Jefferson Parrado's calloused hands caress the leaves of the bushes.
The wind slightly moves the hat that protects him from a sun that radiates like a stove.
Suddenly, he tears off a leaf and crushes it between his fingers.
"Coca is our only means of subsistence," says the president of the community council of Nueva Colombia, a small town next to a river where coca leaves are grown, which the peasants themselves later turn into base paste, into a drug called bazuco.
Colombian soldiers appear here from time to time, unannounced, to burn their laboratories and uproot the bushes and thus comply with an eradication program agreed upon with the United States.
"They harass us," Parrado says with a grimace.
And they intimidate the civilian population.
People panic when they know the Army is coming.
Jefferson Parrado, peasant leader and president of the JAC of Nueva Colombia. Chelo Camacho
EL PAÍS has had access to hundreds of thousands of documents from the General Command of the Armed Forces in Colombia leaked by the
hacktivist
collective Guacamaya through Forbidden Stories, a consortium of journalists based in Paris.
Internal communications and reports show that soldiers committed human rights violations during the 2020 coca eradication campaign, in full lockdown.
The army harassed farmers and journalists and went so far as to commit at least three murders during the confrontations that break out in these operations between the producers and the soldiers.
The files bring to light that the military took advantage of the pandemic to carry out their plans.
At that time, Colombia established one of the strictest lockdowns in Latin America, which lasted for five months.
Land and sea borders were closed, international and domestic flights canceled and bus travel suspended.
But operations to manually destroy coca, poppy and marijuana crops never stopped, ever.
The leaked documents reveal that up to eight army divisions, two joint task forces and some naval units were involved in forced eradication efforts on those dates.
As of early August 2020, 338 squads deployed in 14 out of 32 departments were engaged in eradication.
A farmer holds in his hand the coca base paste produced in Nueva Colombia, Meta, Colombia, on January 21, 2023. Chelo Camacho
Colombia, the world's largest supplier of cocaine, primarily focuses its eradication efforts on coca, in places like Nueva Colombia.
On the outskirts of that town, coca fields follow one another on both sides of a road.
A beautiful landscape that has caused rivers of blood.
Military, guerrilla, paramilitary and other criminal groups compete for control of these key growing areas.
Most of it is in the hands of small farmers who have no other opportunities.
In 2016, the peace agreements between the FARC and the government included a voluntary crop substitution program that, over time, has run out of support.
“Since the 1970s, Colombia has appealed to forced eradication policies.
That has been their policy to combat the phenomena of the marijuana, coca, and poppy economies,” says Salomón Majbub, a drug policy researcher at the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz).
"That is responding to some logic of a prohibitionist policy that has been established in the United States since the 70s."
In 2020, as of August 5, two members of the armed forces had been killed and eight wounded in forced eradication operations, according to a draft military response leaked to senators who had requested information.
The senators' question about deaths and injuries clearly also referred to the general civilian population, but the military ignored that point.
Limit between the jungle and a young crop of the coca plant. Chelo Camacho
The reality is that they knew the answer: at least three civilians died in eradication operations.
On March 26, 2020, just the second day of confinement, a soldier shot dead Alejandro Carvajal in the Catatumbo region, in Norte de Santander.
Less than a month later, on May 18, Digno Emerito Buendía was assassinated in that same region.
And two days later, they killed Ariolfo Sánchez in Anori, Antioquia.
“It occurs during the Government of Iván Duque Márquez, the former President of the Republic, after his announcements to carry out forceful actions in the territory, especially there in Catatumbo, despite the fact that the peasant community for decades has been insisting on the past governments to seek a concerted and peaceful solution,” says Gustavo Quintero, a lawyer working on the Carvajal and Buendía cases on behalf of the Catatumbo Peasant Association (Ascamcat).
Alejandro Carvajal, according to Quintero, was trying to explain to the soldiers, the day he was assassinated, that the families had signed up for the voluntary crop substitution program, but that the government did not fulfill its part of the agreement.
“Suddenly a shot rang out and just the sound and the direction of the origin of that projectile came from where the National Army was and hit Alejandro.
This projectile entered through his back, piercing his lung, pierced his heart and also amputated a finger, ”continues Quintero.
"At no time had there been a scenario of hostility, of attacks by armed groups on the public forces, much less on the community, to justify firing a firearm."
His client died instantly.
