Occasional voices were raised to criticize chemical fumigation

During the year 1994, 5.314 hectares were eradicated .However, according to US estimates, poppy fields that year did not fall below 20,000 hectares, an estimate that was never denied by the Colombian authorities.The illegal heroin trade of the eighties and nineties appeared to follow a similar pattern to that of the marijuana business in the sixties and seventies. In the case of marijuana, the production triangle in this hemisphere had been made up of Mexico, Jamaica and Colombia. When repression took its toll in one country, especially due to the use of herbicides, the business moved to another, although it always returned to the spot where initially larger amounts had been planted. Something similar occurred with poppies between Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia. The original problem of illegal crops was never overcome, nor were the authorities able to dismount the equipment and infrastructure which enabled such plantations and laboratories to stay in business in the above-mentioned countries. By attacking temporarily, and in an isolated fashion an illegal crop, public anti-drug policy automatically attacks the weakest and least decisive link in the vast and complex chain of illegal drug dealing, and at the same time has the worst possible negative effect from a social viewpoint on small farmers and Indian populations, while affecting hardly at all the area of organized crime financed by the drug traffickers. The Gaviria administration had decided to deal with the drug problem by placing its emphasis on a policy of submission and making clear that it differentiated between drug trafficking and narco-terrorism. President Gaviria stated that “while narco-terrorism is our problem, drug trafficking is an international phenomenon.” Nonetheless, in the case of poppy growing, Gaviria did what former governments had done in their attacks on coca and marijuana fields.

The results of his efforts were insignificant and ephemeral, as were those of his predecessors. When a government acts on the basis of punishment alone and without offering incentives,indoor vertical farming believing that it is indulging in a technically-approved and non-harmful type of fumigation, it finishes up contributing to environmental damage and to a greater social breakdown in the zones where the plantations are grown.But discussions on the subject assumed an elitist, moral tone: on one side were the “good, hard-line, intelligent people” uncontaminated by drug traffic, and on the other “the softies, the badies, the dumb idiots” who were either mouthpieces of the traffickers or were unconsciously letting themselves be used by them. In February 1992, Colombia’s Justice Minister made a comment which illustrates this point: he claimed that “a cloak of complicity has been thrown over things by those who object to herbicide fumigation for environmental reasons, while all the time playing into the hands of the drug traffickers.”At no time was there a lobby sufficiently coherent, serious and affirmative to combat the government’s determination to keep on fumigating. The executive did not receive substantial criticism nor impediments to the actions it carried out through legislation and the judiciary. The government was therefore able to go ahead with its eradication policy with few internal restrictions. Even so, the result was not very positive; the rise of the poppy emporium in Colombia amply demonstrated the limits of the government’s public anti-narcotics policy and the dramatic consequences of unremitting prohibition on the part of the United States. The Colombian government did not attack drug trafficking or narco-terrorism on the financial front. In accordance with the logic of the so-called economic liberalization fomented by the government in the early nineties, it made no sense to place restrictions and greater controls on the free movement of capital. In 1993, a report by the Vienna-based United Nations International Board on Fiscal Control of Narcotics recommended that “Colombian legislation consider the laundering of capital resources to be a crime and that banking laws should become stricter in order to allow for multilateral cooperation….”The alleged financing of the presidential election campaign with drug money formed the backdrop to the anti-narcotics policies of President Ernesto Samper’s administration . As months went by, the coercive diplomacy which the United States had hitherto been exerting on Colombia became transformed into “blackmail diplomacy.”The president’s capacity for political survival led him to “North Americanize” the fight against drug trafficking in Colombia; that is to say, the president accepted and implemented a strategy virtually imposed by the United States. The Samper government undertook an all-out chemical eradication campaign far beyond anything seen in the two preceding decades, with massive use of glyphosate. Fumigators also employed imazapyr, a more powerful granulated herbicide, and were planning to use tebuthiouron, an even more devastating killer than the others. Ernesto Samper also became the president who most helped criminalize the drug trade, while in Colombia it became almost impossible to discuss the subject of legalizing drugs, something Samper himself had suggested in the late seventies, given the failure of repressive measures taken at that time by the Turbay administration and fomented by the United States.The Samper government even went beyond the demands of the United States executive and legislature. In 1995, months before the infamous “Frechette Memorandum”began to circulate — a document which suggested that Colombia should adopt legislation and take drastic measures in the anti-drug war — President Samper had launched his “integral plan” announcing, amongst other things, the creation of Operación Resplandor designed to put a definite end to all illegal crops which existed in Colombia in the space of two years.”An all-out eradication policy had been set in place. In 1994 , 4.094 hectares of coca were eradicated. In 1995, the Samper administration eradicated 25,402 hectares; and in 1996, 9,711 hectares. In 1994, the Gaviria and Samper administrations had eradicated 5,314 hectares of poppies. In 1995, the Samper government eradicated 5,074 hectares; and in 1996, 6,044 hectares Between the years 1995 and 1996, glyphosate was used on a massive scale to destroy illegal crops.Even