becomes the end. And the EPL, and I'm the guerrilla group is a perfect example of this. At the beginning, they're exporting drugs to fund the revolution. By the end, they're fighting the revolution just to keep exporting drugs.

I mean, and that's what can happen. And you will see a difference with the FARC's behavior. Once cocaine or the COCA, whatever you want to say, the tax on COCA becomes their main source of income, then the FARC adjusts to ensure that that income keeps flowing in. So you'll see that the fiercest fighting throughout the 2000s between the FARC and their enemies are going to be the spots with the most COCA. But the COCA is going to have an immediate impact on the FARC. Because by the end of the 1980s, the beginning of the 1990s, obviously this is when the USSR collapses. Now, whether the USSR was giving financial aid, and Latin America had so many different left

wing guerrilla groups all throughout Central America, all throughout South America. Now, whether the USSR was giving them financial aid, was giving them logistical help, at the minimum, the USSR was a beacon of hope for these guerrilla groups. Well, that's the society we're trying to get to. Once the USSR collapses, obviously communism as a whole takes a knock. So you see this wave of peace deals across the continent, with the exception of Colombia, The FARC are going to go from strength to strength to strength. And it's over the 1990s that the FARC begin to deliver their biggest ever blows against the army.

This is when they will take over entire army bases. By the end of the century, by their year 2000, they have hundreds and hundreds of Colombian soldiers kidnapped. They're keeping them in this kind of open-air jungle camp with barbed wires around. down there as they try and negotiate a deal. And that was the immediate benefit that cocaine brought to the FARC. The kidnapping thing is big, though, right? I mean, they were kidnapping politicians, civilians, some pretty famous stories there. Absolutely. So the FARC, by the time I arrived to Columbia, Colombia is the kidnapped capital of the world. And this is precisely because of the FARC. Common criminals were involved, but often the common criminals would then sell a hostage to the

park themselves. But yes, it was an incredible source of income, but it was also the way of the FARC saying, the FARC really did come out of Colombia's poorest sections. And we know that the FARC deeply resented, that the war was so often fought in the homeland of the FARC, but also pitting poor soldiers against poor guerrillas. The kidnapping was a way for the FARC to actually say, to the richest Colombians, uh-uh, you guys are involved in this too. You guys. are going to bleed with us. So what it was a way, what they were doing was it was a way of kidnapping politicians and they kidnapped presidential candidates, they kidnapped American

defense contractors, and that was a way of pressuring the government. These special hostages, those were being kept for a deal that would free all of the FARC, which ran into hundreds. I think it was close to a thousand members of the FARC who were in prison would be released for these 15 hostages. That was what the FARC demanded. And there were years of negotiations that was international mediation that they can never actually come to an agreement. Yeah, they kidnapped what's the movie? They kidnapped the American scientist, right? Or the environmentalist guy for like eight or nine years or no, he was only for a couple months, right? Do you know what I'm talking about? Was this the orchid guy? Maybe. Movie was proof of life. Thomas, Thomas Hargrove.

Okay. Yeah, I can't remember the specifics of that come, that. I do remember, though, hearing one story and this was that one person, he was an Englishman and I can't remember how he ended up getting himself kidnapped, but he would have been wandering around one red zone is what we used to call it. The red zones where the FARC were operative or where the Civil War was at its fiercist. And I remember hearing about, I think it was an Englishman, he got kidnapped by the FARC. Eventually he just annoyed the FARC so much that they ended up telling him to just go. And he left the camp, wandered around in the forest, got lost. lost had to go back to the FARC camp and ask for directions.

Now, I can't remember who this was, but I remember a Reuters journalist telling me about this some years ago. Yeah, it sounds like an Englishman that I know quite well. But no, I think it was different. I think it was an American scientist and they held them for like 11 months. They made that movie. I think Meg Ryan's in it. But I can't, I don't remember too many specifics.

But yeah, I mean, you know, from the way you're describing it, it sounds like the FARC had these sort of noble aspirations and were trying to fight for Columbia's underclass. But then we did see right in the 2000s, they were massive anti-FARC protests in some of these areas. So what kind of what went wrong? 100%. I do want to clarify my view on the FARC. I think it's important. The biggest cliche you will hear about the FARC is that they lost their ideology. And that is just not true. The FARC absolutely were committed to their ideology. Now, their ideology and what they were aiming for and their way of going about that is the thing to criticize.

