» Cocaine

Cocaine

April 12, 2024 — 0

Ecuador Didn’t Suddenly Become a Cocaine Transshipment Corridor

This narrative to explain Ecuador’s sharp escalation of organized-crime violence—repeated by a BBC report this week is… kind of correct, sort of?

Between 2020 and 2021 alone, cocaine production shot up by nearly a third and international drug cartels began looking for new routes through which to smuggle the cocaine produced in Colombia and Peru.

Ecuador, which is sandwiched between Peru and Colombia and whose authorities lacked experience in fighting trafficking, was seen as the perfect option.

I don’t mean to single out the BBC: you see this “cocaine surged, then homicide rates multiplied” idea repeated a lot. There’s something to it. But it misses a lot.

Cocaine seizures (from the UNODC World Drug Report) point to trends. That data, for Ecuador, does show a big jump in the amount of cocaine transiting the country from 2020 to 2021.

Tons of Cocaine Seized by Ecuadorian Forces

1990 1.25
1991 1.16
1992 3.89
1993 1.2
1994 1.79
1995 4.28
1996 9.53
1997 3.7
1998 3.85
1999 10.16
2000 3.31
2001 12.24
2002 11.21
2003 6.85
2004 4.78
2005 43.36
2006 34.25
2007 32.97
2008 29.07
2009 66.18
2010 15.47
2011 21.34
2012 31.98
2013 48.91
2014 53.49
2015 65.58
2016 97.78
2017 83.57
2018 79.4
2019 33.78
2020 92.16
2021 176.66
2022 (through October 31) 154
2023 (through October 6) 155

However, the numbers also show that there was already a lot of cocaine flowing through Ecuador during the 2010s, when the country was regarded to be among the least violent in the Americas.

The correlation between narcotrafficking and violence exists, but its strength often gets overestimated. A larger part of the story seems to have to do with the structure of organized crime in Ecuador.

Peaceful arrangements among criminal groups, which involved corrupt people high up in government (as prosecutors are uncovering), fell apart sometime around the turn of this decade. The river of cocaine that was already flowing through Ecuador fell into bitter dispute as past equilibria shattered.

The demobilization of Colombia’s FARC probably contributed to that. An early indicator of trouble was an extreme wave of prison violence between fast-growing gangs in the late 2010s and early 2020s, signaling a big shake-out among the country’s organized crime groups. There may have been a perfect storm of factors within the criminal underworlds of Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador, and perhaps elsewhere.

No matter what, the explanation rests on more than just a jump in the flow of cocaine. That flow was already quite robust, and quite tolerated by corrupt people in Ecuador’s security forces, judiciary, and government institutions.

Charts: Drug Seizures at the U.S.-Mexico Border

We now have 11 months of data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) about how much illicit drugs the agency seized at the U.S.-Mexico border during the 2023 fiscal year so far (from October 2022 to August 2023). That’s enough to compare this year’s drug seizures with previous years’.

With one exception—fentanyl—the data show a drop or stagnation in the amount of drugs being detected crossing the border.

Drugs manufactured from plants are turning up less often. A few years ago, Americans addicted to prescription opioids were turning to heroin made in Mexico (from the poppy plant), and heroin seizures were way up. That is no longer true: fentanyl competes with heroin, and it’s cheaper and easier to make. Heroin seizures have fallen sharply.

Data table

As is the case with all drugs except marijuana, 90 percent of this year’s border heroin seizures have taken place at ports of entry (official border crossings), where CBP’s Office of Field Operations operates—not the areas in between the ports where Border Patrol operates. 60 percent of all border-wide heroin seizures happened at California ports of entry (CBP’s San Diego Field Office).

Cocaine seizures are flat, despite evidence of increased production in the Andes (from the coca plant). 81 percent has been seized at ports of entry this year. 47 percent of all border-wide heroin seizures happened at California ports of entry (CBP’s San Diego Field Office), and another 23 percent at south Texas ports of entry (Laredo Field Office).

Data table

Marijuana seizures have been declining for a while. With so many U.S. states now allowing some form of legal, regulated sale of cannabis, there’s far less reason to take the risk of importing it from Mexico.

Data table

Marijuana is the only drug that mostly gets seized between the ports of entry. Only 25 percent was seized at ports of entry in fiscal 2023. Most marijuana gets seized in Texas (in 2023 so far, Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector 31 percent, Border Patrol’s Big Bend Sector 22 percent, CBP’s Laredo Field Office 19 percent, and Border Patrol’s Laredo Sector 12 percent).

I haven’t done the research to understand why, but seizures of a major synthetic (not plant-based) drug, methamphetamine, have also fallen. 88 percent of meth got seized at ports of entry this year. Of all border-wide 2023 seizures, 63 percent happened at California ports of entry (CBP’s San Diego Field Office).

Data table

The one drug that’s being seized in far greater amounts is fentanyl. CBP seized 106 percent more of the highly potent, highly compact synthetic opioid in the first 11 months of fiscal 2023 than it did in the same period of fiscal 2022. (That’s measured in the weight of pills or other form of seized doses, not the weight of pure fentanyl.)

Data table

89 percent of fentanyl seizures took place at ports of entry during the first 11 months of fiscal 2023. The ports in California (San Diego, blue) and Arizona (Tucson, green) have accounted for 87 percent of all 2023 fentanyl seizures border-wide.

Data table

September 5, 2023 — 0

At VOA Spanish: “Política antidrogas de EEUU y el impacto de la coca en Colombia”

My thanks to Gonzalo Abarca and Voice of America’s Foro Interamericano program for inviting me to participate as a panelist on September 1. We talked about the status of counter-narcotics efforts in light of my recent mini-report on the collapse of coca markets in Colombia.

November 22, 2022 — 0

Cocaine seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border remained flat during fiscal 2022

Border-zone cocaine seizures were up just 2 percent from 2018 to 2022. This is surprising, since U.S. estimates point to a 26 percent increase in Andean cocaine production from 2018 to 2021. Additional cocaine production appears to be going to other consuming countries more than to the United States.

June 29, 2022 — 0

Supply and demand

Here’s what it looks like when you chart out Table 8.3 in the just-released 2022 UNODC World Drug Report. This is the average price of a gram of cocaine sold on U.S. streets over the 31 years between 1990 and 2020, in 2020 inflation-adjusted dollars, adjusted for purity.

Two things stand out:

If the purpose of “supply side” drug policy is to make cocaine scarcer, it has largely failed to do so. The only moment when cocaine prices were a bit higher than usual—indicating some relative scarcity—was the late 2000s and early-to-mid 2010s. That was a time when aerial fumigation was declining in Colombia, and manual eradication and territorial governance efforts were increasing.
The White House’s last update on Andean cocaine showed the region’s total potential production of the drug increasing from 1,521 tons in 2016 to 2,132 tons in 2020. That’s a 40% potential supply increase. But this chart shows almost no decrease in price over those four years, just $6, or 3 percent. That probably tells us that the Andes’ big increase in coca and cocaine production is going to other countries’ drug markets, not to the United States, where there’s some balance between supply and demand.

October 1, 2018 — 0

The past week in Colombia’s peace process

(Week of September 16-22)

UNODC Publishes Its 2017 Coca Cultivation Estimate

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime published an executive summary of its 2017 estimate of coca cultivation and cocaine production in Colombia. The UN agency has usually produced this document, in complete form, in June or July of each year. Among the latest report’s most notable findings:

Coca cultivation increased by 17 percent in Colombia between 2016 and 2017, growing from 146,000 to 171,000 hectares. (A hectare is about two and a half acres.) In June, the U.S. government publicized its own estimate for 2017, finding an 11 percent increase to 209,000 hectares. According to Defense Minister Guillermo Botero, the UN figure is “the official statistic that the Colombian government works with.”
64% of the increase was concentrated in four departments: Antioquia, Putumayo, Norte de Santander and Cauca. Nearly all coca is grown in municipalities where coca was grown a decade ago.
The department with the most coca is still Nariño, as has been the case every year since 2006. Nariño makes up 27% of all Colombian coca cultivation, but the crop increased by only 7% there in 2017.
Tumaco, a giant municipality (county) in southwestern Nariño, remains the number-one coca-growing municipality in the country. However, coca cultivation declined by 16% in Tumaco last year.
The department of Guaviare saw the largest decrease, shrinking 28% from 6,800 to 4,900 hectares. Guaviare, along with Tumaco, has been a main focus of crop-substitution efforts within the framework of the peace accord. In Meta, another department that saw a lot of crop substitution, coca increased 2%.
The areas where the Colombian government has managed to get crop-substitution programs up and running comprise 14% of coca-growing territories. But in those territories, cultivation fell 11% in 2017.
33% of coca crops were detected in “isolated areas, 10 km away from any populated center.”
34% of coca crops were detected in areas that were covered by forests in 2014.
Probably due to increased supply, prices crashed in 2017. Coca leaf prices fell 28%; cocaine paste fell 14%, and cocaine fell 11% inside Colombia. This isn’t entirely supply and demand: local circumstances, like changes in armed-group control, may be more important factors in some areas.
Colombia’s cocaine exports were worth about US$2.7 billion in 2017. Colombia’s coffee exports totaled about US$2.5 billion. Only oil and coal produced more export revenue.
All cocaine base produced in the country was worth US$1.315 billion. All coca leaf was worth US$371 million.
In the ten municipalities (counties) with the most coca crops, the coca leaf market adds up to US$302 million. These counties’ combined municipal budgets were US$196 million.
5% of coca was planted within national parks, and another 27% within 20 kilometers of a national park.
10% was planted within indigenous reserves. 15% was planted in land belonging to Afro-Colombian communities.
16% of coca was planted within 10 kilometers of a border, mainly those with Venezuela and Ecuador.
The National Comprehensive Substitution Program (PNIS), the voluntary crop-substitution program set up by the FARC peace accord, had enrolled 54,027 families by the end of 2017. By June 2018, that had climbed to 77,659 families.
Mainly because the bushes have had time to grow taller than they used to be, their yield—the amount of cocaine that can be produced from a hectare of coca—has increased by one third since 2012. As a result, Colombia’s potential cocaine production grew from 1,053 tons in 2016 to 1,379 tons in 2017.
Processing that much cocaine required that 510 million liters of liquid precursor chemicals, and 98,000 tons of solid precursors, be smuggled in to very remote areas.
“When we talk about coca growers,” UNODC Colombia Director Bo Mathiasen told El Espectador, “we talk about there being today about 119,500 households that depend on that. If we estimate that each family has four members, we are talking about almost half a million Colombians, just those involved with crops.” That is 1% of Colombia’s population of about 50 million.

