Colombia Pushes Coca Over the Border

El Tiempo reports on the latest coca bush acreage (hectareage?) statistics from the U.S. government, which show a continued drop in Colombia's crop, to a 15-year low.

That would be excellent news - if it meant advances in the drug war's REAL goals: fewer addicts and less money going to violent, illegal groups. Unfortunately, there are lots of reasons to question whether that's happening.

In the first place, the United Nation's latest coca survey found that Colombia's acreage had actually increased, albeit only by 2%. More significantly, coca acreage has clearly expanded in the world's two other producers: Peru and Bolivia.

"Each decrease in Colombia has shifted to Peru and Bolivia; the laboratories have moved to Ecuador and Venezuela and the trafficking to Central America and Mexico," University of the Andes Professor Daniel mejía told AFP.

In today's paper, El Tiempo asks U.S. Ambassador Michael McKinley about this 'balloon effect.' However, he prefers not to talk about it, concentrating instead on Colombia's accomplishments.

The ambassador seems to be suggesting that Peru and Bolivia could accomplish as much if they only applied Colombia's aggressive erraddication strategies. That a poor, highly corrupt and underdeveloped nation like Bolivia could carry out such an effort seems unlikely, but the fact is that it won't even try: Bolivia's anti-Washington government - whose Pres. Evo Morales also heads the national coca leaf growers federation - has been scaling back cooperation with U.S. anti-drug efforts and lobbied for the U.N. to legalize coca leaf  chewing. In Venezuela, Pres. Chavez has completely cut anti-drug cooperation with Washington, while allegedly opening the borders wide to drug traffickers. The only reason I can think of why cocaleros haven't yet started planting in Venezuela and Ecuador is because they haven't needed to. And little Uruguay's plan to legalize and produce marijuana can't be encouraging for prohibitionists, either.

Meanwhile, use of synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamines, appears to be booming.

Colombia's reported drop in coca area is positive, but isolated, and perhaps pointless in the context of wider trends.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Marching Powder

Inmates in Bolivia's San Pedro Prison. (All photos taken by Mike Ceaser, around the year 2000.)

Children in San Pedro Prison.

Thomas McFadden would have been just one more guy doing time in a Third World prison for trying to make fast and easy money smuggling drugs - except that McFadden got locked up in La Paz, Bolivia's hyper-corrupt San Pedro Prison and befriended Australian lawyer-turned-writer Rusty Young. 

The result, Marching Powder, is a memorable account of McFadden's years in San Pedro. Marching Powder may not match the grueling prison accounts like Papillon and Midnight Express, but it does capture the craziness and corruption of Bolivia and San Pedro prison - where prisoners hold the keys to their own cells, manufacture cocaine and sometimes sometimes do prison tours for foreigners. 

And Marching Powder, of course also provides an implicit commentary on the War on Drugs.

In San Pedro's kitchen. 

Rusty Young during a visit
to Bogotá two years ago.

From the book's beginning, when McFadden is betrayed by a police official whom McFadden has bribed to let his cocaine shipment thru, to the book's end, when McFadden pays off judges to let him off of a trumped-up drug charge, this book is about corruption. I lived for several years in Bolivia and visited San Pedro Prison multiple times, and throughout the book I kept telling myself: 'Yep, that's Bolivia!' 

The prison's swimming pool. McFadden describes an
episode in which a mob murders three alleged
child rapists in this pool. 

San Pedro, with its stores, families, churches and neighborhood organizations, is arguably a more humane place to be locked up than many normal prisons - A french drug trafficker and mercenary doing time there told me 'This would be the world's best place to be imprisoned - if you could only get your sentence.' Indeed, the prison seemed to be full of inmates who'd spent years there without being getting their trial, much less sentence - one of the disfunctional systems' myriad arbitrary and wholesale human rights violations. McFadden's experience starts with him being thrown into a cell and forgotten, apparently a strategy meant to force him to confess, then later deposited in San Pedro, where he crawled into a bathroom to sleep and was beaten up by other inmates who believed that he was from the U.S. (the country which inspired Bolivia's hated drug laws).

A prisoner relaxes in his cell. 