The FARC were absolutely, I would say, the FARC never carried out the type of psychopathic terrorism that you would see from scumbags like ISIS, right? They never deliberately tried to kill civilians. There was usually an army or a police target that they were aiming for. But what ended up happening is they were always criminally, and that civilians would die. And a perfect example is one of the biggest atrocities of the Colombian Civil War is a town in Chocco,

which is north-western Colombia, right up close to the border with Panama. And there was heavy fighting between the FARC and their enemies, the AUC. And the FARC fired off these homemade mortars that they're called Tatukos. And because they were fighting in this town, all of the towns, many of the townspeople had run into the local church. It was called Bohaya, the town, if I'm not wrong. They had run into the church to find some sort of refuge, to find some sort of safety. And one of these homemade mortars landed right on the church. And it was like 120 people just gone. Just brutal. And the FARC are responsible for that. It was this constant negligence with the civilian population. They did kidnap

people. By the end, the FARC had really lost their mind as well, because they were inhabiting the jungle. they had really been cut off from a lot of their civilian base by a well-trained, well-financed army and their enemies in the AUC. The AUC would commit these atrocious massacres of civilians. Civilians suspected of being FARC sympathizers. And what that did was it really cut the cord between the FARC and a lot of these towns and especially the cities. So the FARC retreated into the jungle. And they had no one else to talk to. except themselves. So of course, they all went mad. They had no point of perspective on anything, because the only thing they did was just talk to their neighbour, another mad member of the FARC.

So you would speak to them and you would say, look, about this kidnapping. This is worldwide being rejected by every left-wing group who actually agrees with your aims of that Colombia needs a fundamental overhaul and is sympathetic to your aim of trying to overthrow that violently, but they can't tolerate the kidnapping. They'll say, well, you know, they just don't understand us. Or they would say, well, you know, our comrades are in prison. And you would say, well, yeah, being in prison and going through an official trial is one thing. You are holding people in these atrocious jungle conditions where people are getting sick.

So the presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt, they would release periodically these proof of life videos. In one of them, the FAR could lost their money. mind to such an extent. They had the video with Ingrid Bettencourt with chains around her neck. They didn't understand that the whole world was going to say, what the fuck are you doing? They thought this was going to pressure the government a bit more. Ah-ha, look what we're doing to your person. Instead, the world was revolted by them. So the FARC were losing their mind. And they had this inability to sort of compromise on anything. They had this long-running fight.

with the Yelan in the eastern department of the country around Aralca. They were fighting with one of the crazier blocks of the Yelan called the Domingo La Eain front. And these two lunatics would just fight each other, but they would like arrange a, it was, I mean, it's kind of funny, but they would arrange a truce. And they'd say, all right, let's meet here and let's work out this truce. They would go there and one would ambush the other one, kill all of the negotiators. Then six months later they'd say, all right, enough fighting. Let's arrange a truce. They would meet a up, then they would kill each other again. And it was back and forth between these two demented fronts. But yeah, lunacy runs high in the Colombian Civil War, as I think we've established.

Yeah, it's interesting. You're talking about these guys in the jungle who only talk to their friends and they're losing their minds over ideology. And that sounds like a lot of people I know on, on like, Twitter and social media, you know, it's, they're not even in the jungle. They have no excuse. They have no excuse. There's a phrase of, I can't remember where I said it, because I would love to give the credit to someone, to the person who said it, but the phrase, but the phrase, is the jungle makes you poor, the jungle makes you stupid, the jungle makes you crazy. Someone, a Colombian wrote that somewhere, and I wish I could give them credit, but I've always remembered that.

Sounds like New York. And, you know, you mentioned the AUC, just to be clear, that's the right-wing sort of paramilitary groups that came up in the 90s, I believe? You talked about that in the Don Burner episode a lot. Exactly, yeah. So the AUC is really a response to the FARC. So the FARC, and you know, we've got to be careful here as well because there is a lot of mythologizing in the Colombian Civil War. There's a lot of self-justification.

The fact is, is that many landowners were terrorized by the FARC. And the FARC would turn up to these farms and they would say, all right, we want 20% of your income. That's the tax, they would call it, right? Which is just extortion or they call it the vaccine. That was the slang term, the vaccine. but they would say our tax is 20%. And if a farm owner, a cattle rancher didn't pay, then they would terrorize this farm.

