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| At Small Lab, It Pays To Keep a Low Profile |
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Posted by FoM on March 11, 2002 at 08:02:35 PT By Tim Collie, Foreign Correspondent Source: Orlando Sentinel 
In the violent, high-stakes world of the global narcotics trade, Jose Ceron's cocaine lab is strictly a mom-and-pop operation. In a good year, one with four coca harvests, Ceron can clear about $3,600 for making the paste that eventually yields the white powder fetching hundreds of thousands more on U.S. streets.That's about half the average income in Colombia but nearly twice what a farmer can make in Putumayo. He clears that profit after paying rent for the lab, the chemical supplies used in processing, and the barefoot "chemists" who -- for $18 a week -- stomp, pour and sift the gooey mix into paste. Each harvest produces about 2.5 kilograms of paste that Ceron sells to drug traffickers for about $780 per kilogram -- which after being further refined will fetch about $225,000 in the United States. "I was a coca picker here, a raspachin just like everyone else," said Ceron, who still grows a small amount of coca but now focuses on running his lab. "I just saw an opportunity to make some money, so I took it. I have two children. I'd like to send them to school so they can do better than me." For three years, Ceron has run a "laboratory" in a wooden shack hidden by thick foliage. It is about an hour's walk from the nearest road in this southern Colombian state. It's a clandestine operation, but because just about everybody in Putumayo grows coca, it's not good business to be too hidden. Farmers need to know where they can take their crop for sale and processing. On a typical day, local pickers deliver the leaves to Ceron's lab in 25-pound sacks called arrobas. Ceron records each picker's arroba count in a child's Mickey Mouse notebook and pays them at the end of the week. While several battalions of Colombian anti-narcotics police regularly destroy labs like Ceron's, the relatively small scale of his business may keep him safe. Until recently, the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia were linked to huge labs that were essentially multimillion-dollar assembly lines combining harvesting, processing and shipping to the United States and Europe. The local powers, be they guerrillas or paramilitaries, tax the coca trade's use of land, crops and precursor chemicals. But the tax is built into the price for small labs like Ceron's, and he is generally left alone. By comparison to the guerillas' labs, a full day's work in Ceron's 20-by-30-foot open-air shed may yield enough coca paste to fill a small bowl. That mix is then taken to a "kitchen," another lab run by someone else that refines it into the snortable, injectable mix that will be further cut with other chemicals before it ends up in somebody's bloodstream. The lab sits on land Ceron rents near a coca field of about 5 acres. There are no guns within view, and the farmers and chemists frequently smile and crack jokes. During a recent visit by two American reporters, most workers were in their teens and early 20s, including a 12-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl. "Now you can say you've met some real traficantes," joked Pepe Mora, 25. "Really, though. I've been doing this since I was a kid. I grew up with this." To make cocaine, workers chop up the leaves with common weed whackers. They mix the chopped leaves with kerosene, lime and uric acid in plastic-lined pits or the wooden floors of shacks. Barefoot workers stomp the leaves in much the same way that grapes are crushed into wine. The stench can be nauseating. "Right now we're fine, but tonight I'll have headaches, and probably years from now, I'll have lung problems," said Ceron, who like many in Putumayo immigrated here from other Colombian states in search of work raising coca. "You do it for the money. This is the only work that we have to survive on." Ceron squeezes the chopped, stomped leaves into 25-gallon drums filled with more kerosene. The barrels sit for about an hour as kerosene sucks the "essence" from the leaves. A worker then siphons the kerosene into another container and mixes it with water. The kerosene separates, leaving the coca extract in the water. Known as suero, or serum, the extract is mixed with sulfuric acid and potassium permanganate. The paste is mixed again with acetone or other solvents to further dissolve the cocaine base, which is strained through a cloth to finally yield white cocaine hydrochloride crystals -- called "the merchandise." "This is very hard, dirty work," Ceron said. "It's not as easy as people seem to think." Tim Collie is a reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a Tribune Publishing newspaper. Source: Orlando Sentinel (FL) Related Articles & Web Site: Colombia Drug War News Human Rights Disaster Activist Speaks Against U.S. Policy in Colombia Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help |
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