Illicit Crops

Como resultado de la preocupación en torno a la problemática de los cultivos de uso ilícito en el sur de Bolívar y de su profunda incidencia sobre los aspectos de la región, la Corporación de Desarrollo y Paz del Magdalena Medio -CDPMM- preparó una iniciativa para realizar un censo sobre la extensión de los cultivos de coca allí presentes. Esta iniciativa también buscaba identificar y formular una estrategia que a través de la promoción de proyectos productivos y bajo un enfoque de desarrollo alternativo estimulara la erradicación voluntaria de los mismos. Sin embargo, esta visión se transformó como respuesta a ciertos hechos que se vivían en la región, entre ellos la agudización de la crisis humanitaria, la intensificación del conflicto armado, el incremento en la superficie cultivada con coca, la preocupante vinculación de la comunidad a las actividades relacionadas con el cultivo y transformación de la coca, y la crisis regional que se sufre como consecuencia de la quiebra de la economía rural y agraria por la que atraviesa el país. Así mismo, fue muy importante el interés manifiesto de algunos campesinos y colonos de iniciar procesos de erradicación voluntaria a cambio de propuestas concretas de sustitución de los cultivos de uso ilícito.
Para la realización del estudio se partió de una serie de supuestos formulados por la CDPMM y  revisados por el equipo de investigación. Estos supuestos respondían más al interés de realizar un análisis de la economía política de la región del sur de Bolívar frente a la problemática de la alta presencia de cultivos ilícitos, que a la formulación de una propuesta de desarrollo alternativo. En este sentido, se pretendió abarcar y comprender las distintas dimensiones sociales, económicas, culturales y políticas de un fenómeno ilegal que domina el paisaje de las diversas zonas rurales marginadas del país, y que ello sirviera para plantear salidas perdurables, participativas y democráticas a la problemática. Así se quería avanzar hacia bases más firmes en el proceso de planificación operativa y estratégica del Laboratorio de Paz en el sur de Bolívar.
Se pensaba que la visión planteada para promover el desarrollo alternativo tenía como elemento central la búsqueda de soluciones para lograr la erradicación de los cultivos ilícitos, justificando como “población objeto” a quienes estaban directamente implicados con las actividades del cultivo de ilícitos. Esta característica del desarrollo alternativo fundada, además, en una justificación de promoción del desarrollo local generalmente “introducía” como elementos exógenos una suerte de proyectos que se centraban en actividades productivas de carácter agropecuario, sin mayores consideraciones sobre el desarrollo de las condiciones que habían hecho efectivo el funcionamiento de esta economía ilícita en la acumulación de valor y de recursos de distinto orden (sociales, políticos, culturales). Este contexto había servido para estimular procesos migratorios voluntarios, al atraer a la población a las nuevas zonas objeto de programas de desarrollo alternativo que, en algunos casos, buscaban beneficiarse de la situación de ilegalidad. Todo lo anterior generaba condiciones de desarraigo que dificultaban aún más la cimentación de procesos de construcción y recuperación de lo público.
Para tener una aproximación más cercana a la percepción subjetiva de los actores implicados en esta problemática se ensayó una metodología participativa para ponerla en práctica directamente en las zonas productoras de coca. Ciertamente, el trabajo se realizó mediante la aplicación de técnicas de investigación cualitativa (entrevistas selectivas, entrevistas colectivas, conversatorios) con el apoyo, consulta y participación tanto de miembros de la comunidad como de instituciones municipales y organizaciones gremiales, entre otros. Esta labor fue precedida de una revisión de fuentes secundarias (otros estudios, información de prensa) y la elaboración de programas de salidas de campo, acordadas con la CDPMM. Luego se adelantó una sistematización de la información primaria y se construyeron algunas hipótesis explicativas de la problemática, teniendo como marco teórico de referencia las elaboraciones de algunos autores sobre la sociología rural y la economía política.
La idea central de este trabajo fue plantear, con la mayor complejidad posible, la situación social, política y económica existente alrededor del fenómeno de la expansión de los cultivos ilícitos. Como parte del ejercicio realizado al inicio de la investigación y como resultado del análisis de la propuesta presentada por la CDPMM se definieron algunos supuestos de carácter metodológico y político que sirvieron para preparar las propuestas que aparecen al final del documento. Esperamos que estas propuestas sirvan efectivamente para una más eficaz intervención del Laboratorio de Paz y se consoliden como políticas públicas de diferentes instituciones y organizaciones en el ámbito regional y local. Ello sin duda alguna requiere la participación y el compromiso de las instituciones del orden nacional y regional, toda vez que los Laboratorios son propuestas del Estado colombiano apoyadas por la Unión Europea.