They would kidnap them. They would possibly kill them. They would certainly kill workers. That happened a lot as a warning. And the farming would always be too late to arrive. So these farm owners did become frustrated. And what comes out of this coalition of army politicians and businesses in many parts of Colombia is going to be the far right desk,

the AUC. The army is going to encourage these fighters by giving them training, essentially giving them intelligence, giving them logistical support. The army sees in the AUC, this group can carry out the war that we cannot carry out. They will break all of the laws. They will carry out the dirty war that as the army we can't do. The politicians will give the AUC. that kind of, they will help with the institutions. They will divert any investigator away. They will

keep Bogotas investigations at an arm's length. And then finally, you have the local business who will fund this. And the drug traffickers, because they've bought up so much land, instantly identify with the landowners of Colombia. And they get into this very, very quickly. So what you'll see is the AUC is quickly populated at its highest levels with. big drug traffickers, Don Burner, Macacao. In fact, the majority of the most famous members of the AUC are drug traffickers themselves. And they are going to lead this in the most brutal aspect of the Colombian Civil War. This is when the AUC is going to unleash an offensive across Colombia, trying to attack the guerrillas. But then first and most important thing is to separate the

guerrillas from that civilian base, those civilian supporters they have in the towns and the cities. So you have massacres become a daily event in Colombia. That's when I first got to Colombia. And I think I may have mentioned this on a previous episode. I remember there was a massacre of some like 14 fishermen in the port town of Buenaventura. And I think it was on the final page of the newspaper. The country had become so so used to these massacres. It just was no longer news anymore if 14 people were gunned down. After, after Escobar and not including Don Burnah, what was like, what was the sort of relationship between FARC and some of the other drug cartels? Were they fighting each other? Were they sort of doing deals together? Was it

kind of like a wary standoffishness? No, so again, I mean, the FARC never tried to take all of the coca under its control, produce that and distribute that itself. Never. What they may have done is in parts of the country, I think they were doing there, but on the whole, they weren't. So it was the drug cartels that were coming in. They were sending emissaries in order to buy the coca paste from FARC territory in order to turn into cocaine. And this also shows the madness of the Colombian War because some traffickers would actually put themselves in the middle. So you had cases like local Barera had this really interesting thing where he set himself up as, He would buy all of this coca paste from the FARC in the east of the country.

I think he was in Guwabiaria, if I'm not wrong. He would buy it from the FARC. He would then turn that into cocaine and then sell it to the FARC's enemies, the AUC. And so everybody knows. The FARC knew that they were sending cocaine or cocapaece that would eventually enrich their enemies, the AUC. The AUC knew that they were sending money back that would eventually land in the FARC's pockets. Once you get addicted to that cocaine money, you don't have any way back. And having funding a standing man army, which probably reached around 20,000 fighters, that's expensive. I mean,

that is expensive. You have to feed them. You have to arm them. You have to give them all of the bullets. And these, again, it goes back to the theatrics of war. I would get caught in these firefights in a place like Torabiu. And it would go on for four or five hours. And you would, you would think hundreds of bullets have been used. And then you would ask around the next day and you'd say, well, you know, what were the fatalities from that? Oh, no, no one was killed. It was just theatrics, right? They would fight at each other. They would go through an entire banana clip, fight with the AK-47. Well, that cost money. But again, I was always struck by that. How many bullets are used in war for such a low return? But yes, the FARC would occasionally, well, it was constantly overseeing the sales of

Coca pays to Wireless can feel like a world of traps but not with Visible. It's one-line wireless with unlimited data and hotspot powered by Verizon for $25 a month. Taxes and fees included. Plus, for a limited time,

new members pay just $20 a month for one year on the Visible Plan using the code Fresh Start. Refresh your wireless with Visible. Tap the banner to switch today. Terms apply. Limited time offer subject to change. See Visible.com for plan features

and network management details. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day Like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance With USAA you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. At first I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light

And I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows. chose and they were all free. The truth is our city. It's just so beautiful.

On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep and sudden belief in extraterrestrials, no credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Through these cartels, but the cartels, as I said, always hate the leftist rebels because they always are always very right-wing drug traffickers by their nature. you know you mentioned spending time in in these areas what like nowadays i don't know if you've been there in recent years i think you have but like what is what's rural columbia and these sort of jungle

villages what are they like i mean they're very poor they're in the mountains they're in the jungle they usually set in astonishingly beautiful parts of the country there used to be an old joke that it was only journalists the small farmers the soldiers and the guerrillas knew how beautiful Columbia was because so much of the country was off limits to the rest of the country. I mean, I've seen astonishing landscapes, but it was guerrilla-controlled, or it would be mountaintops where the army and the FARC were fighting each other for days on end, and anyone with good sense that long got out of there. They're poor, they're often, they're lacking the basic infrastructure, and infrastructure is a big word, and I tend to try and not use that, but I mean,