Asked whether the increase in coca-growing was “a failure of the peace agreement,” Mathiasen replied that Colombia’s government over-promised to coca-growing families.

It’s an agreement with promises that had no basis. They promised more than they could fulfill. The Government does not have the money to fulfill the prior commitments. There was a lack of realistic communication about the resources that were available and what could be delivered. This caused the campesinos to think that if they planted more coca, they could have subsidies and be part of the substitution program.

Mathiasen also criticized the simultaneous implementation of crop substitution and crop eradication, two strategies that “work with different timeframes.” He cautioned against relying too heavily on renewed fumigation of coca with the herbicide glyphosate.

The United Nations does not have an opinion either in favor or against the use of glyphosate, and I must add that it is widely used in agriculture in Colombia and in many countries. The effectiveness of forced eradication has limits. Yes, the plant is done away with, but replanting has historically been high in eradication zones where there is no program of social and economic intervention going hand-in-hand. If you want a more sustainable outcome over time you have to combine forced or voluntary eradication with investment programs to develop these territories.

President Iván Duque said that in coming days, “he would present a new plan to combat drugs that would ‘strengthen our air, sea and land interception capacity’ and ‘dismantle completely the supply chain, both precursors and product,’” the New York Times reported, adding that “so far, he has provided no details.”

Interviewed by El Tiempo, U.S. Ambassador Kevin Whitaker reiterated his support for glyphosate-spraying, despite a California jury’s August ruling that a gardener who contracted cancer was entitled to hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from Monsanto, the company that produces most glyphosate herbicide sold in the United States.

I have always said, and I maintain, that the use of glyphosate is safe and effective. It can be a very important tool in the fight against narcotics as part of eradication, which is only one aspect of a comprehensive program. Evidently there was a jury decision in California, and you have to respect that. But that decision does not change the science at all, and the science is clear.

Government Won’t Name an ELN Negotiating Team Until Conditions Met

In a statement, the ELN’s negotiators in Havana called on the government to re-start frozen peace talks, citing its release of nine captives during the first half of September. The Duque government announced that it would not name a new negotiating team until the ELN releases all hostages. The government has a list of ten individuals who remain in ELN captivity. It is unclear whether all are alive, and the guerrillas have not addressed their cases.

This week the ELN released Mayerly Cortés Rodríguez, a 16-year-old whom guerrillas had kidnapped in Chocó. By holding a minor, government High Commissioner for Peace Miguel Ceballos said, the ELN “broke all the rules.” The ELN’s Chocó-based Western War Front stated that it was holding Cortés not as a hostage, but “to clear up her collaboration with the Marines,” accusing her of providing intelligence to the local unit. The commander of Colombia’s Pacific Naval Force (Marines are part of the Navy) insisted that it does not seek intelligence from minors.

The ELN talks remain stalled. “It’s evident that neither the government nor the ELN wants to be seen as the one slamming the door on the peace process, but neither of the two parties wants to be the one that gives up the most to restart the dialogues,” El Tiempo’s Marisol Gómez observed.

Elsewhere in Chocó, combat between the ELN and Army displaced about 80 indigenous people from the Murindó River reserve.

FARC Dissident Leader “Guacho” is Wounded, Military Says

A military offensive against FARC dissident groups has intensified in Nariño, along what may be Colombia’s busiest cocaine production and trafficking corridor. Last week, troops killed alias “David,” commander of the United Guerrillas of the Pacific dissident group. This week, special forces reported wounding his rival, Walter Arízala alias “Guacho,” commander of the Oliver Sinisterra Front dissident group.

Though born in Ecuador, Guacho rose through the FARC’s ranks in Narino over 15 years, becoming deeply involved in narcotrafficking. He refused to demobilize in 2017, then became one of the two or three most-wanted armed-group leaders in Colombia earlier this year, after he staged attacks on government forces in Nariño and across the border in Ecuador, and then kidnapped and killed two Ecuadorian reporters and their driver. The tragedy of the El Comercio journalists was front-page news in Ecuador for weeks.

On September 15, at a site in the northern part of Tumaco further from the border, a joint unit seeking to capture Guacho was closing in, but was detected by the dissident leader’s innermost security ring. During the resulting firefight, troops shot a fleeing Guacho twice in the back, but his men helped him to escape.

Though Colombian and Ecuadorian troops reportedly did not coordinate, Ecuador’s military and police strengthened security on their side of the border with the aim of preventing Guacho from crossing. There were no new reports about the guerrilla leader’s condition or whereabouts during the rest of the week.

Semana magazine, claiming that Guacho’s influence in Nariño had been declining, reported that the guerrilla leader “is fleeing with the last of his bodyguards, and the search continues.”

Three Mining Company Geologists Killed in Antioquia; Guerrilla Dissidents Blamed

A group of armed men burst into a mining company camp in the predawn hours of September 20 in Yarumal, Antioquia, opening fire and killing Laura Alejandra Flórez Aguirre, Henry Mauricio Martínez Gómez, and Camilo Andrés Tirado Farak. The three were geologists carrying out explorations for Continental Gold Mines, a Canadian company.

No group has claimed responsibility. Colombian authorities told the media that dissident members of the FARC’s 36th Front are very active in Yarumal. Precious-metals mining has been a principal income stream for organized crime groups here and in many parts of the country.

In the nearby municipality of Buriticá, Continental Gold is building what El Espectador calls “the first large-scale subterranean gold mine in Colombia,” which is to begin operation in 2020 and produce an average of 253,000 ounces of gold per year over 14 years.

Accord Implementation Budget Appears Insufficient

Colombia’s Comptroller-General’s Office (Contraloría) sent a new report to Congress on expenditures to implement the FARC peace accord. It concludes that, over the next 15 years, the government will need to come up with about US$25 billion to fulfill the commitments made in the accord. Most of the resources needed would go to the accord’s first chapter on rural development.

The Treasury Ministry has estimated a 15-year cost of accord implementation at 129.5 trillion pesos, or about US$43 billion. The Contraloría sees a need for an additional 76 trillion pesos, which

would represent 0.4% of annual GDP that would be added to the fiscal deficit projected for the coming years. These calculations could increase to up to 1.1% of GDP if we add the additional costs of covering all the municipalities with scattered rural territories as contemplated in the Final Agreement, and the reparation measures in the public policy of attention to victims.

The Contraloría report found that the government spent 6.9 trillion pesos (about US$2.3 billion) in 2017 on activities related to the FARC peace accord.

El Espectador meanwhile notes that Colombia’s defense budget has increased during the post-accord period, growing 8 percent from 2017 to 2018.

FARC Remains on U.S. Terrorist List

The U.S. Department of State released its annual report on international terrorism on September 19. This report includes and updates the Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. The FARC—recognized as a political party today in Colombia—remains on that list.

“Colombia experienced a continued decrease in terrorist activity in 2017, due in large part to the November 2016 peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC),” the report reads, citing the disarmament, demobilization, and reincorporation process that the ex-guerrillas underwent last year. Still, a footnote in the report explains that the FARC remains on the terrorist list because the party’s ties to increasingly active guerrilla dissident groups are “unclear”:

The FARC remains a Foreign Terrorist Organization under the Immigration and Nationality Act. However, the Colombian government classifies FARC dissidents as criminals. While the ideological motivations of such groups and ongoing connections with demobilized FARC are unclear, we have included acts of violence by FARC dissidents in this report.

Although the UN verification mission and other observers fault both the Colombian government and the FARC for the slow pace of ex-guerrillas’ reintegration programs, the State Department report places all the blame on the FARC. It essentially faults the ex-guerrillas for insisting on collective reintegration, instead of accepting the government’s standard individual reintegration offer:

The Agency for Reincorporation and Normalization (ARN), formerly the Colombian Reintegration Agency (ACR), is the implementing arm of this process. Delays in implementing the program, caused by the refusal of FARC leadership to permit members to actively and effectively participate, increased the prospects that some ex-combatants would return to engaging in criminal activities.