From information at municipal level about vegetation coverage changes in coca regions, provided by the system of monitoring of illicit crops, SIMCI, deforestation caused by coca would be up to one fifth of the national deforestation since the beginning of the 21st century. In addition, temporal and geographical dynamics of
deforestation were estimated applying panel data and spatial econometrics, where their determinants are coca crops, environmental conflict, infrastructure and thepopulation´s vulnerability to coca.

Cadmium (Cd) tends to bioaccumulate in Thebroma cacao beans, affecting human health and its marketing possibilities.
For this reason, the European Union (EU) approved Regulation No 488/2014 for processed cocoa products, which
applies from January 2019, and motivated authors to conduct research on its bioaccumulation in beans, the potential
risks to health, quality, and its export possibilities. The results show high levels in different regions of the main Latin
American (LA) producing countries: Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Honduras,
and others. However, EU regulation does not stipulate maximum limits for raw cocoa. In the absence of it, research
has been classified by reference to the limits for processed cocoa, generating oversized metal levels, controversies in
the producer’s and setback in replacing illegal coca cultivation in this region. Thus, this review article will detail research
on Cd levels in cocoa beans in major Latin American producing countries, the application of EU regulation No
488/2014 to raw cocoa, proposals to set maximum limits on raw beans and their implications for replacing illicit crops.

In a search for appropriate theory, this essay inserts drug trafficking, the world’s largest illicit economic activity, within a wider analytical frame called the “covert netherworld.” Through the convergence xof three factors—covert operations, illicit commerce, and social milieu—such netherworlds can form at regional, national, and international levels, thereby transforming social margins of crime and illicit commerce into potent sources of political change. By deftly playing upon this netherworld’s politics and illicit commerce along the Burma-Thai borderlands, a regional “drug lord” amassed sufficient local power to dominate the global heroin trade for over a decade and simultaneously sustain an ethnic revolt for nearly 15 years. In the Philippines, the illicit traffic in synthetic drugs developed a parallel power to influence the character of national politics, compromising three presidential administrations and shaping the moral economy of political life. For the past 40 years in Afghanistan, an illicit commodity, opium, has shaped the fate of military intervention by the world’s sole superpower, allowing it an initial success and later contributing to its ongoing failure. Through the sum of these cases, the essay concludes that the covert netherworld can serve as invisible incubator for a range of extralegal activities and has thereby attained sufficient autonomy to be treated as a significant factor in international politics.

Until October 2015, Colombia was the only country in the world still permitting the controversial practice of aerially fumigating illicit crops – mostly coca and, to a lesser extent, opium poppies – despite evidence that suggested serious violations of the socio-environmental rights of affected communities. According to US and Colombian authorities involved in the conduct of aerial eradication, however, most of this criticism was unwarranted or exaggerated. This article, based on interviews conducted in the last year the aerial eradication program was in operation, analyzes the disconnection between officials involved in the oversight of the aerial eradication and related policy versus black communities of the Pacific region affected by this strategy. More specifically, it examines why these rural black communities, supposedly guaranteed the right to prior consultation, were never granted this process and why the aerial eradication complaint system failed to address the grievances lodged against it. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications for the territorial rights of black communities and illicit-crop eradication in Colombia.

The ability of the United States (U.S.) to influence policies in Colombia is indisputable. The U.S. is Colombia’s largest trading partner, and this alone provides the U.S. with great power with regards to Colombian policymaking. U.S. power is not only manifest within the economic realm, though, as Colombia is a consumer of many U.S. cultural products, but U.S. political decisions also greatly inform Colombian policymaking.
However, the nature of decisions in the U.S., and their influence, only partially explains policies in Colombia. Domestic policies also remain shaped by the configuration of different actors, agendas, and interests within the country itself. 
In this chapter, we argue that although there are shifts in the agenda between both countries, we should not understand these changes as only due to the rhetoric and the style brought by the Trump government. The policy changes also relate to internal political processes within Colombia, alongside other external factors.

Whereas one might argue that there are changes with regards to policies concerning counter-narcotics, international affairs (particularly in relation to Venezuela), and military cooperation, these policies are, in fact, a continuation of long-standing policies that have only shifted in their approaches. Counter-narcotics, Venezuela, and military cooperation are indeed central to the bilateral agenda, but they have been central to this agenda for several years. 

In addition, although U.S. power can be seen as diminishing in Colombia, and other countries in the region, given the growing presence of China, the influence of the U.S. is still prevalent.1 In the case of Colombia, and given the nature of the policies and challenges that connect these two countries, U.S. power and influence remain significant. Whereas the U.S. can be understood as a hegemon in decay, it is still a hegemon, and it still wields great political and economic power, particularly in Colombia. The response and uncertainty brought by the Trump government’s rhetoric is only a symptom of this decay. And so, major shifts in policy are likely. Indeed, the rhetoric might heighten around the issue of drug trafficking and the problem of Venezuela, but no prominent changes will take place.