it's they're lacking roads, they're lacking bridges to get them to town, they're lacking schools, they're lacking health facilities, they're lacking the basics of what we consider civilization, which is a basic enforcement of laws, a basic ability to get yourself healed if you're sick, and a basic level of education. When I'm writing my book, Keilo, one of the things that really struck me. I was hanging out in a, this kind of, I mean, it's not even a hamlet. It was a collection of about four or five homes. And they were telling me that they had set up this toll on this dirt track. So anyone who had business to do along this dirt track, which was either importing illegal gasoline from Venezuela, always carrying coca paste, had to pay something like 50 cents,

pass this toll on this dirt track. They were collecting that money to build a school. cocaine paid for that school where the fuck was the local authorities why wasn't the local government of norte de san dandere which is the province why weren't they out there actually just building a fucking school to give these kids some sort of hope and it was heartbreaking to see that once the school was there that these small farmers had actually built how much the kids thrived and loved the school but if they hadn't built it themselves they were just going to be stuck with no education These were now in this zone I got my first meeting

of the new generation of FARC. These are the so-called dissidents. And, you know, this is FARC 2.0 almost. Yeah, I want to get to that in a second, but I just want to touch on one weird thing, a story that I, you've told me and that I kind of love about Tanya, the Dutch FARC woman.

Can you kind of just give us a brief sort of rundown of who she is and what happened there? Yeah, so Tanya was, you know, around, Columbia had the worst human rights record in the Western Hemisphere. This is around the turn of the century. So you'd get quite a lot of foreign visitors, really, who were very concerned about human rights, would come to Colombia and would come and volunteer. They would accompany human rights leaders, trade union activists, because all of these people were under threat by the AUC. And Tanya was one of those, I think. She was attracted by the injustice of the country. She wanted to do something.

And if I'm remembering right, she was teaching in the slums of a city and then obviously made some left-wing friends who at some point, I think, revealed that they were in the FARC. And she decided to go join the FARC. She's an interesting case. Her existence came about because the Colombian army carried out a raid. And in this raid, they found her diary.

and it was all of this her five years in the FARC. And she talked about the ups and the downs of the FAR. She talks about, you know, someday she feels completely pointless being there in the FARC. Now, yeah, she's still there in Colombia. She probably can't leave Colombia. I mean, I think she got an amnesty within Colombia, although there are still fine points going on about that, I think.

But I don't think she would be able to travel back to Europe. But I don't know. but that would be my assumption. Yeah, I mean, you got to give her credit, though. Like, she didn't just go join some leftist militia for like five months to like get cloud on social media. Like she, you know, she went for it. She put the years in. Oh, 100%.

And I should say about this, the FARC is, you join the FARC and that's it. You don't leave the FAR. That is not an option. You are in it for life. And yeah, she absolutely, I think, is a woman absolutely convinced of her ideals and is prepared to live. and die for those ideals. You know, these guerrillas have to live through bombing raids by the Colombian Air Force, attack helicopters appearing out of nowhere. I've been under a bombing raid in Syria, and that is one of the most terrifying things you can live through. There is a feeling of

complete helplessness. And I know that there's just nothing you can do. All you can do is just, all right, it's going to happen or it's not. And this is what these FARC were living in with. They would live in these jungle camps and, you know, the Colombian Air Force would get some intelligence and then they would bomb the center of the camps. Then you are just grabbing what you can and running in the darkness and hoping some laser-guided bomb is not following you. It's, it's, and for her to put herself through that, yeah, I mean, she really was committed to that life. Just living in the jungle on its own, you know, forget bombing rates. Like living in the, living in the Amazon for like four or five years, especially when you come from like a Western country strikes me as,

Even if you come from Bogota, Sarkspian is not a pleasant life. No, it's very, very tough. But I think they find their sense of fraternity. Oh, yeah. You know, they're all in it together. And they're all motivated by the similar ideals. I mean, every experience you have with a FARC is always going to be memorable. I mean, just they're fascinating.

