Pablo Escobar and the State’s Luddite Reflex

How the State’s fragmented and uncoordinated response to drug trafficking resembles the Luddite logic: destroying instruments without transforming structures.

The transformation of drug trafficking through the instruments of the legal economy.

In 1980, the most important decade in the history of cocaine began. That white powder that exerted a powerful attraction on the American middle and upper classes reached the cover of Time magazine on July 6, 1981. Under the headline “High on Cocaine,” the magazine showed a classic martini glass with its olive and stirrer, but instead of gin it was filled with cocaine.

Journalist Michael Demarest reported that an ounce of cocaine—just over 28 grams—came to be worth up to five times more than an ounce of gold. As an emblem of wealth and power, he described scenes of consumption using rolled hundred-dollar bills and repeated two ideas that circulated strongly at the time: that it left no visible physical marks—unlike heroin—and that it did not cause addiction if consumed “in moderation.”

In the same article, Demarest argued that if all drug traffickers had formed a single company, the profits obtained from the cocaine trade to the United States would have placed it at number seven on the Fortune 500 list, below Ford and above the then-oil company Gulf, now part of Chevron Corporation.

The 1980s were the most important decade in the history of the illegal commercialization of cocaine. But the foundations of that expansion were built during the 1970s, when the substance had not yet reached its symbolic massification nor its market explosion.

During that decade, cocaine consumption was concentrated mainly among the upper sectors of American society. It also circulated—more discreetly—within elite university environments. It was, to a large extent, a class-based consumption pattern: while higher-income sectors accessed high-purity cocaine, the working class could only afford marijuana or low-quality heroin.

The quasi-advertising diffusion of cocaine’s supposed advantages over other drugs, combined with the aspirational character of the environments in which it was consumed, expanded demand toward sectors that lacked the purchasing power to sustain that consumption. The phenomenon was not limited to the United States. In Western Europe, markets—smaller in volume—also began to grow, and cocaine became one of the most profitable illegal products in history.

But cocaine was about to cease being a passing fad and would become another element in everyday life—whether one consumed it or not.

The Henry Ford of cocaine

Henry Ford, creator of the automaker that bears his name, developed at the beginning of the twentieth century a production system that transformed global industry. At his Highland Park plant in the state of Michigan, through the standardization of the production process, the maximization of labor time, and the concentration of manufacturing stages in a single facility, Ford and his engineers achieved an unprecedented leap in productivity.

The system increased output, reduced costs, lowered prices, and allowed broad sectors of workers to enter the automobile market. The Fordist model proved so successful that it was adopted by industries worldwide, from heavy manufacturing to fast-food services. Decades later, that same logic would also be applied to the drug business.

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was a Colombian drug trafficker who transformed the global cocaine market by adapting—informally but effectively—principles drawn from the Fordist model. His beginnings in the criminal world were modest: he started by desecrating graves to sell the gold and bronze from tombstones. Later, together with his cousin, he became involved in appliance smuggling and quickly moved into buying and selling cocaine on a small and medium scale.

Although Escobar became the most famous drug trafficker on the planet, he was not necessarily the most powerful nor the one who accumulated the greatest fortunes. In Colombia, that position was also contested by figures such as the Ochoa brothers, José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha—alias “El Mexicano”—and Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas, who diversified their activities across multiple legal and illegal businesses. What propelled Escobar to a prominent place in the narco world was not only the extreme violence he deployed, but his ability to read the growing demand for cocaine and reorganize supply through production and logistics methods reminiscent of Fordism.

Escobar brought together several traffickers from the Medellín region and helped consolidate the so-called Medellín cartel: a structure aimed at coordinating the production, transportation, and commercialization of cocaine. Such arrangements imply that members invest and share resources—economic, logistical, political, and judicial—in order to dominate a significant portion of the market and maximize profits, which are then distributed among the partners.

Cartels tend to emerge in industries where control of strategic raw materials allows decisive influence over prices. A paradigmatic example in the legal economy is the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which, by concentrating a large share of global oil reserves, can influence international crude prices—as it first did in 1973 when it halted oil production, stopped selling to countries allied with Israel, and ultimately forced companies to quadruple oil prices in retaliation for the Arab-Israeli War, or Yom Kippur War.

In Escobar’s case, emulating the great Fordist industrial complexes, the Medellín cartel installed enormous laboratories near the areas where coca bushes—the basic raw material for producing cocaine—were concentrated, in order to reduce costs and lower the sale price. One of the clearest examples that later revealed the development of the system created by Escobar—emulating Henry Ford—occurred on March 7, 1984, when the Colombian Army discovered and destroyed a gigantic cocaine production laboratory in the jungle region of Caquetá and Meta in south-central Colombia.

