Q24N (Infobae) The United States affirmed that it is “very concerned” about the “high levels” of coca cultivation and cocaine production in Colombia, and assured that it will continue to cooperate with the South American country to combat drug trafficking.
This was expressed by a State Department spokesman consulted by the EFE news agency about the United Nations report that revealed on Thursday that coca crops in Colombia grew by 43% in 2021.
“The United States remains very concerned about the high levels of coca cultivation and cocaine production in Colombia. We will continue to cooperate closely with Colombia to respond to the great threat posed by drug trafficking,” said the source.
The spokesman recalled that the plan of Washington and Bogotá is to “implement a comprehensive approach” in drug policy that addresses the reduction of drug production and demand, the protection of the environment, and development and justice for the Colombian countryside.
Coca crops in Colombia grew by 43% in 2021, the year in which 204,000 hectares were registered, while in 2020 that figure was 143,000 hectares, according to the annual report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) presented on Thursday.
The report indicates that coca crops in Colombia continue to be located in “the same territories with conditions of vulnerability” and that 62% of the total are concentrated in three departments: Nariño (border with Ecuador), Norte de Santander (border with Venezuela) and Putumayo (border with Peru and Ecuador).
During his visit to Colombia two weeks ago, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured that his country firmly supports the anti-drug policy proposed by the new Colombian president, the leftist Gustavo Petro.
In a harsh speech at the UN General Assembly, Petro lashed out at Washington’s decades-long military war on drugs that he said has damaged the Colombian jungle. The concern of the UN
Last Thursday, the report of the United Nations Integrated Illicit Crop Monitoring System was presented, detailing worrying figures on cocaine production in Colombia, which, in fact, reached an all-time high and set off alarms, not only at the UN but also in the Colombian Government.
According to the document, in 2021 the area planted with coca plants grew by 43% and the potential for cocaine production increased by 14%, reflecting figures never seen before on illicit crops in the country. Under this scenario, in Colombia, there are no longer 143,000 hectares but 204,000. In addition, it indicates that the potential production of fresh coca leaf can exceed one million tons.
In this sense, cocaine seizures increased: from 505,683 kilos in 2020, to 669,340 in 2021 and 86.5% of the crops have been in the same places for 10 years. On the other hand, this report draws attention, which was published four months later due to the change of director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime —UNODC— for the Southern Cone and the Andean Region, and also due to the transition of government from August 7 this year.
As short-term factors —according to the document— associated with the dynamics of coca cultivation from 2020 to 2021 are the positioning of new criminal groups, the reduction of intervention and the deterioration of socioeconomic conditions due to the pandemic. Now, regarding the concentration of crops, these are Nariño, Norte de Santander and Putumayo, departments that house 62% of the total.
CALI, Colombia—Pablo Escobar once said that cocaine trafficking “might be illegal at the moment but in the long run, in the future, it will tend to be legalized.”
The future predicted by the self-styled King of Coke might now be here. An explosive piece of legislation has been introduced into the Colombian Senate that would make Escobar’s words prophetic, sanctioning cocaine for both local consumption and international research.
Colombia remains the world’s top producer of cocaine, exporting about 1,700 tons per year—around 90 percent of the world’s supply. The Andean nation is also a hotbed of armed groups that traffic in the marching powder. The new measure is aimed at curbing violence through legalization—by reducing the coffers of cartels and other criminal organizations—as well as saving the state money and advancing discoveries for medical applications of the drug.
The plan would have huge ramifications for the U.S.-backed drug war in Latin America. It would also cause a flashpoint with the international cartels, guerrillas, paramilitaries, and other crime groups that use cocaine trafficking to fund their operations. Some insiders expect them to use violence to try and cling to their share of the market, others say they could be rendered toothless and collapse all together.
‘All the Violence Would Disappear’
If passed the bill would immediately decriminalize the growing of coca leaves, which are the main ingredient in cocaine. Colombia is currently home to approximately 495,000 acres of coca crop, which constitutes the primary source of income for hundreds of thousands of rural families.
The leaves have been used for centuries as traditional medicine by indigenous peoples. In its natural state, coca can act as a topical anaesthetic or mild coffee-like stimulant when chewed or taken as a tea.