Asked by a reporter why the FARC party remains on the list, State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Nathan Sales offered no specifics.

I’m not going to be in a position to comment on any internal deliberations that may or may not be taking place. What I can tell you is that the statutory standards for getting on the FTO list or getting off the FTO list are very clear, and it – we apply the standards that Congress has given us consistent with the evidence in front of us, and we do that regardless of the organization or country.

Interviewed by El Tiempo, U.S. Ambassador Kevin Whitaker insisted that Washington would push for the extradition of any wanted FARC members believed to have committed crimes after the peace accord’s December 2016 ratification. “Any effort, by any actor or institution, to limit extradition, affects U.S. interests.”

Whitaker criticized a Constitutional Court finding that appears to give the transitional justice system (JEP) the power to review evidence against those wanted in extradition for alleged post-accord crimes, like FARC negotiator Jesús Santrich. The way extradition works, he said, is that the requesting country evaluates the evidence.

The Ambassador also rejected the idea that wanted individuals should first remain in Colombia to provide victims with truth and reparations. “I don’t accept the mistaken idea that if there is extradition, then there can be no truth. In the case of the paramilitaries extradited a decade ago, we have set up 3,000 hearings, including victims, prosecutors, magistrates, etcetera. There has been every opportunity to clarify the truth. So both can be done.”

President Duque Meets UN Mission Chief

Jean Arnault, the chief of the UN verification mission that just had its mandate extended for another year, met with President Iván Duque. Arnault’s mission is overseeing the reintegration and security of FARC ex-combatants, which have moved forward but faced setbacks and obstacles over the past year.

Appearing publicly with the President, Arnault said, “I encourage you to continue with a difficult process, full of obstacles and still very fragile. We encourage you to continue not only for the sake of Colombia, but also for the sake of the international community.” Duque said that the government remains committed to “the people who have genuinely bet it all on demobilization, disarmament, reintegration and non-repetition, can make a transition to coexistence and a life of legality.”

Arnault said that Duque’s six-week-old government was in the midst of a “useful reflection” about its ex-combatant reincorporation policy. Duque and Arnault agreed that finding productive projects for ex-combatants was a priority. These projects, Duque said, “had to incorporate more than 10,000 people in the process, but today do not exceed 100 people.” The President and the mission chief agreed that future reintegration projects should benefit entire communities, not just the ex-guerrillas.

In response to a written request from FARC party leader Rodrigo Londoño, Duque’s government named its representatives to the Commission of Follow-up, Impulse and Verification (CSIVI), the government-FARC mechanism meant to oversee implementation of the peace accord. They are Emilio José Archila, the High Counselor for the Post-Conflict; High Commissioner for Peace Miguel Ceballos; and Interior Minister Nancy Patricia Gutiérrez.

Meanwhile, one of the highest-profile demobilized guerrilla leaders, Luciano Marín alias Iván Márquez—the guerrillas’ lead negotiator during the Havana peace process—remains missing. FARC leaders insist that Márquez has not abandoned the peace process, that he has “clandestinized” himself out of concern for his security.

Márquez is free to roam the country pending his eventual transitional-justice trial for war crimes. But he now faces calls to clarify his situation.

The Congressional Peace Committee, which recently traveled to the demobilization site in Caquetá that Márquez abandoned in June or July, published a letter calling on him to “unequivocally reiterate your commitment to this process very soon.”
During the week of September 9, the transitional-justice system (JEP) called on Márquez and 30 other former FARC commanders to submit a written statement that each remains committed to the process and intends to comply with the peace accord. The JEP demanded a response within ten business days. Márquez’s lawyer may have bought some additional time by submitting an official information request to the JEP about its demand.

In-Depth Reading

Christina Noriega, “Colombia False Positive Scandal: Families Demand ‘Greater Truth’” (Al Jazzeera, September 21, 2018).
Daniel Flynn, Nacho Doce, “In Colombia, Victims of Sexual Abuse Speak Out After Peace Deal” (Reuters , September 21, 2018).
“Documental Muestra la Dificil Relacion de Arauca Con el Eln” (El Espectador (Colombia), September 21, 2018).
Cecilia Orozco Tascón, “Autor de Falsos Positivos, Invitado de Lafaurie-Cabal” (El Espectador (Colombia), September 20, 2018).
Pedro Arenas, “La Sustitucion Voluntaria en Briceno Es Posible” (Observatorio de Cultivos y Cultivadores declarados Ílícitos, El Espectador (Colombia), September 19, 2018).
“Proyecto de Modificacion de Ley de Tierras Ataca la ‘Medula’ de la Restitucion” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), September 19, 2018).
Federico Rios Escobar, Nicholas Casey, “Colombia Struck a Peace Deal With Guerrillas, but Many Return to Arms” (The New York Times, September 18, 2018).
“Guacho y David, las Vidas Paralelas de los Dos Mayores Narcos del Pacifico” (Semana (Colombia), September 18, 2018).
“El Dosier de David Char Ante la Jep” (Semana (Colombia), September 18, 2018).
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), “Estados Unidos Debe Apoyar a Colombia” (EFE, Firmas de EFE, September 18, 2018).
Beatriz Valdes Correa, “Mineria, Glifosato y Guerra: La Historia Que No Quieren Repetir los Negros de Timbiqui” (El Espectador (Colombia), September 17, 2018).
Nicolas Sanchez A., “El Desencanto de las Comunidades del Rio San Juan Tras su Retorno” (El Espectador (Colombia), September 17, 2018).
María Jimena Duzán, “Sin Pudor” (Semana (Colombia), September 17, 2018).
Cecilia Orozco Tascón, “Presidenta de la Jep: ‘los Vinculados Han Tenido Conducta Intachable’” (El Espectador (Colombia), September 17, 2018).
“Mindefensa y Lideres Sociales: De Lios de Faldas a ‘Subvenciones’ de Narcos” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), September 17, 2018).

September 30, 2018 — 1

Ouch, this statement did not age well.

This is William Brownfield, then the assistant secretary of state for narcotics and law enforcement affairs, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on August 2, 2017:

Tranche one in this four-stage Colombian strategy was the southwest. Down in Tumaco and the province of Nariño. We are unable to support that because the FARC has, in a sense, captured the alternative development part of that. The next step is going to be up in Antioquia. That’s further to the north and slightly to the west, but still central Colombia.

There, we are trying to work specifically an arrangement whereby the government will work directly with the campesinos themselves, the individual farmers. And we have told the government we will support alternative development. We will provide INCLE funding—generously provided by the United States Congress to the Department of State and INL—and we will support alternative development there.

We will then, ladies and gentlemen, have a test. We’ll see how it worked in the southwest [Tumaco], with the FARC largely running the process, and how it works up in Antioquia with the FARC out of the process. And then we’ll reach some conclusions. What works best?

Brownfield throws down the gauntlet. Within the framework of the peace accords, the Colombian government of then-president Juan Manuel Santos can carry out its own coca strategy in Nariño. The Americans will do things their own way up north in Antioquia. And we’ll see what works best.

On September 19, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime released its department-by-department estimates of coca growing in Colombia. And Nariño comes off looking a lot better than Antioquia. Here are the numbers:

Colombia, nationally, saw a 17 percent increase in coca cultivation.
Nariño, which the U.S. government avoided, saw a 7 percent increase: less than the national average. In Tumaco, Nariño, the municipality (county) that has more coca than any other—and thus a key focus of the Santos government’s efforts—coca declined by 16 percent.
Antioquia, on the other hand, saw a 55 percent increase.

Assistant secretary Brownfield’s “test” was not off to a good start in 2017. Who knows, maybe 2018 will be different; the so-called “Plan Antioquia” was also just getting going. But the UN’s 2017 numbers show that coca really did stop increasing, or even start reducing, in the areas where the Colombian government managed to get it together enough to implement crop substitution, in line with Chapter 4 of the FARC peace accord.

In those areas, the UNODC reports, the peace accords’ National Substitution Program (PNIS) managed to enroll 54,027 families in voluntary coca substitution by the end of 2017. By June 2018, this had risen to 77,659 families. In areas where the PNIS got going, covering 14 percent of coca-growing territory, 2017 saw an 11 percent reduction in crops.

The UN data, troubling as they are, show that things are far more complicated than “let’s have a test.” They especially underscore the importance of keeping commitments made to the tens of thousands of families who signed up to eradicate their coca voluntarily. UNODC Colombia Director Bo Mathiasen adds that there are currently 119,500 families growing coca in Colombia: about half a million people in a country of 50 million. A successful coca-control strategy, then, would measure success in number of families instead of number of hectares.

July 19, 2018 — 0

Video: “The Origins of Cocaine” book event

Here is video of yesterday afternoon’s WOLA event with Paul Gootenberg and Liliana Dávalos of Stony Brook University. They’re the editors of The Origins of Cocaine, a new book that finds a striking overlap between today’s South American coca-growing areas and the zones where governments carried out failed development and colonization projects 50 years ago. I wrote an epilogue to the book looking at the present moment.

The discussion was lively and well informed. Paul is a historian, and Liliana is an evolutionary biologist, which made for a novel combination.

