“Personality has the power to uplift, power to depress,  power to curse and power to bless.”

Paul P. Harris

On the weathered table in front of them were stacks of catalogues and a small stack of order forms. It was a meeting that could have taken place in an office anywhere in the world. But this was Columbia, and the office was an abandoned farmhouse whose acreage was being reclaimed by the jungle. A group of men were putting together details of a future trade that would rock the small country of Colombia if anyone in an official capacity knew what they were doing. It was almost Christmas 2012, a joyous time of year, and they were planning an even more joyous Christmas in 2013 for themselves, not the rest of the country.

Colonel Alberto Sandino, accompanied by three officers of lower rank, was chairing the meeting. As a Colonel in the Colombian Army working at the behest of one of the country’s top generals, he was among their youngest Colonels ever at a mere 29 years old and fast making a name for himself with his higher-ups. He was ambitious and willing to take risks. He belonged to an elite National Army unit within a unit that was responsible for carrying out what was known as Black Operations. To the guerrillas, the government forces were collectively known as the Ogliarchy. These were initiatives intended to achieve objectives that, for political reasons, could not be made public. This meeting had taken months to set up, using drones to courier documents to and from designated rendezvous points in the jungle that were created using satellite technology and the simple expedient of cutting down a couple of tall trees and clearing the ground.

Sandino’s guerrilla counterpart, Commandant Nuñez, and his henchmen ran a newly formed rebel front based partly in Cali. They shared territory after a fashion with a growing drug cartel. This was due to its proximity to the border where the Carchi River flows under the Rumichaca Bridge between Tulcan, Ecuador and Ipiales, Colombia. From the jungles of southwestern Colombia, there are only so many ways to access the Pacific Ocean and, from there, access to shipping routes to the rest of the world. The region is mountainous and heavily forested with few roads or trails. It rains a lot in the region, and human activities are soon obliterated by new growth unless they are maintained. It takes a lot of motivation and money to keep transportation routes of any sort viable. Jungles grow fast and never take a day off.

For years, the Black Ops Committee had maintained a fragile, highly secret relationship with the guerrillas and certain drug cartels for mutual gain. There was a lot of money to be made by all sides in exchange for keeping the war going indefinitely. The length of the war and its inevitability enabled those with monetary skills to devise a win/win situation out of a race to the bottom.  Yes, people were killed but not their people. How the rebel leaders rationalized it was none of their concern. Black Ops personnel were all familiar with the fact that the rebels felt they were hard done by and that the Álvaro Uribe government taxed the poor into deeper poverty and intended to keep doing that. They were entirely correct in that assumption. Eventually, the farmers had had enough and formed more rebel groups and attempted to secede from the country. That began way back on May 27, 1964. Dishonourable conduct ever since on both sides ensured that the war could not end.

If the war had been clearly defined as just one group against another, the war would have been short. But as other factions had entered the fray, each had its own inflexible agenda. Far-right para-military groups such as the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), the National Liberation Army (ELN), crime syndicates, and far-left guerrillas (FARC) were separately at war with Colombia’s government. To make matters worse, multinational corporations inserted themselves into the conflict. Combined, this made for a massive, confused social latticework that routinely took national focus away from the biggest and worst offenders, the drug cartels.

The drug cartels tolerated the guerrillas because they, by default, became free, armed guards for their jungle plantations and laboratories. The drug cartels felt the rebels’ lives were worthless. Not even wealthy drug cartels could afford the quality of security the guerrillas provided for free, so they took full advantage.

The guerrillas historically claimed to have Colombia’s best interests at heart, but the combined effect of the corrupt government’s armed forces and paramilitary groups meant that all sides represented an entrenched, plague of bloodsuckers preying on defenceless civilians. The reality was that no matter who was running what in Colombia, corruption was everywhere at every level saturating the national identity.

Front Commandant Diego Carbonell, one of Nuñez’s captains, was not a negotiator who had anything to do with engineering the deal that was going down now. His presence was as a facilitator. He had no children and thus no collateral in case of a double cross. 

Carbonell’s role had been to forward money for drugs going to the army from one of the cartels. In this, he was a middleman keeping a safe, “politically correct” separation between the two forces. The cocaine and the ammo were a straight exchange. Neither side had a direct interest in what the other wanted with the goods. The fee for the drugs exchange was fifteen crates of American rifles and ammunition to be delivered to a location to be named and identified on a map that would never be seen by officials in the army or the cartel. Another part of the deal was a shipment of children trafficked from abroad. A small military plane was used for this purpose to avoid border crossing scrutiny. The imported children would be split up between the cartel and the rebels. The best-looking girls would go north to Cartagena, and the “homegrowns” were split between Cordoba, Barranquilla and a couple of other northern centres. Exports to the Arab Emirates, Spain, Turkey and the Orient departed from Tumaco on the southwest coast or routed through Ecuador.

Ecuador, for its part, rather than fight the drug trade or child traffickers, found it easier to cut down the old-growth forests the cartels were hiding in by contracting with a company called Endesa-Botrosa, a plywood supplier to major North American Home Centres.