Under the bill, “indigenous families that cultivate coca leaves would stop being persecuted by the armed forces and police,” Senator Iván Marulanda, who authored the proposal, told The Daily Beast. Marulanda envisions an expansion of artisanal products such as coca-based foods, beverages and even cosmetics that could be legally produced and sold to alleviate poverty in indigenous communities.
“They would become part of the institution, they would work and live in peace under the protection of the state,” he said.
Similar moves aimed at ending eradication efforts and the persecution of indigenous farmers have proven successful in Peru and Bolivia. But the Colombian plan would break new ground in that it would actually put the government in charge of purchasing the nation’s entire harvest of coca leaves—thus eliminating cartels and other crime groups from the equation.
“The state would buy all the coca leaf produced at market prices,” Marulanda said. “Colombia would stop being an exporter of cocaine and the business that finances all the violence in this country would disappear.”
In addition to buying the coca leaves, the state would also oversee and regulate production of cocaine for medicinal and recreational use. Pharmacies would dispense the cocaine to qualified users—in fact, an amendment to the Colombian constitution already allows citizens to possess up to a gram. And strict licensing would ensure it was not diluted with harmful substances, as is often the case today.
The policy would cut organized crime off from the coca leaf, and it would cut consumers off from organized crime, according to Marulanda, who estimates there are about 250,000 users in the country. At the same time, treatment programs for addicts or users of crack cocaine would also be made more widely available.
To prevent export, excess coca leaves or paste could simply be destroyed under international supervision. Meanwhile, substitution programs for legal crops would help rural farmers transition away from growing coca.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America [WOLA], said legalization was “a net gain for a country like Colombia, which has a lot of organized crime but a relatively small addict population.”
“Drugs are artificially expensive—they’re easy and relatively cheap to make, but their illegality creates scarcity. Legalization and regulation would eliminate the price markup that scarcity creates. That would mean a lot less money for criminal and armed groups,” Isacson said.
Marulanda also emphasized the steep cost of criminalization: “We have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of human lives, yet we no longer exercise sovereignty over vast territories of the country that are dominated by the armies of organized crime. Politics, justice, and the public trust are corrupted by drug mafias and laundered money.”
Legalization would also pave the way for medical research programs aimed at exploring cocaine’s special analgesic properties. The drug can be used to narrow small blood vessels, and so is sometimes used to limit bleeding in delicate sinus procedures and other facial surgeries.
The U.S. currently imports its medicinal cocaine from Peru, but under Marulanda’s plan Colombia could also supply researchers in North America and Europe.
A 2016 scientific paper stated that “there is no direct replacement for [cocaine’s] useful unique characteristics.”
Blowback
Marulanda’s proposition appears to make fiscal sense. For example, the Colombian government currently spends about $1 billion a year on coca eradication efforts. But buying the harvest would run to just $680 million.
The strategy would also lessen deforestation, because farmers wouldn’t have to resort to slash-and-burn tactics to create new cultivation sites after their coca plots were razed by force.
And legalization would reduce overcrowding in prisons.
“At least 80,000 people a year are incarcerated for growing, small-scale dealing, and consumption. They’re the most vulnerable people in the entire chain of drug trafficking,” said Senator Feliciano Valencia, a member of the indigenous Nasa community.
“The impacts that this legalization process would have on indigenous peoples, peasants, Afro-Colombians is quite profound,” said Valencia, who is part of a multi-party coalition of more than 30 members of congress who back the bill.
But of course the bill does have its detractors, including some coca growers who fear the legislation would result in multinational pharmaceutical corporations moving in to take over production.
“We’ve already seen this with medical marijuana production here in Colombia,” said William Orozco, a union leader for the Campesino [Peasant] Cultivators of Coca, Poppies, and Marijuna. “Only farmers with corporate contracts can move their product legally because of the restrictions and testing. So it’s almost impossible for most of us to get contracts due to the cost of the paperwork.”
As a result, Orozco and other small farmers worry they would still have to sell their coca on the black market.
“Even after legalization we will continue to suffer the rigors of war, of abandonment by the state, and with more deplorable conditions. We would go from small producers to simply begging for jobs from the centralized producers,” Orozco said.
A congressman opposed to the bill, Jaime Vallejo, of the right-leaning Center Democratic party, warned that: “The regularization of this crop and its derivatives in an isolated way and without achieving consensus with consuming countries, would be the biggest error committed in the history of Colombia in relation to the fight against drugs.”
