I asked him if the AUC traded cocaine for weapons. Mancuso leaned over the desk and said, "Phillip, we did it many times. We exchanged drugs for guns. Basically, almost all the arms transactions were made either in drugs or dollars." He confirmed that this was a main part of their growth strategy, and then spoke about AUC export taxes for cocaine in Urabá. "They charged 500,000 per kilo? Look, there were blocks up there that charged a 100, 150, 200, 300 dollar tax to dispatch a boat, or whatever was going out, a boat, a ship, whatever. It was the AUC block that charged."

If I wanted to know the exact details, he said, I would have to talk to the commanders of the Bananero block of the AUC, his subordinates. Lorenzo also insisted that Chiquita people had meetings with AUC duros about drug smuggling and weapons. Lorenzo knew the exact place where they had meetings, but Mancuso wouldn't admit to knowing about a specific agreement to export drugs from the port, although he would go on to describe the AUC drug export scenario in vivid detail. Mancuso said he did not believe that excutives of the company knew about the drugs for weapons exchange, because it wasn't necessary for them to know. "The people who run the port at an operational level had to be involved; those are the people who would notice all this." "How hard is it to exchange cocaine for weapons?" I asked. "It's the easiest thing in the world," he said and smiled.

The company will no doubt say that if there were any drugs shipped on its freighters when the AUC controlled its port, it did not know about them. But over the years, people did find out about it and were either intimidated or paid to stay silent. This export scheme was the exact mechanism that allowed the AUC to grow and commit crimes on a vast scale. To acquire weapons it had to ship cocaine to the United States and Europe, so it looked for an export channel. Simple. In Urabá, AUC was merely a symbiont on the body of a larger corporation which shared its interests. It too, was a kind of corporation. They fed off each other.

Outside the gate of the prison, the old woman asked me how it went. I said that it went well while she cleaned the ink from my fingers with a spray bottle. The air had warmed up since the morning. The same police officer smiled and waved and I started walking down the hill to town. Below the mountains of Itagui, people were getting ready for the Festival of Flowers while above them drifted the legions of Colombian ghosts who follow their every move.

The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting provided a small travel grant for this story. There is a second chapter to be written to this investigative story. I am still in contact with human rights lawyers and other sources in Colombia who can shed more light on what happened in Turbo during the reign of the death squads.

To contribute or commission a new Colombia reporting project, click here.