Coca eradication during coronavirus pandemic
Colombia eradicated more coca fields in June than in any other month since the peace accords were signed. COVID-19 has not stopped eradication operations.
BY JAKE KINCAID
jkincaid@miamiherald.com
Marco Rivadeneira worked to organize rural communities to voluntarily abandon growing coca leaves for legal crops around Puerto Asís, the largest city in the Amazonian Colombian state of Putumayo. In doing so, he publicly threatened the interests of at least six armed groups operating in the region who demanded a constant supply of the raw ingredients needed to make cocaine.
On March 19 Rivadeneira was in a meeting with the community leaders of Nueva Granada to implement a voluntary substitution initiative. He had a record of success and worked with seven communities in the region that had agreed to substitute coca for legal crops.
Three armed men arrived and kidnapped him. He was later found dead in the village of Nueva Granada.
A Colombian police helicopter flies over Tumaco, Narino Department, Colombia, on Feb. 26.
An analysis of Colombian Ministry of Defense and the Observatory of Drugs in Colombia data shows that in the months following Rivadeneira’s death, as the coronavirus pandemic swept the country, Puerto Asís became a target in a wave of forced eradication of coca crops by Colombian military forces not seen in at least a decade.
In the month of June more than 13,000 hectares — about 32,000 acres — of coca fields were forcibly eradicated, more than any month since 2016, when the government and the FARC guerrillas signed a peace accord. In 2020 there was more coca acreage forcibly eradicated from January to June than in the same period of any year going back to at least
2010.
The Municipality of Puerto Asís was behind only Tumaco in forced eradications during the pandemic. The state of Putumayo is a stronghold of support for the National Program for Integrated Substitution of Illegal Crops, PNIS for its name in Spanish, with 20% of total national participation and more participants than any other department.
During Iván Duque’s presidency, Putumayo has once again become a focus of military operations to eradicate coca — the kind the peace accords were meant to do away with in favor of crop substitution.
Some of the very same communities Rivadeneira was working with to substitute voluntarily had their crops forcibly eradicated by the military just weeks later, according to reports by local farmers organizations in the region.
“The government has taken advantage of the pandemic to do an eradication campaign and not to support farmers,” said Eduardo Diaz, director of the Agency for the Voluntary Substitution of Illegal Crops under former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. “If the government wanted to support farmers, they would also take the opportunity to be present in the territories and support them in the production of food, support them in productive development. It takes the same effort to bring troops to do forced eradication as to bring technicians to do training and plant the fields. ...
They have to pursue drug traffickers, but the farmers aren’t drug traffickers.”
Puerto Asís, a region thick with jungle bordering Ecuador and Peru, borders the Putumayo River, where the state takes its name. Outside of agriculture and the illicit economy, industry centers around oil — the proceeds of which do not make it to rural communities, where coca is the primary source of income.
FARMERS’ SUPPORT
Putumayo’s coca farmers supported the substitution program; 20,331 of the 99,097 total number of families that are part of PNIS were from the region as of March 2020. The peace accords say that before forcibly eradicating coca crops, the government must offer communities the opportunity to participate in a voluntary crop substitution program, in which the government works with communities to provide the infrastructure and capital to replace the illicit economy.
It hasn’t turned out that way. Substitution has lost momentum since 2018 when Duque won the presidency from Santos, who received a Nobel Peace Prize for the peace deal.
As of September 2018, one month after Duque took office, there were 97,084 families in PNIS. Since then only about 2,000 more families have signed up.
Other substitution programs have sprung up, like the Puerto Asís program that Rivadeneira was involved in, but they lack the weight of PNIS and the peace accords. Fighting between armed groups seeking to fill the void left by the FARC has made advocating for voluntary crop substitution a dangerous endeavor in Putumayo and across the country. Still, activists around the country continue to push for what they see as the only road out of the illicit economy.
COCCAM, a national organization that represents coca farmers, has long denounced forced eradication of fields by the government, saying that the strategy attacks the livelihoods of farmers who live in regions with no legal economic alternatives and leaves them without any way to obtain basics like food. After the government forces leave, farmers are forced to replant their coca fields by armed groups who violently insist they continue to produce the raw materials for cocaine.
COCCAM has called for forced eradication efforts to stop during the pandemic because communities fear troops would bring the virus into rural areas that have no access to healthcare, and the pandemic has made access to basic supplies even more precarious. As coca farmers have protested eradications, violent clashes have occurred between farmers and eradication forces.
National COCCAM coordinator Leider Valencia said that seven farmers have been killed during eradication operations. “The most concerning incidents are those where there are agreements to crop-substitute with communities, where communities have already substituted. ... They are sending troops to run over the communities, violate human rights. We are facing a complicated situation during the pandemic. ... We continue to be willing to substitute if the government gives us the economic guarantees to make this change.”
While farming organizations report that incidents of aggression between eradication forces and farmers appear to be increasing, Juan Carlos Garzo, an analyst with the Fundacion Ideas para la
Paz, said there is no registry of prior trends with which to make comparisons. Nevertheless, coca farmers who have their crops eradicated during the pandemic face a precarious situation.
What is clearly supported in the data is the idea that the PNIS program can get coca farmers out of the illegal economy in the long term.
