"The war on drugs has failed."

Rachel Duarte, from Sul 21

At almost 60 years old and with seven books on public security, anthropologist Luiz Eduardo Soares stumbled upon a story that would bring him unexpected personal lessons. A psychoanalyst friend introduced him to Ronald Soares, now known as the 'economist of drug trafficking'. Sharing the same last name and almost the same age as the writer, Ronald served a 24-year prison sentence for coordinating the logistics and finances of one of the main drug trafficking networks on the Colombia-Caribbean-England route. It was the biggest trial in the history of English justice and years of police intelligence to combat what is impossible to combat. “By the time Ronald’s network is caught, other networks have already been formed. And when they dismantle this one, it opens space for others. It’s impossible to control,” says Luiz Eduardo Soares in an interview with [publication name]. South21.

The author of Elite Squad, which inspired the film Elite Squad, spoke for over an hour with... South21 at a hotel in Porto Alegre this week, when he launched the book. Everything or nothingThe book, which tells the story of Ronald Soares, is rich in details and curiosities about the international drug trafficking scheme, previously unknown even to specialists. It proposes a journey through the life trajectory of a successful man who abandons everything, plunges into addiction, and succumbs to ambition. “This environment is very close to us. It’s not a universe that stems from people with psychological illnesses. We have an environment that fosters the unilateral valuation of profit, sacrificing values ​​and respect for others. In Ronald’s case, he was deluded by the idea that he wouldn’t harm anyone, that it was just a business deal,” he says.

The novel is not fiction. It addresses the true story of a person who faced imprisonment in England and Brazil, exposing the problems with usual methods for dealing with transgression, as well as the prejudice against drug regulation and the political pressure that prevents legalization, which Luiz Eduardo Soares defends as the only measure capable of reducing harm and curbing violence related to drug trafficking. “I start from an observation, it’s not an opinion. Anyone dedicated to this area, both professionals and researchers, knows that the war on drugs has failed. We have to define the best constitutional context to confront the problem,” he proposes.

Sul21 – Why did this story interest you as a literary work?

Luiz Eduardo Soares – It's a very interesting story from a human perspective and from the perspective of the cultural transformations of the last few decades. It's also important for understanding the inner workings of international drug trafficking. The character's existential richness encompassed all these aspects. And surprisingly, it's a story not well-known in Brazil, despite being the longest trial in English history. It lasted 14 months, resulting in a 24-year sentence, and the convict was classified as the most dangerous prisoner in England for six years. This led the English justice system to imprison him in a maximum-security prison. He spent five years in solitary confinement, which mobilized human rights organizations in Europe to launch campaigns, because solitary confinement is an unacceptable practice. English authorities argued that he wasn't in solitary confinement, he was alone, which would be different because he was simply not in the company of other prisoners of this 'caliber'. The classification given to him wasn't due to violence. While there's no drug trafficking without violence at some point in the process, he never picked up a weapon or killed anyone. He was never violent, but he did try to escape. This is considered extremely serious by the English system. That's why he received this 'upgrade' to maximum security. He already represented the Cali Cartel and was arrested in an operation involving three tons of cocaine. He handled the logistics and finances that brought cocaine from the Colombian jungle, across the Caribbean Sea to London. Learning about these behind-the-scenes details was interesting. But, beyond that, as a human and existential journey, it was a very rich story.

Sul21 – How did he end up in Bangu prison in Brazil? What is the difference between the Brazilian and English prison systems?

Luiz Eduardo Soares - He was arrested in 1999 and served 12 years in a maximum-security prison in England. At the end of his sentence, he managed to be transferred to Brazil. There is an international agreement between Brazil and England that allows this. He experienced both realities, which are very different. One is very aseptic and absolutely legalistic, with strict adherence to English rules. He was never touched. He always had medical assistance, absolute hygiene, and good food. But he almost went crazy there. The claustrophobic confinement. No possibility of visits. The guards are forbidden from speaking to the prisoners. Whenever there is an exchange of words, a third guard must be present. So the silence and confinement were violent for someone seeking the freedom of the sea.