Cars set on fire by armed groups in the hamlet of Puerto Nuevo, Guaviare, Colombia. Chelo Camacho
The deaths of the three men made the news, but they were diluted in the sea of violent information that occurs in Colombia.
Killings by the military often stall when authorities say they will investigate, but those results are rarely made public.
The army often treats the victims as members of armed groups so as not to shock the population.
The cases of Carvajal, Buendía and Sánchez are exceptions to the rule.
The soldier who killed Carvajal was sent to trial in 2022 after a successful legal battle to have the case heard in the ordinary justice system instead of military courts.
The same battle occurred in the other two cases.
The leaked documentation shows the names of the three victims.
In an internal registry of the military, their cases are classified as "alleged violations of human rights allegedly committed by members of the army."
The two alleged act in denial.
There appears a document in which the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported 11 cases in 2020 that involved 13 people killed, presumably at the hands of military personnel.
A separate document of alleged human rights violations includes 31 people killed during military operations between February 2019 and September 2021. Carvajal, Buendía and Sánchez are included on both lists.
The military, according to the information found, monitors the cases.
The three victims are classified as MDOM (deaths in development of military operations).
These forms are very brief: they record those responsible, some contextual details, and follow up on various criminal and disciplinary investigations.
Until the end of 2021, the internal investigations were still ongoing without any results being known.
And they probably never will.
The murders of these three people did not delay the Army's plans.
The day Sánchez was killed was just the beginning of a riotous campaign to uproot coca plants in the Guayabero region, where Nueva Colombia is located.
“There was isolation, a confinement, and the public forces took the opportunity to go out to eradicate.
But of course the peasants did not allow it and there were many clashes between the communities and the Public Force”, explains Majbub.
To get to Nueva Colombia, you have to drive a rocky road for four hours and later navigate the Guayabero River by boat.
During the journey you can see alligators, turtles and freshwater dolphins.
After leaving the boat at a dock and walking up an embankment, the first houses appear that make up this place embedded in the middle of the jungle.
The entire region is littered with banners of the Jorge Briceño Suárez front, a splinter group of the extinct FARC made up of fighters who did not join the 2016 peace process. They never stopped fighting in the jungle.
One of these posters shows Gentil Duarte, once the most wanted man in Colombia, who was murdered almost a year ago in Venezuelan territory, saying: "I am alive and on the warpath against the global imperialism of the north."
The front rules on this bank of the river and in almost the entire Guayabero region, where the departments of Meta, Guaviare and Caquetá border.
Pure guerrilla territory.
View of the Guayabero river. Chelo Camacho
Without your authorization it is impossible to get here.
They rule.
The front exercises severe social control.
Prostitution or gambling is not allowed.
Men are not allowed to wear long hair or earrings.
Of course, drug use is punishable.
Parrado, the president of the community action board —a kind of mayor—, sees the positive side of that all-seeing eye:
—The FARC carry out some controls that one appreciates, because that makes the regions healthy.
The government sees it with bad eyes, but in this town you can put your pockets full of money to bed and wake up the next day the same way.
In another place you wake up without clothes.
The life of the town revolves around coca.
They try different types of leaves to have up to four harvests a year.
Once they collect it, in the laboratory they add lime, ammonium sulfate and petroleum, and from there the base paste comes out.
The peasants sell it like this.
In a following process, for which a greater knowledge of chemistry is needed, is when it becomes cocaine.
When cash is scarce, the neighbors buy and sell with grams of base paste as currency.
A beer is worth a gram, five a shoe.
The owners of the stores and bars have small scales where they weigh the merchandise.
The farmers of the place, where a good number of ex-guerrillas who did join the peace process live, spend the whole year waiting for the army not to appear out of nowhere and want to destroy the crops.
The main witnesses to this eradication have been local journalists, who have risked their lives to broadcast what was happening.
The counter of a bar in Nueva Colombia. Chelo Camacho
“At first we were able to film well, without anyone bothering us, but later the military got angry and called us guerrillas.
If we made ourselves visible, they gave us lead,” says Edilson Álvarez, one of the founders of Voces del Guayabero.
The communication medium began with the initiative of small hamlets that put up money to buy cameras and bring in a journalist from outside to instruct the novice reporters.
In May 2020, the informants traveled to El Tercer Milenio, where the military repressed protests by peasants who opposed forced eradication.
When they arrived, more troops were deployed and began shooting at the protesters.