The laboratory, owned by the Medellín cartel, was called “Tranquilandia.” At the time of the raid, authorities found fifteen tons ready to be converted into cocaine hydrochloride; hundreds of tons of chemical precursors; nine laboratories; eight airstrips; four airplanes dedicated exclusively to transporting cocaine; and a helicopter that was later revealed to belong to a company owned by Alberto Uribe Sierra, father of future president Álvaro Uribe Vélez.

The Medellín cartel operated from the late 1970s until 1993, when Escobar was killed on the roof of a house while attempting to escape. During those same years, another monopoly operated just 420 kilometers south of Medellín in the city of Cali, popularly known as the Cali cartel. These were the years in which the War on Drugs—declared by U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1971—was the only more-or-less planned state response to the phenomenon of drug trafficking.

The War on Drugs, unilaterally declared by the United States, fundamentally aimed to destroy the sources of raw materials necessary to produce drugs—in the case of cocaine, coca leaf bushes. The idea was to deprive traffickers of the basic input needed to manufacture cocaine so they would be forced to raise prices and thus trigger a decline in demand. That simplistic interpretation of the law of supply and demand might have worked if traffickers had not formed cartels and implemented technological developments to improve production and avoid the consequences of that war.

Most commercial agreements eventually crack—especially when criminals establish them. To increase profits, each group attempted to open new sales territories or seize those belonging to the other. The volume of cocaine both groups introduced into the market ultimately produced oversupply, and falling prices soon followed.

In a short time, cocaine ceased to be an exclusive consumer good and became just another product of the emerging global consumer society. The logic that had allowed the automobile to reach the working class was beginning—albeit with different consequences—to operate in the narco business as well. Yet while the cocaine business grew and reorganized under the premises of capitalism, the State, by contrast, failed to evolve sufficiently to address the causes of the phenomenon rather than merely its consequences.  

Far from addressing the structural conditions that made the expansion of the cocaine market possible, the State focused on pursuing visible actors and seizing shipments. Even though far more was produced than confiscated—and far more people recruited than arrested—the State remained, and still remains, focused on the consequences.

The disproportion between the complexity of the phenomenon and the simplicity of the response more closely resembles a Luddite reflex than a policy truly capable of changing how the market actually functions.

Striking the Machine Does Not Destroy the System

Luddism was a movement of English textile workers that, at the end of the eighteenth century, opposed the massive introduction of machinery into textile production. The Luddites believed that capitalists introduced machinery to replace workers and maximize profits.

The movement began in Nottingham, in central England, and spread mainly northward, where most of the English textile industry was concentrated. The Luddites rehearsed military-style maneuvers to enter factories and destroy or damage certain machines, particularly those that posed the greatest threat to jobs.

British historians Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson repeatedly noted the paradox of some Luddite actions in which machines were used to destroy other machines. For example, in Yorkshire, a harvesting machine manufactured by Enoch Taylor was destroyed using a hammer also made by Enoch Taylor. Mockingly, the Luddites used to say: “Enoch makes them and Enoch breaks them.”

Although Luddism spread across several regions of England and generated panic among capitalists, the movement was quickly crushed by the British government through trials and death sentences for several of those convicted. The Luddite movement organized itself around a tactic—the destruction of machines—and around the need to find hope, however fleeting, in each act of sabotage in support of its demands. The developments of the Industrial Revolution were there to stay, and damaging a few machines was never going to stop what was coming.

The drug market internationalized beginning in the 1970s, when heroin demand grew in the United States and Europe, and consolidated during the 1980s and 1990s when cocaine became economically accessible to a broad public. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Mexican cartels would carry out a new transformation of the international drug market through synthetic drugs. 

Since the 1970s, drug trafficking has mutated and grown more complex, but state responses have largely remained the same. The tactic of confronting drug trafficking through a War on Drugs remains in force worldwide; only in some places have the actors, methods, and instruments changed.

In many scenarios, the fight against drug trafficking ceased to be primarily a military matter and became predominantly a policing issue. Technological developments were implemented to pursue traffickers, and judicial practices were modernized to recover assets and financially weaken criminal organizations. But state transformations have largely been spasmodic reactions to structural changes promoted by criminal organizations and accepted by consumer society.

From its origins, the War on Drugs has been oriented toward intervening on supply rather than demand. The types of drugs consumed by society vary over time, but traffickers have adapted their production and commercialization systems to meet demand.

Pablo Escobar was one of the first to understand that drug trafficking is not merely a group of people committing crimes in a more or less organized way, but a system of social and economic relations in permanent transformation. The State is still trying to understand it, yet resists recognizing that it intervenes only on the machines and not on the system. Consumer society, meanwhile, always demands something to buy: sometimes commodities, other times promises.