By Esneyder Negrete and Irene Escudero |
Unguía (Colombia) (EFE) , an activity that they would like to leave behind.
However, their hope clashes with the apathy of an absent State, of which they only know the military face, and with the Clan del Golfo, the illegal armed group that controls the drug-trafficking business in much of the country.
Planting corn, plantains or rice is less profitable than planting coca, the peasants of Unguía (Chocó), in the northwest, know this. They long to return to those tasks, but they know that cultivating the plant can give them money and many problems at the same time. .
“The Government (Anti-Narcotics Police) came. What did they come to do? Let’s burn the coves”, a nervous Elías Caro, president of the Community Action Board of the village of El Naranjo, told EFE about the operations against illicit crops.
Following the burning of several “coves” in the area by the Army a few weeks ago, President Gustavo Petro celebrated the destruction of several “laboratories” as part of his policy of prioritizing seizures over forced eradications.
The peasants complain about these operations, since these laboratories, which they call “coves”, are a rustic complex of 20 square meters, with a plastic roof and a dirt floor.
In these structures, they prick the leaf with a scythe to release substance and later ferment it with a cocktail of chemicals with ammonia, sulfuric acid, gasoline, cement and lime to obtain the paste or coca base.
“They arrive and they pass it on the news, which are some laboratories of illegal groups that operate in the area. And it is not like that (…) they are running over the peasant, they are not weakening any illegal group ”, he reaffirms.
Coca: a lot of money, little profit
The peasants calculate that to produce a gram of coca paste it is necessary to collect an arroba of leaves, a task carried out by a “raspachin” who is paid 8,000 pesos (1.79 dollars) for each arroba collected.
This market, which has suffered a drop in prices, is regulated by whoever governs it, the Clan del Golfo, and each gram of coca paste is quoted at 3,100 pesos (0.67 dollars), but sometimes small-scale production in their crops it is insufficient to cover the expenses while the bushes are ready for a new harvest.
“These crops are not being profitable,” refers to EFE Tomás Fandiño, president of the Unguía Coca Growers Association, who admits that in the drug trafficking chain they are a small link that must deal with the persecution of the authorities and where the money The illegal networks keep it.
“We are between a rock and a hard place, the government says one thing and the armed groups another. And in the end we carry a stick from all over the world, ”he says.
Going into the mountainous and jungle border of Colombia and Panama, thousands of felled trees give way to the brilliant green of coca, but the cocaleros affirm: “The business is not really good for us as it is now.”
They insist that the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia – or “the Company”, as they call the Clan del Golfo – do not meddle in their issues, but when asked who buys the coca paste in whispers, a farmer affirms: “the financing arm of the paramilitaries”.
It is a business for which the Clan del Golfo has threatened entire towns in the Caribbean and Pacific, where the priority is shipments that end up in the hands of Mexican or international groups and therefore kill and displace their population.
Message to the Government
Both Caro and Fandiño put their hopes in the government’s new anti-drug policy that seeks to give oxygen to small growers, but suffocate traffickers, money launderers and groups that live from the business, at a time when cultivated hectares are beating records and last year stood at 204,000 in the country.
They ask the State to attend to them “and to listen to the peasants of Unguía who are obliged to sow coca leaves because there is no other alternative,” says Caro, looking from time to time at the plane that flies over and that a few weeks ago landed to set fire to their plots.
Although the peasants say they are willing to participate in the Comprehensive National Program for the Substitution of Crops for Illicit Use (PNIS), which was established in the agreement with the FARC, they make it clear that they will only do so when the State arrives.
And that they do it not in military helicopters but with social programs that improve access roads and buying crops without intermediaries. But, for the moment, the only ones that have improved their roads are the Clan del Golfo.
“They have come here three times to eradicate, and the government has never brought us a productive project,” says Caro.