Sul21 – How did he not succumb?

Luiz Eduardo Soares – He succumbed. He even had a severe breakdown at one point. It was terrible psychological suffering. There were completely strange and difficult-to-understand practices. The cell had a hatch that was opened rigorously every 40 minutes. Day and night, every day. They noted the prisoner's physical position. There were two guards dedicated exclusively to this task. They would look and note the time and write in a logbook: “He is sitting, with his hands on his knees and looking at the wall.” “14:40 PM – He is lying down and looking at the ceiling.” “03:30 AM – He is reading a book.” This became so ingrained that he prepared himself like a clock. He would count down to know how much privacy time he would have left.

Sul21 – Who was Ronald before he entered the world of drug trafficking?

Luiz Eduardo Soares - In the 70s he left the economics faculty. He was an intelligent and very capable student. It was the time of the emergence of the capital market, of treeThe economic boom of the dictatorship, the 'economic miracle,' and the expansion of financial capital. He was young, gifted with intelligence and aggressiveness for business, and very daring. He made a fortune in just a few years. He married the most sought-after girl among his college classmates. He lived a fairytale dream. He had everything. Six months into their marriage, his wife cheated on him with his best friend, and he fell into a depression. He began to have an existential crisis because he had wealth and had become someone he no longer identified with. And he had always dreamed, since adolescence, of sailing, a dream inherited from equestrianism and the world of contemplation. He gave it all up and bought a sailboat. He remarried and, along with a couple of friends, began to live at sea, crossing oceans. Initially, this made me think it was simply about fulfilling that dream of contemplating nature. But, learning what daily life is like on the high seas, I saw that it wasn't just that. There was also the discipline, Spartan, almost stoic, with the strict adherence to shifts to control the boat. He would wake up at dawn for this. For 10 years, he went through all the risks and most difficult moments of adventure. Something I can't imagine for myself, who can't even spend half an hour at sea without getting seasick.laughsAnd this was his life during this period. This already shows the type of personality he had. And that's why the book is called... Everything or NothingBecause that's always been his life.

Sul21 – How was he able to support himself financially while living solely at sea?

Luiz Eduardo Soares – He supported himself by doing small repairs for other boats, organizing dives, and doing odd jobs in the ports just to earn enough to buy more fuel and food. During this period, their only drugs were marijuana or hashish, which are contemplative drugs. That's why I said it's a cultural snapshot. It was the end of the 60s, marijuana was used for contemplation… At the end of the ten-year period, there's a shift to cocaine, a drug linked to competitive work and the aggressive market. This transition from marijuana to cocaine is also related to the cultural change of a young generation, which preached peace and love, respect for nature, community life, to the individualistic, competitive world, where the need for competitive energy at work meets cocaine.

Sul21 – Where did he first acquire cocaine? How did he go from being a user to dealing drugs?

Luiz Eduardo Soares – It was in the Caribbean. But first, there was the transition from marijuana to cocaine – which wasn't unique to him, it was a transition that occurred throughout the Western world. Then there were small experiences in retail. He earned small amounts of money from selling the drugs he consumed. He transported small batches, since he knew the sea well, but it only yielded small amounts to extend the trip. Gradually, this became an addiction, and he discovered heroin, which almost killed him. Back in Brazil, he met an old friend he had met in the Caribbean, who was involved in international drug trafficking. It was a chance encounter. This scene is in the central part of the book and is very interesting. He, addicted, steals from his friend to buy heroin. The friend was perplexed and realized he was living with addiction. The friend had suitcases with millions of dollars from the drug trade, and he stole something like a thousand dollars. Upon learning of his addiction, his friend offered him $5 to do one of two things: buy all the drugs he could and die of an overdose, or buy a ticket to South Africa, where his friend's brother had overcome his addiction. He knew where to get treatment and promised to cure him. Ronald, like a good Brazilian, thought about it and ended up doing both: he bought the drugs and the ticket.laughsUpon arriving at the airport in Africa, he threw away the rest of the drug and faced the painful treatment. Heroin withdrawal syndrome is one of the most terrible pains. The whole body aches. He overcame it in three months. When he was returning to Brazil with the same friend, he received an offer to work with the drug. Since he was no longer dependent, he could be a professional.