Vallejo told The Daily Beast in an email that passage of the bill in question could result in serious economic, political, and social consequences—including alienating the U.S., Colombia’s top trading partner.
“Without a doubt, it could lead to this country becoming a narco-state,” Vallejo said. Although some might argue that Colombia already verges on being a narco-state, Vallejo said the new bill could worsen conditions to the point where “there would be a risk that various countries break commercial and political relations with Colombia.”
Dr. Hector Zuleta, a security analyst at the University of the Andes, also expressed concern about Colombia becoming a “pariah nation if it acts unilaterally on this issue.” Passing the current legislation would be akin, he said, to “severing diplomatic ties to the U.S.”
However, Zuleta added that if a bilateral agreement were in place the results could be “fabulous,” particularly in Mexico, where cartel warfare over cocaine imports is surging.
“If cocaine were legalized in Colombia, Mexico and in the United States, violence would drop off,” Zuleta said. “But the fundamental problem is that it is totally unfeasible to think that the U.S. accepts the legalization of cocaine.”
Legalization as a ‘Sovereign Right’
Colombia remains one of Washington’s strongest allies in the hemisphere, and the U.S. has spent billions of dollars in counter-narcotics operations, while also pressuring Bogota to increase eradication efforts by any means necessary. So officials in D.C. are unlikely to look favorably on the bill now before the Colombian senate.
“The U.S. government would be likely to come down hard on Colombia if it sought to legalize cocaine without coordinating with the rest of the world,” said Isacson. “Even a Biden administration would likely treat Colombia like a rogue state deliberately flooding an illegal market.”
Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of international operations, said there would be swift pressure to push back against such a move and that, “potential economic sanctions could possibly come into play to prevent it.”
Vigil also said there was an underlying question of values at issue.
“It is very difficult morally and ethical to reconcile the legalization of a drug that has killed millions of people,” he said, citing the sharp rise in cocaine overdose deaths recently in the U.S.
But Vigil also accused the U.S. of sending mixed messages, citing both the Trump administration’s demand for toxic aerial spraying in Colombia—using the known carcinogen glyphosate—even as the trend toward legalizing certain drugs grown Stateside.
“The U.S. has to be careful about how they tread on the snake of legalization and then with great hypocrisy bully other countries to combat drug production and distribution,” Vigil said. “The question many nations are asking themselves is: Why are we losing lives and spending tens of millions of dollars each year on prohibition, and yet the biggest consumer market in the world is legalizing drugs?”
Senator Marulanda concurred with Vigil, calling cocaine regulation “a sovereign right of Colombia, just as 35 or more states in the U.S. legalized marijuana and Oregon decriminalized cocaine without Colombia or any country saying anything.”
Marulanda added: “The international conventions that criminalized psychoactive substances 60 years ago are collapsing.”
‘The Decades-Old Drug War Is Broken’
Peru has already decriminalized cocaine, while Bolivia has fully legalized coca. Uruguay has made marijuana legal, and Mexico appears poised to do the same. Combining all of that with recent developments in Colombia, could lead to a sea change in the perception toward narcotics in Latin America?
“The decades-old Drug War is broken. It has pretty much failed as policy but no agreed-upon replacement policy presently exists in the U.S.,” said Dr. Robert Bunker, research director at the security consulting firm Futures.
“In many Latin American countries, the current policy initiatives are to decriminalize or even legalize some or all illicit narcotics. Over time this will create more inconsistencies with U.S. drug war policies,” Bunker said.
However, Bunker also cautioned that the cartels and other trafficking groups won’t be easily vanquished, even if their revenue streams are reduced by state intervention. “If narcotics trafficking becomes legalized and criminals are eventually pushed out of it then those criminals will be forced to look for other illicit business opportunities. This may cause more crime of other types to take place or new forms of criminal enterprises to emerge,” Bunker said.
Former DEA agent Vigil agreed: “The cartels, paramilitaries,and [narco-guerrillas] will definitely not take a passive stance. They will engage security forces and at the end of a gun barrel force and the farmers to continue cultivating coca for illicit purposes. The government will have a difficult time dealing with legalization.”
Nevertheless, WOLA defense chief Isacson said that, “Within Latin America—like in many U.S. states—there is exhaustion with the punitive model… I think that will spread, especially in more urban areas.”
Of that punitive model Senator Marulanda said: “The failure is obvious.”
