TUMACO, Colombia—On a muddy, unpaved road, Maria Cespedes, 42, walked in rubber boots to her secluded home in Tumaco, a municipality in southwestern Colombia. by miles. ” The fact is that coca employs a lot of other people here,” said Cespedes, who has been developing the plant for more than a decade. “It’s the only livelihood you have in those rural areas. “
There are more than 8,500 hectares (or 33 square miles) of coca planted in Tumaco, according to a 2021 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. This makes Tumaco the largest coca manufacturer of the moment in the country. In the network of one Hundreds of families in Céspedes, virtually all live off the illicit coca economy, whether in cultivation, harvesting or promoting the crop, which is transported north in the form of a thick white paste. arrest and imprisonment.
In July expired, as Cespedes headed home, he pointed to a thin road connecting the network to a main road. “It was paid for with coca,” he said, as well as Cespedes’ own home.
TUMACO, Colombia—Along a muddy, unpaved road, Maria Cespedes, 42, walked in rubber boots to her isolated home in Tumaco, a municipality in southwestern Colombia. On both sides of the road, coca, the plant used in cocaine production, stretched for miles. “The fact is that coca employs a lot of other people here,” said Cespedes, who has been developing the plant for more than a decade. “It’s the only livelihood you have in those rural areas. “
There are more than 8,500 hectares (or 33 square miles) of coca planted in Tumaco, according to a 2021 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. This makes Tumaco the largest coca manufacturer of the moment in the country. In the network of one Hundreds of families in Céspedes, virtually all live off the illicit coca economy, whether in cultivation, harvesting or promoting the crop, which is transported north in the form of a thick white paste. arrest and imprisonment.
In July expired, as Cespedes headed home, he pointed to a thin road connecting the network to a main road. “It was paid for with coca,” he said, as well as Cespedes’ own home.
“Everything I have I owe to coca,” Cespedes said.
Nearly 40 years after the U. S. -led drug war reached Colombia, the country remains the world’s largest coca producer and cocaine manufacturer. the lowest grades in the chain of origin. But even Plan Colombia, the $10 billion strategy subsidized through the U. S. The U. S. government to crack down on drug trafficking and organized crime that lasted from 2000 to 2015 failed to eliminate the industry. Meanwhile, Colombia is generating more coca and cocaine than ever before.
Today, Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, the country’s first leftist president, is pursuing a new strategy. The newly inaugurated leader, who called the war on drugs a “categorical failure” that “has claimed a million lives in Latin America,” advocated for the country’s drug policies. “If we keep repeating the same policy, the only thing we will reap is more failures,” Felipe Tascón, head of Petro’s transition team on drug policy, told Foreign Policy.
Petro plans to address the root of the country’s drug problem by investing in rural communities. Although his plan is still in development, Petro is seeking intermediate talks with farmers and helping them upgrade coca with legal crops. It is an ambitiouspolitical strategy, yet many coca growers hope that Petro, despite everything, will succeed in revising the country’s anti-drug policy.
Coca is difficult to update because it is lucrative. In many remote areas, Colombians coca is the only commercially viable crop. As Tascón pointed out, coca is unique in its ability to employ a giant number of people. About 120,000 families grow coca in the country today, said Maria Alejandra Velez, director of the Center for Security and Drug Studies at the University of the Andes in Bogota. The first harvest takes only seven months, can be adapted to other altitudes and climates and yields 3 to 4 harvests a year.
By comparison, pineapple, a popular economic crop, is susceptible to colder climates and takes 16 months until the first harvest. Coffee, one of the main exports, can take up to 4 years and produces two harvests a year. Suitable spaces for coffee development and, in some cases, farmers have replaced coffee with coca to adapt to the harshest summers.
The government’s strategies to eliminate coca, from criminalizing farmers to forced eradications, have failed. Notably, in the mid-1990s, when Colombia became the world’s largest coca producer, the military began aerial fumigation with the herbicide glyphosate to kill crops. More than 1. 7 million hectares (or 6,600 square miles) of land were fumigated before the government halted the focus in 2015 after the World Health Organization classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic. “
But even glyphosate is useless for reducing the harvest. Fumigation has most commonly been successful in displacing production, not getting rid of it. Putumayo Province.
“These kinds of methods don’t solve the root challenge,” Velez said. “The question we ask ourselves is: why are there [so many] families committed to coca cultivation?of opportunities
In 2016, when a peace deal was signed between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC), the country’s largest insurgent group, and the Colombian state, some 216,000 families were growing coca. A breach of the agreement was faithful to “solving the drug problem. “problem,” as negotiators claimed that drug trafficking had fueled bloodshed through armed investment teams on all sides of the conflict. Coca farmers. Farmers who voluntarily uprooted their coca plants obtained subsidies in a two-step procedure: first for their short-term livelihood and then to start a new long-term business.
“Because the government has not kept its promises, there are many other people here who have redeveloped coca. “
Almost 100,000 families have enrolled in the substitution program, some 14,500 families in Tumaco. But some families, like Cespedes, were skeptical. His entire network abstained from the program; Years of forced eradication had taught them to distrust the government.
They were right to be cautious. In 2020, the year in which the subsidies were due to end, only 1% of Colombian coca families that participated in the program obtained grants to start a new long-term business. Maria Alicia Guanga, a 49-year-old single mother. A five-year-old coca grew for 14 years in a cultivation network in Tumaco before deciding to enroll in the substitution program in 2017. He uprooted the crops from his farm but never won the promised investment.
