Cocaine use is rising in rich countries once again. Donald Trump is desperate to reduce the supply
in Uribe, a district in central Colombia, Efraín Silva, a 50-year-old farmer, points at a solitary coca bush still on his land. “This one must have been left by a lazy soldier,” he laughs. The rest of the six hectares on which Mr Silva used to grow the cocaine-producing plant was torn up by the army in 2017, as part of a voluntary agreement he struck with the government in the wake of Colombia’s peace deal.
At Mr Silva’s farm, the first profitable legal crop seems a long way off. His land is at the end of a long dirt track that few vehicles can travel on, about six hours’ drive from the nearest tarmac road. When growing coca, that was not a problem. “The narcos taught us how to industrialise it,” he says. By processing it with petrol and then sulphuric acid, he could turn a hectare-worth of coca leaves into a kilogram of cocaine paste, which could be carried into town in a backpack.
The trouble in places like Uribe, says Adam Isacson, of the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy organisation, is that although thehave disarmed, the conditions that allowed them to survive so long have not changed. “The coca and the armed groups are symptoms of the same problem,” he says. State services—not just roads but also electricity, water and the like—are all but absent. Almost nobody has a title to their land.
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