Our latest podcast is about drug trade. As usual, the podcast is in Spanish – for those lucky bilingual birds – but I will touch upon some of the topics in my blog for English speakers. Why drug trade? During the peace negotiations in Havana, we spent a great deal of time discussing drug trafficking. It formed part of the fourth point on the negotiating agenda: the solution to the problem of illicit drugs. One of the results was PNIS, the National Comprehensive Programme for the Substitution of Illicit Crops.
At the time, however, another story was being told in Colombia. The message repeated in much of the media was remarkably simple: the FARC controlled the drug-trafficking routes; once the guerrilla laid down its weapons and handed over those routes, the drug business would come to an end. This prediction turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Drug trafficking did not disappear with the FARC, nor did coca plants or cocaine production. The routes did not disappear either. And, last but not least, the money keeps on circulating. And I keep on wondering: why is nobody talking about this today?
What disappeared was not drug trafficking, but much of the public debate about who truly benefits from it. That is exactly where selective memory becomes politically useful.
In 2016, the year the Peace Agreement was signed, Colombia had approximately 146,000 hectares planted with coca. By 2024, that figure had risen to around 261,000 hectares. The cocaine economy has also become considerably more productive, sophisticated and transnational. Recent estimates say the revenues generated by cocaine production and trafficking at more than four per cent of Colombia’s GDP. Because this is an illegal economy, any attempt to calculate its exact size has obvious limitations. But the general conclusion is difficult to dispute: the business did not disappear after the Peace Agreement. It expanded and transformed.
Shouldn’t we then reconsider the way the problem was framed in the first place? Drug trafficking was never simply a “FARC problem.” It is a capitalist problem, a cultural problem, a problem of the Colombian state and its institutions, and, fundamentally, a transnational problem involving producers, traffickers, financial systems, money laundering, international routes and consumers across the world.
Reducing all of that to one armed organization was politically convenient. It was never an adequate explanation of the phenomenon.
Living in Cali, you encounter the cocaine economy in ways that are sometimes difficult to quantify but impossible not to notice. Huge luxury cars move through the south of the city. People look at them and whisper: narcos. Everybody seems to know. And that raises an uncomfortable question: if everybody knows, why does nothing happen?
Why is state policy so often directed at the coca-growing peasant at the very bottom of the chain, while the enormous accumulation of capital further up that chain seems much harder to confront?
The same question occurred to us during the war. Everybody supposedly knew where the drug-trafficking routes were. Yet the public was told that the FARC would somehow “hand over” those routes during the peace process, as though they were secret roads whose existence was known only to us.
Well, they were not. My ETCR (the Reintegration Zones where we handed in our weapons) was established along a route historically associated with the drug trade. There were army checkpoints. There was an enormous movement of coca leaf and other goods. So again: if the routes are known, if the regions are known and if the economic structures are known, why is dismantling the business apparently so difficult? And why are people who seriously expose corruption and trafficking networks so frequently threatened or silenced?
Those questions take us beyond coca cultivation. They take us to the relationship between illicit economies and institutions. This remains one of the central weaknesses of the traditional “war on drugs.” It concentrates on territory, crops and poor communities while paying much less public attention to the structures that allow the money to circulate and become legitimate.
None of this means pretending that the FARC existed outside the drug economy. The FARC was founded in 1964. The cocaine economy expanded dramatically in Colombia from the late 1970s and especially during the 1980s. When that new economy entered the territories where the guerrilla operated, it also became a source of taxation and financing for the war. People sometimes forget another basic fact: war is extraordinarily expensive. An army needs food, uniforms, medicines and weapons. It has to sustain people in territories where there may be no other significant economy at all.
There was an obvious incompatibility between the revolutionary values we claimed to defend and the culture surrounding the cocaine economy. The revolutionary ideal emphasized austerity, collective life and opposition to capitalist accumulation. We were not paid salaries. Personal enrichment was formally rejected. Everything belonged to the organization, not to individual combatants.
