A Colombia Without Coca –A
Historical Proposal
Colombian politicians have been promising a Colombia without coca for over 50
years. The world has been trying unsuccessfully to ban those plants
which it classifies as narcotics, even though they’re not, for the past 100
years.
Apparently, Juan Manuel Santos has no problem with his
incongruity. He purports to innovatively propose “A Colombia without coca”
as a shift in the paradigm to “solve the problem of illicit drugs”.
He does, nonetheless, favor the
needed changes to be brought about by the Therapeutic Cannabis Bill being
debated in the Colombian Congress.
Something quite similar happened in the mid twentieth
century when President Mariano Ospina Pérez had the government distribute
1,400,000 packages of hemp seeds to alleviate the Colombian textile industry
crisis[1]
while pushing through Decree 896 of 1947[2]
which banned coca planting and the use of the coca leaf as a means of payment
currently used at the time. Ten thousand peasant coca growers (cocaleros)
from the Cauca Department and others protested, demanded and attained the repeal
of this decree.
In 1939, President Eduardo Santos, our current
president’s great-uncle, founded Colombia’s first National Narcotics Fund, and,
through Law 36 of 1939[3],
instituted a State monopoly for “those drugs that create
pernicious habit”. During his Administration, Juan Manuel Santos [2010-2018] has
restructured Colombia’s antinarcotics agencies and proposed that the global
antidrug strategy be revised.[4]
This discourse is totally discordant with his insistence on the attempt
to completely extinguish Colombia’s coca.
This promise/slogan, which is an affront to Colombian Indigenous People and
peasants, has in fact done wonders for Colombia’s image abroad throughout the
decades of Drug War. But the cost to Colombia, socially, environmentally as well
as to its sovereignty, has been unimaginable. The zero coca goal has conditioned
what Colombia can and cannot do both domestically and internationally.
In 1962, ten years after the first frontal attacks on
coca chewing, Colombia had less than 1,000 hectares of coca planted.[5]
Thanks to the profits to be made from Prohibition and from living off of
prohibiting, from its propaganda and the unfulfilled/unfulfillable promises to
coca growers, fifty years later Colombia grows 50,000 hectares of coca[6]
and its policies and politicians are totally drugged.
“ A Colombia Without Coca” entails
1- flagrantly
violating
indigenous peoples’ rights;
2- disregarding the balloon effect
on our neighbors; 3- ignoring that
it is institutionalized narcotics-trafficking corruption which promotes coca
crops for cocaine; 4- fantasizing
that it is feasible to completely eliminate the use of cocaine salts and
crystals; and 5-promising achievements
without resources and that the hundreds of thousands of Colombians whose sole
livelihood is directly or indirectly derived from coca should
simply eradicate
without the required prior economic
incentives.
“A Colombia Without Coca” implies crass ignorance of
the past; denying the country’s history and right to sovereignty; automatizing
coca into cocaine and refusing to take notice of what many before us have also
said, namely
that this coca is “for
America a great source of richness and hope” [José
María Samper 1882]. It implies first and foremost repeating our mistakes,
failures and continuing to inflict the damages caused by the attempts of the
past 100 years.
In order to attain his Colombia without coca, Santos,
much like President Julio César Turbay [1978-1982] and the other six presidents
that succeeded him, has continued spraying potent chemical mixtures on the
victims of the war in the Colombian countryside, against Nature,
against market forces
and with the empty promise of substitution programs without the means,
after the facts, and in some cases
proven to be extremely counterproductive.
In 1972,
the United States sponsored it first crop-substitution program in Turkey, and
poppy growing spread throughout the region.
In 1978, the U.S. imposed its first aerial spraying
operations in Colombia to eradicate marijuana.[7]
In the following decades, coca crops were sprayed with the same false promises
of substitution post-eradication. Coca went bigtime and spread all over the
country.
Recently and basically thanks to the peace talks in
Havana, since to all effects social appeals and questioning by the United
Nations Special Rapporteur[8]
have gone unanswered[9],
President Santos has promised to apply chemical aerial spraying only as an
extreme measure.
Obviously, how this promise is fulfilled depends on
his judgment of what an extreme case is. He, thus, continues to atrociously
fumigate those territories which are still victimized by the guerilla groups.
Among others, the Putumayo Department bordering with Ecuador where the aerial
spraying buffer zone is to be reduced from 10 to 5 and then 2 kilometers.[10]
Meanwhile, we can rightly wonder if, after the Havana Peace Talks/Agreement, the
territories that “deserve” to be sprayed will be those being victimized by the
criminal bands (BACRIM) left over from paramilitary demobilization,
We can also ask ourselves if the technical and
activities component of the National Development Plan 2015-2018; the National
Drug Commission Report, the FARC’s Havana documents, and the new version of the
National Drug Statute will also put forward this empty promise with all that it
implies as regards “collateral” damages and policies with no factual nor
scientific
substance, far removed from reality and from
current society; policies which are solely possible on paper but unfulfillable
in our true everyday world.
There has never been a Colombia without coca and there
never will be; it’s not even an ecologically-desirable consideration. Colombia
would serve itself and the International Community well by having the courage to
truly shift its paradigm on coca and put an end to three
decades of unsucessful and hazardous aerial spraying once and for all.
[11]
Maria Mercedes Moreno
January 15,
2015
[1]
Professor Pount’s Program under US sponsorship
was implemented in 1946 by Colombian President Mariano Ospina Pérez. The
government distributed 1,400,000
packs of seeds to contribute to self-grown marijuana gardens as a
way out to the textile industry’s economic recession. The plants turned
out to poor in hemp but great for smoking.. [Rivera 1985]
[4]
http://www.caracol.com.co/noticias/internacionales/santos-si-se-aprueba-referendo-en-california-hay-que-replantear-estrategia-global-antidrogas/20101023/nota/1375550.aspx