From coca to cocaine

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. Initially, the FARC was concerned that this mass migration would undermine the political and social status quo in the areas it controlled. The rebel group’s mindset changed, however, when it realized that significant new revenue in the form of “war taxes” levied on drug activities enabled the guerrillas to vastly improve their military capabilities. The increased revenues also enabled the rebels to offer social and economic services to the local peasantry.

Despite the increase in coca cultivation by non-indigenous Colombians, there was not enough of the leaf to supply the needs of the cocaine cartels in the cities of Medellín and Cali. Consequently, they obtained most of their coca from Peru and Bolivia from the beginning of the cocaine boom in the 1970s until the mid-1990s. The cartels transported the coca to processing labs situated in Colombia’s remote jungles for processing into cocaine.

However, during the 1990s, US-sponsored eradication campaigns drastically reduced the amount of coca being cultivated in Bolivia and Peru. Despite these apparent drug war successes, the amount of coca being cultivated in South America at the end of the decade remained at the same level as when the eradication campaigns were initiated. Coca cultivation had simply moved to southern Colombia, where the number of hectares under cultivation doubled between 1995 and 2000.

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. Farmers cultivated and harvested coca and processed the leaves into coca paste, a brown liquid that was 40 percent cocaine. They would then sell the paste to cocaine processing labs, most of which were affiliated with right-wing paramilitary groups. 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. US funding was used to establish a 3,000 strong Colombian army counter-narcotics battalion and to provide military helicopters and fumigation planes. The principal objective of Plan Colombia was to eradicate cocaine at its source by targeting coca crops with aerial fumigations.

Plan Colombia’s aerial fumigations eliminated many of the larger plantations, leaving small farmers as the principal cultivators of coca. The FARC, which had initially levied taxes on large coca plantations and processing labs, lost an important source of revenue. Instead of taxing small growers, the rebel group instead began acting as a broker between the farmers and the cocaine processors. In the regions under its control, the FARC purchases coca paste from the farmers—usually at a higher rate than farmers receive in paramilitary-controlled regions—and sell it to the cocaine processing labs for a profit. The labs process the coca paste into 99 percent pure cocaine hydrochloride, which traffickers then ship to North America and Europe.

Shorter version