June 27, 2018 — 0

Most new cocaine production is not U.S.-bound (unless the law of supply and demand is broken)

Dig up all the U.S. government’s estimates of how many tons of cocaine are produced in the Andes, from the State Department’s International Narcotics Control Strategy Reports.

Then look at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s purity-and-inflation-adjusted estimates of how much the average gram of cocaine costs on U.S. streets. (Table 7.5 here.)

That data, graphed out, looks like these:

In basic economics classes, you quickly learn the law of supply and demand: when something is more plentiful or demand for it decreases, the price goes down. When it becomes scarcer or demand increases, the price goes up.

That’s barely happening here. Between 2012 and 2016, the U.S. government’s estimate of South American cocaine production shot up 113 percent. In Colombia, the source of about 92 percent of cocaine consumed in the United States, cocaine production increased 268 percent.

With that much more illegal product headed our way, you’d expect U.S. street prices to fall sharply between 2012 and 2016. And they did fall—but not sharply. The estimated price of a gram of cocaine dropped only 15 percent over those four years.

What’s going on here? It’s possible that both supply and price estimates are wildly inaccurate. It’s also possible that most of the new cocaine supplies are headed to other countries, like Europe, Brazil, even China.

The White House contended in a press release Monday that increased cocaine supply “directly relates” to increased demand. “The number of new cocaine users in the United States has increased by 81% since 2013,” it reads, “and overdose deaths involving cocaine have more than doubled during that same timeframe.” Most of that increase in overdose deaths (66 percent of cases in 2015) involves combining cocaine with opioids.

These worrying indicators are still lower than the 268 percent supply increase from Colombia. Prices would have to drop more than 15 percent to entice that kind of an increase in users.

The most likely explanation, then, is that most of the new worldwide cocaine supply is not coming to the United States. The new UNODC World Drug Report, released this week, estimates that North America accounts for 34 percent of the world’s cocaine market—that’s down from “about half” in the agency’s 2000 report.

June 26, 2018 — 0

24 years of coca and eradication in Colombia

Over the years I’ve been inadvertently building a big collection of “graphs that need periodic updating, which makes them more complicated.”

This one depicts coca cultivation in Colombia, and efforts to eradicate it, since 1994. There are two measures of coca cultivation, from the United States and the UN. Eradication has mostly occurred through aerial spraying of herbicides (which stopped in 2015) and through manual uprooting or spraying of plants.

New U.S. data came out yesterday, with a stern scolding from the White House. The UN hasn’t issued its 2017 estimate yet, but local media have reported 180,000 hectares last year.

This chart tells quite a story if you stare at it long enough. But my main takeaways are:

Aerial herbicide fumigation—the cruelest of the strategies because it anonymously dumps herbicides over small farmers’ legal crops and homes while leaving behind no government presence—is able to reduce coca cultivation from “insanely high” to “moderately high” levels, after which growers adjust and bring cultivation back up to “high” levels.
Manual eradication seems to correlate more strongly with reductions in coca growing, and it requires at least some on-the-ground government presence. But it’s dangerous for the eradicators, generates conflict with communities, and growers replant if the government disappears once the eradicators vacate the area.
What hasn’t been tried is actually having a functioning government presence on the ground providing public goods (security, roads, land titles) necessary for a legal economy to exist. The FARC peace accord offers one version of a blueprint for how to make that work, and has improved security conditions, for now. But with the accord’s critics waiting to take power on Colombia’s August 7 inauguration day, that blueprint’s future is in doubt.

May 1, 2018 — 0

The past week in Colombia’s peace process

(Still catching up. This is the week of April 15-21.)

Ecuador Will No Longer Host the ELN Negotiations

The president of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, announced April 18 that his country will no longer host the ongoing peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the ELN. Government representatives and guerrilla leaders had held five rounds of talks in Quito since February 2017. Moreno’s announcement came days after the murder of two Ecuadorian journalists and their driver, whom a group of re-armed FARC guerrillas had abducted in late March on Ecuador’s side of the border with Colombia.

“I have asked the foreign minister of Ecuador to put the brakes on the conversations and put the brakes on our role as a guarantor of the peace process while the ELN does not commit to ending terrorist actions,” Moreno told Colombian cable news network NTN24.

“President Santos understands the reasons why President Moreno has decided to move away from his role as guarantor and host of these negotiations,” Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguín responded, adding that Colombia will seek a new foreign country in which to hold the talks, which have made only very modest progress on their agenda. The candidate leading polls for Colombia’s May 27 presidential election, rightist Iván Duque, endorsed Ecuador’s move: “President Moreno was completely right to suspend the dialogues with the ELN. What President Santos did not do, the Ecuadorian government did well.”

The talks’ remaining five guarantor countries are Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Norway, and Venezuela. Analysts asked by Colombian media coincided in the view that Cuba or perhaps Chile is the best choice for a new venue: Brazil is about to have elections, Chile just inaugurated a new conservative government, Norway is too far away, and Venezuela is roiled by political and economic instability. Another option would be to continue the original vision of “itinerant” negotiations that move from country to country, which poses logistical challenges.

Moreno’s decision came after the journalists’ kidnapping-murder, another kidnapping of two Ecuadorians who remain in custody, and several attacks on Ecuador’s security forces in the border region, mainly in the Pacific province of Esmeraldas. All of these actions were perpetrated by the so-called Oliver Sinisterra Front, a grouping of ex-FARC members headed by Walter Arizara, an Ecuadorian-born former FARC member who goes by the alias “Guacho.” Though the ELN has nothing to do with Guacho’s group’s actions, the attacks on Ecuadorian soil have soured public opinion in the country toward Colombian armed groups in general.

The Colombian journalism website Verdad Abierta adds that Ecuador’s government was also probably miffed at the “lack of diplomatic tact” with which Colombia’s government handled the reporters’ kidnapping and murder.

For more than two years, annoyance has been incubating within the Ecuadorian Defense Ministry over their Colombian counterparts’ lack of commitment to the design of a joint border security strategy that would include contingency plans. Since that time, it was known that some FARC units wouldn’t accept the accords signed with the Colombian government.
… A researcher who has studied the armed conflict dynamic in that border region for several years, and who asked not to use his/her name, affirmed… “The Ecuadorian government has always felt undervalued by the Colombian government. The situation intensified with President Juan Manuel Santos’s response to the situation with the murdered journalists. This had several elements, for example that he did not go to Ecuador to meet with Moreno at a moment of intense pain for Ecuadorians. This was seen as an affront.”
That atmosphere became even tenser after President Santos’s clumsy statements saying that “Guacho” was Ecuadorian and that the reporters were killed in Ecuador. Those statements were interpreted by many Ecuadorian people, including by international bodies as saying “that’s Ecuador’s problem.”

On April 15, two days after President Moreno announced the reporters’ death, President Santos recognized that the reporters were killed on Colombian soil. The bodies remain there, unrecovered.

On April 19 someone—the Colombian military said the ELN—bombed a power pylon in Nariño, Colombia, shutting off electricity throughout the border region, including the troubled port city of Tumaco. The peace talks, meanwhile, continue to seek a new venue at which to resume their fifth round.

Aftermath of the Arrest of Jesús Santrich

Seusis Pausias Hernández alias Jesús Santrich, the FARC ideologist and negotiator arrested April 9 on charges of conspiring to traffic cocaine, was transferred to southern Bogotá’s La Picota prison, where he will remain as Colombian judicial authorities determine whether he should be separated from the peace accords’ transitional justice process and extradited to the United States. Colombia’s Supreme Court denied a habeas corpus motion seeking his release; his lawyers contended, unsuccessfully, that the transitional justice system (Special Jurisdiction for Peace or JEP) should have executed the arrest order instead of the regular criminal justice system.

From his confinement, Santrich gave an interview to Colombia’s W Radio news station. He confirmed that he had spoken to Mexican traffickers —who were either undercover DEA agents, or had one or more DEA agents embedded in their group—but thought that they were potential investors in post-conflict agricultural projects. Santrich had been put into contact with the Mexicans by Marlon Marín, a lawyer who is the nephew of chief FARC negotiator Iván Márquez, a close associate of Santrich’s on the FARC party’s hardline wing.

Santrich said his relationship with Marín “is a working relationship about ideas for productive projects, specifically about farms growing native crops, to implement in zones where the accord on integral rural reform will be carried out.” He said that he did not know the name of Rafael Caro Quintero, the top Mexican drug trafficker whom his intermediaries claimed to be representing. “It’s very hard for me to keep in mind who could be a narco or not. Many people came to my house with the idea of contributing to moving the peace process forward, and all of the people who came were registered with the National Police.” Asked about the ink drawing he gave the Mexicans, dedicated to Caro Quintero, he said that he thought Caro was a potential investor, and that he had given similar drawings to Vice-President Óscar Naranjo and presidential post-conflict chief Rafael Pardo.

“You will never hear words like ‘cocaine, payment, five-kilogram packages’ come out of my mouth,” Santrich said. “This is like an Indiana Jones movie, everyone adding special effects and the setup is right around the corner.” He added, “It’s more likely that cocaine passed through the nose of the chief prosecutor of the nation than through my hands.” Recordings of Santrich’s conversations with the Mexicans, currently in U.S. authorities’ possession, may give a clearer idea of to what extent Santrich knowingly discussed a plan to send 10 tons of cocaine to the United States, or how he reacted when Marlon Marín—who had urged Santrich to meet the Mexicans—discussed the plan in his presence.