They're just crazy. I mean, there was kind of, the FARC, again, I repeat, they really do come. out of the poorest sections of Colombia. And that was always something that the people who didn't understand who grew up in places like Bogota, Meri, Kali, Katha Heena, never really understood that when you would go to these tiny towns, well, you know, and you'd say, oh, you know, and the army would say, where are the FARC? You were asking someone whose, his cousin was probably in his FARC, if not his brother,

if not his best friend from childhood. So this person who you're asking may not be in favor of the FARC's policies, but there's, you're taking someone out of that environment. But on the other hand, you also got as political, as left-wingers, it became increasingly untenable, unsurvivable with this AUC, ferocious offensive in the beginning of the 2000s. Many normal hard left-wingers ended up fleeing places like universities and they would join the FARC because they just didn't feel safe anymore. and the AUC was sending Sicario, sending killers for hire,

to go kill them at their universities, at their places for work. I remember meeting one. This was in Antiochia. His name was Negro Thomas, so Black Thomas. And in the Colombian underworld, if you're Black, if you're Afro,

there's about 50% chance that your nickname's going to be Black something, right? So Black Thomas was from Barankegia, and he comes out of that incredible, I get nostalgic for this kind of thing, you know, the once in Colombia existed this vibrant intellectual Caribbean community. Gabrielle Garcia-Marquez, these guys would get together in Barranguija or Catehina and they would drink and swap ideas, swap short stories. And this guy kind of comes out of this. He was,

he taught at the university, I think he was sociology. Anyway, he joins the FARC and I meet him in Antiochi in the mountains. And we were filming this documentary. This is about 2007. This guy was a true intellectual, right, Negro Tamas. But he was surrounded by, you know, young men and women who had come straight from the farm. Some of them probably never had one year of schooling. So you could tell he felt intensely lonely up there. But what that meant was that when I was there and with the guy I was making this film with, he would just pepper us with questions about, so what do you think about Gordon Brown? But on this day, we needed to kind of get out. And the helicopters have been ominously circling on the horizon. I was like, this isn't a good sign. I don't want to get caught in a, in a firefight between

the FARC and this black hawk helicopter. I'm like, oh yeah, you know, yeah, Gordon Brown, you know, yeah, he's kind of trying his best. Okay, what do you think really happened with Lady Diana? Yeah, okay, Negro, I think I'm going to. He's like, yeah, but just a few more questions about the euro. Yeah, no, definitely next time, mate, definitely will catch up. Because, you know, this guy was absolutely by himself. You know, he had no one to talk to. And again, the jungle, you know, it drives you crazy. It really does. And it drives men and women crazy. Sorry, I should also mention, I meant to mention this earlier.

In the 2000s, I think it was basically only the Kurds and the FARC and the ELN and the Colombians who were having women in front-line positions of combat. I don't think anyone else was doing that. I could be wrong. But yeah, that was another thing that made them quite distinctive about the FARC. you know so they have the uh negro thomas as the as the nickname but they're putting woman ahead so it's kind of like a mixed bag and progressiveness there you know yeah exactly and in fact they were known columbia is quite a deeply racist country and it was interesting to speak to the black members of

the park and they said never once never once did i have any any uh snip of racism in the park that just wasn't tolerated the women went through a different um different different experience. The women, the FARC claimed that were about 40% women, I think that was a bit higher than it probably was. I never saw a camp where there was four in 10 were women. But they were

forced to take contraception. If they did, by any chance, become pregnant, it was an automatic abortion. There was just not going to be any discussion about that. And I know many women were traumatized by that. There was another aspect about the FARC as well is that the FARC did the FARC did accept underage fighters, which obviously contravenes the international law.

You would see 15, 16 year old, 17 year old men and women teenagers in the FARC. I think the FARC tried to lower that towards the end. But I think there were also cases there of obviously like a 16 year old girl, probably ending up in a relationship with a local commander. It wouldn't have been, I mean, you know, I don't want to get into specifics about this or, you know, to be too dismissive of this, and that's not why I mean, it wasn't going to be forced rape because that shit was just not tolerated in the FARC, anything like that. And there's just no record of that sort of sexual violence, or if there is, it was

swiftly taken care of. The FARC would put someone in front of the firing squad in minutes if it was decided this man had raped a civilian or raped another member of the FARC. It just wasn't tolerated. But I did notice that difference that. The black members of the FARC were really constantly talking about how the FARC there was no racism, but the women said, yeah, there is still sexism. We'll end up being, will be the ones who are often cooking the meals, we'll end up washing the pans. And they felt like the equality wasn't quite there as much as the FARC claimed it was. So you mentioned, you mentioned the end, right? So let's kind of catch up to speed and get into like the peace deal, I think it was in 2016, right?

So what, what's happening leading up to this peace deal and what sort of happens during those discussions? and the demobilization and everything like that. So it's actually helpful to kind of jump back again to the 90s, that Columbia is basically sort of staggering. It's just day after day is another sign of this Columbia, of the Fox victories. They would post these videos of then taking over entire police stations, entire armies.

