International Cocaine Cartel, or Afrikaans Mercenaries?

by Anthony C Heaford - 10 March 2019  
(last updated 17:33 GMT, 30 September 2019)

In 2006 I spent three weeks lodging with Chris and Theo in the former pirate hideout town of Minca in Colombia. During my stay they quite openly demonstrated their involvement in an international cocaine cartel, but to be honest I think they did that to hide a far more nefarious activity. 

I believe they are Afrikaans mercenaries who’ve been involved in training rightwing Colombian paramilitaries and death squads since the mid-1990s. More recently they will have been training the non-uniformed regime change agents working against Venezuela on behalf of coup plotters and US ‘diplomat’ Elliot Abrams.

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My Evidenence

My principle piece of evidence that these men were not who they claimed to be is the fact that towards the end of my 3-week stay Theo asked me to spend a day preparing coca seeds (which I did) for him to take to Kampala, Uganda. He told me about his plan to establish commercial coca plantations and his intention to establish the first cocaine production facility on the continent.

In 2017, not long after I had spoke about this to British security services and journalists, Africa's first known cocaine production facility was discovered and destroyed by US DEA agents and Ugandan police, approximately 10-years after I had prepared coca seed in Colombia that were destined for Uganda. 

Another fact from my stay on Chris’s finca (a small farm holding) was the visiting Colombian army officer. Returning to the finca from town one day I saw a car & a uniformed driver waiting outside. I’d describe the car & uniform as being army staff – i.e. smart, not camouflaged. An hour or so later I saw a uniformed army officer leaving the finca, from what I have assumed was a meeting with Chris and Theo. The long standing and strong links between the Colombian military and rightwing paramilitaries and death squads are very well documented.

The finca is in a stratigic location controlling the road in to Minca from the Sierra Nevada, and the town was on the frontline of the internal battles of Colombia from about 1995 to 2005.

And there’s also a pretty definite connection to kidnapping gangs. Chris and Theo introduced me to a German couple also resident in the town. I would describe the couple’s circumstances there as precarious - living in a shack that literally over-hung a steep rock cliff. They’d put an ironic sign outside their tiny patch of land saying ‘Zona Roja’, Spanish for ‘Red Zone’ and a Colombian term for ‘War Zone’.

The Germans claimed to be fleeing drug charges in Europe but the fact that they both had their ring fingers identically amputated down to the 2nd knuckle suggested a very different story. In all the time I spent socializing with this couple the subject of their missing fingers was never mentioned or explained. My intuition tells me they were likely indebted to a local drug cartel and that if they were really fleeing drug charges in Europe, a German prison cell would be far preferable to the circustances I saw them living in.

Kidnap Attempt?

It was the German couple (at Theo’s instigation I suspect) who tried to entice me to travel with them to an area further up in the Sierra Nevada ('snowy mountains' in Spanish), an area that in 2006 the British foreign office had warned was lawless and prone to kidnapping. The couple had invited me to join them on a visit to some land they owned in the Sierra Nevada and initially I agreed enthusiastically. The next morning Theo and the German couple called me to the road outside the finca where they were waiting with a battered truck, ready to depart. I made my apologies and told them I had remembered I had an urgent email to send from the internet cafe in town and that I couldn’t come. The couple looked very relieved and immediately said they weren’t going either. Theo looked very put out as it turned out he'd borrowed the truck for the journey, even though he was not coming with us. I suspected then and now that this was a setup for a kidnapping; the land they claimed to own and the proposed visit were never mentioned again.

