“Two dollars.” Del Pozo grinned. “But two dollars goes a long way here. They can make more money selling coca than coffee or coconuts.” He picked up a leaf from the table and rubbed it between his fingers. “Each crop takes two or three months to grow. If you have enough farmers who want to sell you their crop, you can produce as much paste as you want. This place? We make sure it runs twenty-four seven.”

Milton followed del Pozo as he headed beneath the ramshackle roof to a separate area with a wooden floor that was, in turn, covered with a plastic sheet. The floor was strewn with green coca leaves. The bags must have been brought through and tipped out after the farmers had sold them. Two men were using large food processors to mulch the leaves into a fine paste. The contents of the processors were tipped out into plastic troughs, and then a woman sprinkled lime over the paste, scooping it out of a sack at her feet. The lime-and-paste mixture was then scooped into a large plastic barrel with its top sliced off. Gasoline was poured into the barrel, and the sludge was stirred with a long wooden spoon.

The woman looked to be in her early to mid-forties. She was wearing a white vest that was cropped an inch or two above her waist, the fabric stained with grease and residue from the process of refining the coca leaves. She had long brown hair that was tied back in a ponytail; a few rogue tresses were plastered to her face by either her sweat or the rain. Her eyes were brown, too, and, as she turned her attention to Milton, he saw that they were deep and soulful.

“Inglés?” she said.

“Yes,” Milton replied. “English.”

She switched to English. “You want to know what happens here?”

He nodded.

She gestured to the activity that was taking place behind her. “The leaves must be dried first,” she explained. “We leave them out in the sun. Then, as you saw, they are spread out and minced. We add the cement powder, the lime, and sometimes the ammonia, then we spray gasoline. The mixture is stirred and stirred, all the time, to make sure that the chemicals are being applied evenly.”

She took Milton to a table that held a large container that looked as if it had been standing for a while. She nodded to the man who was tending to it, and he turned a tap, opening a valve that allowed the contents to flow out into a metal can. The process had produced a lime-green liquid, very different from the blackened sludge that Milton had just seen in the first container. The man handed the can of liquid to the woman, and she proffered it to Milton so that he could look at it more closely.