Yezid Arteta, a former FARC member turned columnist for Semana magazine’s website, called Marín “the typical lizard that one finds in all political parties and institutions, who seems to be one of the planners of the trap laid for Santrich.” On April 16, Marlon Marín boarded a flight to New York, where he has agreed to testify against Jesús Santrich as a cooperating witness. Asked about his relationship with his nephew, FARC leader Iván Márquez only said he was a “gentleman” whose “conduct will have to be investigated.”

On April 19 Márquez, who is slated to take a seat in Colombia’s Senate on July 20, notified Colombia’s Police and National Protection Unit that he was leaving Bogotá, moving “temporarily to the territorial space [FARC demobilization site] in Miravalle,” in the southern department of Caquetá, “due to the situation and until there is greater clarity and certainty about what comes next.” Santrich, on a hunger strike in La Picota, said he would rather starve to death than be extradited.

Aftermath of Revelation of Peace Fund Irregularities

A week after Colombian media reported on letters from European ambassadors and from Colombia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía) voicing concerns about the management of special peace accord implementation funds, President Santos announced a “crash plan” to improve monitoring of resources and administrative steps to restructure management of resources from international donors.

The concerns center around the “Colombia in Peace Fund,” which concentrates a few hundred million dollars in resources for peace accord implementation projects, most of them from foreign donors. Though the fund is subject to close oversight and reporting, in order to speed delivery of aid it is largely exempt from often cumbersome procedures in regular Colombian law designed to prevent corruption in contracting.

The government found that 97 percent of the fund’s resources so far have gone to 40 contracts. “That’s why the denunciations and suspicions that persist about supposed poor management are so concerning,” reads an editorial in El Espectador. “In synthesis, it seems that the corrupt political bureaucracy that is so rooted in our country has also tried to stick its hand in the investments that should be consolidating the accord’s implementation.”

The concerns led to the dismissal of Carlos Fidel Simancas, a contractor of the International Organization for Migration who worked in the Presidency’s Post-Conflict Secretariat. “In that Secretariat,” El Tiempo reported, Simancas

was the manager of former Green Party congressional candidate Sonia Elvira Veloza Mogollón, who last Friday was called for questioning at the Fiscalía as part of the “group of people who played specific roles” in the presumed irregularities in the management of productive projects for demobilized FARC.
Another eight people—a list that does not include Simancas—were also called to the Fiscalía, and their offices and homes were searched on suspicion of being part of the network of Marlon Marín Marín, who according to the investigative body was a sort of articulator of a network that sought to enrich itself with peace contracts.
Marlon Marín first sought to obtain a cut of the contracts for basic healthcare at the demobilized combatants’ concentration sites.

This is the same Marlon Marín involved in the arrest of Jesús Santrich, the FARC leader’s nephew whom columnist Yezid Arteta referred to above as a “lizard.” Before discovering his efforts to strike a cocaine deal with Mexicans, Colombian authorities were already monitoring Marín because they suspected he was mishandling these health contracts.

Vice President Óscar Naranjo said that the government will seek “to accelerate the accords’ implementation, especially with relation to productive projects.” Treasury Vice-Minister Paula Acosta said that the government has contracted the accounting firm Ernst and Young to audit the contracts awarded so far.

Naranjo promised a detailed review of post-conflict productive projects. He said there are 214 such projects so far, in different states of development. Among them, 35, involving 1,533 ex-FARC members, are in the “formulation phase” and will cost about COP$22.764 billion (US$8.081 million).

“This is no reason, certainly, to slow implementation” of the peace accord, concluded El Espectador’s editorial. “The accord has already faltered too much for the government to keep delaying compliance with its promises. The money is there precisely to be spent as soon as possible and to put in motion everything that was promised. Can’t we do this with transparency?”

UN Secretary General Reports on Peace Process

The UN Security Council convened on September 19 to hear the Secretary General’s latest report on the peace process and the work of the UN Verification Mission. The ambassadors in attendance gave supportive statements and celebrated the progress away from conflict that Colombia has made. Some, most notably Russia, voiced concerns about the pace of implementation.

“While it is obviously too early to take stock of a peace process that has set ambitious and long-term goals,” UN Mission Head Jean Arnault told the Council that there is reason for optimism.

[W]e have already observed that it has achieved a notable reduction of violence in the context of the congressional elections. Similarly, it has created a series of institutions dedicated to overcoming patterns of social, economic and political violence in the conflict areas. …Throughout the implementation phase of the Peace Agreement, circumstances have occasionally tested the commitment of the two parties to stay the course. They have stayed the course.

Nonetheless Arnault, and the Secretary-General’s report, warned of problems. “[T]he resurgence of violence in several of the areas most affected by the conflict and the persistent pattern of killings of community and social leaders are the main subjects of concern at present,” the report emphasized.

The report highlights the slowness with which Colombia is reintegrating former FARC combatants.

Socioeconomic reintegration is lagging behind. The transition from early reinsertion to sustainable reintegration has not yet been completed, and this uncertainty continues to undermine the confidence of former members of FARC-EP in their reintegration and in the peace process itself.

Lack of progress in this respect is in good part responsible for the movement of former FARC-EP members outside the territorial areas, hence the growing importance of access to land, the design, funding and implementation of viable productive projects linked to local development and the creation of cooperatives to implement them.

Remarkably, Colombia still does not have a plan in place for reintegrating ex-combatants, violating a cardinal precept of how a peace accord should be implemented.

I reiterate the need for the National Reintegration Council to adopt, as provided for in the Peace Agreement, its national reintegration plan linking reintegration to development.

The Secretary-General’s report also voices concern for the security of former FARC members located outside the former concentration zones, and of threatened social leaders throughout the country.

I am concerned that, by all accounts, the killing of community leaders and human rights defenders has continued unabated in the past three months, despite several measures to address the alarming number of killings registered in 2017. This trend and the proliferation of illegal armed actors associated with it should be brought under control as a matter of urgency, as has been acknowledged by the President and top officials of his Government.
Of particular concern are the attacks against persons working to implement government programmes related to coca substitution and land restitution. Members of local community boards, the governance mechanism established in rural districts, are among the main targets of violence.

A Supportive Statement From U.S.-UN

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, read a statement that was significantly more supportive of the peace effort than has been customary for the Trump administration. It calls for greater government presence in territories, reintegration of former combatants, and action on land tenure. The expected exhortation to “accelerate its counter-narcotics effort” doesn’t appear until the 11th of 15 paragraphs.

The agreement that ended five decades of war in Colombia has created the conditions for the just and lasting peace that Colombians deserve. It was a historic achievement. But peace in Colombia remains an unfinished project. All of us have a role in ensuring that it succeeds.
…We cannot allow formerly FARC-controlled areas to fall into the hands of criminals and illegal armed groups. That would undo much of the progress of the peace accord. We encourage the government to continue efforts to eliminate Colombia’s ungoverned spaces. The United States also urges the government to continue the full implementation of the comprehensive peace plan. This includes efforts to reintegrate former combatants into civilian life.
The peace accord provides an important opportunity to address historical land issues that have driven conflict and violence in Colombia. We welcome President Santos’ landmark decree meant to formalize land ownership for more than 2.5 million farmers. Improving access to land is essential in transforming rural livelihoods. Criminal groups and narco-traffickers have dominated rural areas of Colombia for decades. With secure land titles, the Colombian people can provide for their families without feeling beholden to these groups.

DEA Investigating Corruption Allegations Against Agent

A story by BuzzFeed reporter Aram Roston, later picked up by the New York Times, reveals that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating veteran agent José Irizarry, who had been stationed in the agency’s field office in Cartagena, Colombia. The nature of the now-resigned agent’s misconduct is not clear, but three anonymous sources told Roston “the scope of the case is believed to be unprecedented in the agency’s history.” One source said that Irizarry is also being investigated by the Justice Department’s Inspector-General and the FBI.

Proposal To Eradicate Coca With Drones

El Tiempo reported that the U.S. government’s estimate of the amount of coca planted in Colombia in 2017 reached a new record of between 220,000 and 230,000 hectares, up from 188,000 in 2016. The White House has not yet published its 2017 figure. Nor have Colombian authorities published their estimate, but the same article cites a Colombian estimate of 170,000-180,000 hectares, up from 146,000 in 2016. This apparent increase occurred even though Colombian government, police, and military eradicators uprooted, cut down, or directly applied herbicides to 53,000 hectares of coca bushes last year, and worked with farmers for the voluntary eradication of about 20,000 more.

As a result, the same El Tiempo article revealed, the Colombian National Police Anti-Narcotics Directorate (DIRAN) is pursuing the possibility of employing drones to spray herbicides on the coca fields. Each would fly a meter or less over the bushes, spraying the herbicide glyphosate.

In 2015, Colombia suspended the U.S.-funded practice of spraying glyphosate from aircraft after the UN World Health Organization published a literature review finding that the chemical “is probably carcinogenic to humans.” Glyphosate is still commonly used in Colombian (and U.S.) agriculture, and eradicators still kill coca with the more precise method of applying it from backpack-mounted dispensers, which presumably minimizes spray drift to populated areas and destruction of legal food crops. The drone proposal would enable similar close-proximity spraying without the risks that sharpshooters, ambushes, landmines, and booby traps have posed to human eradicators working in the fields.