Clothes drying in crowded San Pedro Prison. 

After his initial crisis, McFadden actually flourishes in prison. Marching Powder drew me in with its accounts of McFadden's entrepeneurial efforts in prison, including opening businesses, operating criminal projects and doing tours for foreign tourists. At one point, McFadden even finds work in a prison cocaine factory in order to 'keep myself out of trouble.' But prison was all fun for McFadden. His conflicts with other inmates, particularly the evil Fonsecas, and the tragedies of unfortunates shipped off to die in the cold and barren Chonchocoro prison in the altiplano, are also gripping. But I could have used less about his love affair with an Israeli tourist, which wasn't so different from a love affair anywhere. On the other hand, I would have appreciated much more about other inmates: their crimes, their backgrounds, their roles in Bolivian society. When I visited San Pedro a decade ago, I recall hearing accounts of campesinos doing long sentences because a small plot of coca bushes, the base ingredient for cocaine, had been found on their land. In some cases, the drug crop may not even have been theirs. Others, called mulas, had been caught transporting small packages of drugs, from which someone else would make most of the profit, but they'd pay any penalty. These sorts of impoverished people are the ones who get trapped by the system, railroaded, and end up living in San Pedro with their wives and families.

A French mercenary works on art in his cell
in San Pedro Prison. 

In San Pedro's carpentry shop. 

This prompts me to ask what ends imprisonment in San Pedro Prison achieves: Does it punish criminals? Protect society from criminals? Preserve human rights? It's hard to argue that it accomplishes any of these things, altho it clearly does provide great criminal training and ruin lots of lives. Does Bolivia's penal system fight crime, and the drug trade specifically? Sure, McFadden suffers in prison - but he keeps on dealing. (The book at times reads like a how-to manual for drug smugglers). And, for every smuggler that gets caught, many must successfully bribe or sneak their way thru and enjoy the profits. On the other hand, San Pedro is full of people doing time for petty offenses or none at all, simply because they are poor and powerless. All of this at huge human and financial costs for an impoverished nation.

While reading Marching Powder, I also wondered about the experience of the author, Rusty Young, a young Australian lawyer, whom I met in Bolivia (where he struck me as too much of a cokehead to ever write a book), and again here in Bogotá. Young gets portrayed as something of a hero in the book for helping McFadden beat a second, trumped-up charge and finally leave prison. I would have enjoyed a chapter describing Young's own impressions first-hand: It's not every day that a lawyer from a rich nation pays to spend time in a corrupt third-world prison.

Lunchtime in San Pedro. 

And I spent much of the book wondering about McFadden's own background: Was his family poor? Rich? How did he get into drug-smuggling? Why? What happened to all the money he must have made? McFadden evidently had a long exprience running drugs to Europe, but he provides no details. Perhaps he left this out for legal reasons, altho it seems as tho the years and statutes of limitations would make earlier crimes irrelevent. This lack is the book's single greatest failing, in my opinion. 

The source of the trouble: Coca bushes. 

It's hard to feel very sorry for McFadden, who made quick money thru bribery and smuggling an addictive substance knowing full-well the possible consequences. While incarcerated, McFadden got the assistance of the British consulate and a UK prisoners' rights organization, was aided by friends back home and got the love of a beautiful Israeli girl - not to mention plentiful and cheap cocaine and marijuana. That many people who've committed no crimes at all should be so lucky!

A La Paz graffiti says 'Don't fall asleep - chew coca.'

I also looked unsuccesfully for some remorse or reflection from McFadden about his trafficking. He says that before San Pedro he'd never tried cocaine, a claim which seems dubious (but if true is another condemnation of the prison system). McFadden seems to have enjoyed San Pedro's plentiful drug supply, altho without those daily highs he might have used his prison time more productively, perhaps by studying something. In San Pedro, he witnesses pathetic cases of drug addiction - just as he must have seen in the outside world. Yet McFadden never reflects on the human impacts of his profession, and in fact continues shipping drugs from prison.  

Headed to San Pedro? A Bolivian coca farmer whose plot has been erradicated. 

Naturally, I also wonder what McFadden is doing today. I suppose that if I had to guess, judging by his long experience and his continued success smuggling drugs while in prison, I suspect he might back at his old profession.  