“They left us alone, and with the violence here, it’s difficult,” said Guanga, a member of the Asociación Porvenir Campesina Asoporca in Tumaco, a coalition of more than 6,000 families who once grew coca.
In the wake of the peace deal, new and old illegal teams have taken the FARC’s position on drug trafficking. Clashes continue between armed teams vying for power. More than a dozen drug-related teams are now operating in Nariño province, according to local news reports, and network leaders advocating for coca substitution are targeted. Between 2016 and 2020, 75 of them were killed across Colombia, according to the human rights organization Somos Defensores.
Guanga, who lives in the midst of this violence, was forced to locate works in the city when her grant checks to help her get by in the short term came late. He got a job at a hospital, but said he only earned about 800,000 pesos (about $163 at today’s exchange rate) every two months, about a fraction of what he earned in agriculture. Coca.
One showed that across Tumaco, farmers who joined the substitution program saw their wages cut by more than half. Some farmers have turned to coca cultivation, even if it means risking being pushed out of the substitution plan.
“Because the government has not kept its promises, there are many other people here who have redeveloped coca,” Guanga said. “People have lost hope. “
Today, coca growing families turn to Petro, who has advocated a radically different technique than government intervention. During the election campaign, Petro promised to maintain the ban on fumigation and reform the substitution program. His promises to rural families won 74% of the vote. vote in Tumaco.
Since Petro’s election, drug policy reform has remained a key component of his platform. After his inaugural address in August to advocate for a “new foreign conference that recognizes that the war on drugs has failed,” Petro called on Latin America to end the war on drugs in his address to the United Nations General Assembly the following month.
A new drug law is expected to be introduced within a year, Tascón said, once administrative reforms are put in place to reposition the way drugs are treated institutionally. According to Tascón, those reforms come with the move of the long-term drug czar’s workplace from the Justice Ministry to the presidency, which would reflect the administration’s view that drug policy is a human rights factor and not a corrupt justice factor.
A central element of Petro’s drug policy will be a program to update coca with legal crops, based on classes learned from the mistakes of the previous program. According to Tascón, Petro’s transition team, which included drug policy experts and coca development executives, advised the program that it would implement a gradual, rather than brutal, eradication of coca. This provision was originally included in the peace agreement, but was later removed in the final agreement.
Petro also said the substitution program enshrined in the peace deal would be “revived” and “strengthened. “The main points of the programme are still unclear; It is also unclear where the investment will come from, given that the peace deal has not received sufficient funding.
“The goal has become to eliminate plants, while the initial goal was to create progression projects,” Tascón said. “The focus will have to be on offering technical assistance [to farmers] and locating cutting-edge projects. “
Petro’s transition team learned about successful crops that could upgrade coca in various parts of the country, such as oyster mushrooms, açaí palm, essential oilseeds and medical marijuana. (The cultivation and export of marijuana for medical purposes has been legal since 2016, however, the government has only granted a limited number of licenses. )Meanwhile, 3 expenditures have been presented in Colombia’s Congress to legalize and recreate marijuana, which have a smart chance of passing now that the legislature is controlled by a pro-Petro majority.
The government also claimed that the old substitution program was hampered by land-use problems. In some coca-growing areas, farmers never owned the name of their land, preventing them from participating in the program. Although Petro did not directly address this problem, he has in the past called for land reform that would allocate land to coca growers.
“We want to avoid focusing on characterizing this as a thieve challenge and focus on the human rights of peasant families. “
More radically, Petro opened a debate on decriminalization. He said that as long as cocaine is illegal, it will continue to finance organized crime in Colombia. the coca leaf, but gave more details.
Petro also said his administration would target high-ranking traffickers over poor coca growers. “We want to avoid focusing on characterizing this as a thieve challenge and instead focus on the human rights of peasant families,” Tascón said.
Colombia’s drug prohibition is increasingly being questioned by experts, adding Colombia’s Truth Commission, created following the 2016 peace deal, which concluded that the war on drugs had exacerbated the country’s armed confrontation and regulation of the drug market.
Tascón, meanwhile, predicts that cocaine will be legalized in the next 10 years. But any path to cocaine legalization is unlikely for now. Petro pointed to the limits of cocaine decriminalization while foreign treaties criminalize the drug and the U. S. government is doing so. UU. se strongly opposes. ” Cocaine is prohibited and. . . not even the president of the republic can say that it is going to be legalized because it depends on the centers of world power,” Petro said in September.
Petro is also facing an internal retreat. In 2020, a bill proposing to legalize coca leaf and cocaine drew strong complaints from conservative lawmakers. The bill has been stalled for two years. In August, when asked if management would legalize cocaine, Petro Justice Minister Nestor Osuna said the resolution was not an option. of the coca leaf and marijuana.
For Cespedes, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the renovation comes down to legally growing the crop or replacing it with a new one. police intervention, but through the offer of employment and rural development.
“The only thing we and our network want. . . they are promises that we will have a dignified life and projects of choice,” Cespedes said. “We hope this government will be different. “
Christina Noriega is a journalist and photographer in Colombia. She covers human rights, gender equality, social movements and the environment. Twitter: @c_mnoriega
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