On April 13, the DIRAN began testing drones from five companies. It is prepared in 2018 to spend COP$21 billion (US$7.5 million) on drones that meet a series of standards:

Ability to fly between 50 centimeters and one meter above the plants.
Ability to operate in temperatures ranging from -5 to 40 degrees Celsius.
Two GPS systems to guarantee precision of spraying.
An anti-collision sensor.
An automatic recording system that records the drone’s location at every second.

The DIRAN expects that each drone would be able to spray between 10 and 15 hectares per day, whereas a human eradicator can only destroy 3 to 5 hectares of coca per day. In an absence of government presence in coca-growing zones, though, it remains unclear what would prevent farmers with limited economic options from replanting the crop.

Fighting Between Armed Groups in Bajo Cauca and Catatumbo Has Displaced Thousands This Year

In addition to the Colombia-Ecuador border region, where the FARC dissident group commanded by alias “Guacho” has drawn much attention, two other regions saw intensified violence during the week between groups that remain active, and are growing, in post-accord Colombia.

The Bajo Cauca region in northeastern Antioquia, a coca production and cocaine transshipment zone a few hours’ drive from Medellín, is the scene of frequent combat between two organized crime groups. The Urabeños (also known as Gulf Clan, or Usuga Clan, or Gaitanistas), the largest organized armed group in the country, is battling a regional group called the “Caparrapos” (also known as the Virgilio Peralta Arenas Front). Both groups can trace their lineage back to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia paramilitary network that terrorized much of Colombia, and enjoyed some support on the political right, in the 1990s and 2000s.

So far this year, fighting between the two groups has displaced at least 2,175 people in the Antioquia municipalities of Cáceres, Caucasia, Tarazá, and Ituango. Violence has also been intense across the departmental border in southern Córdoba. Fighting on April 13-15 killed five people and displaced 210. In the sports complex in Tarazá’s town center, 120 of the displaced are currently taking refuge.

Sergio Mesa Cárdenas of the Medellín NGO Corpades told El Colombiano that the warring groups are getting support from the Mexican cartels that buy their illicit product.

The “Caparrapos” gang, led by alias “Ratón,” has alliances with Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel and Medellín’s “Los Triana” gang. Regarding the “Gulf Clan,” led by alias “Gonzalito,” the investigator says they have the support of the “Pachelly” gang from [the Medellín suburb of] Bello and the “Zetas” cartel.

The situation is arguably worse in Catatumbo, a poorly governed coca-growing region in Norte de Santander department, near the Venezuelan border. This zone had a longtime presence of the FARC, the ELN, and the EPL. The latter group, the People’s Liberation Army, is descended from the dissident remnant of a larger group that demobilized in 1991. (The Colombian government often calls them “Los Pelusos.”) The EPL remained active in Catatumbo, profiting from the production and transshipment of drugs into Venezuela; today it has about 200 members and appears to be growing.

With the FARC’s exit from the scene—the 33rd Front concentrated in a demobilization zone in Tibú municipality over a year ago—the EPL and ELN began to compete for control of its previous territories of influence. A longstanding non-aggression arrangement broke down in mid-March, and combat has intensified ever since. “According to voices in the region who spoke to reporter Salud Hernández-Mora,” El Tiempo noted, “it is all because the ELN believes that the ‘Pelusos’ violated accords to share the business that the FARC left behind.”

After a month of tensions and sporadic combat, the situation worsened April 15 with the EPL’s declaration of an “armed stoppage”: a several-day prohibition on all road travel, and often a requirement that local businesses shut their doors. Residents of several Catatumbo municipalities received pamphlets informing them of the stoppage, and many of the region’s population centers became “ghost towns.” Schools closed all week, “affecting about 45,000 children and 2,000 teachers,” according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.

Norte de Santander Governor William Villamizar declared a state of humanitarian emergency in Catatumbo, and asked the national government to authorize a dialogue between ELN and EPL leaders at the ELN negotiating table. The commander of the Colombian Army’s “Vulcan” Task Force, stationed in the region, said that “a special deployment has been done.”

Civil society groups in Catatumbo, along with the Catholic church and local governments, have joined in calls on the armed groups to leave the civilian population out of the fighting. Business owners tried to open their establishments for half-day periods, but, according to El Colombiano, were met by armed people “who obligated them to close with the threat: ‘we’re the ones who have the weapons here.’”

The UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs says that 2,500 people have been displaced by Catatumbo’s violence since the situation deteriorated in mid-March. A government source told El Colombiano that the actual number is probably higher, as many displaced are fearful of registering and may be staying with relatives and friends. If the situation continues for another week, the source said, food could start running out in some communities.

In-Depth Reading

Catalina Vargas, “‘Guacho’, el Desafiante” (El Espectador (Colombia), April 20, 2018).
Juan Carlos Garzon V., Julián Wilches, Maria Victoria Llorente, “Diez Puntos Claves Sobre Politica de Drogas para los Candidatos Presidenciales” (Fundacion Ideas por la Paz (Colombia), April 19, 2018).
Holly K. Sonneland, “Poll Tracker: Colombia’s 2018 Presidential Election” (Americas Society – Council of the Americas, April 19, 2018).
“Lo Que Callan los Periodistas” (La Silla Vacia (Colombia), April 19, 2018).
“Cada Semana Asesinan un Lider Social en el Pais” (El Tiempo (Colombia), April 18, 2018).
“Eduardo Umana, 20 Anos de un Crimen Sin Respuestas” (El Espectador (Colombia), April 18, 2018).
“‘Hagan Hablar al Archivo, No Dejen Que Guarde Silencio’: Fabiola Lalinde” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), April 18, 2018).
“Las Grietas de la Paz: Ocho Escenarios de un Acuerdo en Crisis” (El Espectador (Colombia), April 17, 2018).
Olga Patricia Rendon M., “De los Desmovilizados, Solo el 20 % Encuentra Empleo Formal” (El Colombiano (Medellin Colombia), April 17, 2018).
Nicolas Sanchez A., “La Guerra en el Corregimiento de Uraba Donde Asesinaron a Ocho Policias” (El Espectador (Colombia), April 17, 2018).
“‘Violencia Contra Defensores de Derechos Territoriales Es Sistematica y Generalizada’: Procuraduria” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), April 17, 2018).

April 28, 2018 — 0

Coca in Colombia: what are the options?

Revised 9:00AM on 4/29/18: I added two more options to the table based on a suggestion from Twitter user @gabrielvc.

Colombia’s government, faced with record-high levels of coca cultivation, is considering using drones to spray herbicides over the fields.

This is less indiscriminate and risky to public health than spraying from aircraft, a program the U.S. government paid for between 1994 and 2015. It’s safer for the eradicators, who would be less vulnerable to snipers, ambushes, landmines, and booby traps in the fields.

But ultimately even a billion-dollar swarm of drones wouldn’t solve Colombia’s coca problem. Here’s a really simplified matrix I threw together today illustrating why, by looking at all the main options.

As you can see here, in my view, only one of the options promises to bring coca cultivation under control in the long term. That’s the one where Colombia actually governs its territory effectively with a minimum of corruption or abuse. That’s the hardest of these options to pursue, and the least immediately rewarding. But all of the others are just partial fixes.

Here it is at Google Sheets.
And here’s a PDF version, which is probably easier to read.

(This matrix leaves out the “legalize cocaine” option, which isn’t a near-term possibility. Because the drug is more addictive than most, legalization advocates confront a widespread belief that legalized use would carry too high a social cost.)

October 26, 2017 — 0

Honduras went zero-for-100 in 2016

“The number of inbound flights to Honduras allegedly trafficking cocaine dropped 30 percent between 2015 and 2016, according to estimates from the United States government,” reads a letter to the New York Times editor, published yesterday, from the Honduran Presidency’s minister and adviser for strategy and communication.

But what happens when flights or boats suspected of bringing drugs to Honduras do make landfall? The news isn’t good.

Here’s the State Department’s March 2017 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. Boldface is mine:

The Honduran military, however, made few improvements in 2016 to increase overall capabilities to degrade and disrupt illicit trafficking. In the domain of maritime interdiction, no interdictions were recorded despite 100 actionable events supported by U.S. authorities. Many factors contribute to the low success rate in suppressing international narcotics trafficking off the Honduran coast.… Corruption further impedes progress, as trafficking organizations have infiltrated some military units in active drug corridors such as the Gracias a Dios Department and along the northern Caribbean coast.

September 12, 2017 — 0

2016 suspect trafficking maps

These U.S. government maps were on display at today’s Senate Colombia hearing, but weren’t in anyone’s published testimony. Click on them to see them enlarged.

That route from southwest Colombia and Ecuador to Mexico and Guatemala is really striking.

Also striking is the relative absence of vessels headed to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, and Haiti.

