While the price of basic pasta and coca leaf in Colombia has been on the ground for at least 18 months, the country’s fields continue to be flooded with crops. A paradoxical and unprecedented scenario, and an adequate framework to understand the impoverishment of hundreds of farmers overwhelmed by the accumulated oversupply. The phenomenon, in an illicit universe full of variables, has pushed foreign criminals to promote new crops in Central America or to install laboratories in Europe in search of stability. These are drug traffickers in Mexico or the United States interested in guaranteeing the solidity of their business and intensifying alternative trafficking routes.
The signs point towards a gradual and unusual transformation of drug trafficking. According to interviews carried out on the ground by multiple researchers, international “buyers” have mobilized their attention towards Belize, Honduras or Guatemala. But new circuits are also being forged in Ecuador and Venezuela. And Ana María Rueda, a researcher at the Ideas for Peace Foundation, says that cocaine sales in Peru, which has been a traditional enclave, are skyrocketing.
The task of putting the pieces together to better understand the situation is not easy for any of the six experts consulted. Rueda laments that today the only ones with a clear map of the situation are probably the Colombian and American intelligence agencies. And, protected by the nature of their job, neither of the two agencies has been friendly to providing reports or information.
A massive leak of emails from the Prosecutor’s Office published by a media consortium reinforces the idea that the metamorphosis of the business is such that in recent years “dozens of new processing laboratories” have been found in Europe. According to this journalistic investigation, Colombian criminals have participated by “exporting their expertise.” In Mexico alone, 171 coca leaf plantations have been destroyed between 2020 and 2023. Rueda adds that in Honduras the existence of about 1,000 planted hectares has been confirmed, just a fraction of the 230,000 in Colombia, but a significant increase in the small Central American country.
The gap left since 2016 in Colombia by the defunct Marxist guerrilla FARC, which for years controlled the panorama, has left a dispersion of actors vying for predominance in the south and southwest of the country. It is known that the Gulf Clan monopolizes an important part of the business in the north of the country. “In Cauca and Putumayo, historically coca-growing areas, there are dissidents and other groups that continue to benefit from the business. Today the debate revolves around how to articulate security and drug policy within the negotiations between the Government and these armed groups,” explains Catalina Niño, researcher at the German-Colombian think tank Fescol.
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He refers to the policy baptized by the ruling party as “total peace.” “There have also been other factions in the south of the country,” continues Niño, “that have taken advantage of the situation to migrate to different illicit activities such as illegal coal mining in the conflictive Bajo Cauca.” This atomization of the armed groups has reduced their negotiating capacity against foreign criminals who manage the downstream links, such as the Mexican cartels that have a strong presence in the port of Buenaventura, in the Pacific: “There are analyzes that suggest that the geographical diversification of the business, crops and processing, has reduced the income of Colombian illegal groups. “In the same way, there are indications that the ELN, for example, has resumed kidnappings to compensate for the gaps left by the coca crisis.”
The area planted with coca in Colombia increased by 13% between 2021 and 2022, according to United Nations figures. 65% of the 230,000 hectares planted are concentrated in the departments of Nariño and Putumayo, on the border with Ecuador, and Norte de Santander, on the border with Venezuela. “International buyers have gradually gained prominence,” says Elizabeth Dickinson, of the International Crisis Group, “increasingly, international traffickers have a greater impact on what happens in Colombian territory.”
In the midst of these international movements, the collective impoverishment of the coca-growing peasantry is worrying and, for Catalina Niño, quite marginalized from the political debate. “The coca-growing territories have been in crisis since 2022,” highlights Dejusticia researcher Luis Felipe Cruz, “In Guaviare, Putumayo, Caquetá or the south of Meta, farmers no longer know who to sell the coca leaf to because the demobilization of “The FARC left them without the bridge that linked them to buyers and even determined what quantities could be traded.”
In the absence of clear ideas from the Government, Niño regrets that there is no organization that brings together coca-growing families and has sufficient political muscle to make their precarious situation more visible: “For there to be peace in this country, we have to pay much more attention to the peasant issue, which lately has receded even in the academic and activist community, which was where issues such as crop substitution were generally discussed.” Katherin Galindo Ortíz, researcher at Colombia Risk Analysis, remembers that the peasantry bears the brunt of the business: “They are the least beneficiaries of this illegal chain. “They are the most persecuted by the authorities, those who collect the least and those who risk the most.”
Rueda suggests that many have even migrated to the cities to earn a living as motorcycle taxi drivers or other jobs: “There is not much to do on the farms. The demotivation is total. Something curious happens in Putumayo and that is that business is reactivated at times. It seems as if an armed group sent a sudden message and people take out their saved packages of pasta and sell them.” Dickinson adds that in some areas of the Caribbean coast, such as the south of Córdoba or Bolívar, the Clan del Golfo has managed to establish a base paste market that is to a certain extent stable.
But nothing works with the fluidity of yesteryear: “Today the market demands a product of the highest quality. And Colombia is no longer the first option for armed groups. Now they have a choice and it is very complex for farmers to meet the requirements that the cartels want because the price of gasoline is very high and chemical inputs since the war in Ukraine are very expensive,” concludes Rueda.
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