Buildings in Nueva, a once flourishing town thanks to coca production, now partially abandoned in Colombia. — ©2024 The New York Times Company
FOR decades, one industry has sustained the small, remote Colombian village of Cano Cabra: cocaine.
Those who live in the community in the central part of the country rise early nearly every morning to pick coca leaf, scraping brittle branches, sometimes until their hands bleed. Later, they mix the leaves with gasoline and other chemicals to make chalky white bricks of coca paste.
But two years ago, the villagers said, something alarming happened: the drug traffickers who buy the coca paste and turn it into cocaine stopped showing up.
Suddenly, people who were already poor had no income. Food became scarce. An exodus to other parts of Colombia in search of jobs followed. The town of 200 people shrunk to 40.
The same pattern was repeated in communities across the country where coca is the only source of income.
Colombia, the global nexus of the cocaine industry, where Pablo Escobar became the world’s best known criminal, and which still produces more of the drug than any other nation, is facing tectonic shifts as a result of domestic and global forces that are reshaping the drug industry.
The changing dynamics have led to blocks of unsold coca paste piling up across Colombia.
The purchase of the paste in more than half of the country’s coca-growing regions has dropped precipitously or disappeared completely, spurring a humanitarian crisis in many remote, impoverished communities.
The drug market had never seen “such a dramatic downturn”, said Felipe Tascón, an economist who has studied the illicit drug economy and had directed a national government programme to help move coca farmers to legal crops.
The upending of the cocaine industry is, in part, an unintended consequence of a landmark peace deal eight years ago with the country’s largest armed group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, that ended one phase of a conflict that has lasted decades.
The leftist group financed its war largely through cocaine and relied on thousands of farmers to provide the bright green coca plant – the drug’s main ingredient.
But once the FARC exited the cocaine industry, it was replaced by smaller criminal groups pursuing a new economic model, said Leonardo Correa of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: buying large quantities of coca from a smaller number of farmers and limiting their operations to border regions where it is easier to move drugs out of the country.
That means towns like Cano Cabra, deep in the country’s interior, about 265km southeast of Bogota, the capital, have seen their sole business largely vanish.
“It’s been difficult,” said Yamile Hernandez, 42, a coca farmer and mother of two teenagers who has struggled to put food on the table. “I don’t know what will happen.”
At the same time, other countries have become important competitors and have contributed to changes in Colombia’s drug market. Ecuador has emerged as a top cocaine exporter, while cultivation of coca leaf has increased in Peru and Central America.
That has helped push global cocaine production higher than it has ever been. And while cocaine consumption has flattened in the United States, it is growing in Europe and Latin America and emerging in other regions, like Asia.
In Colombia, government policies, including a move away from eradicating coca plants, and technological advances in cultivation, have allowed coca production to expand despite decades of investment by the United States to try to dismantle the cocaine industry.
Annual production of the coca leaf and cocaine hit new highs in 2022, with the manufacturing of the drug rising 24% from the previous year, according to the most recent data available from the United Nations.
“We’re seeing production at levels that Pablo Escobar dreamt about,” said a US official who has worked for years on drug interdiction in Colombia and asked not to be identified because he was not authorised to speak on the record.
“You go to coca fields,” he added, “and it’s like standing in a cornfield in Iowa — you can’t see the end.”
New fertilisers have also helped make it easier to grow more coca, even as many Colombian armed groups contributing to the country’s continuing conflict are relying far less on drugs for income and turning to other illicit activities that do not draw as much scrutiny from law enforcement, like gold mining, logging and the smuggling of migrants, according to several analysts.
So while cocaine remains an enormous moneymaking enterprise for criminal networks in Colombia, the new economic model has brought suffering to many parts of the country.
While some experts say the transformation of the cocaine industry could lead coca plant growers to transition to legal ways of making a living, many worry that farmers could instead switch to other illicit activities.
Jefferson Parrado, 39, the president of the local council that presides over the region that includes Cano Cabra, said many might switch to raising cattle – one of the world’s biggest drivers of deforestation. Other residents said they might join armed groups out of economic desperation.
“Several regions have achieved economic development thanks to the coca and cocaine market,” said Diego Garcia-Devis, who manages the drug policy programme at the Open Society Foundations. “What income will replace coca income? Another illegal income? Mining, trafficking of humans, wildlife, timber? Extortion?”
In many remote areas of Colombia, it is not economically viable to sell other crops because of high transportation costs. By the time produce arrived at market, it would rot, residents said. For many Colombians, the cocaine industry has been their only option.
“It does harm to humanity, and we are aware of that,” Parrado said. “But for us, it means health, it means education, it means the sustenance of the families in the regions.” — ©2024 The New York Times Company
