Donald Trump has said it is time for Colombia to dump clouds of glyphosate on its coca fields again. Colombia may have to comply
A PLUME OF pink smoke wafts above the treetops, signalling where the Black Hawk helicopters should land. They circle down and, one at a time, rest their front wheels on the hillside. It is too steep to land properly, so they keep their rotors whirring while the passengers alight and then immediately lift off again.
President Iván Duque’s administration is trying hard to wipe out coca, as America insists it must. Last year it destroyed about 100,000 hectares of it—twice as much as the previous administration managed in 2017. However, cocaleros replanted slightly more. Coca was grown on 212,000 hectares of Colombia in 2019, 2% more than the previous year, according to estimates released by the White House on March 5th. And the new bushes were higher-yielding than the ones they replaced.
Colombia is roughly twice the size of France. Drug gangs encourage coca farmers to encroach on national parks, which are 11% of Colombian territory. Many indigenous reserves are full of coca—and police can only enter in consultation with native leaders. In remote areas with no good roads, farmers struggle to get alternative crops such as papayas to market. Coca leaves, by contrast, are light; and the buyers come knocking on your door.
In remote areas where the state is more or less absent, dozens of local leaders are still being murdered as other rebel-gangsters move in. Rapid, intensive forced eradication of coca makes matters worse. It alienates rural Colombians from the state, argues Ms Felbab-Brown, and so makes it harder to pacify the coca-growing areas. Often, the state destroys a farmer’s livelihood today and offers an alternative, such as a road to get papayas to market, at some point in the future.
Of the 4.5m Venezuelans who have left their country, Colombia has absorbed 1.8m. Its foreign-born population has risen 14-fold since 2013. It has welcomed the newcomers with open arms, treating their illnesses, educating their children and letting them work. Until this week, thousands of children who lived near the border commuted to classrooms in Colombia each day, since Venezuelan schools are atrocious. On the Colombian side, the state laid on buses for them.
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