The scene is getting hot at Las Fiestas. The Critters are going wild. The dread-locked surfer who runs the coke game at all the bars in the Roundabout is way too geeked out on his own product. We call him the Lion King, and he’s wearing his usual tank top and red visor, his golden locks falling over his massive brown shoulders, but there is something different in his walnut-black eyes tonight. He’s half crazed, desperate. It’s Sunday night. He shakes my hand not with the usual chill Costa Rican shake of a slap and a fist pump but grabs it and squeezes it hard, the muscles on his forearm popping out, and lets out a primal grunt. I’m cool with him, but later on there are fireworks.
During the high season, when caravans of rich Ticos from San Jose and American tourists swelled the town, the bars were filled with a pretty balanced mix of hunters and prey, those working and those about to get worked. Making that money was easy, no matter what your angle was. But now they are starting to leave, ready to get back to work and school and leave memories of surfside Tamarindo and the bad choices they made behind until next year, and with them go there dollars and drunken late night trips to the Banco Costa Rica ATM machine. It’s left a drastic imbalance in supply and demand. There are about 3 Critters to every tourist, and about 3 guys to every girl. Those are dangerous ratios in a bar, yet alone a bar in a 3rd World country where everyone is coked up and drunk and the two security guards at the door are about 150 lbs soaking wet and someone can pay them off with $10 to slip a knife in when they are supposed to be patting you down. It’s a scramble for market share and in this case competition can be bad for your health.
This is how it goes down. About 91% of the coke that ends up in the United States comes up from Columbia and is dispersed into Costa Rica and other easy transit nations, eventually moving up the Pan American highway (or pipeline) and coming into the US through Mexico. Columbia is only about 120 kilometers away from the shores of Costa Rica, about 1 ½ hours by boat, a hop, skip and jump for the cartels to move their product, and then store it in clandestine warehouses, shipyards, and factories where it gets “stepped on” and repackaged for distribution. Whether it wants to or not Costa Rica serves as a warehouse to store and transit the entire world’s coke supply. No one can accurately guess just how much boogie sugar moves through the country, but to put it in perspective seizures have gone from 2,955 kilos in 2002 to over 90,000 kilos over the past three years. The Columbian-Costa Rican narcotic distribution process would make UPS jealous.
Bless its little heart, they try their best to be a benevolent, progressive nation who really cares about its people, but the pure reality is that everyone is corrupt or corruptible. If something does go wrong it’s easy to bribe your way out of it; security guards, policeman, public officials, judges, banks, border officials, and yes, even politicians. In a country where most people make around $5,000 a year and the average policeman’s salary is $350 a month, for a few thousand dollars not only will they look the other way but they might just name their first born child after you. It’s like tipping the guy behind the counter at 7-11 $5 to ensure you get the winning lottery ticket. Even a bar like Las Fiestas gets a small monthly cut of the profits for letting the sharks in the tank to have a go at the steady stream of tourists, fresh chum in the tank every week. The waters get bloody real fast.
They bring tons of kilos of coke, an almost unfathomable supply, by speedboats, fishing boats, helicopters, dropped from planes, in the stomachs of human “mules”, in the luggage of prostitutes, and hidden in candy, dolls, furniture, diapers, church charitable contributions, and everywhere else you can imagine. They even bring it in via wooden submarines.
If you are like me you are saying “what the hell is a wooden submarine?” and visualizing some little hand-carved toy sinking in the bathtub. Necessity is the mother of invention and when you have billions of dollars of product that you need to get from Point A to Point B you’ll go MacGyver on that ass real quick. Wooden submarines were first detected around 1993. Technically they are not submarines but semi-submersibles because they don’t actually dive, but cruise along just under the water’s surface, usually with just the very top of the cockpit or exhaust pipes above the water for breathable air. These “narco subs” are built in makeshift shipyards hidden in the jungles, and take about 2 million dollars and a year to build. They are nearly undetectable by radar, sonar, infrared systems or patrolling aircrafts. Most of them are hand-made with wood and fiberglass, reaching 60 feet long end to end, and move pretty slowly – about 7-11mph, with underwater diesel outboard motors manned by a crew of four. They have a fancy GPS system but no bathroom. Whether on a speedboat, or a wooden submarine, much of the yay-yo is vacuum sealed and dropped off in the open ocean in floating 50 gallon drums with electronic location transmitters, later to be fished out of inlets, marshes, and estuaries by someone else in fishing boats. Believe it or not a one of the worst occupational hazards for these drug runners who do the pick-up isn’t cops or bullets, but crocodiles. Costa Rica has a huge croc population along parts of its wild, unsettled coast, and drug runners jumping in and out of the water at night serve as a tasty snack.
These wooden submarines can transport up to 10 tons of cocaine at a time. The economic reality is staggering – almost incomprehensible. Check this out - in Columbia you can get a gram of cocaine for $2.50, $1,750 for a kilo (2.2 lbs), and it is almost 100% pure. In Costa Rica the same gram, now 70-90% pure after it’s stepped on (meaning you increased your product by 10-30% with no additional cost, will cost you $20 on the street and a kilo is closer to $5,000. In the US? That same gram is now two grams, meaning the coke is only 50% pure and stepped on with Baking Soda, baby powder, or diaretic. I remember a college professor in my marketing class telling me that Arm and Hammer makes a fortune on selling Baking Soda in the hood marked up 300%. Think about it – they certainly aren’t in business selling little boxes for $1.50 that you put in your freezer for 6 months. It will go for $90 per gram or $23,000 per kilo. On a side note, can we please go to the decimal system already like everyone else? This conversion stuff is hurting my brain.
We started with 10 tons on a wooden submarine. That’s 9,090 kilograms. Let’s say you bought it in Columbia (instead of producing and manufacturing it) and paid $15,907,500. By the time it hits the streets in the US it’s doubled in volume (and that’s a very conservative estimate) so it’s now 36,360 kilos, and will sell for $836,280,000. Ahemmm (clear my throat)…I am officially in the wrong business. 836 million dollars! And that’s only one submarine with one shipment. Of course there are many people involved that get paid on the hand-off commiserate with their level of risk; actually that reminds me of the mortgage business. Either way 800 million is a number that would certainly make Dr. Evil put his pinky to his teeth and let out his creepy laugh.
Keep in mind that someone is actually doing all that coke. That blows my mind – no pun intended. If no one was doing it in the US then no one would buy it and therefore no one would sell it, so keep that in mind before you cloak yourself in judgment. Only some of it gets converted to crack cocaine and sold in the hood so most of it ends up in clubs and offices and in the ashtray of Porches. I was talking to a local attorney the other day, who is President of the Tamarindo City Council, about the drug problem, and they brought this point up quickly to vehemently defend the local populace; it takes two to dance, and for every person selling there is someone buying and using. For ever “causo” there is an “effectivo”, she said. The demand in the US and European markets is so rabid that it’s like selling beer and spring break – you could charge whatever the fuck you want and you are only regulated by what the guy down the beach is charging.
No comments:
Post a Comment