Sul21 – How did you come across Ronald's story, which was unprecedented in Brazil?

Luiz Eduardo Soares – He contacted me while he was still imprisoned in Bangu. His cousin, a psychoanalyst who lives in Recife and knew me, attended my lectures and runs a human rights NGO after his brother's death in a robbery. After a lecture in 2006, he told me about his cousin, who was returning to Brazil to serve the remainder of his sentence, that he wanted to tell his story and that I might be interested. I said I couldn't take on new projects; I was already contracted to others at the time. But I said it would be a pleasure nonetheless. I met Ronald, and we got along very well. Because there was a connection, he felt confident in me and chose to wait until I was released to dedicate myself to it. We accumulated information and conversations. Since 2007, we've been meeting regularly. It took five years for me to publish the book. Ronald finished his sentence and was released in 2011.

Sul21 – How fictional is the story? Were there any adaptations or changes?

Luiz Eduardo Soares – No. The tone is literary. It mixes romance and suspense. But there's no fiction. It's all based on a true story. I only changed the names to protect the privacy of those involved. Ronald Soares, for example, became Lukas Mello.

Sul21 – How does the behind-the-scenes of international drug trafficking work?

Luiz Eduardo Soares – The cocaine leaves the Colombian jungle in a small plane that takes off from an airstrip with a $100 bribe paid to the military that controls the area. They use the airstrip once a week for takeoff. The weather conditions have to be favorable due to the aircraft's limited flight range. The boxes of Marlboro cigarettes, with a capacity of 25 kilos each, are dropped into the open sea, on the border between Colombia and the Caribbean. It's a very risky maneuver, with a life-threatening risk, and some boxes are lost. From there, they are taken by boat to the Caribbean port. There are stage-set boats there, which I describe in detail in the book. Seen from above, they give the impression of having women in bikinis drinking, but in reality, they are loaded with cocaine. They are flat boats, built on the ground, but their design gives the same illusion as three-dimensional advertisements in football stadiums. When they reach the sector boat, 200 miles from England, they throw all the technological steering and navigation equipment overboard. A boat that left some English port, carrying two couples on a date, heads towards them and takes the drugs to England. There's nothing suspicious because it's two couples leaving the port and returning as if they were just going for a stroll. And the boat that actually transported the drugs, with the men on board, arrives without any equipment on board or trace of the drugs, because it threw everything into the sea at the entrance to the English ocean. There's no way to even prove the navigation. The drugs leave chemically processed. One ton left with 85% purity but, due to temperature issues to withstand the journey, it is altered, reaching retail in England with 15% purity. There is a sixfold change in weight. One ton becomes six tons. This means that at retail, at the time, 1999-2000, it was equivalent to 30 million pounds. Something like US$43 million per ton.

Sul21 – How do you explain someone with a promising, successful career getting involved in drug trafficking after all the painful recovery?

Luiz Eduardo Soares – He even had doubts. He asked what the conditions would be. Since he knew the sea well and had experience as an economist, he would oversee the financial operation and the drug logistics. For this, he would receive something around US$5 million for each operation. This would solve his life. He already had children and nothing left to start over. He didn't plan to live doing this. He thought about overcoming the difficulties and retiring quickly. He kept doing it for a few years and, when he was about to carry out the big operation that would earn him enough for retirement, he went to prison.

Sul21 – Having even a small idea of ​​the size of the international trafficking network and understanding how it is organized, it becomes difficult to imagine how to combat it. How do we confront the problem?