This is when the Americans come up with this bipartisan thing called Plan Colombia. Republicans and Democrats, it starts off under Bill Clinton, but will continue under the presidency of Georgia. W. Bush, billions and billions of dollars is going to the Colombians to strengthen their police and army in order to fight the cocaine industry. At first, it specifically said that they're not going to fight the insurgency, because this is when America still had PTSD about Vietnam.

Obviously, after 9-11, the global war on terror, Colombia is well in that. This was the South American front of the global war on terror, so they got rid of that and allowed all of this aid to be used against the FARC. And crucially what you're doing there is it's investing in the Blackhawks. Well, there's two things they're doing. They're professionalizing a conscript Colombian army, which often drew on the poorest sections of Columbia. Everybody wealthy in Columbia knew how to get out of military service. It was only the poor who served in the army. And then they over the years, in the beginning of the 2000s, they professionalized that. So they get rid of conscription and turn to professional soldiers and these black cork helicopters. This is going to make all of the

difference. It's this ability to get troops from one spot, from one mountaintop to another in a question of minutes, and going ahead, just turn this massive automatic cannon on the FARC. The FARC never learned to roll or even find a good defense against this airpower, let alone turn it back on the Colombian army. They just never got to grips with air power, and it was devastating for them. So we have the army building up and up and up in the background, but there's this funny thing with the fact that for their entire history, they have never, ever lost a commander in battle. They may have died from natural causes. They may have died of cancer, heart attack, but never. And then you've been building up this Colombian army, then we get to 2000 Dunday.

And then it just all sort of happens at once. You know, the cliche from Ernest Hemingway about how his family turned bankrupt, it's slowly, slowly, slowly, then all at once. And this is what happens to the bark in 2000. You just have commander after commander, starting, I believe, with Raul Regis, who was their most, who was their spokesman, very, very, you know, was always appearing on the Colombian television sets was one of the most well-known Colombians. He's killed in this border raid. He's just across the border in Ecuador. Then you have Monahorhoi is also killed. He was this

legendary figure of the FARC. He was their kind of military tactical genius. Then you have, you have Mono Hall. Then you have for the moments that matter. Choose Curat Naturals. Infused with aloeira and vitamin E. Kirad Natural's bandages protect your unexpected scrapes, cuts and burns while also moisturizing your skin. Find deeper relief with natural ingredients you can trust to start the healing. When life surprises call for the best, choose Kyrad, a deeper level of care. Shop the full collection on Amazon or visit Kyrad.com to learn more. Manuel Marilanda, the original founding member of the FARC, dies in 2008.

There's some controversy. The Colombian government say he died in a bombing raid. the FARC say, no, he died by himself, or he died surrounded by friends of a heart attack. He was very old by that point, died in the jungle. I had a, and this is a sign of the savagery of the war, I had an interview request with a division, a FARC leader called Ivan Rios. And his part of Colombia was Western Columbia, including the strategic province of Antiochia. And I had been swapping text messages on a burner phone with his people.

And they said something like, look, now's not a good time. There's a lot of soldiers in the zone. This wasn't a panicked message. This is what they were used to. They would send messages like that, basically just saying, look, we can't come get you. We're kind of dodging army patrols. But, you know, this is normal.

But once it calms down a little bit, or we get to a different part of the jungle, where there are less soldiers, we'll contact you again for this interview. Okay, cool. I see the news a couple of days later that Ivan Rios' bodyguard, a man named Rojas, wakes up in the middle of the night, or perhaps as just still awake,

creeps into the tent where Ivan Rios is sleeping with his girlfriend, puts a gun against their heads at point-blank range, kills them both, takes out his machete, hacks off Ivan Rios's hand, comes out of the mountain holding this hand, looking for the first military base, holds it up and says, I'm here to hand myself in,

and I want my five million dollar reward. his Ivan Rios's hand, you can confirm that I killed him. Because all of the commanders had $2.5 million bounty, $5 million bounty on the head. And it was so grim. Even in this war that didn't seem to have any sort of limits, the Colombian army was like, oh God, this is just unbearably fucking grim, man. What do we do about this one? And they just didn't know what to do with this horrific sight of this psychopath sitting there saying, where's my money? I want my money. I did my part. And they've sort of put him in prison while they sort of decided what to do. I don't know if they ever paid him or not.

But that was one of those moments where you just realized this violence is just insanity. It's driven everybody mad. Everybody's gone mad by the murder. So then we have these sort of peace talks that start. I read something about Ravi Shankar, the Transcendental Meditation guy. He was involved and at one point blamed Norway for sabotaging it. But this essentially leads to the. dissolution of the FARC, no?