With its imperfections, Marching Powder is an interesting and entertaining book which will open your eyes. 

Protesters, many of them coca farmers, in Cochabamba, Colombia. 

Protesters, many of them coca farmers, march in Cochabamba, Colombia. 

Schoolgirls in San Pedro.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Misaimed Drug War?

A coca leaf farmer in Bolivia's chapare region about a decade ago. His plot had just been chopped down and burnt by U.S.-backed erradicators. (All photos taken by Mike Ceaser in Bolivia about 12 years ago.)

If you've ever tried to open a simple Colombian bank account, only to be required to first document your salary, and also bring Chamber of Commerce certificates proving your employer's legitimacy, and God-only-knows what other papers, then you might enjoy this book by two Los Andes University professors: Anti-Drug Policies In Colombia: Successes, Failures And Mistakes, by Alejandro Gaviria and Daniel Mejía. 

Chapare coca leaves, to be made into cocaine. 

According to this commentary in The Guardian newspaper, the book argues that rich nations' anti-drug warriors have directed their efforts at the easiest targets: farmers, banks, chemical sellers and others in the producer and transit countries, while the banks and drug retailers in the United States and Europe who earn the great majority of the profits, generally get off easy.

Things are of course much more complex than this, but there's also truth here. After all, the generally impoverished coca leaf or heroin poppy farmer, like the 'boys in the hood' dealing grams on streetcorners in Los Angeles, California, or London are obvious targets without lobbyists in the U.S. Congress. The banking executive, who never actually touches illegal drugs, (except perhaps in his expensive private club) and can argue that he doesn't know the origin of the money he manages, is a difficult target.

A family living in the San Pedro Prison in La Paz, Bolivia.
Most likely, the man was there for a minor
drug-related crime. 

Women examine coca leaves in a legal market in Bolivia.
These leaves are supposed to be used for making tea,
chewing or other traditional uses.

The Andes University professors' book also points out that only a few percentage points of cocaine's profits actually stay in Colombia (or Peru or Bolivia), while some 97% of the profit is made in the wealthy consuming countries. This is a predictable situation, and not so different in some ways from legal commodities such as cotton and sugar. After all, in those wealthy countries the costs of labor and other services are much higher. With any product, the cost escalates the closer to the final consumer. But with an illegal drug the effect is much more dramatic because the cost of the alkaloid which produces the high is trifling, while the cost of the danger and trouble of transporting the drug halfway across the globe are immense. Just ask Thomas McFadden, the protagonist of the book Marching Powder, who was locked up in La Paz, Bolivia's hyper-corrupt San Pedro Prison. In San Pedro, McFadden found cheap, plentiful, high quality cocaine. His problem was shipping it to Europe. Standing in the way were transport and bribery costs, the dangers of confistication and arrest and potential violence, all of which raised the final products cost far above what a Colombian campesino could imagine. Of course, the wealthy countries' economies aren't getting rich off of the drug trade, (altho some people and businesses certainly are), since the money also comes from the rich countries' own economies.

A woman sorts coca leaves in legal market in Bolivia. 

The authors' thesis that producer countries pay a disproportionate cost for the War on Drugs is reasonable, but also debatable. After all, developed nations' prisons are packed with drug criminals - creating huge social and economic costs. But unquestionably it is the producer and transit nations such as Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica and Colombia which have suffered most of the violence and corruption for a failed effort, while seeing only a small slice of the revenue.

Some people would certainly argue that this situation is behind Washington and other power centers' prohibitionist policies in the War on Drugs. I personally doubt it, since this money is simply being recycled thru the rich nations' economies, rather than pumped into them. And, if drugs were legal, then you can be certain that both banks and other big companies (Philip Morris? RJ Reynolds?) would be marketing them. On an economics forum, Daniel Mejia, one of the new book's authors, offers the hypothesis that wealthy nations back prohibitionism because it transfers the negative impacts from their nations to the producer and transit countries. After all, If drugs were legalized, prices would drop and consumption would rise, along with its associated health problems. Meanwhile, prohibitionism's impacts are mostly in those other, poorer nations.