August 16, 2017 — 0

Peace-ocracy

Colombians complain constantly about their government’s ossified bureaucracy. But when they get a chance to approach a problem in a new way—with a sweeping peace accord—this is what happens:

In the executive branch, there are at least six entities or authorities with competencies related to the illicit crops issue, including the Defense Ministry. In addition, there are three different “directorates” with similar functions—in the Vice-Presidency, in the Ministry of Justice, and in the High Presidential Ministry for the Post-Conflict. To these must be added the challenges of effectively articulating the PNIS [National Integral Program for Substitution of Illicitly Used Crops] with the Territorial Renovation Agency in the framework of the implementation of the Development Programs with a Territorial Focus (PDET), as well as with the Land Agency, the Rural Development Agency, and the Agriculture Ministry itself.

That’s from page 14 of a July report from Colombia’s Ideas for Peace Foundation think-tank.

Colombia’s peace accord provides a huge opportunity to reverse generations-old failings that hold back the country’s development. Especially the lawlessness and abandonment in the countryside that enable coca cultivation.

But if this soup of agencies with unclear mandates and poor coordination is what’s going to implement the accord’s coca provisions—well, we can predict the outcome, can’t we.

August 4, 2017 — 0

The U.S. government’s strident approach to Colombia’s coca boom

Carlos Ortega photo at El Tiempo (Colombia).

The “answers” in this imagined dialogue are direct quotes from Wednesday’s Senate testimony of Amb. William Brownfield, the longtime assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs. This “imagined conversation” format is a bit goofy, but it illustrates how knotted and constrained the U.S. approach to coca is right now.

Q: Colombia’s government says it plans to manually eradicate 50,000 hectares of coca plants this year, the most since 2009. As of early July, it was at 20.297 hectares, up from 18,000 hectares in all of 2016. Is that effort robust enough?

A: Colombian leadership must find a way to implement a robust forced manual eradication effort to create a disincentive to coca cultivation and an incentive to participation in the government’s crop substitution effort.

Q: So the U.S. view is that Colombia needs to step up manual eradication even further. What about Colombia’s ambitious (perhaps too ambitious) program to work with coca-growing families to voluntarily eradicate another 50,000 hectares?

A: We are strongly encouraging the Colombian government to limit the number of voluntary eradication agreements they negotiate and sign to make implementation feasible.

Q: So the U.S. view is that Colombia should scale back voluntary eradication and crop substitution? But this program was foreseen in the peace accords, and former FARC members are supposed to be helping once they leave their disarmament zones.

A: To be successful, the Colombian government’s voluntary eradication and crop substitution program needs adequate financial and human resources as well as a clear implementation plan to succeed.

Q: Sure. Then, if Colombia is short on voluntary eradication funds, why doesn’t U.S. assistance help fill the funding and expertise gaps?

A: The United States is not currently supporting the Colombian government’s voluntary eradication and crop substitution program because the FARC is involved in some aspects of the program and remains designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization under several U.S. laws and sanctions regimes.

Q: We could debate whether a demobilized FARC member participating in coca substitution is really still a “terrorist.” But never mind that.

In the end, if Colombia carries out so much forced eradication that it outpaces economic assistance for affected communities, what happens to the families who live in ungoverned, abandoned coca-growing zones? The UNODC estimates that 106,900 Colombian households depended on coca last year, earning an average of only US$960 per person per year. If you take their main income source away and don’t replace it with anything, won’t these families go out and protest?

A: Making manual eradication work includes overcoming the persistent social protests that disrupt forced eradication operations. Without a permanent solution to the social protest issue, forced eradication efforts are unlikely to have a significant effect on coca cultivation levels in 2017. In 2016, 675 attempted eradication operations were cancelled in the field due to restrictive rules of engagement that prevented security forces from engaging protestors. In 2017, the protests continue.

Take these responses together, and the U.S. approach to Colombia’s coca boom appears to be:

Increase the pace of forced eradication.
Do less to help coca-growing families in ungoverned areas.
If the families protest, unleash the security forces so they can “engage” them.

Wow.

July 18, 2017 — 0

UNODC’s Colombia coca estimate is out

On July 14 the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released (PDF) its 2016 estimate of coca cultivation in Colombia (the dark blue line). It shows a lower estimate than the U.S. government’s (the green line), but a sharper rate of increase over 2015.

UNODC identified four reasons for the increase:

Some coca farmers “have a perception of reduced risk associated with illicit activity due to the suspension of aerial spraying and the possibility of avoiding forced [manual] eradication through blockades of the security forces.”
Increased expectations of receiving compensation for substituting coca within the framework of the peace accord.
“A general reduction of alternative development efforts in all of the country due to transition to a strategy centered on the elimination of crops to a strategy centered on transformation of territory.”
Coca-leaf prices shrunk somewhat, but remain “at a high level.”

In an interview with Colombia’s daily El Tiempo, UNODC’s representative in Colombia, Bo Mathiasen, made clear that renewing aerial herbicide spraying—the preferred strategy of many in the U.S. government—is not the solution.

It’s a sovereign issue for Colombia. But the past impact of glyphosate [the herbicide that is sprayed] could be analyzed. Did it really work for anything and give the desired results? I don’t believe so. In the medium term, there was always replanting in these zones. Spraying happened, and they planted again. The desired change was not achieved.

July 11, 2017 — 0

Podcast: “U.S.-Colombia Relations ‘in a Challenged Place'”

It’s nice to put one of these out again, for the first time in 2 1/2 months.

Relations between the United States and close ally Colombia have hit their roughest patch in years. The situation is aggravated by the Trump administration’s much darker view of the FARC peace accord, and open disagreement about how to deal with coca eradication. Messages from Washington, meanwhile, have been confusingly mixed. A better-briefed Secretary of State could deal with this more effectively, but that doesn’t seem to be Rex Tillerson’s style.

June 15, 2017 — 0

Trafficking routes over time

Below this text, in reverse chronological order, are some maps from U.S. Southern Command that I’ve collected over the years. They show the tracks of aircraft or boats that Southcom and its Key West, Florida-based “Joint Interagency Task Force South” (JIATF-South) component has suspected of trafficking drugs (or other illegal things). These give you a general idea of how trafficking (I believe this is nearly all cocaine trafficking) patterns have shifted over the past 12 years.

Four things stand out:

The Eastern Pacific is the busiest route. Southcom reported earlier this year that “Eastern Pacific flow currently accounts for more than 68% of documented cocaine movement,” and the more recent maps show that clearly. Colombia’s entire Pacific coast, as well as Esmeraldas and Manabí, Ecuador, are the main launching points for maritime traffic. (Southcom estimates that, after steady decline, only 3 percent of cocaine trafficking from the Andes is aerial; the rest is maritime.) For a while, detected trafficking vessels were not going out as far as the Galápagos Islands, which requires larger boats full of fuel to be stationed in the deep ocean, but now that long-haul route is active again. These long hauls tend not to arrive in Mexico, other than Chiapas which, along with San Marcos and Retalhuleu, Guatemala, remains a very heavy destination.
Costa Rica and Panama have been increasingly inundated with maritime traffic, which now blankets their heavily touristed coasts. In the Caribbean, Puerto Rico appears to have seen a very sharp increase too.
The Venezuela-to-Honduras aerial route, from Apure to Gracias a Dios, remains active, though overall aerial trafficking is reduced.
Traffickers tend to avoid Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. (The 2016 map reverses Haiti and the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola.) The lack of tracks detected in Cuba is total in recent years, which is remarkable.

These aren’t secret or classified, but I don’t know why Southcom and JIATF-South don’t just put these on their websites and in their reporting to Congress and the media. It’s about telling your own story.

2016

2014

2011

2010

2007

2005

May 17, 2017 — 0

The FARC really appears to be abandoning coca—which may mean violence

Ricardo Cruz photo from Verdad Abierta (Colombia).

This is a remarkable paragraph in a Semana magazine column from Daniel Rico, a former Colombian government counter-drug official who now analyzes the cocaine trade and security at the Ideas for Peace Foundation, a Bogotá think tank. In last year’s peace accords, Rico writes,

“…with regard to narcotrafficking, the FARC committed itself to ‘put an end to any relationship which, as a function of rebellion, may have presented itself with this phenomenon.’ And for now everything indicates that they have complied. As an organization the FARC has exited from its intermediary role as a buyer of coca base between farmers and narcos. Today, the laboratories and cocaine routes don’t belong to it, although they still exist. The ‘de-narcotization’ of the FARC is one of the main causes of the drop in coca base prices in hamlets from Nariño [southwest Colombia] to Catatumbo [northeast Colombia], where people are burying their kilos of processed coca waiting for new buyers to return and for prices to improve. They’re not stupid, they’ve lived through this before and they know that the coca market will stabilize sooner rather than later.”

With the FARC truly out of the drug trade, and Colombia’s state dithering in filling the governance vacuum in most previously FARC-dominated areas, several regions of the country may soon see a very violent competition to determine who will be the next dominant coca-base buyer and processor. Ariel Ávila, of the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation think tank, is calling this “criminal anarchy.” This could get ugly.

May 16, 2017 — 1

This set of charts shows why a border wall won’t stop drugs

From the May 13 San Diego Union-Tribune.

This graphic, from a San Diego Union-Tribune article that appeared Saturday, includes data that we almost never get to see: real-time information on U.S. border authorities’ drug seizures. (Click on it, or here, to view it larger.)

