Cocaine production in Colombia increased by 53% in 2023, reaching a record number of 2,600 tons, according to a United Nations report released this Friday (18).
The annual report from UNODC (Office Against Drugs and Crime) also recorded the highest number of coca leaf plantations, which reached 253 thousand hectares last year, 10% more than in 2022.
These are the highest data documented by the UN since the organization began monitoring the issue in 2001. “Coca continues to be concentrated in areas where productivity is highest in its three phases, cultivation, extraction and transformation, making one hectare of coca today produces up to twice the amount of cocaine it produced two years ago”, said Candice Welsch, regional director of UNODC, during the presentation of the report in Bogotá.
In 2022, Colombia had around 230 thousand hectares of coca leaf crops, the raw material for cocaine, and produced 1,738 tons of the drug.
The upward trend has been registered since 2014, despite the persecution of drug trafficking over five decades, with the million-dollar help of the United States, the largest cocaine consumer on the planet.
The signing of the peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas, in 2016, also failed to contain the boom of this drug, fuel for armed groups that prolong the internal conflict in Colombia.
In power since 2022, left-wing president Gustavo Petro considers the so-called war on drugs a failure and is betting on an approach more focused on preventing consumption in developed economies.
“We are going to start state purchasing of the coca harvest. If we don’t change the methods, we won’t change,” said the president this Friday, without explaining how he will implement this policy.
In 2023, the territories that recorded the greatest net increase in crops were the departments of Cauca and Nariño (southwest), strongholds of FARC dissidents who control this million-dollar business and the daily life of extensive peasant areas. The rebels impose terror in this region near Cali, which will host the COP16 on biodiversity starting on Monday.
Fragmented and complex
In four departments —Cauca, Nariño, Putumayo and Norte de Santander—, there are cultivated areas measuring more than 30 thousand hectares.
Nariño and Putumayo are on the border with Ecuador, whose president, Daniel Noboa, announced this week the discovery of around 2,000 hectares of coca leaf crops for the first time in the country.
Financed by drug trafficking, illegal mining and extortion, armed groups are multiplying. Despite the disarmament of the FARC, other organizations that profit from drugs persist, such as dissidents who rejected the peace agreement, rebels from the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Gulf Clan, the largest drug trafficking gang in the country. It is an “increasingly fragmented and complex criminal landscape”, states the UN report.
North America, Western Europe and South America are the main consumer markets for the drug.
