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Colombia’s Coca Acreage for Cocaine Production at All-Time High

A police helicopter landing on a coca field in Tumaco, southern Colombia, in April. Colombia has more land producing the plant used to make cocaine now than ever in its history.Credit...Fernando Vergara/Associated Press

MEDELLÍN, Colombia — Colombia has more land producing the plant used to make cocaine than ever in its history, according to new figures from the United Nations’ crime watchdog.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in a report released this week, said the land used to grow coca reached 422,550 acres by the end of 2017 — an area larger than the footprint of Los Angeles.

That’s a 17 percent increase from the year before, and part of a longer trend: Each year since 2013, land used to produce coca leaf has gone up, on average, about 45 percent, the report said. The crops now are also a third more productive than they were in 2012, the agency said.

The figures caused “deep worry,” said Colombia’s defense minister, Guillermo Botero.

“It’s a curve that’s permanently going up and hasn’t reached its inflection point,” he told reporters.

The numbers, which mirror an assessment published in June by the United States, put increased pressure on President Iván Duque to crack down on coca growers — amid growing impatience from the American government, which is Colombia’s biggest ally in the war on drugs. Washington has provided more than $10.5 billion in aid since 2000.

The findings are also a blow to the perception that Colombia turned a corner on its twin battles against drugs and the armed groups that traffic them.

The coca production figures show the government never gained control over the vast territory occupied by the rebels with whom it signed a peace deal in 2016, experts say. And so long as coca production is rising, the criminal groups that manage the trade have easy financing to challenge the state.

The increase came even as significant progress was made combating drug traffickers in Colombia.

More than twenty-five years have passed since the kingpin Pablo Escobar was killed on a Medellín rooftop with the help of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. And in 2016, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the leftist rebel group, signed a peace deal with the government and said it was giving up drug trafficking.

Adam Isacson, who studies security trends at the Washington Office on Latin America, said that while Colombia had delivered blows to drug trafficking organizations, it had still failed to make the investment needed to wean the many thousands of poor Colombians who rely on the lucrative coca crop.

“Plan Colombia was too focused on short-term solutions,” he said. Among them: spraying coca crops from planes and capturing the heads of cartels and extraditing them.

Mr. Duque, a conservative who took office in August, is now under redoubled pressure to stem the coca explosion, particularly from the U.S.

President Trump will be visiting the country in December, during his first visit to Latin America as president. In August, Mr. Trump sent Nikki R. Haley, his United Nations ambassador, to meet with Mr. Duque during his inauguration. She arrived with the message that the administration’s principal concern was that Colombia curb drug production.

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Colombian officials are testing ways to eradicate the coca plant, including the use of tactical vehicles to spray herbicides.Credit...Fernando Vergara/Associated Press

Mr. Duque said that in the coming days, he would present a new plan to combat drugs that would “strengthen our air, sea and land interception capacity” and “dismantle completely the supply chain, both precursors and product.”

So far, he has provided no details. But many are closely watching whether Mr. Duque will increase the use of aerial fumigation to destroy coca crops, a technique that was suspended for a time by his predecessor, Juan Manuel Santos, over concerns that the chemical used, glyphosate, was a potential carcinogen. (Under United States pressure, Mr. Santos said he would allow spraying to resume shortly before he left office in August.)

Human rights groups and Colombian farmers have long criticized the fumigation, not just out of health concerns but also because they also obliterate many legal crops. That leaves subsistence farmers without food.

Many officials, particularly in the United States, note that the surge in coca leaf production coincided with Mr. Santos’ decision to stop spraying. They argue that it is a vital tool to curb coca production.

But Jeremy McDermott, co-director of InSight Crime, a foundation which monitors criminal activity, said that resuming spraying might lower production in the short term but ultimately backfire. He said it could drive farmers back into alliances with dissident rebel groups who have returned to trafficking drugs after the peace deal.

“If they want to recruit and solidify their territorial bases again, there will be no greater recruitment tool than the aerial fumigation of crops,” he said.

The rebel groups that have taken up arms again have been emboldened in recent days. On Thursday, dissident fighters killed three employees of the Canadian gold mining company, Continental Gold, the government said.

Mr. McDermott also said it would be hard to reduce coca production in Colombia because shrubs planted in previous years are now reaching their maturity.

“The yield per hectare is going through the roof,” he said.

Experts also say that a promised crop substitution program — part of the peace deal with the rebels — has produced unintended consequences.

As farmers who grew other crops saw subsidies for coca farmers take shape, many switched into the coca business simply to be bought out by the government. When the government failed to make good on the subsidies, many continued to plant.

“One of the reasons that this grew so much starting in 2013 was certainly the peace process,” said Hernando Zuleta, an economics professor at the University of the Andes, in Bogotá, the capital.

And as the state attempts to reclaim lands ceded by the rebels under the peace deal, it is often finding those challenging it over the crops aren’t drug trafficking organizations at all, but farmers’ unions and civil society groups.

At times the conflicts between the two have turned deadly.

This was the case last October, when farmers blocked the military from entering coca farms outside the southern city of Tumaco and officials opened fire, killing a number of civilians. And some say it could get worse if there is any attempt to speed up coca eradication in the countryside.

“There will be many violent incidents,” says Mr. Isacson, the analyst in Washington.

Susan Abad contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Land Used for Cocaine Production in Colombia Climbs to Record, U.N. Says. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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