Luiz Eduardo Soares "The trafficking is going very well, thank you. Precisely because of all this complexity. The investigation to unravel Ronald's network took many years. It involved piecing together parts of the story, finding some agents, then reaching others. By the time they catch this one, other networks have already been formed, and when they dismantle this one, it opens up space for more. It's impossible to control. The route from London that Ronald took, which I describe in the book, is the typical route of someone living underground. The best path between two points is the longest and most labyrinthine, the most baroque route. Contrary to usual physics. They would take the subway, then a taxi, then a bus to make a short journey, but to be able to evade security. What was surprising even to Ronald is that everything was filmed by police intelligence, and he watched everything at the trial. The trial is visual, and everything can be easily described. I had access to it, and it facilitated this description in the book." There were police officers from a special group of the English police, composed of former MI16 officers and other intelligence sectors that had been reduced after the Cold War. They had six agents accompanying Ronald every day, every four hours. There were 24 agents who took turns so he wouldn't identify them. The scenes are completely cinematic. An old lady buying peanuts, a woman opening a window, another agent passing by in a taxi, and they controlled all of Ronald's movements and those of the main agents in his trafficking network for many years. They ended up having no way out.

Sul21 – How would drug regulation affect trafficking?

Luiz Eduardo Soares - I'm starting from an observation to talk about this. This isn't a matter of opinion. Anyone dedicated to this area, both professionals and researchers, knows that the war on drugs has failed. For the last 30 or 40 years, the US has led what they themselves call the war on drugs and control of trafficking. The result has been increased consumption, maintained price quality, increased police corruption, and the expenditure of billions of dollars. This is an easy observation for any agent in the US narcotics department; it's admitted behind the scenes. Of course, they won't say it publicly, but they know that what was done didn't work. It wasn't a lack of resources or inefficiency of American, British, or Japanese police forces. The reason is very simple: it's impossible to control trafficking except under totalitarianism. We can regulate and guide markets, but not abolish them completely. Especially when it comes to individualized retail. When it comes to products that aren't directly useful for consumption, it's different. But individualized commerce is impossible to control. Supply and demand will meet. The country that won the Cold War by demonstrating the ability to completely suppress the market invents the War on Drugs. Everyone knows this. Highly intelligent people like Obama clearly know this.

The rest is politics. Politics in the sense of demagoguery, populism, and conservative, ignorant, and prejudiced public opinion. Since it's impossible to control, the question isn't whether or not we should allow access to drugs. It's the same as asking whether or not we should allow the law of gravity… People who want restrictions on access to drugs are horrified at the thought of legalizing drugs, as if they didn't already have access today. It's not about permission, it's about defining the context in which this access will occur. This is the real question, and it changes the angle of observation. We have to define the best constitutional context to address the problem. For example, we have 18 million alcoholics in Brazil. Tobacco is another problem. And Brazil managed to reduce cigarette consumption with educational campaigns, restrictions on consumption, and harm. Society began to reject its use. Whoever wants to die of lung cancer smokes, but smokes far away from me. There's salt and sugar, which are also drugs. The rule should apply to all drugs. We cannot allow innocent people to die so that a citizen can have some kind of drug. Cocaine causes fewer than 100 deaths per year. The average varies up to 65 people per year. Intentional homicides number 50, with almost half related to trafficking. Thousands of people are dying because of the clandestine drug trade, the purchase of weapons, and other terrible dynamics. Cocaine deaths are related to substances combined with cocaine. There is no quality, the drug is not properly processed, it is contaminated. Crack is a derivative of cocaine that emerged from this clandestine trade. There are all these corruptions. Drug quality control has an impact on harm reduction. Even if we cannot contain consumption, legalization ensures that the problems are restricted to those who choose to use these drugs. To prevent use, we will invest in education and health. But other factors such as the purchase of weapons, corruption, violence, prisons…

Sul21 – What solution do you envision for the prison problem in Brazil?