According to reports from the United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime, 96 percent of farmers who substituted voluntarily as part of PNIS stayed in the program and out of the illicit economy. In contrast, Colombia’s High Peace Commissioner Miguel Ceballos and think tank Indepaz report that replanting of coca is between 50 and 67 percent for forced eradication operations.
Now analysts and farmers organizations say the government has gone back to the same strategies that have failed to create a lasting reduction in the supply of cocaine in the country. In 2019 the Colombian government eradicated almost 100,000 hectares, but cocaine production still rose and total hectares of coca dropped just slightly from 169,000 to 154,000, according to the United Nations. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy statistics show an overall increase to 212,000 hectares of coca growing.
“This eradication that is happening right now is completely uncoordinated with even basic food security support, forget about alternative development. Just even, hey here’s a sandwich. Nothing. Which is a basic mistake that was committed 20 years ago that we thought they would stop committing,” said Adam Isacson, director of Defense Oversight for the Washington Office on
Latin America, a human rights research group. “Eradication with no other assistance in the past has been a recipe for replanting [coca] as quickly as possible.”
U.S. PUSHES BANNED DRUG WAR TACTICS
President Donald Trump and Colombian President Duque have said that the only way to stop record levels of cocaine in Colombia production is to increase the use of tactics that were prevalent before the peace accords.
The Trump administration has pushed Colombia to resume forced eradication efforts, including aerial fumigation with glyphosate, a practice that was banned by Colombia’s constitutional court in 2015 because the World Health Organization indicated the pesticide probably causes cancer in humans. Duque has unsuccessfully fought throughout his term to bring aerial spraying with glyphosate back. The pesticide is still sprayed by hand in forced eradication operations.
The new wave of forced eradication by ground forces also has ties to Washington. Colombian Minister of Defense Carlos Holmes Trujillo announced the goal of eradicating 130,000 hectares of coca in 2020 after a visit to the United States, saying the goal was reached in discussion with the U.S. The goal was an increase from the previous year’s 100,000.
“It seems like they are just so single-minded about hitting their number, which is of course all that Trump cares about. Really, they are just putting off the problem that will reemerge in a year or two,” Isacson said. “So far it looks like they are making some of the same drug-war mistakes, thinking they can just eradicate their way out of it without paying attention to the other aspects. ... They will insist up and down that no, the plan is a comprehensive plan to get the state, all services into these areas. ... All we’ve seen so far is the military part.”
The U.S. deployed the Security Force Assistance Brigade, a specialized army unit first used in Afghanistan, to Colombia to serve an advisory and training role in the war on drugs. The brigade was deployed in June. That month had more forced eradications than any other month since the peace accords were signed in 2016. Part of the brigade was sent to assist troops in Nariño, the state with the most eradications in 2020. A Colombian state court ruled the deployment illegal in July, but the federal government has vowed to fight it.
It is unclear to what extent the force was involved in eradication operations. Neither the U.S. Southern Command nor the Colombian Ministry of Defense responded to a request for comment.
VOLUNTARY SUBSTITUTION ACTIVISTS SYSTEMATICALLY TARGETED
Rivadeneira wasn’t the only social leader to be assassinated while working to implement elements of the peace accords, like voluntary substitution.
More than 180 social leaders have been killed this year, and more than 400 since the signing of the peace accords, according to Colombia-based think tank Indepaz. Many of the leaders were involved in defending elements of the peace accords. Six were murdered while carrying out the
PNIS voluntary eradication program this year, and many more like Rivadeneira were working on other substitution initiatives.
In Putumayo a group called the death caravan went door to door on motorcycles, killing at least five social leaders and farmers associated with voluntary substitution programs earlier this year, Colombian magazine Semana has reported. The killers were later identified as members of a group called the Mafia of Sinaloa, a criminal organization made up of FARC dissidents and demobilized paramilitaries.
Threats from narcotraffickers force social leaders to flee their homes, said Wilmer Madroñero, a human rights defender in the Putumayo Human Rights Network. Madroñero himself has been forced to flee his home after being threatened by the Sinaloa Mafia, the same group many believe murdered Rivadeneira. “The leaders who are the oldest members of the [peace] process are all displaced.”
The Colombian government withdrew some security units meant to protect social leaders at the start of the pandemic.
One suspect allegedly connected to the Putumayo death caravan has been arrested and charged, but that is the exception. Social leaders are often killed with impunity.
According to a U.S. State Department human rights report, of the 753 investigations into threats against social leaders in 2019, only three resulted in convictions. Since the peace accords were signed in 2016, of the 300 social leaders killed (the government counts fewer cases than local human rights groups), 43 cases led to convictions. The military and police presence that forced eradication brings is short lived, and soon after, farmers and social leaders are again left at the mercy of armed groups like the Sinaloa Mafia.
“The cause of the armed conflict in Colombia is the absence of land for farmers. The expulsion of farmers to isolated regions explains the proliferation of coca cultivation in this country. The peace accords not only substitute coca cultivation with other projects but advance rural reform. Both rural reform and the substitution program require land to be given to farmers, and this has been totally abandoned,” said Diaz, the former director of the Agency for the Voluntary Substitution of Illegal Crops. “It’s an important investment, instead of spending more money fumigating or eradicating with levels of replanting above 70 percent, which is the same as riding a stationary bike.”