More thoughts on cocaine

Last night was the presidential debate here in Colombia, with 6 candidates vying for the hearts and minds of average Colombians. It seems that the more progressive candidates (Pardo for the Liberals, Petro for the Polo Democratico, and Mockus for the Greens) came out looking pretty good, while the until-now leading candidate, Juan Manuel Santos, was shown to be the murderous crypto-Nazi that he always has been.

Various candidates, Petro chief among them, referred to taking the 2 to 5 million hectares of land that has been confiscated from narcotraffickers, and redistributing it among people displaced by the war. I had and have a few questions about this: Are there really that many hectares that have been seized from narcotraffickers? Would this amount of land be sufficient to provide the estimated 2 to 4 million displaced people in Colombia with productive, viable farms? The idea of giving criminals' land to the people they have victimized is attractive, but I don't know if the numbers work out.

Also, by referring to the criminals whose land has been confiscated as "narcotraffickers", I fear that the candidates are missing an important component. The term "narcotrafficker" evokes individuals or criminal organizations driven by the profit motive, but there is no political overtone to the term. Some narcotrafficking is indeed undertaken by such mafias with little political orientation, and these mafias are indeed a source of violent urban crime that we would do well to suppress. But many people who are being investigated in the Colombian criminal justice system are in fact members of paramilitary groups, that is to say illegal, violent political organizations. Yes, they usually finance their activities with narcotrafficking, but much of the illegal armed seizure of land from hapless peasants isn't directly tied to narcotrafficking. These paramilitary groups massacre civilians and terrify them to get them to forfeit their land. This is sometimes done so the groups can plant coca on the illegally seized land, but as often as not this illegal seizure of land by paramilitary groups is done in order that local oligarchs may plant oil palm or other crops, or simply for the paramilitaries to gain strategic military control of an area. The massacres, the rural violence, the terror, the forced displacement of people that is perpetrated by armed paramilitary groups, these are the most pressing problems in Colombia right now, much more so than simple mafia violence. So when the government confiscates the land of these heinous people, I fear that calling them narcotraffickers gives the false impression that they are purely profit-motivated mafias, as opposed to organized politico-military groups with an explicit agenda (which often coincides with that of the Colombian right wing politicians). An inordinate focus on narcotrafficking depoliticizes the issue of rural violence in Colombia, which is inherently and above all political, and which is a far graver threat to the Colombian polity than is the street violence directly linked to narcotrafficking mafias.

In contrast, most left-wing insurgent groups in Colombia would not be qualified as narcotraffickers, but this doesn't mean that society shouldn't be or isn't just as concerned about them as it is about paramilitary groups. The left-wing guerrillas usually don't displace people from land or themselves plant illicit crops. These groups (the largest of which is the FARC) take part in other crimes like executions and kidnapping, and they profit from the drug trade, but they do not directly participate in narcotrafficking. No, their profit comes from taxing coca growers and drug traffickers that operate in the areas under their control. The DEA says as much in a report from 1994. So focusing on "narcotraffickers" as the main problem in Colombia confuses the issue here too, because it would seem to imply that left-wing insurgent groups, which are not narcotraffickers, are somehow less dangerous to Colombian society. This view overlooks the fact that Colombia's major political and security problems come not from narcotraffickers, but from illegal armed political groups, be they right-wing paramilitaries or left-wing insurgents. Often narcotrafficking provides these groups, directly or indirectly, with a major source of funds, but the narcotrafficking is just a means to enable the operation of violent extralegal armies, which are the real problem facing Colombia.

All this has me thinking once again about the drug trade in Colombia. Honestly, so many problems would just disappear if coca growing and cocaine processing were simply legalized or at least tacitly permitted in Colombia, as I discussed in my last post. That said, this article points out that a country that doesn't conform to the US priorities in the drug war will suffer sanctions, such as lost preferential status as a US trade partner. In this case it seems that the US felt that Bolivia was turning a blind eye to illegal cocaine production by allowing more acres of coca plantation than were necessary for the local demand for chewing-coca. This tacit allowance for illegal cocaine production by accepting on good faith that inordinately large areas of coca are destined for legal production, is essentially what I proposed in my last blog post. So it seems that even my sort of sneaky, passive formula for a de facto legalization of cocaine would draw the ire of US authorities.

In any case, I have two more ideas for measures that could benefit Colombia and its coca growers, but they really wouldn't work unless cocaine production were legal.

My main idea is for a greener production of cocaine. As you can see in this DEA report on coca growing and processing, the procedure for turning coca leaves into powder cocaine (what they call cocaine HCl) involves a lot of toxic chemicals. At least in the initial, farm-level steps of the process, many of these chemicals, such as kerosene, concrete, gasoline, ammonia, and hydrochloric acid, are dumped into nearby waterways after their use. This can be devastating for local ecosystems and sources of drinking water. The report indicates that in the final stages of processing, which require more expensive chemicals, these are often recycled. This is a good thing for people and nature--I'd like to see the practice of recycling toxic chemicals generalized throughout the entire cocaine industry.

This brings me to my second, related idea. What if there were Fair Trade cocaine? If you were to buy such cocaine in the US or Europe, you could be assured that it was produced by and bought directly from small family farmers, and that the methods used in its production were ecologically sustainable. Since cocaine is essentially a luxury product consumed by the wealthy, this label could really catch on--the growth of the Fair Trade industry indicates that the wealthy of the world are concerned about where their products come from and how they're produced, and I imagine that many wealthy cocaine users would be interested in this progressive idea.

But again, both to promote green practices in the cocaine industry, and to trace and label Fair Trade cocaine, the drug would need to be legalized, at least in both the producing and the consuming countries. Without such legalization, the production and commerce of cocaine are doomed to remain in the shadows, with no oversight or regulation.