In Coca’s Claws: How Colombia Is Rethinking the War on Drugs
On October 5, 2017, in the southwestern Colombian town of Tumaco, local farmers of coca leaves woke up to a disturbing revelation. Local security forces were en route to oversee an operation to destroy the farmers’ crops. Coca is the principal raw ingredient used in the manufacturing of cocaine. The white paste from its leaves is extracted and dried, later becoming the better known white powder down the line of production. While the cultivation of coca is illegal in Colombia, its growth is vital to the economic wellbeing of certain communities like Tumaco, where the farmers rallied in protest against the security operation. One eyewitness claimed that hundreds of people created a “human shield” to prevent the destruction of the coca crops, after which tragedy ensued. Police fired into the gathering, killing at least six and wounding several additional people.
The war on drugs in Latin America has been partly defined by on-the-ground, brute-force operations which target the lowest rungs of the narcotics network. Rural farming communities which rely on the income generated by the production of the raw ingredients of illegal drugs suffer in the process. Infamously, various ultra-wealthy leaders of trafficking syndicates, predominantly those focused on peddling cocaine, have repeatedly eluded capture in years-long manhunts and investigations. Meanwhile, entire countryside towns, dependent on coca agriculture, repeatedly bear the brunt of police crackdowns and violence. Such communities have been caught in the middle of gravely destructive operations aimed at destroying crops and laboratories. This same pattern, historically, has dominated Colombia.
However, the legacy of the violence in Tumaco and similar places has motivated a major shift in the nation’s approach to coca. Under the current administration of Colombia’s leftist president Gustavo Petro, inaugurated in 2022, the government has undertaken a set of delicate strategies aimed at supporting rural communities. The administration hopes to transition farmers away from coca rather than destroying crops in one fell swoop. While policies seeking to ensure the transition to other forms of agriculture have been in place for years, they have seen limited success.
President Petro made it clear from the outset of his administration that investments in rural agricultural communities will be expanded. The government has placed emphasis on measures of replacing coca plants with legal crops including coffee and cacao. The administration has also stressed the need to assist farmers who aren’t able to make the switch on their own due to their economic reliance on coca farming.
Another key change is in the direction of coca crop destruction. Starting in the 1990s, the Colombian government engaged in mass aerial fumigations of remote coca farms which were often family-run. Small planes would fly over fields of coca and spray large amounts of glyphosate, an herbicide that the International Agency for Research on Cancer has meanwhile deemed as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The government ended the policy in 2015. Decrying the forsaken practice, Petro remarked in his address to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2022 that the spraying of glyphosate has contributed to the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest.
Over a year after Petro’s inauguration as president and the unveiling of the government’s new methods of handling the illegal narcotics crisis, the amount of coca cultivated in Colombia has expanded dramatically while its black market price has plummeted. In September 2023, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that during the previous year, Colombia broke its record for coca cultivation with a 13 percent increase in the number of hectares of cultivated coca. Meanwhile, an approximately 40 percent drop in the price of coca paste in the northern municipality of Tibú alone may prove to be a microcosm of a new trend which has forced some farmers out of the coca trade and into alternate markets. While the fluctuations in the black market have yielded some of the results sought out by Bogotá, the explosion in coca growing and the financial threat to farmers posed by the price collapse herald a possible exacerbation of the crisis.
Regardless, the Petro administration remains determined to pursue its new tactics, as Petro also aims to encourage their implementation internationally. On September 9, at the Latin America and Caribbean Conference on Drugs in Cali, Colombia’s president called for the formation of an international alliance of Latin American states against drug trafficking. Having enlisted the help of Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador just days prior to the conference, Petro has reaffirmed his commitment to a reassessment of the war on drugs at a global level. His strategy is grounded in the approach to illegal narcotics of combating traffickers not by killing off entire fields of crops, but instead by securing a stable, alternative future for farmers who rely on them to live.