“We have fought the war against drugs for 40 years, and we lost this war. To continue on such a path would merely be foolish,” Marulanda said. “To seek new paths is now the only way for us to discover a better future.”
For information about the legalization of marijuana and its use in Colombia see:
Pablo Escobar’s former right-hand man has been deported from a US prison to Germany. The Colombian-German national revolutionized cocaine smuggling — and his life is more unbelievable than the most gripping telenovela.
(QREPORTS) Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll: even “Crazy Charlie’s” last day of freedom was like a movie. It was 1987. Carlos Lehder Rivas was at a Medellin Cartel party, snorting cocaine and amusing himself in the company of a prostitute when one of Pablo Escobar’s hitmen had the temerity to knock on the door.
Carlos Lehder “Crazy Charlie”, Pablo Escobar’s drug trafficking partner
Lehder didn’t think twice. He shot the man, who also happened to be one of the woman’s lovers. Gunshots, screams and a dead body in the middle of a fiesta with blaring salsa music; the Netflix series Narcos is a harmless joke when compared to the reality in Colombia at the time.
Lehder apologized to Escobar, the body was disposed of and, of course, the party went on. But while Lehder, a Colombian-German national, thought the party would never end, drug lord Escobar had come to a different conclusion that night.
In the end, there is nothing more dangerous than a crazy dealer whose escapades threaten to bring down the entire operation. The day after the party, Escobar sent Lehder to a secret hiding place, promising him he would be safe there — then he ratted him out to US authorities.
Lehder was the right-hand man of Pablo Escobar (above)
Pablo Escobar drops his right-hand man
Escobar penned an open letter vehemently denying any involvement in his business partner’s arrest. Still, Lehder’s stock had fallen dramatically with his boss. What is more surprising is that Escobar didn’t simply have him quietly knocked off — as he had so many others.
For most “narcotraficantes” — or “drug traffickers” — life generally holds one of two possible fates: death, like Escobar’s at the hands of US and Colombian special agents during a raid in Medellin in 1993; or prison in the US, like Carlos Lehder. At the time, Lehder’s 1988 trial was the biggest court case against a foreign drug smuggler in US history.
The court sentenced Lehder to life in prison without parole. For good measure, it added another 134 years for allegedly flooding US streets with 2,000 kilos (4,409 pounds) of cocaine. As serious as the charges against him were, prosecutors often spoke of his skills with admiration, comparing his smuggling system to Henry Ford’s automated assembly line.
Tens of thousands of Colombians died in the U.S.-backed war on drugs. But after an official about-face on marijuana, Colombia is looking to exchange gun-toting traffickers for corporate backers in a bid to become the Saudi Arabia of legal pot.
The new industry is budding here on the outskirts of Medellin, where Pablo Escobar moved marijuana in the 1970s before becoming the “King of Cocaine.” Fifteen years after his death in a last stand with the law, cannabis plants are blooming in the emerald hills beyond the city, this time with the government’s blessing.
Test plants thrive at the new cannabis cultivation and processing center of the Colombian subsidiary of Canada-based PharmaCielo, which is set to launch commercial sales and exports in the coming months, in Rionegro, Colombia. (Anthony Faiola/The Washington Post)
“You are looking at history,” beamed Camilo Ospina, the lab-coat-wearing chief innovation officer for PharmaCielo Colombia Holdings, gesturing like a showman before a sprawling greenhouse of pungent cannabis plants. His company is one of a fast-rising number of corporations seeking to leverage the “made in Colombia” label in a new age of legalization.
“Our advantage is that the Colombian brand already has a mystique,” he said. “We want to intensify that, so that the Colombian cannabis you already know — the Punto Rojo, the Colombian Gold — is the cannabis you want to buy.”
Colombia is still a hotbed of illegal drugs: A report last year from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency showed Colombia as the source of 92 percent of cocaine seized on U.S. soil. And after 18 years and $10 billion spent on Plan Colombia, the U.S.-funded effort to counter cartels and coca farmers, cocaine production here is at all-time highs.
Yet when it comes to marijuana, Colombia is taking a new tack: If you can’t beat ’em, regulate ’em.
Two years ago, the country passed a landmark law legalizing medical marijuana for both domestic use and export, laying the groundwork for the new industry. The government started handing out the first licenses to grow, process and export medicinal cannabis in September and has approved 33 companies so far. Legal growers such as Canadian-owned PharmaCielo are now raising test crops for upcoming product lines, with the first commercial sales and exports slated for the coming weeks and months.