But legalizing drugs would also reduce crime and prison overcrowding and generate lots of taxes in wealthy nations, giving them a net benefit.

I suspect that the motives behind prohibition are much simpler: The effort against illegal drugs has been labeled a 'war' and no politician likes to lose a war. Meanwhile, the benefits of ending prohibition are longer term and more difficult to see.

If only, 40 years ago, US Pres. Richard Nixon had picked a less simplistic phrase than 'War on Drugs', then it might be easier to make policy shifts today. Nixon left a lot of bad legacies, but this might be one of his worst.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Cocaine Production's Comeback

Erradicating coca leaf bushes. But they don't stay gone. 

The numbers are in, and once again it looks like the billions of dollars the world pours annually into the War on Drugs have accomplished little. 

Global cocaine prices haven shifted little in recent years.
(United Nations graph)   

Yesterday's El Tiempo reported that Colombia's coca leaf acreage increased by 3% last year. While that's not much, and the defense ministry called the numbers "stable," it does mean that cultivation has ceased declining, despite erradication efforts. 


The defense ministry explained that cultivation has increased in certain areas because they are near borders and have indigenous territories, where erradication efforts are restricted. But the defense ministry did not observe that Colombia will always have border regions and indigenous territories, meaning that this upward trend may very well continue.

Legal and illegal drugs have followed similar consumption
patterns. (United Nations graph)

Beyond Colombia's borders, the trend is also negative. Coca leaf cultivation has increased in both Bolivia and Peru, which has surpassed Colombia to become the world's biggest cocaine producer, according to the United Nations. The Wall Street Journal reports that Peruvian coca leaf growers have managed to cultivate the crop in wetlands, something once thot impossible. That means both more production and environmental impacts. The Journal points out that growers could easily cross the border and plant coca in Brazil - and why not Africa and Asia? (In the early 20th century coca leaf was grown industrially in Java and Taiwan.) Today, much of South America's cocaine is shipped to Europe via Africa. Wouldn't planting the stuff in Africa be much cheaper and easier for the traffickers?

The United Nations annual world drug report offers a mixed review of the main plant-based drugs: cocaine, heroin and marijuana. Global coca bush cultivation has dropped by a third since the year 2000, according to the U.N. (altho productivity per acre has apparently risen). But those gains have been counterbalanced "by rising levels of synthetic drug production." And some of those drugs, such as amphithetamines, may be much more harmful than heroin and cocaine.

Thru 2010, coca leaf cultivation inched upwards in Peru and
Bolivia, but dropped in Colombia. That's since changed. 

The reports, once again, constitute a powerful case for legalizing and regulating these now-illegal substances. Such a policy change, which is happening slowly and contradictorily for marijuana - would enable states to tax and regulate these substances, require quality standards and enforce environmental protections.

And, the world would save a whole lot of money it now spends on drug law enforcement and encarceration.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

How Governments Built a Cocaine Factory

An inmate in San Pedro Prison with his wife and daughters, who shared his cell.
(All photos by Mike Ceaser) 

Create a government-owned cocaine factory in the middle of your capital city? Who in their right mind would do such a thing? But Bolivia has, in colaboration with the U.S. government, as described in Marching Powder, which I'm reading now.

A stairway in the crowded San Pedro prison. 

A dozen years ago when I lived in La Paz, Bolivia, (and when Marching Powder's author Rusty Young was there) San Pedro prison's cocaine and counterfeit money factories were already notorious.

Many, probably the overwhelming majority, of San Pedro's inmates were there for non-violent drug crimes, such as smuggling or growing coca bushes on their land.

San Pedro is a bizarre, inside-out place in the middle of La Paz, where prisoners pay to be imprisoned and have the keys to their own cells, where tourists visit and where the drugs are smuggled not in, but out. If you don't believe me, then read Marching Powder or visit La Paz yourself.

Protesters, many of them coca leaf growers, protest in Cochabamba, Bolivia against erradication programs and other issues. Many of those in San Pedro prison were very poor people who could afford neither lawyers nor bribes.

With a corrupt and powerless prison administration, experience in the illegal drug economy and almost no food or other supplied from the government, the prisoners made the logical move into manufacturing a product with a guaranteed market: addictive drugs. What else would you expect?