so, the idea of putting an end once and for all to illegal crops proved again to be illusory. In 1996, the US government estimated that the number of hectares dedicated to the planting of coca in Colombia had reached 53,800 hectares, while independent estimates placed the figure at around 80,000 hectares.This meant that Colombia had surpassed Bolivia, a country which traditionally was second only to Peru as a coca producer in South America. The same official US source estimated that Colombia had 4.133 hectares of marijuana and that the country had produced 63 tons of heroin in 1996. However, Colombians had their greatest surprise of all in 1996 when small farmers from the south, especially from the Caquetá region, suddenly made their presence felt in mass demonstrations and protest marches. Nobody had expected this. It was as if the whole population had discovered overnight, and a little belatedly, that the country had ceased to be the processor of these stimulants and had transformed itself now into something else: a huge grower of illegal crops. People also came to realize that the state simply did not operate at all in a large and strategic portion of the country’s territory, and that power, at the local level, was in the hands of insurgent groups, especially in those of the FARC . Colombians came to realize as well that violent measures alone were not going to solve the profound and intricate social, political and economic problems which had been incubating for decades in the nation’s geographic wilderness.In sum, fumigating with herbicides in southern Colombia in 1996 turned out to be as useless for dismantling the illegal business of drug dealing as had similar efforts in previous years. The difference was that, in 1996, paramilitary detachments were multiplying at a frightening rate in the south. The political blindness of people in government, hydroponic vertical farming police officers and the military, together with the administration’s obsequious submission to United States policies, led to a repeat, in 1997, of the indiscriminate fumigation with herbicides — on a huge scale with glyphosate, to a lesser extent with imazapyr. In 1997, Colombia sprayed 41,847 hectares of coca and 6,962 hectares of marijuana. Twenty-two hectares of coca were eradicated manually, as well as twenty-five hectares of poppies and 261 hectares of marijuana. In just over three years, the government had fumigated more than 100,000 hectares of illegal crops. But paradoxically that only went to prove, as never before, just how mistaken, harmful and counter-productive the chemical destruction of such crops could be; in 1998, almost 110,000 hectares of the national territory were dedicated to plantations of coca, marijuana and poppies. In that year, the Samper administration , and that of Andrés Pastrana , fumigated 66,083 hectares of coca and 2,931 of poppies, and manually destroyed 3,126 hectares of coca, 181 of poppies and 18 of marijuana.From the mid-nineties up to the present time, Colombia has broken all historical records in the matter of fumigation. And yet the data on the eradication of illegal crops in Colombia has never been more negative. For example, according to US estimates, in 1990 heroin production in Colombia was hardly worth mentioning; there were 32,100 hectares of coca plantations, and marijuana was being grown in 1,500 hectares. In 1996, Colombia was producing 63 tons of heroin annually, while 32,100 hectares were planted in coca and 4,133 in marijuana.In 1998, Colombia produced 435 metric tons of cocaine, and in 1999 it was producing 520 metric tons, and in the year 2000 production had gone up to 580 tons.According to Colombia’s Anti-narcotic Police, the Pastrana government had destroyed approximately 50,000 hectares of coca plantations by 1999 , and the US State Department gives a total of 56,254 hectares eradicated by Colombia in the year 2000.50Nonetheless, according to the Central Intelligence Agency , the total area planted in coca in 1999 amounted to 120,000 hectares,and the US State Department declared that this had increased to 136,200 hectares in the year 2000. This means that in just four years, from 1996 to 2000, the surface planted in coca in Colombia has doubled; the total number of hectares went from 8,280 to 13,200. An increase in the fumigation of illegal crops has not resulted in a decrease in the area planted with illegal crops, nor to a decrease in the production of illegal drugs. To this evident failure one must add the fact that, on the US market, cocaine and heroin have become both cheaper and purer. It is worth noting, also, that something similar has occurred in Western Europe where, in 1999, a gram of cocaine was worth US$90, and a gram of heroin was fetching US$98. So, the rationale which attempts to justify a strong eradication policy in the centers of supply has proved to be way off the mark. It had been presumed that the massive destruction of illegal drugs where production and processing were taking place was going to lead to less availability of narcotics in the centers of demand, an increase in price for the ultimate consumer and a lowering of standards of purity in the stimulants themselves. Quite the opposite has happened; in the year 2000 one could procure in the United States more drugs of better quality than ever before, and at lower prices. Besides, in terms of illegal drug consumption and of drug-related crime, the United States record has not shown substantial improvement. In 1988 the number of occasional consumers of heroin was reckoned at 167,000; in 1995 it had reached 322,000; while the total number of heroin consumers worldwide went from 692,000 in 1992 to 810,000 in 1995. The overall demand for heroin was 1,800,000 grams per year in 1988, but by 1996 it had soared to 2,400,000.53 Despite certain laudable achievements in reducing drug consumption in the United States, it is evident that a strong demand still exists. In this context it is worth quoting Bruce Bagley: “Some 13 million US drug users spent approximately US$67 billion on illicit drugs in 1999, making the US market the most lucrative one in the world for Colombian traffickers.”Concomitantly, in 1990 the total number of arrests in the area of drug-related law infringements was 1,089,500, whereas in 1996 the figure had risen to 1,128,647. In 1990, 53 percent of prisoners in federal jails were serving sentences for narcotic-related crimes; in 1995 the statistic had risen to 59.9 percent.