At the beginning of the government of Gustavo Petro, the fight against drug trafficking has suffered a lag in terms of the eradication of coca leaf crops and the seizure of cocaine. This was evidenced by the bimonthly report published by the Ministry of Defense, which detailed that the seizure of the alkaloid fell by 39% between January and February compared to the same period in 2022.
This decrease in the seizure of cocaine, which is supported by official government figures, contrasts with the version of the Head of State who affirms that the processes of eradicating illicit crops in the country were deliberately halted so that, according to him, the Military Forces and the Police will concentrate on interdiction, but this also has a downward trend.
These figures would be agreeing with the Attorney General, Francisco Barbosa, who has questioned the Government that “there is no seizure, there is no eradication, nor do we have arrest warrants”, in the midst of the clashes he has had with Petro, due to the legal benefits that he believes are being promoted for drug traffickers in Colombia.
There was a decline in the results
Upon coming to power, Petro asked to reconfigure the fight against drugs, but this order ended up being translated into a reduction in seizures, which was exposed in the reports of operational results of the MinDefense, in which it was specified that between January and February seized 74 tons of cocaine compared to 121 tons that were seized in the same period of 2022.
The official report itself set off alarm bells regarding the reduction in results, since 47 fewer tons of cocaine were seized during that period, equivalent to a 37% drop. What is striking about these downward figures is that they are recorded in parallel to the President’s criticism of the global fight against drugs, which he has described as a failure.
“The most violent region in the world is not Ukraine, not the Middle East, not Iraq, not Libya. The most violent region in the world is America, with clandestine cocaine trafficking routes (…) The war on drugs has failed and has only brought death,” Petro said in November 2022 at the opening session of the Forum on Paris on Peace.
Parallel to his criticisms, the president has taken measures to take the first step in reconfiguring the fight against drugs, and began by stopping the eradication of illicit crops, arguing that with this the coca growers are hit and not the drug traffickers. For this reason, he clarified that these tasks will not be restored until there is a crop substitution program that guarantees the subsistence of the coca growers.
This strategy does not fully convince the United States government, which, although it has shown itself willing to keep in touch with the Colombian government, has not put aside its harsh objections to the cessation of the eradication of leafy crops. coca, which are the basic input for the production of cocaine.
From Washington they have had no qualms about publicly ‘pulling the ears’ of the Government. The last one occurred in mid-March in the US Senate, where Colombia was one of the central issues of the Foreign Relations Committee.
There, Republican Senator James Risch, who holds the highest rank in this Committee, questioned Brian Nichols, the US Department of State’s Undersecretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, about the reasons why Colombia suspended the eradication of coca at the beginning of 2023.
“Petro has said that he wants to re-evaluate the anti-narcotics policies of previous administrations and, as part of that re-evaluation, he wanted to have a purely manual eradication program. Those discussions of how it would be done are going on, but we think it is very difficult to succeed if there is no pressure against (illicit) crops especially before a voluntary eradication program is in place,” Nichols said.
And it is that the concern of the White House is not for less, since according to the report of the Ministry of Defense between January and February of this year only 733 hectares of coca crops have been manually eradicated, which although they are the result of a deliberate decision of the Government, do not cease to surprise due to the volume of the figures.
The concern is based on the fact that the official report states that the country went from eradicating 9,895 hectares between January and February 2022, during the government of Iván Duque, to eradicating only 733 in the same period of 2023, which is equivalent to a collapse. of 93% in the results.
Regarding this bulky reduction, this newspaper consulted with a high source of the Military Forces who clarified that the Government’s instruction was to suspend the manual eradication processes to focus specifically on the other links in the drug trafficking chain, such as the seizure of cocaine caches.
Petro decided to shoot goals
Against this background, the Minister of Defense, Iván Velásquez (see Lead), spoke out the previous week to defend that “although they have not reached those that had been achieved in the same period as the previous year, they are on the rise with increases significant in the last month.
Along these lines, Velásquez acknowledged that the Head of State has been pressing to achieve “historic figures” in terms of drug seizures, especially when eradication is being set aside, for which he uncovered the ambitious annual goal set for him by the Government to the Military Forces and the Police, which contrasts with the reduction of almost 40% in this area at the beginning of the year.
“As the President of the Republic has said, historical figures have to be achieved and the National Police has assumed the commitment to achieve the seizure of more than 381 tons during this year 2023, while the Military Forces have a goal of 452 tons. tons, for a total seizure of 834 tons,” said Velásquez.
Thus, the Government chose to demand more ambitious results just when it became clear that its plan did not bear the expected results and the figures ended up sinking. And now the challenge will be much bigger, since the seizure goal for 2022 was 484.9 tons of cocaine and for the current year Petro decided to raise it by more than 40%.
The panorama becomes even darker for the interests of the Government, taking into account that while seizures and eradication are on the decline, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime revealed in its most recent report that Colombia is the country that produces the most cocaine in the world: it exported 1,400 tons only during 2021.