Spain will help Colombia to combat environmental crimes of drug trafficking

Fernando Grande-Marlaska, in his meeting last Friday with Colombian Defense Minister Diego Molano, in Bogotá, in an image provided by the latter's department. Víctor Holguín (EFE/Colombian Ministry of Defense)

The fight against drug trafficking is not only reduced to the seizure of caches and the arrest of traffickers.

The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, has promised during his recent trip to Colombia to provide support to the Police of this country to combat crimes against the environment caused by the cultivation of the coca plant and its subsequent chemical processing , as made public by the Colombian president, Iván Duque, on social networks and sources from the Interior highlighted to EL PAÍS.

The agreement reached by Grande-Marlaska will be finalized in the coming weeks, when the general directors of the National Police, Francisco Pardo, and the Civil Guard, María Gámez, travel to the South American country to specify how this support will be articulated.

Grande-Marlaska's commitment took place during the two-day trip he made to Colombia, in which he met with Iván Duque himself, with the Vice President and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marta Lucía Ramírez;

the interior minister, Daniel Palacios;

that of Defense ―which is the portfolio that addresses the Colombian National Police―, Diego Andrés Molano;

and the director of the National Police, General Jorge Luis Vargas, among other authorities.

In all the meetings, the police cooperation that both countries have maintained for years in the fight against drug trafficking and organized crime has been present ―last September, President Duque already signed an agreement with Spain to intensify efforts in this regard during a visit carried out in Madrid―as well as in other police areas, such as cybercrime,

However, the main advance has been the commitment to expressly expand cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking to the field of environmental crimes, including these as one of the priority challenges.

This has been influenced by the fact that this type of crime in Colombia is closely linked to drug trafficking, having caused this indiscriminate felling to gain space for clandestine coca leaf crops and the subsequent use of highly polluting precursors, such as gasoline and all kinds of acids, to the manufacture of cocaine hydrochloride.

In addition, from the 1980s until 2015, the Colombian authorities used aerial spraying with glyphosate, a herbicide highly questioned for its toxicity to the environment, to destroy the plantations.

The support proposal proposed by Grande-Marlaska would be articulated through the Nature Protection Service (Seprona) of the Civil Guard, and the groups specialized in environmental crime of the Specialized and Violent Crime Unit (UDEV) of the Police National, which would thus be added to other units of both bodies that in other areas of the fight against organized crime already collaborate with the Colombian security forces.