Also against journalists.
Álvarez heard the military say: "we have the guerrilla photographers, we have the guerrilla journalists."
It was a way of targeting them: associating them with an armed group implicitly justifies their being able to be shot.
By that time, the outlet had been running for two years.
Its members mainly used WhatsApp to share photos, videos, and messages from the region's social leaders.
Later they created a Facebook page to reach more people.
The first video that Álvarez uploaded, in May, was a 26-second clip of the conflict over forced eradication in which several people are seen carrying a man who has been shot in the leg.
Edilson Álvarez, journalist for Voces del Guayabero. Chelo Camacho
The first direct attack against the journalists came just two weeks after coverage began.
One of them, Fernando Montes, was filming the military repression of peasant protests when a bullet went through the hand with which he was holding his camera.
A second shell landed in the camera bag on his back.
“He completely lost his little finger and, in the other three fingers, around 60% of mobility,” says Álvarez.
"The Omega had been devastating everything," adds the reporter.
He is referring to Joint Task Force Omega, a military unit that operates in this area.
Joint Task Force Omega was created in 2003, when the United States was investing more than half a billion dollars a year in military and police aid in Colombia.
In 1999, Bill Clinton and Andrés Pastrana established Plan Colombia, a massive aid package focused on helping police and military forces eradicate coca.
When it was established, George W. Bush and Álvaro Uribe were in power and the unit was also engaged in anti-insurgency operations.
The leaked documents include details about Omega's war crimes during that period of peak US military aid to Colombia.
A spreadsheet tracks investigations and court cases of Omega members.
The unit killed civilians and presented them as guerrillas, a practice known as
false positives
in Colombia.
Other documents follow up on reports of various crimes and human rights violations in the area.
Another secret report shows an inspection of Omega carried out in 2021 in which irregularities are found.
A battalion, for example, operates outside the territory in which it has jurisdiction.
Dusk in the streets of Nueva Colombia. Chelo Camacho
In 2022, Colombians elected Gustavo Petro, a left-wing economist who was a member of an urban guerrilla group known as the M-19 in his youth.
Petro is convinced that the war against drugs that President Richard Nixon started in the 1970s and that his successes have continued is a true failure that has filled Latin America with deaths.
In September, before the UN General Assembly, he said that the time had come to stop investing millions of dollars in weapons and forced eradication to dedicate it to financing programs for peasants or projects to prevent deforestation in the Amazon.
The speech sounded revolutionary.
A semester after he came to power, however, the Government continues to think about the matter.
Iván Cepeda, a senator fully trusted by Petro, maintains that the objective now is to eradicate large hectares of coca cultivation, clearly destined to finance drug trafficking, and leave small producers alone.
A couple of weeks after Petro took office, his new police director said forced eradication was suspended and voluntary crop substitution would be prioritized in certain regions.
Later, though, Petro, Defense Minister Iván Velásquez, and other officials met with cocaleros in the Catatumbo region and pledged support for crop substitution during their visit, which was welcomed by cocalero movements.
Edilson Álvarez, walks towards the Guayabero river. Chelo Camacho
The following month, Velásquez publicly clarified that the forced eradication had not stopped, but that there was a dialogue on the subject.
A couple of weeks later, on October 3, 2022, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, met with Petro in Bogotá.
In a joint press conference immediately after their closed-door meeting, Petro said forced eradication would continue, but only for crops not in the hands of small farmers.
Military operations to eradicate small farmers' coca crops have continued long after all the promises of the Petro Administration.
In November 2022, troops appeared for forced eradication in Lejanías, a village in the municipality of La Macarena, but now things have changed a lot.
The army meets real resistance.
The Guardia Campesina, a community-based unarmed civil protection force, has been organized throughout the Guayabero region.
In Lejanías, they quickly mobilized and surrounded the soldiers for days, forcing government officials to appear at the scene to avoid a major conflict and agree to a momentary suspension of the eradication.
Empty barrels in a "Cambullón" laboratory for the processing of coca base, in Nueva Colombia. Chelo Camacho
Meanwhile, in Nueva Colombia they do not trust.
Cockfights are organized in town, the women's committee coordinates activities, billiards is played, murals are painted, and Mexican music fills every corner.
However, they remain alert because they don't know if at any moment they will see the soldiers with their rifles coming in the distance.
Their way of life is still in danger.
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