Yes, exactly. Sorry, you're 100% right. So this 2008 essentially marks the Nadia of the FARC, and from there, the Colombian government decides, all right, now is a time to really seek peace. They're going to keep hitting the FARC for a few more years, but I think it's around about 2012 that a new government with Juan Manuel Santos is going to begin peace talks with the FARC. This is going to lead to a successful peace deal in the year 2016. And it was kind of interesting this peace talks, because the peace talks occur, they're finalized.

And again, I take my hat off to the Colombian negotiators who had to deal with dialectical Marxists for three or four years arguing over every fucking comma, 300-page peace deal. It must have been absolute name it. So Umberto de la Cayre is like the lead negotiator. I think the man is just, he embodies the best of Colombia, this kind of innate decency, this kind of he's smart. And he was just working for his country. But the peace talks are quite divisive. And this is, so on the one hand, especially amongst the elites of Colombia, who actually matter because they control the thing. You know, what you had is you had, on one side, you had this kind of global elite. The kind of Colombian who feels as at home in a bar in Manhattan, as she does in a bar in Switzerland, as she does as a restaurant

in London. They were all for the peace deal, because at that point, these were urban Colombians, the civil war was a kind of embarrassment for them. Oh, wait, you're from Columbia. You're still in the civil war or something? Yeah, yeah. That's else. Then on the other hand, you had the rural elites, the countryside, the farmers, those who had made their money, who had suffered the sharp end of the FARC's attacks. And they still hated DeFarck. And they didn't want any sort of peace deal. They wanted an absolute surrender, something the FARC promised would never happen. And this was really revealed in the two presidents. Albao Riebe, the former president, would lead this campaign against the peace process. And Juan Manuel Santos would be the public face of this. But he does.

Santos decides, much like Brexit, because they happen in 2016. He decides to have a referendum just to humiliate the opposition. That's what he says. He says, you know what, we're going to have a referendum on this peace talks. Of course he thinks the country's overwhelmingly going to vote in favor of the peace deal, just like those in Brexit did. They lose. I had been with the FARC before the referendum and at this massive peace conference

where they officially decided to vote on the peace process and they supported it. And they were telling me, they were saying, you know what? If the referendum is less than 75% in favor of this peace deal, that's a big warning for us. We need Colombian society to embrace us and for us to embrace them to get over this hatred, to get over this war. They ended up losing that peace deal. It was about 50-50, but the nose won the deal. And it was this complete confusion. And just like Brexit, those who won the peace deal had no idea what to do. So as soon as Alibah took over the nose,

those against the peace process, they said, all right, we're taking over now, but they didn't know what to do. So eventually they were kind of edged out by the government after a few months. And then they kind of wrapped up this peace deal, and that was his legacy. The FARC demobilized.

But it was in 2016, 2017 was this really genuinely, there was this moment that I had never witnessed in Colombia, Columbia was filled with hope. They believed that they had turned the page on their darkest chapter. Not only that, that they had shown the world there was an alternative to war, that you could find even a violent country like Colombia could find the path of peace. And I remember being with these drivers, we were driving through, we were doing a story where we were in the coca zone of a place called Itwango.

And we had hired this driver, and he's sitting there in his truck, and he's driving us down this dirt track. It's the main road there. And he's with this friend. And I was saying, hey, how do you feel about this? You know, with this peace process, because during the peace process there was a ceasefire. And I said, yeah, how's your life changed? He said, oh, I don't know if it's changed.

And he said, there's your life changed. And the guy says, well, you know, they're not killing anymore. And he said, you know what? Yeah, this is the road where they used to dump the bodies. He said, yeah, you're right. It was right there. Every day I would drive by there would be a new body dumped there. I haven't seen a body for a year and a half.

And it was that moment where they were like, shit, we're living in peace. We're living in peace. And it was such a heartwarming moment. But everyone fucked it up. Because what happened was during the ceasefire, essentially what happened is the police stopped carrying out operations in the zones that the FARC controlled. So that meant the COCA was able to grow in these zones. By the time the FARC are ready to hand over control of these zones, these zones are fat with COCA. The FARC are taking the risk of their lives. They're saying, we will lower our weapons. We will put our weapons in a warehouse.