Thomas McFadden, the English drug smuggler who is Marching Powder's protagonist, even calls San Pedro a 'cocaine university.' From the security of the prison, using up-to-date technology and with the collaboration of corrupt staff, McFadden coordinated cocaine shipments to Europe. That was probably not what the drug warriors had in mind when they passed Bolivia's harsh Ley 1008 anti-drug law.

A protesters' fire. 

Whenever something's prohibited, black markets appear. And so San Pedro is the predictable result when unrealistic and unenforceable drug prohibitions meet a poor and thoroughly corrupt society like Bolivia's.

I've visited prisons in Bolivia and two other South American countries, and each had its own kind of tragedy.

A Bolivian campesino, whose coca
field had just been erradicated.

In Paraguay I interviewed several young women imprisoned for smuggling marijuana across the border into Brazil. I'll never forget one, in her early 20s, and just beginning a 15-year prison term which would ruin what was left of her youth. She told me that she'd come from a very poor family, in which everybody slept on the floor of a single room.

"The only ways I could help my family were by smuggling drugs or by prostitution," she recalled, sobbing, "and I wasn't willing to become a prostitute."

A wealthy woman hired her as a 'mule,' to ferry sacks of Paraguayan weed into Brazil. But on her third run she got caught. Altho she'd already been in prison for several years, she said that her family was too poor to visit her - and that she didn't even think they knew where she was. The rich woman who'd hired this expendable young girl? She was still living comfortably outside, most likely with the authorities on her payroll.

A woman handles a sack of coca
leaves in a legal coca leaf market.

In Caracas, Venezuela I accompanied a group of university health workers into one of the city's overcrowded prisons. I don't recall its name, so it may be one of those which have exploded into violence in the last few years. It was nightmarish. The roughest, most violent inmates, who had a fued with other prisoners and with the guards, had barricaded themselves into the upper floors of the main cellblock. They didn't let in outsiders, accepted food only from relatives and tossed their body wastes out the windows. When they were bored or angry, prison staff told us, the toughs picked up their guns and took potshots at inmates on the patio below.

Women weigh sacks of coca leaves in a legal coca market.

A Caracas acquaintance of mine had been imprisoned during the 1990s, I believe in this same prison. There, he was involved in a prison riot. Soldiers were called in. Panicking, the soldiers fired on a crowd of unarmed prisoners in the prison patio, killing dozens. My acquaintance said he survived by burying himself amongst the dead.

Whether government-owned cocaine factories, cemeteries for the living, or criminal fortresses, these prisons are iron and concrete tragedies.

Is the War on Drugs the only reason why these prisons are so corrupt and filled with tragedy? Certainly, not, but it makes things much, much worse.

Related post: Expat Anecdotes

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Expat Anecdotes

Adios to Colin Post. He blogs about sex, drugs and culture at Expat Chronicles, where he just announced that he's out of Colombia.

In addition to being an excellent blogger, Colin is one of those characters whom you meet about once in a lifetime, and describe years later with the afterthought: "and that's the kind of character you meet overseas!"

The Bolivian Times.
(Photo from: Conversion Rate Copywriting.)

During my dozen years in South America I have met many expat characters. The Bolivian Times newsroom, where I slaved away for several years, sheltered a procession of wanderers, wastrels, hippies, drug addicts, evangelicals and even geniuses. One feature story about a bar included a description about the clients' tradition of inserting a cigarette into the mouth of a clay frog and dancing around the beast. Our evangelical editor cut the paragraph because it involved worshipping an idol. Could Jesus Christ really lose followers to a frog?

The Bolivian Times was the sort of place where you could arrive in the country one day, walk into newspaper's office the second and become editor on the third - because nobody else wanted the job. One of our most memorable journalists was a drug-saturated South African who never advanced past a few phrases of Spanish but was soon editing the paper. April Fool's Day came around, and he and a sidekick decided it'd be great fun to invent some humorous anecdotes about things like the president having been beaten up by his wife.

Unfortunately, Bolivia does not celebrate April Fool's Day, and some people believed what they read.