These continued dynamics involving U.S.-Colombia relations are due to several reasons, including:

1. In the case of drug trafficking, some policies might shift, but as long as the U.S. does not approach their problem of drug consumption in a different way, the pressure from the U.S. to embrace more repressive means will continue as it has since the war on drugs began in the 1970s. Repression reduces the availability of drugs and increases the prices of drugs, and in theory this means drugs should be less available to consumers. This logic, however, neglects the nature of addiction, where prices remain inelastic.

2. Whereas the rhetoric around Venezuela might escalate towards war and wild dreams of a joint operation involving Colombian and U.S. forces, the reality is that the international economy and the U.S. cannot afford to maintain two simultaneous conflicts in areas that hold some of the biggest oil reserves in the world. Also the U.S. is aware that the use of military force would provide legitimacy to the Maduro regime and its claims of U.S. imperialism attacking Venezuela, in addition to the likelihood of a diplomatic response by most of the countries in Latin America rejecting a military operation in the area.

This article explores the concept of ‘quasilegality’ in relation to two of Africa’s drug crops: khat and cannabis. It argues that the concept is useful in understanding the two substances and their ambiguous relation to the statute books: khat being of varied and ever-changing legal status yet often treated with suspicion even where legal, while cannabis is illegal everywhere in Africa yet often seems de facto legal. The article argues that such quasilegality is socially significant and productive, raising the value of such crops for farmers and traders, but also allowing states to police or not police these substances as their interests and instincts dictate. It also argues that there is no clear link between the law on the statute book and the actual harm potential of these substances. Finally, it suggests that the concept has much wider use beyond these case studies of drugs in Africa in a world where global consensus on drug policy is cracking, and where many other objects of trade and activities find themselves in the blurred territory of the quasilegal.

A partir de la información a escala municipal, de los cambios en las coberturas vegetales de las zonas con cultivos de coca, del Sistema de Monitoreo de Cultivos Ilícitos, se estima que la deforestación allí ocasionada correspondería a una quinta parte del total nacional en lo corrido de la primera década del siglo XXI. Además mediante econometría de panel y espacial se modela tanto la dinámica temporal como la geográfica de la deforestación, teniendo como determinantes la coca, el conflicto ambiental, la infraestructura y la vulnerabilidad a la coca de la población.

The process through which coca leaves become coca paste, the first step in the production of cocaine, is something between a car mechanics and alchemy. The chemicals used are almost shockingly banal-cement, gasoline, ammonia; while the "labs" are basically shacks with cement floors and plastic canisters barely hidden among the coca farms. And yet there is still something magical about the transformation, from crushed leaves to the crumbling white paste. Other transformations also take place: the coca grower becomes a chemist and entrepreneur. Territories, too, are transformed by the crop, and boundaries blurred. For the indigenous communities of the state of Putumayo, this stimulant has a profound effect of their relationship with their territories, their identity, and the state; yet, despite the entanglement between these fluid and dynamic processes, the figure of the indigenous cocalero occupies a discursive void, which is the subject of our paper. This research takes place as part of a broader study of the current political context in Colombia after the signing of peace agreements between the government and the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia or FARC, in 2016. The agreements included the transitional justice toolkit, as well as more comprehensive measures, such as a broad rural reform and a "comprehensive program for illicit crop substitution", or PNIS, for its somewhat unfortunate Spanish acronym. In a context in which the narratives around the peace agreements range between celebrating them as unprecedented, and bemoaning that nothing has changed, our network-under the name Transitions-set out to understand the continuities and ruptures surrounding forms of governmentality and value chains in Colombia's Southwest under this new "post-conflict" era, by working with local communities and the FARC in developing a framework to understand and act in this new context. The paper I will present today was co-written with the Colombian anthropologist Margarita Chaves. We begin by charting the development of the multicultural regime of recognition of indigeneity in Putumayo, which we argue binds identity and sovereignty. We then analyze a coexisting but different order of sovereignty and relations, that of the coca economy, in order to then explore the tensions between the two models, which we argue come to a head in the context of the "post-conflict" period. Finally, we explore new approaches to sovereignty, analyzing the

The ability of the United States (U.S.) to influence policies in Colombia is indisputable. The U.S. is Colombia's largest trading partner, and this alone provides the U.S. with great power with regards to Colombian policymaking. U.S. power is not only manifest within the economic realm, though, as Colombia is a consumer of many U.S. cultural products, but U.S. political decisions also greatly inform Colombian policymaking. However, the nature of decisions in the U.S., and their influence, only partially explains policies in Colombia. Domestic policies also remain shaped by the configuration of different actors, agendas, and interests within the country itself. In this chapter, we argue that although there are shifts in the agenda between both countries, we should not understand these changes as only due to the rhetoric and the style brought by the Trump government. The policy changes also relate to internal political processes within Colombia, alongside other external factors.

