THE GOLDEN AGE OF COCAINE IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW
The biggest cocaine boom in history has its origins outside towns like La Dorada, Colombia. Here, a few miles down a rutted track through the Amazon, cattle ranches and fish farms give way to endless fields of coca, the pale green shrub used for making the drug.
Apart from a few schoolteachers and occasional raids by the armed forces, the Colombian state barely exists beyond this point. To travel here, outsiders need permission from a muchfeared drug cartel known as the Comandos de la Frontera, whose henchmen in military green
T-shirts patrol the lanes in trucks and on motorbikes.
This region, Putumayo province, is a key supplier of the unprecedented surge in cocaine production. While fans of the hit Netflix series “Narcos” may have the impression that the era of Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel in the 1980s and 1990s was the heyday of the cocaine trade, in fact, a much bigger boom is going on right now.
“We’re living in the golden age of cocaine,” said Toby Muse, the author of the 2020 book “Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels,” who has been reporting on the Colombian drug trade for more than two decades. “Cocaine is reaching corners of the planet that have never seen it before, because there is so much of the drug.”
Underlying that boom is a massive growth in acreage, as well as higher productivity on coca farms – trends driven by shifting political dynamics in the region as well as rising demand. The illicit industry now produces about 2,000 tons of cocaine per year, almost double the amount being made a decade ago, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Satellite photos show that the amount of Colombian land planted with coca rose to a record of more than 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) last year, more than five times what it was when Escobar was gunned down in 1993.
All that supply is flooding markets around the world, bringing violence, corruption and huge profits with it. Some