But we need the government to come in here and take control of these lands. Because if you don't, our enemies will and they'll come looking for us. Because in Colombia, you can never escape the past. They will come looking for you. The Revenge is always hanging over your head. And all of these zones filled with coca, the government didn't take it over. Maybe it was always going to be beyond the government to take over such a vast country. But when the FARC laid down their weapons, it was a starting pistol going off. And all of these illegal other groups, like the Gulf Clan, the ELN, the EPL, they raced to fill in the vacuum. And then once they got in, they started giving new orders to...

the coca farmers. If we see anyone rip out their coca crops here, we're going to kill them. And this is why we are now in the golden age of cocaine. There is more cocaine than ever before precisely because of this piece deal. Damn. And then there also was, there's been, you said FARC 2.0, right? There's been a small amount of like a splinter group that's broken off and kind of kept fighting. Not just one. This is a problem. There's just, I couldn't even tell you how many illegal groups there are. All of these groups popped up. They're called the dissidents. There were around about 10,000 FARC members demobilized. We think about 10,000, sorry, we think about 10% of them

joined the so-called dissidents. These are just narco-malicious. They still pretend, that's my experience anyway. They still pretend that they have some veneer of policy. But that in itself is a tactic, because the Colombian government, up to this point, has had a, rule that it does not negotiate with criminals. So this is why you constantly see criminals in Colombia always trying to put a veneer of policy, a politics. So they'll always claim to be a revolutionary organization, even if all they do is just export drugs. And that's what we're seeing in places like Porto Mayo in Narino, on the borders with Ecuador. There's just three or four groups in one province. and they don't have a national spread.

But what's really sad is that for all of the FARC's many, many legion faults, you could sit and talk with the FARC about politics, about their vision for a new Columbia, about what they were, why they were doing this, what prompted them to risk their life to fight for a new Columbia. With these new groups, they just sit there and wait for orders from Sinola. There's no overlap. These are just scumbags in the jungle, some stupid gold chain around their neck. They're just narcos wearing camouflage. They're entirely uninteresting. They're waiting for orders

from Mexican traffickers, and it's just a degradation of the conflict. And when I run into them, I haven't run into the dissidents that much, but I've run in, I've had enough dealings with the Gulf clan, and it's night and day. These are feral animals. utterly uninteresting people. The FARC, these men and women always had a book on them. They were trying, it was self-improvement. And again, I've gone through all of their sins and their legion. But the difference is just, it's sad now. The conflict had a political element in it before, and now it is strictly about cocaine. There's not a single policy difference. They're just fighting over cocaine. That's all there is.

I think, I want to end there, but I also want to say, I think you're the only person I know, and it speaks to how much time you spent in these places who would call a sort of, you know, narco militia member in the jungle uninteresting and boring. You're the only person I know, I think, who is capable of assigning that sort of description to literal drug traffickers in the Colombian jungle as being like, you know, I just, I can't talk to these guys about books. They're uninterested in the global economy. Nobody wants to know about Navidia stock prices with me. They just want to sell cocaine and it's boring to me. I miss my chats with Negro Thomas. I miss talking about Lady Diana, about Gordon Brown. He actually ended up fleeing from the FARC.

He kind of lost his mind and said they were all out to kill him, which actually they may have gone out to kill him. But, you know, I mean, it was, again, it was men and women dedicated to that life. They had made this sacrifice. And as I say, these new groups, as far as I can see, all they're interested in is cocaine trafficking. And again, you know, the Gulf Clan is a perfect example of what I was saying. They tried to go by this title, the self-defense, the Gaetanista self-defense forces of Colombia. Because that sounds political.

They hate it when people call them the Gulf Clan. They're a Gulf Clan. They're a cartel. There's no policy there. There's nothing interesting. It's just the same old nonsense. And that to me is what kind of separated the gang wars in places like Central America. Columbia had something different. Men and women were out there dying for ideals. And I just don't see that anymore. I mean, obviously the soldiers are out there, you know, dying to, you know, risking their lives to protect the country. But yeah, you know, my, what is it? As Anthony Lloyd said, you know, my conflict, how I miss it. Yeah, my war gone by, how I miss it. What was it? My war gone by, I miss it so. But, yeah, as always, Toby Mews, that's T-O-B-Y-M-U-S-E. His book, Kilo, has been out for a couple years now,

probably the best book on the cartels and drugs in general. I think a Spanish version you were saying just came out right now. Coming out. Coming out. Coming out. So look that up. And is there anywhere else anyone can find you, or do you want people to find you? Anything like that?

Yeah, fine me, say hello. You know, buy me a drink. If you see me standing at a bar, buy me a rum. Yeah, and talk to him, even if you're in Bushwick, talk to him about books. Don't talk to him about cocaine. He doesn't want to talk about it. Exactly. All right.

Until next week, thanks to everyone for tuning in. Thanks, Danny. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. fit for your ambition for citizens back. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI

or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.