The president - a one-time military dictator with blood on his hands - was not amused, and his office called to complain. The South African druggie had to visit the president's office, grovel, and try to explain the mishap in his dozen words of Spanish.

Another character who visited our newsroom was a gringo who worked as a fashion photographer. I remember him as a sort of spirited, sprite like fellow, who pranced around the room describing to the young women how he'd photograph them. Apparently, he'd had some success, because he made trips to Europe to photograph models there. Inconveniently, however, on one such trip they searched his bags and discovered kilos of cocaine. The guy was soon in a top security prison high on the altiplano, rooming near the cell of yet another ex-military dictator. One of our intrepid reporters interviewed him there, where the ex-fashion photographer explained that he'd gotten into meditation and found true peace. I hope that peace lasted thru his years of incarceration.

He was far from the only gringo whom drugs put behind bars in Bolivia. There was also the story of the young South African transvestite who needed money for a sex-change operation. He decided to fly to Bolivia, buy cocaine, smuggle it to Europe and sell it there to pay for the surgery. But in La Paz, Bolivia's airport they searched him, found the drugs, found something else under his skirts which proved he wasn't a woman, and arrested him. In court, he confessed his crime but pleaded to the judge: 'Your honor, I do the time, but for God's sake, don't put me in the men's prison. God know what they'd do to me!'

The judge felt sorry for him. And, in Bolivia's land of flexible laws, he put him into La Paz's women's prison, where I interviewed the South African. He was living quite happily with some 300 women - and had decided against the sex-change operation.

Girls play inside La Paz, Bolivia's San Pedro Prison. 

Yet another foreign prison occupant showed up while I was living in La Paz, but this one was voluntary. You might have heard of Rusty Young, who paid bribes to spend some four months sharing a cell with an English drug smuggler in La Paz's famous San Pedro Prison, where the inmates manufacture cocaine, counterfeit money and cohabit with their wives and children. Rusty said he planned to write a book about it. But, when he visited the Bolivian Times newsroom looking strung out on the white stuff, I decided that the book thing was only a cover to get access to some of the city's cheapest drugs. Rusty told some great anecdotes, like about the time that he was paying a prison guard his daily 5 boliviano bribe to enter the prison - and they grabbed him instead.

"What's the meaning of this! What do you think you're doing bribing a Bolivian official! Don't you know that in Bolivia we're not corrupt? This is a serious crime here!"

"But, but, but...I've paid every day..."


"That's enough. You're under arrest."

So they took him down the street to the local police station, where a cop explained the dire consequences of bribery in Bolivia, including a fine and  prison sentence. To top it all off, with the weekend coming up, he'd be stuck in a miserable cell for days with God-only-knew what sorts of criminals until a lawyer could even visit him.

It's one thing to pay to stay voluntarily in a prison, quite another to be locked up there.

"But isn't there anything I can do?" Rusty pleaded.

"Bribery is a very serious crime here in Bolivia," they reminded him, sternly.

"But isn't there ANYTHING I can do?" he repeated.

So, he paid a much larger bribe and they let him out.

Rusty, of course, went on to write Marching Powder, which has become a bestseller and a minor classic. He also left me wishing I'd thot of it.

In Paraguay, I met a young South African guy who wasn't strictly an expatriate - I think he'd grown up in Paraguay - but a memorable story nonetheless. When South Africa's white minority government fell, this guy's parents had looked around the globe for someplace where the government wouldn't bother them and they wouldn't have to live near  black people. They found Paraguay, a big country with few people and a corrupt government, which has served as a refuge and hideout for others, including Nazis and ultra-conservative colonial Mennonites.

A street in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay.
(Photo: Buenos Aires Corrientes)

Paraguay also invented savage capitalism. Walk thru the Ciudad del Este border town and you'll pass stacks of stereos, cigarettes and whiskey waiting to be smuggled across the river into Brazil. And that's only the stuff that's displayed. Behind the walls are drugs and weapons. It's a hive of aggressive, take-no-prisoners traders from Asia and Lebanon. The South African kid and an Arab partner became successful exporting something more mundane - printer toner cartridges. Until one day, the South African told me, his partner skipped out on him, leaving him with huge debts.

