In Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom: Tales of Drugs, Mules, and Gunmen, the exiled Colombian writer Alfredo Molano makes a similar point. Molano's book consists of a series of populist portraits of the little people in the cocaine business--people who for the most part have gambled and lost, the sort of folks whom, as he puts it, "our compatriots would be happy to bury so as not to cause embarrassment at embassy cocktail parties." (Molano interviewed many of his subjects in prison.) Most are motivated by a desperate desire to escape the poverty that afflicts the vast majority of ordinary Colombians. In each case, cocaine offers the prospect of financial relief--of freedom, really, to use a word that President Bush seems to be unable to complete a sentence without. A man Molano refers to as Scuzzball, the son of peasants from the southern state of Putumayo, leaves home at the age of 13 because, as he puts it, "there's no life where we were living and it was time to go looking for it." Endowed with natural intelligence, Scuzzball becomes an artist at cocaine extraction and sets himself up as a chemist, hiring out his knowledge so that his fellow peasants can coax a little more product out of their coca bushes. Eventually, however, Scuzzball's entrepreneurial instincts lead him into trafficking. He is betrayed, and by the time Molano meets Scuzzball, he is doing time in a Bolivian prison in Cochabamba. "In Colombia," Scuzzball ruefully tells Molano, "it's we nameless people who moved [into the cocaine trade]...until those with nice last names started to ask us for help and little by little we gave it to them, and eventually we take them as partners in the business."

The situation is much the same for the poor of Colombia's slums. "The Mule Driver," another Molano character, describes the gamble taken by the "mules" who transport cocaine on airlines. The mules wrap the cocaine in condoms and swallow them. "If the rubber tears, you'll live a few hours; if it doesn't break but the police seize you, you'll spend eight years of your life behind bars; if you carry it off, you've laid the first layer of bricks that goes towards building a wall between you and poverty."

Molano doesn't romanticize this impulse, which is both corrupting and fraught with moral ambiguity. Colombia's legal products have never sold well enough either internally or in the United States to generate significant numbers of stable jobs. The few jobs that Colombia's globalized neoliberal economy has kicked up are low-wage and nonglamorous--offering little more than what Kirk refers to as "the cheap seat at the world's parade." By contrast, the cocaine business offers fabulous riches and far sexier possibilities--what Kirk describes as "integration through crime." Although for a person of few prospects it's a tempting line of work, it has obvious drawbacks. The Mule Driver, for example, starts as a poor liquor-store delivery boy infatuated with a rich girl--the daughter of the owner of a whorehouse. After he loses his job as the result of this infatuation, his brother tells him that the job was beneath his dignity anyway and advises him to get into cocaine. "Why should I have a 'job' that has me stooping to work at the beck and call of a boss," the Mule Driver argues to himself, "killing myself for a lousy salary that would never compensate me." Although he makes good money for a while, he ultimately gets betrayed by the girlfriend and winds up doing twenty-two years in a Madrid prison.

The Colombian cocaine trade is so pervasive that it threatens to turn the country into a collection of narco-run feudal statelets. The central ambition of Uribe's version of Plan Colombia may be to assert the primacy of the state in regions where it has seldom if ever been a factor. This depends on both defeating FARC and taming and integrating the paramilitaries.

But cocaine is a response to poverty, and it's highly unlikely that Uribe will be able to wean his compatriots off what Colombians call "the little parakeet" without some program to address the country's savage inequalities. Uribe has a plan of sorts--economic liberalization and a tight alliance with the United States. Unnoticed in the fuss surrounding the effort to renew Plan Colombia has been Uribe's project to negotiate a bilateral free-trade agreement with the United States. This would reduce Colombia's already small social-welfare programs and open the country up to more foreign investment. What would a country dependent on neoliberal economics and incorporating the new, more reasonable paramilitaries look like?

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