$222 million jungle jackpot

Colombian soldiers play with the cash found in the mountains. Photo / Morton Andersen

Army officer Jorge Sanabria stumbled upon a huge cache of drug dollars buried in the Colombian mountains. He let his tired and hungry soldiers keep it.

"There is still a hundred million dollars out there in the hills - cash," muses Lieutenant Jorge Sanabria of the Colombian Army as he sips a beer then picks up a thick beef rib.

Sanabria rips apart the meat like a happy dog. Beef blood slides down his right arm and drips off his elbow. His young daughter smiles proudly.

I am drinking with a wanted man in the hills outside of Bogota, Colombia. As he slurps and burps, Sanabria looks relaxed for a man who received nasty threats for years and insinuates that the cute little girl next to him would be snatched.

"He's like Hitler, sleeps in a different place every night, never tells people where he really is," says Jorg Hiller, a Colombian screenwriter who guided me to this remote rendezvous. "Five people have already been murdered because of this money.

Sanabria might just be the luckiest millionaire in the entirely mad, and ultimately futile War On Cocaine. He never sold cocaine. He didn't launder cocaine money (well at least for most of his life).

He found US$150 million (NZ$222 million) in cocaine cash. One hundred and fifty million dollars. Stashed inside oil drums, buried in a remote corner of Colombia.

Each oil drum had US$8 million in stacks and bricks of US$100 bills. At least 20 barrels were unearthed, probably more. Sanabria is planning to go back and get the money he left behind, so he keeps most of his insider details top secret.

The pile of cow ribs disappears, and the cast of empty beer bottles extends across the picnic table.

As the sun tracks across the horizon, Sanabria and a growing coterie of associates tell me about the history of hidden treasure in Colombia.

"They are called a Guaca [pronounced Walk-A]. It is an indigenous word," says Adriana Chacon, Sanabria's lawyer, who often sounds like his spokesman.

"In the aboriginal history, they hid their treasures in clay pots and hid them in the ground. In the begining of the 20th centuries we created Los Guacqueros [Walk-Keros] who went to find and unearth the guacas ... the soldiers called this su guaca [their treasure] because it was a treasure they found."

"I was sent to unbury a huge fortune, probably several hundred million, a huge treasure," said Colonel Hernan Mejia, an elite commander in the Colombian Army Special Forces. "This guy had so many exits from his ranch. At every exit he had a suitcase with US$6 million hidden under the floors, in the roof, behind a mirror. No matter which way he left, there was always a bag of cash."