The data covers just one sector of the U.S.-Mexico border, which Border Patrol divides into nine sectors. This is the San Diego sector, which covers the western half of California’s border with Mexico. 2015 and 2016 data shows this to be the number-one sector, by far, for seizures of heroin and methamphetamine, both of which generally get produced in Mexico’s Pacific coast region. San Diego is also number two for cocaine seizures.

Seizure data gives you at least a vague idea of how much drugs are being trafficked through a sector. In 2015, the DEA reported [PDF], 49% of all heroin and 57% of all methamphetamine that got seized anywhere at the border was seized in the San Diego sector.

San Diego is also one of the most walled-off sectors, with fence built over 46 of its 60 border miles. So it’s a good test case for what a lot of border wall-building might achieve.

The chart here is even more useful because it breaks the seizure information down between what is seized at official border crossings, or “ports of entry” (bottom row), and what is seized in between the ports of entry, where Border Patrol operates and where walls get built (top row).

Look closely at the vertical (y-axis) scale on these charts. The maximum number at the top of each is several times higher for ports of entry than it is for “Border Patrol.” This means that several times more drugs get found at the ports—in cargo containers, hidden in vehicles, carried by people—than in the “in-between” areas where one might build a border wall.

Simply dividing the top-line of the “ports of entry” graphs by the top-line of the “Border Patrol” graphs—a horribly imperfect measure—gives you this general ratio of seizures.

Marijuana: 5 times more seizures at ports than between ports (400,000 pounds ÷ 80,000 pounds).
Methamphetamine: 17 times more seizures at ports than between ports.
Cocaine: 8 times more seizures at ports than between ports.
Heroin: 2.5 times more seizures at ports than between ports (though it’s a rough 1:1 ratio in 2016 and 2017).

The unavoidable conclusion here: building more border wall will have minimal effect on the transit of illegal drugs from Mexico into the United States. If you want to make it harder to transship drugs northward, you have to focus on the ports of entry, which have $5 billion in unmet infrastructure needs and are short-staffed by about 2,000 officers.

The ports are less “sexy” than a big concrete wall, but making them function better would do far more to disrupt drug flows. But the Trump administration’s funding requests have so far included no increases for ports of entry.

Postscript: Note that these charts’ 2017 column represents only the first six months of the government’s Fiscal Year 2017 (which started on October 1 of last year), which is why it looks like seizures went down during the most recent year. Double the size of that column, and you get a rough idea of what end-of-year 2017 seizures might look like. At the current pace, San Diego would see sharply more 2017 seizures of cocaine and methamphetamine, a small increase in heroin, and a sharp drop in cannabis.

April 28, 2017 — 0

Brookings post about coca and peace in Colombia

This just went up on the Brookings Institution’s “Order from Chaos” foreign policy blog. I’ll be talking about “drugs and peace” in post-conflict Colombia at a Brookings panel on Monday morning.

Colombia’s peace accords point the way to a solution. But will they be implemented?

The “illicit crops” part of the peace accord is more transactional than the “rural reform” part of the accord. Instead of addressing state weakness or absence, it says: “eradicate this much, and you’ll receive this benefit.” That its text has been public since 2014 has created a perverse incentive for farmers around the country to plant coca in order to qualify for cash benefits.

Read the whole thing at the Brookings website.

March 23, 2017 — 0

Colombia’s coca problem, in less than 300 words

From Monday’s edition of the Inter-American Dialogue’s Latin America Advisor (PDF).

Q: The U.S. State Department’s annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report released in March said Colombia is the world’s top producer of cocaine and that the cultivation of coca has increased by record amounts for the past two years. What is the reason for the increase in coca cultivation and cocaine production in the country? How will cocaine eradication strategies change as the government and the FARC rebel group implement their peace agreement? What will cooperation with the United States against drugs look like during the Trump administration? How are policies toward coca cultivation and drug trafficking in neighboring Bolivia and Peru likely to affect Colombia’s role in illicit drug production and trafficking?

A: Adam Isacson, senior associate for the regional security policy program at the Washington Office on Latin America: “Colombia has a bumper crop of coca. The U.S. government estimate of 188,000 hectares planted in 2016 is the fourth increase in a row, and is 141 percent more than in 2012 (78,000 hectares). I see seven reasons why this is happening. Colombia halted aerial herbicide spraying, citing health concerns, in 2015, and did not replace it with a new strategy. It slowed forced manual eradication, too, due to costs and dangers. But until this year, it has not increased investment in governance and alternative development. Meanwhile, the price of gold dropped, making illicit mining a less enticing alternative to coca. The dollar rose, making farm-gate prices appear greater in pesos. Word spread that farmers with coca would receive benefits under the FARC peace accords, creating a perverse incentive to plant. And in the middle of peace talks, the government was less willing to use force to confront coca growers. Today, the Colombian government has a plan for new investment and voluntary eradication in the stateless areas of the countryside where coca is grown. The November 2016 peace accord commits former FARC members to help carry out this plan. The U.S. government should support Colombia’s new effort with patience, avoiding an aggressive push to resume policies, like fumigation, that did not solve the problem before. While waiting to see if this can work, though, we must closely monitor the Colombian government’s effort. We must verify it is getting the resources, inter-agency coordination and high priority that bringing governance to coca-growing zones requires. Coca cultivation in Peru and Bolivia has been stable in recent years, ranging around 50,000 hectares in Peru and 35,000 in Bolivia, including legal coca. Trends in those two countries won’t have as much impact on Colombia’s coca boom as the seven factors discussed above.”

March 14, 2017 — 0

Does Colombia have more coca now than before Plan Colombia?

Colombia’s Defense Minister let spill last night that the U.S. government’s 2016 estimate of illicit coca grown in the country is 188,000 hectares (465,000 acres). That is the most coca the USG has ever measured. Here’s what the chart looks like:

188,000 hectares is an 18 percent increase over 2015. That’s a lot, but the 2014-2015 increase was 42 percent, and the 2013-2014 increase was 39 percent. I wouldn’t call this progress—it may indicate that coca is starting to reach levels at which farmers no longer find it profitable to grow.

In an article posted last night to WOLA’s website, I review seven reasons for these big increases. It’s complicated.

But there’s a simpler question that I’m already being asked: is there more coca in Colombia today than there was when Plan Colombia started in 2000-2001?

The answer depends on whom you ask.

The U.S. government would say “yes.” 2016 broke the record. The U.S. government doesn’t publicly discuss its measurement methods in detail.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), whose annual reports discuss methods used, will probably say “no” when it releases its next Colombia survey in June or July. That report will almost certainly find an increase, although the UN measure tends to be smaller than the U.S. figure. If the UNODC estimate also grows by 18 percent, that would be 113,000 hectares—well below the pre-Plan Colombia high of 163,000 measured in 2000. The UN measure would need to have grown by 70 percent to break that record.

March 13, 2017 — 0

At WOLA’s website: Confronting Colombia’s Coca Boom

Looks like everything I’ve written over the last few days about Colombia’s coca bonanza is coming out today. This new analysis just got posted to wola.org.

Here, I find 7 reasons why Colombia’s coca crop has increased so quickly.

Suspending aerial herbicide fumigation and not quickly replacing it with anything else.
Reducing forced manual eradication and not quickly replacing it with anything else.
Not increasing government presence or alternative development in coca-growing zones.
A drop in the price of gold, making illicit mining less attractive than coca.
A strengthening of the dollar, making farm-gate prices appear higher in pesos.
Word spreading about the benefits coca-growers could obtain in the 2014 FARC accord, incentivizing some people to become coca growers.
Coca-growers’ increased organization and skill at blockading and stopping manual eradication, while the government avoided violent confrontations with them during peace talks.

Those are complicated reasons. What to do about it, then? I argue: let Colombia pursue the plan it has put together within the framework of the FARC peace accords. This plan is barely underway. But constantly monitor and verify that Colombia’s government is doing what it says it is going to do, because after repeated betrayals of trust, “implementation” is almost a swear word in the Colombian countryside. We must “trust, but verify” that Colombia will keep up its end of the bargain with farmers who live in the country’s vast, abandoned coca-growing areas.

Read the whole thing here.

March 13, 2017 — 0

New coca estimate may come tomorrow: looks high, but lower than I expected

Tomorrow, the Wall Street Journal reports, the White House will release its estimate of how much coca was planted in Colombia in 2016.

695 square miles is 180,000 hectares. This would be the highest U.S. measurement of Colombian coca cultivation ever.

On the other hand, it would represent the smallest increase in Colombian coca-growing in three years.

180,000 hectares is just 13 percent greater than the 159,000 the U.S. government measured in 2015. That’s robust growth, but lower than I had expected. It’s nothing like the 42 percent increase from 2014-2015 or the 39 percent increase that preceded that (2013-2014).

(The data comes from the Obama White House’s legacy website.)

Amid reports that coca-growers in the Catatumbo region are burying their coca paste instead of selling it amid a price collapse, we may be seeing a glut in the coca market that could discourage new planting. If there’s a glut, though, traffickers may be actively seeking new markets, in the United States and elsewhere.

March 10, 2017 — 0

Latest chart of coca production and eradication in Colombia

I’ll probably be updating this soon, when the U.S. government releases its grim estimate of how much coca was planted in the country last year. That statistic will show a large increase, perhaps over 200,000 hectares for the first time.