In Ciudad del Este, debt collection practices are not gentle.

The South African guy then went from one man he owed money to to the next, pleading forgiveness and promising to make good - someday.

When I met him, the South African was teaching English in Asuncion for a piddling number of guaranis per hour - but still determined to become rich.

"I'm going to be a millionare before I'm 30," he vowed.

And he may already be, sitting on a mountain of printer cartridges.

Here in Bogotá, I met William, a European guy who'd lived here for several years. He lived with his Colombian girlfriend, taught English and had never bothered to learn Spanish.

"Why should I learn Spanish?" he asked. "They should all learn English."

In any case, he didn't need Spanish. His girlfriend spoke English, and William spent his free time at home watching movies and playing violent games on Playstation.

William also didn't bother to renew his Colombian visa. Whenever the police would stop him and demand his cedula, he'd just threaten to call a fictitious attorney. That, and perhaps his atrocious Spanish, got him loose. When he finally decided to get married in order to fix his visa status to be able to leave the country, the local priest required him to first sit thru months of incomprehensible Sunday sermons.

William had terrible luck - but with good fortune mixed in. One day, he was walking down Ave. Septima, and two guys crowded him from both sides, pressing pointed objects against his rib cage.

"Give us your money!" they demanded.

"I don't have any money!" William protested.

"Hand over your money, or else!"

So, William handed over his money.

"Now your cellphone."

"But I DON'T HAVE a cellphone."

At that moment his cellphone rang. So he had to give it to them.

"What else have you got?"

"Nothing!" William declared, raising his hands in the air to make the point.

That was when they saw his wedding ring. They took his wedding ring.

Poor William. He already had a rocky relationship with his wife because of his dalliances, and he feared that when she saw he'd lost the ring it would end things. So, he started searching downtown's compra-ventas, or pawn shops, for a ring which would pass as his own. In one, he spotted one that looked identical.

"Could you show me that ring, please?" he asked.

They showed him the ring. Inside was etched 'With love, for William.' It was his ring.

"Thank you," he said, handing it back.

He returned later accompanied by police and armed with photos of himself with the ring. He got his ring back.

Another time, William was walking thru La Candelaria, about mid-day. A kid walked up to him and demanded: 'Give me your money, gringo!'

"No!"

"I said to give me your money, gringo!"

"No."

The guy didn't display any weapon.

"Give me your money!"

William punched him. Then he punched him again. All of his repressed Playstation violence boiled out. He punched the would-be mugger again and again, until the guy fell onto the sidewalk, and then proceeded to kick him.

That was when the cop showed up.

"What's going on here?"

William wasn't capable of explaining in Spanish. Undoubtedly, the would-be mugger claimed to be the victim. The cop helped the would-be mugger up and sent him off to find a doctor. He arrested William and took him to the police station, where William got fined for assault.

William certainly went overboard with the violence, but his response did warm the hearts of many of us who've been mugged by young punks.

But back to Colin. He's a physically big, high-spirited guy with interests ranging from drugs and women to literature, business and urban planning. He combined them all in his Expat Chronicles blog, which, predictably, got a following. The blog is worth a read, both for its good writing and its dramatic subject matter about drugs, drug smuggling, bribery, sex and more drugs. I'm sure I've never met anybody who can match Colin's frankness about his personal problems and his crimes and pecadillos - and few people who lead such interesting lives.

Colin is also a mess of contradictions. A big guy with a loud, outgoing personality with the guts to smuggle drugs to the United States - and then blog about it - he was also scared permanently by a low-grade mugging by a La Candelaria vagrant. Don't get me wrong. Getting mugged scares me, too. But I also would never have the guts to go to a brothel, smuggle drugs or do a dozen other things Colin has.

Colin's also got ambition. And when lots of people visited his blog to read about his sex life, he realized there was a market there. So he set up Bogotá Brothel Tours. The business got customers, but also got Colin forced from the country. He finally shuttered it when he found God, as he wrote on his blog.

A guy with as much guts, brains, ambition and initiative as Colin's got - combined with debatable ethics - will be up to more interesting things soon enough.

Related post: How Governments Built a Cocaine Factory

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours