From coca to cocaine

From coca to cocaine - longer version

By the mid-1970s, rural poverty in Colombia had reached 67 percent of the population leading many landless peasants to migrate to the predominantly FARC-controlled regions of southern Colombia to cultivate coca. The increased coca cultivation in rural Colombia provided massive funding to leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups, the latter having replaced the Medellín and Cali cartels as the country’s principal drug traffickers by the latter part of the 1990s. As a result, the armed groups bolstered their military capacities as Colombia’s civil conflict became increasingly fueled by profits from the drug trade. The United States responded by launching Plan Colombia, a multi-billion dollar counter-narcotics initiative that primarily targeted coca cultivation in southern Colombia.