In this paper I will seek to investigate what effects the International Illicit Political Economy (IIPE) has had on development. In doing so I will discuss the IIPE and explain its defining features and internal logics of operation; then I will use the IIPE to examine the material and discursive effects it has had on development in the global South. Here, I will draw on both post-Marxist and post-Foucauldian thought, using Foucault’s concepts of ‘discipline’ and ‘governmentality” to investigate what impacts illicit trade has had on development within what may be broadly referred to as the global paradigm of neoliberalism. I will combine these Foucaldian concepts with more traditional Marxian analysis of the international political economy to argue that rather than being an external force that acts upon the normal functioning of the international political economy (IPE), the IIPE actually is a major part of its functioning and a major tool for the domination of the South by the North. As such the IIPE exists within relationships of domination and subordination, where micro and macro relations and economies of power and knowledge interact with one another, producing what may be referred to as ‘zones of exception’ in both the material operation of the IPE and the discursive realms it produces. Within such zones, certain tolerated illegalities exist in a grey area between legality and illegality—producing both subjects of knowledge and  objects for intervention—as the disciplinary technologies of power, originally created in societies within the developed North, are extended to encompass all of global society.

Thus, in this paper I will argue that the IIPE and its zones of exception serve two large purposes for those in the hegemonic North: (1) it allows for tolerated illegalities to exist in ways that proliferate capitalist investment and profit (which flows out of the South and back to the North) through the extension of disciplinary surveillance and control over the entirety of the globe, and (2) it allows for the creation of a class of delinquents which capitalism uses to institutionalize and codify unequal relations of power, often along racial, ethnic, religious, or class lines. Moreover, I would also like to argue that the genesis of these tolerated illegalities, and with them the zones of exception they produce, is not indigenous to the countries and regions in which they have come to exist: they were created in the developed North and exported to the underdeveloped South through the governmentality of disciplinary neoliberalism. Finally, as a consequence of this new governmentality associated with disciplinary neoliberalism I would also like to argue that the underdeveloped South bears the brunt of the costs associated with the IIPE while the developed North reaps the majority of the benefits.

A partir de la información a escala municipal, de los cambios en las coberturas vegetales de las zonas con cultivos de coca, del Sistema de Monitoreo de Cultivos Ilícitos, se estima que la deforestación allí ocasionada correspondería a una quinta parte del total nacional en lo corrido de la primera década del siglo XXI. Además mediante econometría de panel y espacial se modela tanto la dinámica temporal como la geográfica de la deforestación, teniendo como determinantes la coca, el conflicto ambiental, la infraestructura y la vulnerabilidad a la coca de la población.

En este artículoargumento que la hoja de coca es un vector en el ejercicio político de  campesinas/os en  el  Putumayo  colombiano.A  partir  del  trabajo  de  campo realizado durante las protestas campesinas de 2019 y 2021, analizoalgunas de las posiciones y narrativas que tieneel cultivo de hoja de coca como objeto centraltanto de airadas  defensas como de las  estrategias  antidrogas.  Concluyoque  la  coca  ha favorecido  la  permanencia  de  campesinos  en  sus tierras,así  como  la  creación  de espacios  de  construcción deciudadanía  en términos  campesinos  y  putumayenses. Aporta a la cuestión del estado local, un tema central para la antropología política actual.

In what conditions do coca producing families live in Colombia? What is the situation of the crop in the middle of the violence and the prohibitionist policies of the State on this plant? To what does it respond that political-military groups such as the FARC are described as narco-guerrilla? Why did you decide to sign a peace agreement?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ3ungya5f4&t=7s

In A Contracorriente, Luis Hernández Navarro interviews Estefanía Ciro Rodríguez, specialist in the peace process in Colombia and a researcher at the Thinking Center A la Orilla del Río./
¿En qué condiciones viven las familias productoras de coca en Colombia? ¿Cuál es la situación del cultivo en medio de la violencia y las políticas prohibicionistas del Estado sobre esta planta? ¿A qué responde que a grupos político-militar como las FARC se les califique de narcoguerrilla? ¿Por qué decidieron firmar un acuerdo de paz?

En A Contracorriente, Luis Hernández Navarro entrevista a Estefanía Ciro Rodríguez, especialista del proceso de paz en Colombia e investigadora del Centro de Pensamiento A la Orilla del Río. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ3ungya5f4&t=7s

In Peru, the coca growers' movement emerged as a response to the State stance against the proliferation of illicit cultivation of coca leaf. To defend this product, this social movement has appealed mainly to three kinds of actors: pressure groups, political parties and insurgent groups. This article points that, in the exercise of this intermediation, these three actors deploy contradictory discourses and practices, according to the political arenas in which the movement requires navigate to defend the cultivation of the coca leaf.