Becoming the world’s supplier of legal cannabis won’t be easy. The biggest potential market, the United States, remains closed off, with even states that have legalized use banning cannabis imports. Yet an increasing number of other countries, including Germany, Peru, Italy and Croatia, are seen as fast-developing export markets for medical marijuana.
Canada and the Netherlands, on the cutting edge of the legal pot business, have started to meet that demand, with several companies already exporting domestically cultivated crops.
But Colombia, officials here say, is the logical place for the industry’s future.
With a climate well suited to the surprisingly fragile cannabis plant, the country supplied most of the illicit marijuana consumed in the United States during the 1970s and ’80s — a dubious crown it later lost to Mexico. As more countries approve some form of legalization, Colombia is bent on recapturing its global dominance, albeit through export licenses and customs procedures instead of clandestine shipments in the night.
It amounts to a sea change in thinking. Rather than part of the problem, marijuana is being viewed as one solution to Colombia’s struggle against illicit narcotics — particularly coca leaf, the building block of cocaine. Perhaps it is time, authorities say, for coca farmers to start seeing legal marijuana as a potentially lucrative substitute crop.
“The message is, go the legal route with marijuana,” said Andrés López Velasco, head of Colombia’s National Narcotics Fund, the government agency overseeing legal cannabis. “You can keep your know-how, your knowledge of how to cultivate. But do it legally.”
Not everyone is convinced.
Some local authorities in the regions where companies are poised to start growing commercial marijuana remain cautious. They fear that cultivation of stronger strains popular with recreational users, which are also permitted under the rules issued in September, may undermine the image of the budding pot industry as purely pharmaceutical.
Other critics insist the government is sending a negative signal to children, while rekindling the image of Colombia as the world’s factory for controlled substances.
“By saying it can be commercially grown and has a medicinal use, we are telling our children not only that marijuana is not bad but that it’s actually good for your health,” said Rafael Nieto, a former vice justice minister and conservative politician. “I’m sorry, I just don’t believe that.”
Nevertheless, here in the foothills of the Andes, Colombia is seeding the future of a new — or rather, old — industry.
In 1986, Colombia decriminalized small-scale growth for personal use, allowing the cultivation of up to 20 plants. President Juan Manuel Santos pressed for medicinal legalization on a commercial scale as early as 2012 and hailed the 2016 legislation as a major leap of progress.
The nascent industry here still faces hurdles.
Some form of medical marijuana is now legal in more than a dozen nations — with recreational legalization close in Canada, and a reality in Uruguay and U.S. states including California. But it remains illegal in most places.
“Convincing foreign governments to allow imports” will probably be the biggest challenge for growers, said Bethany Gomez, research director for Chicago-based Brightfield Group, a market research firm.
Still, the global trade in legal pot is expanding, with some experts predicting that the market could be worth $31.6 billion by 2021.
At least some local farmers, especially indigenous groups that have long dallied in small-scale marijuana farming at the behest of drug traffickers, are seizing the chance to go legit.
“This is our chance to be part of a legal system,” said Ariel Huetio, a community organizer who represents indigenous farmers in the western state of Cauca. They’ve struck a deal to produce and supply cannabis to FCM Global, a Medellin-based company that has set up a production facility 27 miles southeast of the city. “This is our chance to say no to the wrong people and yes to the right ones.”
A Canadian company, Khiron Life Sciences, expects its first harvests in Colombia later this year. Its plan: Sell the cannabis through branded clinics in Colombia, then export the concept across Latin America and beyond, becoming a sort of farm-to-table marijuana dispensary.
“We don’t see ourselves as drug dealers,” said Alvaro Torres, Khiron’s chief executive. “We’re a pharmaceutical company.”
To keep things on the up and up, the new regulations for commercial marijuana here strictly limit access to legal farms and impose measures — including genetic testing — to prevent illegally grown cannabis from filtering into the legal market.
TSome companies, such as FCM Global, have gone a step further: opting to grow only weaker cannabis strains while refraining from the stronger ones popular with recreational users.
“I lived through the Escobar years. I lost friends during those years. And when I see the TV shows that glorify that guy, it makes me sick,” said Carlos Velasquez, FCM Global’s chief executive. “What we’re doing with medical marijuana is totally different. We want no part of that past, any of it.”
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