World's Toughest Cops: On the Front Line of the War against Crime. Vinnie Jones
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couldn’t ignore it any longer. We had to confront the worst this country had to offer. And that meant two things: the cocaine cartels and the FARC.
The FARC – which stands for The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – have terrorised the nation for over 40 years. This guerrilla force began as the military wing of the Colombian communist party, and their aim is still to overthrow the government and install a communist state. They remain the largest insurgent group in South America – and estimates of their numbers range from 10,000 to 18,000 members.
Their bloody campaign has been financed through kidnapping, extortion and drug trafficking. Tens of thousands have died in the conflict and the terrorists are responsible for more police deaths than any other form of criminal activity. It was FARC guerrillas who captured and imprisoned John Pinchao in the shootout at Mitú.
Taking them on are John Orejuela and the commandos of the Special Ops Unit. We got in touch again, asking whether we could shadow the force on their next assignment. We could, they said. But first they wanted us to meet another man. Listening to him would help us understand just what COPES are up against.
Deep in the jungles of south-eastern Colombia, 180 miles from Bogotá, lies the Colombian National Police anti-narcotics base, San José del Guaviare. Here Colonel Gustavo Chavarro leads an elite division of the drugs squad. Working closely with the Special Ops commandos, Chavarro’s men are responsible for taking out the drugs at source.
Although he’s got 20 years’ service and 80 men under his command, Chavarro isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. ‘It’s a high-risk job and we in the Colombian police are aware of that,’ he told us. ‘But it’s what we like, what we love.’
Colombia produces 70 per cent of the world’s cocaine. Each year 700 hundred tons of the drug is manufactured here with a UK street value of £28 billion. If cocaine were a legitimate business, Colombia would be one of the richest countries in the world – as it is, all that wealth goes into the hands of criminals, resulting in the formation of influential, highly organised and ruthless drug cartels.
Most notorious was the Medellín cartel – headed by the worst drug lord of them all: Pablo Escobar.
Escobar ran the Medellín cartel for over a decade…murdering and bribing his way to a £2 billion fortune: in 1989, at the height of his power, Forbes Magazine in America declared him to be the seventh richest man in the world.
Government officials, judges and politicians were all paid off – and if they couldn’t be bribed, they were ruthlessly murdered. Escobar made it a point of honour to execute anyone he considered a traitor or a threat: whether they were rival cartels, policemen, state officials, civilians, even members of his own gang – hundreds died at his word.
In the poor barrios and slums, he was known to reward street kids for killing police officers, and he once described his policy in dealing with cops as ‘plata o plomo’ – silver or lead. Bribes or bullets.
In 1985 he backed the storming of the Colombian Palace of Justice by left-wing guerillas: 11 of the Supreme Court Justices ended up murdered. In 1989 he was implicated in the assassination of Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán, a liberal who had vowed to clean up the system. That same year he also ordered the bombing of an Avianca passenger plane – the aim was to assassinate just one man, another presidential candidate, but in the event another 120 people were also killed.
Five American citizens were among the dead on Avianca flight 203. For the US administration it was the last straw: Escobar had to be eliminated. In 1992 United States Delta Force operators trained and advised a special Colombian police task force, charged with locating and taking down the drug lord and wiping out his cartel once and for all.
Commandos from COPES were given US Special Forces training. They were taught that the old rules no longer applied: this was a war – and that meant that they were to do whatever it took to win.
Over 18 months the task force conducted hundreds of raids, going up against the full weight of Escobar’s private army. Their tactic was simple and devastating – destroy everything that protected him, eliminate his most trusted allies. Nearly 100 of Escobar’s lieutenants were killed as the commandos got ever closer to their target.
In December 1993, they finally got their man. After the drug lord was tracked down to a middle-class suburb in Medellín, the task force swooped, and in the resulting shootout Escobar was hit three times – the last, fatally, in his ear.
But if it was the end of the most powerful cartel of the 1980s, it was just the start of the modern troubles. Into the vacuum stepped other cartels…and the FARC terrorists. Between them they’ve carved up the cocaine trade – and taken Escobar’s legacy to whole new heights of ruthlessness.
COPES can no longer manage on their own – and that’s where the narcs come in.
Operating with the same military attitude – and the same level of firepower – as the commandos, Chavarro and his men are fighting the drugs trade at its most fundamental level: destroying drug crops and factories, flying deep into territory under the armed control of the cartels and anti-government guerrillas.
They’ve paid a heavy price: 17 officers killed and 29 wounded on recent eradication missions alone.
Chavarro told us about the last one: a raid on a suspected cocaine lab.
‘It was called operation Eclipse,’ he explained, ‘the location, destruction and legal inspection of two laboratories that produce cocaine.’
Four Black Hawk helicopters and 46 police officers made the treacherous journey into the jungle – all prepared and expecting to face armed resistance from the drug producers. The Colombian jungle is dotted with over 100,000 hectares of coca crops, often guarded with landmines and booby traps, and they also have to be ready for ambushes. It’s not something they’re prepared to do without the best weapons. Chavarro’s men all carry automatic machine-guns, and the Black Hawks are armed with GAU-17 miniguns, each of which can spray the jungle with 50 rounds a second.
‘God has given us the guns to defend our ideals,’ he told us. ‘We need good weapons. I take my men to extremely dangerous places. The only thing I want to transmit is confidence to my men – that everything will be fine. Even though I know I can’t personally guarantee it.
‘Our families know that we run high risks, and that we can die. I tell my family that the day I die in service they should be proud. But every morning when I get up I pray to God to let me grow old…I pray that he gives me the opportunity to become a grandfather and see my son grow up.’
On the last raid the drugs squad were revisiting an area notorious for resistance to the cops – several police aircraft had been shot down here before. Ground-level commandos had identified a new cocaine lab, however, and that meant acting fast and being prepared for the worst.
Chavarro’s helicopters were in the air for 40 minutes before they reached their target, a clearing in the jungle and a makeshift laboratory. After several passes of the area, every gun sweeping the dense canopy of trees that could be hiding terrorists with rocket launchers and anti-aircraft weapons, the signal was given and the choppers landed.
The squad was out and running when they had barely touched down, fanning out, fingers on triggers, ready for trouble. But as Chavarro told us with a sudden grin, this time they had been lucky. The criminals had fled at the noise of the approaching helicopters. And they’d left everything behind.
A recently harvested coca crop, chemicals and equipment for making cocaine.
A lab that size, he explained, could produce more than a ton of cocaine every month, with a UK street value of £45 million.
‘So we set the explosives to destroy the lab,’ he said. ‘We took pictures, gathered evidence as quickly as possible – within seven minutes we were out of there again. This was an enemy area. It’s an area where we were exposed to attack. We can never get too comfortable because they might attack us when we are leaving.’
Even as Chavarro’s