Comment BOGOTA, Colombia — It is the world’s largest producer of cocaine, the source of more than 90 percent of the drugs seized in the United States. It is home to the largest overseas office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. And for decades, it has been a key partner in Washington endless “war on drugs”. Now, Colombia is calling for an end to this war. Instead, he wants to lead a global experiment: the decriminalization of cocaine. Two weeks after taking office, The country’s first left-wing government is proposing to end “prohibition” and start a government-regulated cocaine market. Through legislation and alliances with other leftist governments in the region, officials in this South American nation hope to turn their country into a laboratory for drug decriminalization. “It is time for a new international assembly that accepts that the war on drugs has failed,” President Gustavo Petros said in his opening address this month. Of a radical shift in this historically conservative country, one that could upend its long-standing — and lucrative — anti-drug relationship with the United States. US officials past and present are signaling concern. The The drug was responsible for about 25,000 overdose deaths in the United States last year. “The United States and the Biden administration are not supporters of decriminalization” said Jonathan Feiner, the White House deputy national security adviser, who met with Petros here before his inauguration. ONE former DEA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his current The employer had not authorized him to speak on the matter, saying he feared the move would limit the agency’s ability to cooperate with Colombians in drug-trafficking investigations. “It would gradually kill the partnership,” he said. “It would be devastating, not only regionally, but globally. Everyone would be fighting from the outside in.” Billions of dollars have funded a strategy largely focused on destroying the cocaine trade at its source: the fields of rural Colombia. U.S. training and intelligence fueled Colombia’s decades-long military effort to eradicate coca, the base factory for cocaine, and dismantle drug-trafficking groups. And yet more than half a century after the President Richard M. Nixon declared narcotics “America’s number one public enemy,” trade in Colombia reached record levels. Coca cultivation has tripled in the past decade, according to US figures. Felipe Tascon, the Petro drug czar, said the Colombians were aiming to take advantage of a rare moment when many key governments in the region – including cocaine-producing countries Colombia, Peru and Bolivia – are led by leftists. In his first interview since being appointed to the post, the economist said he wants to meet with his counterparts in those countries to discuss decriminalization at regional level. Eventually, he hopes a single regional bloc can renegotiate international drug conventions at the United Nations. The coronavirus has pushed up the price of coke. It could reshape the cocaine trade. Domestically, Petro’s administration plans to support legislation to decriminalize cocaine and marijuana. It aims to end aerial spraying and manual weeding of coca, which critics say unfairly targets poor rural farmers. By regulating the sale of cocaine, Tascón argued, the government would take the market away from armed groups and cartels. “Drug traffickers know their business depends on their interdiction,” Tascón said. “If you set it up like a public market … the high profits disappear and the drug trade disappears.” His goal is to redefine his work not as “anti-drug” or “anti-drug” but rather as “drug policy.” “The government’s program doesn’t talk about the drug problem,” he said. “It talks about the problems created by drug prohibition.” Taskon discussed his plans with his counterparts in Peru. Ricardo Soberon, head of the Peruvian anti-drug agency DEVIDA, said it was too early to say whether Lima would support decriminalization, but he would welcome a regional debate on new approaches. Petro could find an ally in Bolivia, where in the 2000s the government of Evo Morales began allowing farmers to legally grow coca in limited quantities. As America’s most important anti-cocaine ally, Colombia is an unlikely pioneer in its decriminalization. But it is also the country that has suffered the most from the war on drugs. Tascón said it is the country where the need for a new strategy is perhaps the most urgent. The point driven home by the Colombian truth commission. The commission, appointed as part of the country’s 2016 peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, recommended in June that the government move toward “strict legal regulation of drugs.” In a report, the commission said the militarized approach to drug trafficking has intensified fighting in the half-century of conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of Colombians. Guatemala’s Rainforest: Lush Jungle, Mayan Ruins, and Cocaine-Dense Drugs The Washington-based National Security Archive, an independent nonprofit organization, provided the Commission with declassified documents showing that the US government knew its approach would lead to years of bloodshed in Colombia. “We see no possibility that the development and trafficking of narcotics in Colombia could be suppressed and sustained in this way … without a bloody, costly and prolonged coercion effort,” wrote a 1983 national intelligence assessment given to Washington Post from the archive. “One way to stop this war from happening again is to rethink the way we relate to coke and cocaine.” said Estefanía Ciro, who led the truth commission’s drug policy investigators. “The important thing is not that the markets exist or that there is coke, but the violence that the cocaine market produces.” Feiner, Biden’s deputy national security adviser, said that of the Petro administration The drug policy approach overlaps with the comprehensive strategy the Biden administration announced last year for Colombia. But not for decriminalization. “Colombia is a sovereign country. She will make her own decisions,” he said. “This is a relationship that is bigger and broader than our cooperation and our cooperation in the fight against drugs.” A delegation of US officials, including the assistant secretary of state for the Office of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, plans to meet with Petro management officials here next week. USAID Administrator Samantha Power, who attended Petro’s opening here, said American officials “clearly heard [his] message.” Jim Crotty, former DEA deputy chief of staff, argued that a legal cocaine trade “is not going to get rid of the illegal trade.” “As we’ve seen in the past in Colombia and elsewhere, there’s always someone to fill that gap,” Crotty said. Colombians are currently allowed to transport small amounts of marijuana and cocaine. But the proposed legislation aims to go much further, decriminalizing and regulating their use. Cocaine decriminalization will face an uphill battle in a divided Congress. Taking the debate to the international stage will be even more difficult. Honduran president, Trump ally involved in drug trafficking, tries to win over Biden But it’s a conversation Latin America has already had — about marijuana. In 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize the production and sale of recreational cannabis. “We need to open the conversation and break the taboo,” said Milton Romani, who served as secretary general of Uruguay’s national drug council. “It may be a long road, but I don’t think it’s impossible.” Colombia would have the “moral authority” to lead that effort, he said, “because so many people have died for it.” Mellington Cortés has witnessed this bloodshed firsthand. In 2017, he was one of hundreds of coca farmers who gathered in the Nariño department, protesting the forced eradication of coca by security forces, when police began shooting into the crowd. A shot hit him. Another killed his brother, one of seven protesters who died that day. The murders are still under investigation. The 45-year-old continues to grow coca, which he pays more than double the $130 a month he made as a driver. “It’s no secret to anyone that we grow coca to survive, to support our families, our children,” Cortes said. “There are no other resources here. We have been forgotten.”
