After 30 years on the frontline, Colombia looks beyond the failed war on drugs

Wilmer Ovalle’s life is a testament to the failure of the war on drugs in Colombia.

Standing among bright green bushes of coca on a steep hillside of this remote village in north-eastern Colombia, he sprays weedkiller around the base of each bush. In two weeks the leaves will be just the right size for picking and processing into coca paste, the first stage in the production of cocaine.

“If the drug war had worked I wouldn’t be standing here,” he says.

At 19, Ovalle has known both the carrots and the sticks that have been the backbone of Colombia’s counter-drugs strategy for the past two decades to cut supplies to large drug trafficking organisations.

He remembers as a child when crop dusters repeatedly used herbicide to destroy his father’s crops near the town of Tibú – and how his father would replant them. Eventually, tired of being targeted for spraying, Ovalle’s father moved the family deep into a nature reserve – where fumigation is off limits – cut down virgin forest and planted coca.

Ovalle also remembers government promises of helping farmers substitute their coca for legal crops. “They told us to pull up the coca and we would get help to grow and sell other things,” Ovalle says. “We did but the help never came and we went back to coca.”

Today, he sees little future for himself other than to continue his father’s work. “Here, this is all there is,” he says.

Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine, has been on the frontline in the global war on drugs for the past 30 years, living through the terror wrought by the powerful Medellín cartel in the 1980s and 90s then efforts to choke off the source of the cocaine by targeting growers through the US-backed Plan Colombia.

But today Colombia is at the forefront of attempts to overhaul global narcotics policies.

A special session of the United Nations general assembly convening this week will debate the few successes and many failures of global drug policy. At the session the Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, will propose a more “human solution” to the drugs problem that aims to fight the root causes of the problem in all its stages rather than just focusing on enforcement and prohibitionist policies.

At a recent forum on drugs policy in Bogotá, Santos likened the current approach to riding an exercise bike. “We make a huge effort, we sweat and suddenly I look left, I look right and we are in the same place, the business continues,” he said.

After some reduction of coca crops in the 2000s, they are growing again. The area under coca cultivation in Colombia rose 44% in 2014 to 69,000 hectares or 175,000 acres, according to the latest report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, which monitors the crops by satellite. Potential cocaine production soared from 290 tonnes in 2013 to 442 tonnes in 2014, up 52%. This year’s report, which will show 2015 figures, is expected to show an additional increase.

And while Colombia has broken up large cartels and seen an increase in drug-related arrests it has not affected the business, said Juan Carlos Garzón, an expert on drugs policy with the Woodrow Wilson Institute in Washington. The country is also facing rising drug consumption rates.

In academic circles the failure of drug policies has long been a given, said John Collins, who leads the London School of Economics expert group on drug policy. “The policy prescriptions did not match the realities on the ground,” he said.

But it wasn’t until 2012 that Colombia, together with Guatemala and Mexico, first proposed holding the special session at the UN this year, saying a rethink of global drugs policy was “urgent”. Mexico has been racked by violence related to powerful drugs cartels and Guatemala is a major transit country for drugs headed to the United States.

“They have tried everything imaginable and they are getting nowhere,” said Collins. “They have credibility [to lead the proposals for new approaches] because they are the states directly affected by the policies.”

In Colombia, which has faced a half-century of conflict with leftist rebel groups, “the drug policies were also a fight by the state for territorial control”, said Garzón. The areas most heavily carpeted with coca consistently overlapped with regions of the country under rebel control.

La Trinidad lives under the shadow of three different guerrilla groups: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and the small and obscure Popular Liberation Army, EPL. Though uniformed guerrillas do not patrol the streets their presence is felt. The evening entertainment is a five-a-side football match on the town court under bright lights and a Farc banner declaring 26 March – the date the group’s legendary founder Manuel Marulanda died in 2008 – the “universal day of the right of people to armed rebellion”. Just a few metres away, is a banner for the ELN, and pasted to a wall is a tattered poster for the EPL.

Both the Farc and the ELN are engaged in peace talks with the government. The Farc negotiations are considered to be in the final stretch and could be finalised this year. One of the four points already agreed is to find a “solution to illicit drugs”.

Santos has called the deal a “game changer” for the drugs trade, with the Farc shifting from being an obstacle to fighting the drugs trade to a “key ally” of the government.

The agreement includes a Farc commitment to cut off all ties to the drug trade and a government promise to refocus its policies toward manual eradication, crop substitution programmes and voluntary eradication efforts. Already, around La Trinidad, the Farc is no longer buying paste. Meanwhile, the government has suspended its aerial coca crop spraying program and is setting out its new social investment packages.

“We need to provide social and economic alternatives to small growers of illegal crops and other vulnerable communities in order to create the necessary conditions to bring them back to legality,” wrote Santos in an opinion piece in the Observer.

Gathered in one of the village’s five billiard halls, farmers in La Trinidad said they couldn’t agree more.

“We don’t want to work with coca,” says Neftalí Rodríguez, 48, said at the billiard hall meeting. “The chemicals we use to make coca paste are bad for our health and they are bad for the environment. We would much rather grow food.”

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The community store here is well stocked with fruits, vegetables, fish and chicken. But only the tomatoes are local. Everything from the beans and rice to pineapples, onions and chicken are brought in twice a month from Ocaña, the nearest city.

Many of those goods could be produced here but the roads leading in and out of this remote region near the Venezuelan border are little more than rutted tracks. Transporting tomatoes or beans to the nearest market town costs as much as the goods would fetch at the market.

But coca has a steady price and buyers who come straight to the farmers’ doors, paying 2.4m pesos (about $800) per kilo of coca paste.

“If we eat it’s because of coca money, if we have schools for our children it’s because we built them with coca money, our health depends on coca money,” says Rodríguez. “We get no government support and the only sign we see of the government is a military presence.

Yonny Abril, a peasant leader who has lived all his life in La Trinidad, says he is encouraged by the shift in the government’s focus and by the Farc’s commitment to become part of the solution.

“We embrace the fact that the government has recognised this as a social problem. It’s a small light at the end of the tunnel because the military solution didn’t work at all.”

But Abril says the government strategy should not just focus on coca. “It’s not about changing one crop for another, it has to be about changing the development model,” he said. “We need roads and schools and social investment here.”

Ideally, according to Abril, Colombia could find a way to industrialise coca for purposes other than making cocaine, such as medicinal or scientific uses. “We want a cocaine-free country but not necessarily coca-free,” say Abril.

“If in the United States they can legalise marijuana, why not?” he asks.