Luiz Eduardo Soares – In Brazil, we have a tragic reality of 50 intentional homicides per year. We are the second country in absolute numbers, behind only Russia. Of these cases, only 8% are investigated, meaning we have 92% impunity. Conversely, we have the third largest prison population in the world and the highest rate of increase in this population in the last five years. In the mid-90s, we had about 160 prisoners; today we have 540, not counting the arrest warrants issued but not executed, which would quadruple the size of the Brazilian prison population. Who is being imprisoned? According to research by Professor Luciana Boiteux of the Faculty of Law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the large expansion of the prison population in recent years is concentrated in a specific group of offenders. They are young people, with low levels of education, generally black, who traded illicit substances without weapons, without links to criminal organizations, and who ended up in jail. This addresses Brazil's fastest-growing prison population.

Sul21 – The Anti-Drug Law, as it was created, was responsible for increasing the prison population of people with small quantities of drugs, leaving those responsible for large-scale trafficking unpunished. Do you believe that Brazil will be able to advance in this legislation, as Uruguay has done?

Luiz Eduardo Soares – One must take one's hat off to (President of Uruguay, JoséMujica. Looking to the future of Brazil, I see no possibility that this progress will not happen. It's something so absurd and so rooted in people's cynicism, hypocrisy, ignorance, and prejudice. They authorize the legalization of alcohol but not marijuana. It's something so irrational in its effects that I believe historians look at it with the same perplexity we look at some past events. Clearly, these absurd things have to be confronted. But it may take a long time because the resistance of prejudice is very strong. I believe I won't see this in my lifetime. I'm 58 years old. I started writing about this very young. Right after the military dictatorship, in the early 80s, in my first book, I was already defending the legalization of drugs, and we were already seen as romantics, utopians, or even dangerous people for 'defending drugs'. Today there is a Global Commission on Drug Policy, with respected people like Nelson Mandela and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who have been meeting to discuss new policies and abandon the War on Drugs. The media covers the topic daily, and the Marijuana March is no longer criminalized. Now there's a petition circulating in Brazil in favor of legalizing home marijuana production and criminalizing drug trafficking. I didn't sign it. It seems absurd to me that a poor, young, black man sells a substance to another white, middle-class man of the same age, and one is the criminal and the other the 'poor addict'. It makes no sense at all. I advocate for legalization where there is no prohibition, with regulation of the business, information, and taxation. Without hypocrisy and with effective change.

Sul21 – You remain on the side of radical criticism today, but you were once on the other side. You were the National Secretary of Security in Lula's government and stood alongside the former National Secretary of Drug Policy, Pedro Abramovay, when he was dismissed for declaring the same positions as you. From the state's point of view, is it possible to be confident that we will make progress?

Luiz Eduardo Soares "Based on my life experience, I'd say we lived in a different time in history. Progress is slow. In the past, even talking about drugs was forbidden. Today I say this wherever I go. I remember when I worked with Tarso Genro when he was mayor of Porto Alegre in 2001. There was no Secretary of Public Security, and the idea was to create one. I was a consultant. The work was successful. We focused our efforts on Restinga, which was the most violent neighborhood at the time. We focused our investments there and eliminated homicides. This is reported as a national case study. At that time, I was giving a lecture and answered a reporter's question about drug legalization." Zero hourIt was a newspaper headline and sparked debates on the RBS radio network at the time. The criticism was that the man from Rio de Janeiro came to Rio Grande do Sul to legalize drugs. The polls asked people whether they wanted to protect their families or agree with me. But after two weeks of intense debates in the local press, a final assessment on Lasier Martins' program showed opinions almost tied. It was 52% against me and 48% in favor. The subject was even removed from the agenda. I imagine that in another week I would have become…laughsToday, talking about drug legalization no longer has the same effect on society. And the society of Rio Grande do Sul is quite politically aware, so it's a good laboratory for us to compare ourselves to. It's proof that things have changed. Pedro (AbramovayHe was expelled from the government after giving an excellent interview on the subject. But it was regrettable on the part of the government. The positions of the federal government have indeed been regrettable on this issue, as have those of politicians in general, who remain obedient to conservative public opinion so as not to lose votes. But some things have already changed. Whether these changes will have the power to lead anywhere, we don't know. I imagine we would still be talking about this ironically in the future.