Narcoculture represented almost the exact opposite: ostentatious wealth, enormous cars, extravagant spending, individual enrichment, displays of power and a particular relationship between money, masculinity and violence. Many young people in the FARC felt attracted to that.
And so do young people in rural communities nowadays—not necessarily because they are attracted to cocaine itself, but because they are attracted to the economy and culture surrounding it. Imagine being eighteen years old in a rural territory where there is almost no employment, inadequate education, few possibilities to study, poor infrastructure and decades of state abandonment.
Then another economy arrives, offering motorcycles, money, status, guns, huge cars. And maybe a sense of power. What exactly is the legal economy offering in competition? There are certainly villages where drug money, cockfighting, alcohol, weapons, machismo and violence form part of everyday life. Domestic violence should not be romanticized away either.
On the other hand, there is also resistance against it. Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and peasant communities have fought to protect their territories and their own systems of values from an economy that attempts to make money the measure of everything. In many Indigenous territories, for example, the defense of collective authority, community and territory becomes simultaneously a resistance to narcoculture.
There is an interesting difference between how narcoculture operates in rural and urban Colombia. In the cities, its influence has become so normalized that we often cease to see it. You can encounter it in architecture, interior design, beauty standards, music, fashion, cars, nightlife and ideas about success. Cali has been profoundly shaped by this history. In that sense, I sometimes think the cultural battle against narcoculture has largely been lost in the cities—not because everybody is involved in drug trafficking, obviously, but because many of its aesthetic and social values have been absorbed into mainstream culture.
There is another effect of drug trafficking that receives remarkably little attention: what happens to ordinary businesses that have to compete against capital that does not obey ordinary economic rules?
Money laundering does not take place somewhere outside the legal economy, as its entire purpose is to enter it. Cash-intensive businesses are particularly vulnerable because their exact turnover can be difficult to reconstruct. A bakery, for example, may sell hundreds of low-cost products every day, much of it traditionally for cash. Production fluctuates, prices vary. Thousands of small transactions are more difficult to trace than a handful of large ones. I’m not saying that all 24-hour bakeries here in Cali are money-laundering businesses. But imagine trying to open a legitimate bakery in a neighborhood where several bakeries are being sustained by money originating elsewhere.
A business being used primarily to legitimize other money does not necessarily have the same imperative. It can tolerate losses, sell at unusually low prices, pay rents that make little commercial sense or remain open under conditions in which an ordinary entrepreneur would go bankrupt. How does a legitimate entrepreneur compete with that?
For our cooperative – De Mano en Mano-, that contradiction can sometimes be particularly frustrating. We received a building from the Colombian government in 2024 – ironically enough, taken away from a narco. For two years, we have struggled to find the resources simply to make it usable. Every step costs money: electrical systems. Plumbing. Structural repairs. Floors. Bathrooms. Furniture. Equipment. Permits.
Finding seed capital is difficult enough. Finding the money to renovate a large building is harder still. And after all that, you still have not actually financed the business that is supposed to operate inside it. Meanwhile, in Cali, one sometimes watches enormous commercial projects seem to spring from the ground almost overnight.
I’m not saying that such quick construction is evidence of drug trafficking per sé. But still, Colombia’s history forces us to be asking where the money comes from.
So, the greatest deception was never the claim that the FARC had something to do with the cocaine economy. We did, and denying that would be absurd. The deception was this idea that the cocaine economy could be explained by the FARC. The years since the Peace Agreement have definitely demonstrated that it cannot.
Remove one armed organization and the business adapts. New actors occupy territories. Routes change. Production becomes more efficient. International networks evolve. Money finds new ways into the formal economy.
The crop is only the most visible part of a much larger system and perhaps that is precisely why governments find it so convenient to concentrate on it. A coca field can be photographed, eradicated and counted. It is much harder though to photograph the network of political influence, corruption, international finance, money laundering, legal businesses, consumers and accumulated capital that allows the entire economy to function.