None of that was of any concern to the negotiators. This meeting finalized the details to set the meeting place and date for the transaction. It was just another step in what was really an international chess game financed entirely by North American drug abusers. The war on drugs was being lost by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to the very people it was trying to safeguard. Ironically, the substance abusers pay both ways. They pay for drugs and they pay taxes to their governments to fight the traffickers to prevent them from accessing those same drugs. When they're caught, they pay again for lawyers and to the justice system through income taxes.

…

Carbonell had a crew on the farm to ensure compliance on the part of the Army. - with lethal force if necessary. The family that lived there had been warned to disappear for at least three days. Dealing with the Colombian Army was fraught with risk because it wasn’t easy to know whose side the army official you were dealing with was really on. To be sure, the Army would have its own facilitators somewhere at hand, so the entire affair was always a tense stand-off.

The basics of the deal were pretty straightforward. One of the men, Sandino, had new guns and ammunition that were written off as out-dated army surplus, the other, Nuñez, had access to the drugs that could be exchanged for weapons via a cartel mole. The FARC’s money men had paid for the drugs previously in a heavily discounted deal. In exchange, the cartel would share in the weaponry according to the covering documentation. The split was calculated down to the last bullet. Even crooks have to keep records to minimize loss of life in the event of an error. Fatal errors were an occupational hazard that fatally complicated many illicit dealings.

Drugs were not only the stock and trade that financed the war but were the most reliable economic currency used to entrap Colombian politicians who could be expected to become whistle-blowers without powerful evidence against them to keep them quiet. Sandino did not care who the drugs came from, just as long as they came. But this deal was different from earlier deals in that human trafficking was intended as part of the cooperation between all three parties. 

Sandino wasn’t quite sure why human trafficking was a part of the deal this time, but he surmised that the cartels were getting tired of losing close family members to American-led counterattacks. Staffing their operations with links to trafficked resources translated into a layer of protection otherwise known as a human shield. American forces would be less likely to mow down workers in the labs if they knew those workers were apt to be foreign hostages, or maybe women or children from wealthy Colombian families.

Trafficked children, especially, were cheap to import and tourists, especially their children, could make good workers if they were harvested at a young enough age. Pretty ones could do double duty as sex trade workers. That was Sandino’s understanding of what was driving cartel interest this time around.

The wrinkle was that the army was somehow involved in the trafficking. The children were being delivered by small aircraft in the area to a remote airfield in four groups of five or six or so, then marched to the rendezvous site where the arms deal was going down. Three groups of children had already been delivered and paid for. Today was the last batch. The helicopters would not arrive until the last allotment of children was on site. This was strictly a cash-for-ass deal since it could not be guaranteed that all of the trafficked children would survive a journey that would challenge a fit adult. The children would be delivered by a neutral team known to all three groups as top-notch facilitators who worked for area lumber interests under international contracts and permits. The neutral party would be gone before the helicopters arrived.

Sandino had no doubt both the guerrillas and the cartel would have spotters keeping tabs to ensure the safe delivery of the weapons and the children. But from a distance because this was still not a friendly transaction. Each would just as soon kill the other but expediency dictated that they set aside past grievances for their mutual short-term greater good.

This was far more complicated than past transactions and involved more trust from all sides, especially since the army had to look the other way as the facilitators moved their human cargo across the country from Venezuela. 

It was decided to do the deal the old-fashioned way in the end by divulging names and addresses of uninvolved family members - thus the collateral. If there was no betrayal, the family members lived their lives without ever knowing the obligations their lives represented. Key members of each side had children and other family members with known and verified addresses. Those wives and children were security. Documents were formalized and shared. There were too many to move in the event of a double cross. They shook on the deal and the wheels were set in motion to drive the plan forward.

An abandoned farmhouse downriver from Mayoyoque on the Rio Caquertá River was the designated rendezvous location simply because it was far into the bush, but was readily accessible by both four-wheel drive vehicles, boats and helicopters. A landing strip for the plane was a local farm field at the end of a hike through the jungle, then the river. The river would be used to distribute the guns and deliver the coke, and the artillery would arrive by chopper. There was cooperation from the Ecuadorian government too in the form of more blind eyes at the Ipales border to allow the coke to pass. The date was set for January 9th, 2013. Of course, the site was also drone accessible. 

On that day, the shipment of machine guns and ammunition arrived by three army Sikorsky helicopters, one at a time with the children in the last chopper. Only one copter could be on the ground and visible at a time. The drugs were ready, stockpiled in the barn or horse house as the locals called it. Colonel Sandino and his Sergeant Roberto would lead their respective parties to the farmhouse where the money and the crates and the children would change hands. This procedure was followed three times to ensure that no matter what happened, enough of the deal would be consummated to satisfy the aim of the deal.

The trafficked children were on site and locked in a room inside the farmhouse. The facilitators were escorted out of the area and shot.

The choppers arrived one after the other over four hours. They were off-loaded while hovering near the farmhouse with internal hoists mounted in the choppers to avoid the risk of army equipment leaving unique marks that could be spotted from the air by chance army inspections. Only military equipment was heavy enough to cause indelible damage to the land. Suspicious marks spotted from the air would be investigated. 

The skids of drugs were winched onto the choppers and secured. They lifted off heading back to Bogotá at their pre-set intervals.