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My Intuition

I don’t recall Chris or Theo ever telling me their nationality in the 3-weeks I was there. The finca has been an on/off backpackers guesthouse but when I arrived there in November 2006 my request for lodgings caught Chris off-guard and I had to show him the finca’s listing in my almost 15-year old guide book (from my first visit to Colombia in 1995). I appeared to have been the first guest to stay there in many years. In a 2015 online review of the finca / guesthouse Chris is identified as being German, but shortly after my arrival in 2006 I heard Chris and Theo speaking another language. As I passed them chatting in the garden Chris gave me an unneccessary explaination: “We’re speaking Dutch” he said. I am not a linguist but I have an Afrikaans Aunt and have had a Dutch girlfriend; on balance I would say the tone of that garden conversation I overheard was more like my Afrikaans Aunt speaking than my Dutch girlfriend.

My Afrikaans theory would be supported by the fact that in 1993 a unit of the South African Defence Force was disbanded for alledged War Crimes. Called the 32 Battalion but nicknamed “The Terrible Ones” by their enemies, this unit was commanded by white Afrikaans who trained military veteran refugees from neighbouring Angola. This unit was renouned for their brutal tactics, tactics that almost exactly mirror those of the righwing Colombian paramilitary armies. The disbandment of the unit in 1993 was after a particularly murderous operation in a black township and would tie in with Chris’s claimed arrival date in Colombia, circa 1994. This date also ties in with the establishment of large rightwing paramilitary armies throughout Colombia - paid for by rich landowners and with huge assistance from CIA 'black operations’ (where deniable contractors are employed to perform the darkest of the intelligence agency’s tasks).

Whilst chatting with Chris one afternoon I asked if there were any firearms on the finca; Chris became very defensive stating that there categorically were not - only an air rifle that his half-Colombian children used. The mother of these 2-young boys was absent for the entire 3-weeks I was there, some form of trial seperation Chris told me without further explaination. The very defensive denial of any fire arm possession might tie in with the strictly enforced and US backed disbandment of the rightwing paramilitary armies just a few months before. Huge sums of US foreign aid were dependent upon the verification of this disbandment of the 30,000 paramilitaries, but I had already seen with my own eyes that these groups were still present in the nearby Tayrona National Park.

Theo’s possession of some very high quality night vision equipment was a curiosity that might only excite a soldier, going along with the concept that which ever side possesses such kit on a battlefield “owns the night”.

A final suspision was raised shortly before I left the finca when I saw Chris carrying plates of food down a hidden jungle path on the opposite side of the road to his finca’s entrance. Chris gave an odd semi-explanation when he realised I had seen him but this was never convincingly explained away. My intuition tells me that someone was hiding in that ravine, perhaps a listening post or maybe just someone who didn’t want to be seen or known about. 

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Protected From Up-on-High

With the commencement of the US backed regime change / proxy War against Venezuela I decided it was time to share my experiences with law enforcement authorities. I decided the best way to do this was to confess my involvement in preparing coca seeds for transportation to Uganda with my full knowledge they were intended to establish a new cocaine production industry on the African continent. I also wanted German authorities to be aware of the German couple’s predicament in Minca in 2006.

These matters would fall under InterPol’s jurisdiction, but such matters can only be referred to them by local police forces. And so in late December 2018 I reported myself and my wider information to Greater Manchester Police (GMP). It took a battle of wills to even get GMP to acknowledge my claims and a further month for a Chief Inspector to finally provide an InterPol reference number as proof my confession and allegations had been passed to InterPol’s South American desk. I did not share the unmasked photos that I have published here and neither GMP or InterPol have ever requested these identifying images. I can only conclude that both British police and InterPol are actively avoiding these matters. That would make them complicit with the likes of Elliot Abrams in my eyes, playing a small but vital part in allowing US coup plans against Venezuelan to go ahead unhindered.

I also thought to advise the German intelligence services, the bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). Again I have told them of the German couple’s predicament and of their claiming to be fleeing European drug charges, but once again this ‘intelligence service’ has never asked for the identifying photos or any other information.

So it does appear that Colombia is as lawless as I found it to be when travelling there in 2006/07. And it does appear that the European law enforcement and ‘intelligence’ agencies who I’ve contacted are as complicit in that lawlessness as they possibly could be.