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Military operation to destroy a coca plantation in Tumaco, Colombia 2020
Photo: IVAN VALENCIA / Bloomberg via Getty Images
If you drive through the mountains of the Cauca, a region in the southwest of Colombia, you can see them from afar: square areas in that unmistakably bright light green, coca fields.
Some are far away in the middle of the jungle, others very close to the road.
The sweet scent of marijuana hangs in the air.
From time to time, a truck appears, transporting plastic sacks filled with leaves.
Colombia
has recently caught up with a record harvest: the area on which coca leaves are grown grew by 43 percent in 2021 and in the Cauca even by more than 70 percent.
At the same time, the yield per hectare increased significantly, according to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
During the corona pandemic with its lockdowns and supply chain problems, coca cultivation was often the last opportunity for farmers in rural areas to make money.
Colombia, UN experts believe, is now producing more cocaine than at any time in its history.
"The war on drugs has failed," announced Gustavo Petro, Colombia's first left-wing president, in June after his election and again in September before the UN General Assembly.
He called on the world community to end its "irrational" and "hypocritical" struggle.
"The violence in the rainforest is fueled by the persecution of the sacred plant of the Incas, coca."
The failure of the "war on drugs" is obvious just by looking at the bumper crops - not to mention the environmental damage, the thriving business of criminal groups and the horrendous murder rate.
Many former FARC rebels who do not recognize the 2016 peace deal are now full-time drug dealers.
But what follows from this?
What could be a strategy to free Colombia from the clutches of the harmful narco-networks?
And is the government really on the way to a new drug policy that will end the vicious cycle of illegality, money and violence?
For decades, since President Richard Nixon was in office, the US has pumped billions into the South American country to stop cocaine production – without success.
Much of the money was spent on military operations, small farmers were jailed, and the harmful herbicide glyphosate was sprayed from airplanes onto rain forest fields.
At the same time, the FARC guerrillas got into the drug business in the 1980s, along with other paramilitary groups.
And so, despite all counter-offensives, the cultivation of the raw material boomed in the jungle, which was difficult to control;
much of the cocaine traded worldwide comes from Colombia.
Now, the Washington Post wrote in August, Petro's cabinet is "leading a global experiment" and ready to turn the country into a "laboratory for drug decriminalization."
In fact, the president, himself a former guerrilla fighter, aroused great expectations: Shortly after taking office, he spoke of an end to "Prohibition" and in New York of a plan for the "gradual decriminalization" of the drug, starting with small farmers in the countryside who do not belong to him consider as a criminal.
His statements corresponded to what the Truth Commission recommends as part of the Colombian peace process with regard to cocaine, namely legalization with simultaneous strict regulation of the drug and a policy that is based on human rights - and leaves the military out.
The military approach "intensified fighting in a conflict that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands," according to the commission in a report.
In Colombia, the question of peace is inevitably linked to the question of cocaine.
In the meantime, however, the Petro government has backtracked – probably also because the project is not supported either by its own population or by its big ally, the USA.
The United States is firmly opposed to the legalization of cocaine - although it has legalized marijuana in many places and similar arguments are being made for psychedelic drugs.
The "new, holistic anti-drug strategy" for Colombia adopted by the Biden government, on the other hand, relies on the tried and tested: rural development, strengthening of institutions and the legal system and the destruction of coca plants.
Sociologist Estefania Ciro, who led the Truth Commission's drug research team, calls it a "holistic mask hiding the old war on drugs."
In internal talks, the responsible Colombian Minister of Justice, Néstor Osuna, has already made it clear that there will be no regulation of cocaine in this legislative period.
However, in an interview with CNN, Osuna said tackling drug-related violence is a priority — even if that means allowing more cultivation first.
In order to avoid conflicts with growing communities and acts of revenge by the cartels, they want to severely limit the destruction of coca plants.
The government also wants to allow further easing of the legal consumption of drugs – but only in the case of marijuana.
For a country like Colombia, the world's largest exporter of cocaine, the question of legalizing production is crucial.
And this is where the government's most recent proposals read surprisingly conservative, at least a far cry from the revolution that was proclaimed at the beginning: According to the country's development plan, small coca farmers who produce the raw material for the drug should remain unpunished.
But that, says Elizabeth Dickinson, Colombia expert at the International Crisis Group, is "the only really new thing."
However, it remains unclear
In line with the US, the Petro administration continues to bet on persuading small farmers to grow other commodities instead of crops.
There should be financial incentives for this.
Large-scale agricultural production should eventually replace coca cultivation, according to Justice Minister Osuna.
It's a strategy that has failed miserably in the past.
"The price premium in the cocaine industry is 60,000 percent of the raw material in Colombia to the price on the US market," says Daniel Raisbeck, an economist at the free-market Washington think tank Cato Institute.
He thinks Petro's policy is too timid.
“Anyone who continues to rely on substitution programs has simply not understood the dynamics of demand and supply.” The old, US-led strategy of making the drug scarce, driving up prices and thus slowing down demand only works to a limited extent with cocaine .
It is a product with "inelastic demand" and a high addiction factor;
that is, people are also willing to pay higher prices for it—which only makes it more attractive for criminal, violent groups to get into the business, “like it was in the US when alcohol was banned;
it was the heyday of Al Capone and the Italo-American Mafia'.
So how can this problem be solved?
In 2020, then-Senator and Petro ally Iván Marulanda proposed a daring law that would allow the production and consumption of cocaine - regulated by the state: A state monopsony, a system with only one licensed buyer, would make coca Leaves can be purchased legally and government-certified physicians should administer small doses of cocaine to patients.
The »bureaucratic fantasy project«, as Raisbeck calls it, found only a few supporters – but a not entirely dissimilar model already exists in neighboring Peru: There, the state-owned company »La Empresa Nacional de la Coca« (Enaco) can legally produce coca products in the country to sell.
In 2020, however, the Reuters news agency reported that, according to Enaco, 93 percent of cocaine production in Peru was illegally processed into drugs.
The narcos simply pay much better.
This attempt can also be considered a failure.
For the economist Raisbeck it is therefore clear: only the free market can regulate it.
He calls for a unilateral legalization of cocaine by the Colombian government.
Thus, similar to marijuana in the United States, legal actors could emerge to produce the drug.
However, as long as »Prohibition« is maintained, illegal groups will always dominate the business and turn large parts of rural Colombia into a war zone.
He believes that the diplomatic upheavals that such a step would entail are manageable.
Although he expects drastic sanctions, the costs of the "war on drugs" will be significantly lower and the murder rate will be significantly lower.
It's worth it.
However, when asked what should happen to the armed groups in the country, he has no clear answer.
From a radical liberalization thinks
Sociologist Estefania Ciro little.
She advocates strict state controls, a regulated market that produces cocaine for the world, but is primarily intended to protect small farmers.
"They have to be able to negotiate their prices," she says, "otherwise there is a risk that the big players will continue to exert pressure and Mafia-like structures will be maintained." Cocaine is currently being cultivated on an area of 200,000 hectares, by comparison to coffee plantations or livestock farming that is manageable.
Ciro floats an agricultural industry
with state licenses.
She wants to involve the drug gangs in the production.
You should start legal businesses now.
In the future they would have to pay taxes, but they could save themselves the expensive private armies.
"The USA just beamed us back 40 years into the past," says Ciro, "but we can no longer allow ourselves to be dictated from outside what works and what doesn't work." Carrying on like this is a worst-case scenario for Colombia .
As different as the future scenarios of the experts for dealing with the drug look differently, they are surprisingly unanimous on one point: There will be no lasting peace in Colombia without some kind of legalization of cocaine.
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