BOGOTÁ, Colombia – It is the world’s largest producer of cocaine, the source of more than 90 percent of the drugs seized in the United States. Here is the largest office of the Drug Enforcement Administration abroad. And it has been a key partner of Washington for decades endless “war on drugs”.
Now Colombia is demanding an end to this war. Instead, she wants to lead a global experiment: the decriminalization of cocaine.
Two weeks after taking office The country’s first left-wing government proposes an end to “Prohibition” and the start of a state-regulated cocaine market. Through legislation and alliances with other left-wing governments in the region, officials in this South American nation hope to turn their country into a laboratory for drug decriminalization.
“It’s time for a new international convention that accepts that the war on drugs has failed,” President Gustavo Petro said in his inaugural address this month.
It is a radical shift in this historically conservative country that could upend its long-standing — and lucrative — anti-narcotics relationship with the United States. US Officials Past and Present Signal Concern; the The drug was responsible for an estimated 25,000 overdose deaths in the United States last year.
“The United States and the Biden administration are not proponents of decriminalization” said Jonathan Finer, the White House deputy national security adviser, who met with Petro here before his inauguration.
A former DEA official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his current status Employers did not authorize him to speak on the matter, saying he fears the move would limit the agency’s ability to cooperate with the Colombians in drug trafficking investigations.
“It would gradually destroy the cooperation,” he said. “It would be devastating, not just regionally but globally. Everyone would fight from the outside in.”
Billions of dollars have funded a strategy largely focused on destroying the cocaine trade at its source: the fields of rural Colombia. US training and intelligence have fueled Colombia’s decades-long military effort to eradicate coca, the staple crop for cocaine, and dismantle drug trafficking groups. And yet more than half a century after President Richard M. Nixon declared drugs “America’s number one public enemy” to have reached the Colombian trade record level. According to US data, coca cultivation has tripled in the last ten years.
Felipe Tascón, Petro’s drug czar, said Colombians wanted to capitalize on a rare moment when many key governments in the region – including cocaine-producing countries Colombia, Peru and Bolivia – are led by leftists.
In his first interview since his appointment, the economist said he wanted to meet with his colleagues in those countries to discuss it Decriminalization at regional level. Eventually, he hopes a unified regional bloc can renegotiate international drug conventions at the United Nations.
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Domestically, Petro’s government plans to support legislation to decriminalize cocaine and marijuana. It plans to end aerial spraying and manual eradication of coca, which critics say is unfairly targeting poor rural farmers. By regulating the sale of cocaine, Tascón argued, the government was wresting the market from armed groups and cartels.
“Drug dealers know their business depends on it being banned,” Tascón said. “If you regulate it like a public market … the high profits go away and the drug trade goes away.”
He doesn’t want to recast his job as “fighting drugs” or “fighting drugs” but as “drug politics.”
“The government’s program doesn’t talk about the drug problem,” he said. “It talks about the problems created by prohibiting drugs.”
Tascón has discussed his plans with his counterparts in Peru. Ricardo Soberón, head of Peru’s anti-drug agency DEVIDA, said it was too early to say whether Lima would support decriminalization, but he would welcome a regional debate on new approaches. Petro may find an ally in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ government began allowing farmers to legally grow coca in limited quantities in the 2000s.
As America’s number one ally against cocaine Colombia is an unlikely pioneer in decriminalization. But it is also the country that has suffered the most from the drug war. Tascón said it is the country where the need for a new strategy is perhaps most pressing.
That Punkt was driven home by the Colombian Truth Commission. The panel, set up under the country’s 2016 peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), recommended in June that the government move towards “tough legal regulation of drugs.”
In a report, the commission said the militarized approach to drug trafficking has intensified fighting during the half-century of conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of Colombians.
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The Washington-based National Security Archive, an independent nonprofit, provided the commission with declassified documents showing the US government knew its actions would result in years of bloodshed in Colombia.
“We see no way that the cultivation and trafficking of drugs in Colombia could be suppressed and maintained … without bloody, costly and prolonged coercive measures,” said a 1983 national intelligence estimate available from archives to the Washington Post was asked.
“One way to prevent this war is to rethink our relationship with coca and cocaine.” said Estefanía Ciro, who headed the Truth Commission’s drug researchers. “The important thing is not that the markets exist or that coca exists, but the violence that the cocaine market produces.”
Finer, Biden’s deputy national security adviser, told the Petro administration Approach to drug policy overlaps with the holistic strategy the Biden administration announced for Colombia last year. But not for decriminalization.
“Colombia is a sovereign state. It will make its own decisions,” he said. “This is a relationship that is bigger and more inclusive than just our collaboration and our drug-fighting collaboration.”
A delegation of US officials, including the assistant secretary of state for the Office of International Drug and Law Enforcement Affairs and the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, plans to meet with Petro administration officials here next week.
USAID Administrator Samantha Power, who attended Petro’s inauguration here, said US officials “heard clearly [his] Message.”
Jim Crotty, a former DEA deputy chief of staff, argued that a legal cocaine trade “won’t eliminate the illicit trade.”
“As we’ve seen in Colombia and elsewhere, there’s always someone to fill that vacuum,” Crotty said.
Colombians are currently allowed to carry small amounts of marijuana and cocaine. However, the proposed legislation aims to go much further and decriminalize and regulate their use.
Cocaine decriminalization faces an uphill battle in a divided Congress. It will be even more difficult to bring the debate onto the international stage.
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But it’s a discussion Latin America already has — about marijuana. In 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize the production and sale of recreational cannabis.
“We need to open the debate and break the taboo,” said Milton Romani, who served as Secretary-General of Uruguay’s National Medicines Agency. “It may be a long road, but I don’t think it’s impossible.”
Colombia has the “moral authority” to lead this effort, he said, “because so many people died for it.”
Mellington Cortés has seen this bloodshed firsthand.
In 2017, he was one of hundreds of coca farmers who gathered in Nariño department to protest the forced eradication of coca by security forces when police began shooting into the crowd. A shot hit him. Another killed his brother, one of seven protesters who died that day. The murders are still under investigation.
The 45-year-old continues to grow coca pays more than double the $130 a month he earned as a driver.
“It’s no secret to anyone that we grow coca to survive, to feed our families and to feed our children,” Cortés said. “There are no other resources here. We have been forgotten.”