Plan Colombia and Beyond

Until about 2003 or so, the State Department’s estimates of South American coca cultivation appeared within an annual public report about the previous year’s narcotics strategy. This report came out at the beginning of March.

A few years ago, though, the coca estimate’s release disappeared from the annual narcotics reports, only to be put out in press releases weeks later. Officials insisted they needed more time to come up with a number.

In 2005 and 2006, when U.S. data began to show Colombian coca on the increase, the estimates came out in April, at the very end of Good Friday, the beginning of Easter weekend. This year, though, Good Friday came and went with no word on what happened to Colombia’s coca crop in 2006, despite record amounts of U.S.-funded herbicide fumigation and forced manual eradication.

As of June 1, though, we finally have the U.S. coca estimate for last year. It comes from an unusual source: Colombian President Álvaro Uribe.

(Click to enlarge image)

At the end of a long speech Friday, Uribe revealed that, according to U.S. government measures, Colombian coca cultivation increased from 144,000 hectares to 156,000 hectares between 2005 and 2006 (that’s from 355,800 acres to 385,500 acres).

According to the Associated Press, it was no accident that Uribe dropped this bad news just a few days before another visit to Washington (he arrives Wednesday night).

“Yesterday [Thursday] they [the U.S. government] told me they were worried about revealing this number because of my upcoming trip to the United States, that the Americans should reveal it,” Uribe said. “But that’s why I’m revealing it. We’re not trying to put makeup on what is a serious matter.”

We understand that the U.S. government will probably follow up with an official release of Colombian coca data sometime today (probably on this page).

Uribe’s announcement also comes shortly before Tuesday’s meeting of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, which will be “marking up” (drafting and approving) the foreign aid budget bill for 2008. The coca announcement will give further backing to majority-party Democrats who believe that the aerial herbicide fumigation program in Colombia has been unsuccessful and a poor use of scarce foreign-aid funds.

Indeed, the new numbers do indicate that the U.S.-supported program – massive fumigation plus insufficient development aid – has been a shocking failure.

This is true even if one takes into account that the U.S. government is measuring more of the country than before. Many of the remote, empty areas now being measured for the first time probably had no coca until recently. Significant coca-growing in places like Vichada or Chocó began after fumigation elsewhere displaced coca-growing into previously undisturbed jungles.

Changes in measurement methodology may mean that the 2006 figure cannot be usefully compared with previous years. Even if it is inaccurate to say that coca “increased” in 2006, though, we can say for sure that

(1) Large-scale spraying has failed to reduce coca-growing in Colombia. The 2006 figure is the second-highest amount of coca that the U.S. government has ever measured.

(2) We really have little idea how much coca is being grown in Colombia. The U.S. government estimate is now almost exactly double the figure that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime will release later this month (79,000 hectares). The U.S. figure increased in 2006, while the UN figure shrank. What is going on?

(3) This is the time for a new strategy. At the end of 1999, the U.S. government assumed that there were 122,500 hectares of coca in Colombia. It reacted by helping to design “Plan Colombia,” and pushing a big aid bill through Congress in early 2000.

Seven years later, after $5.4 billion in U.S. aid to Colombia and 946,000 hectares sprayed or manually eradicated, the U.S. government has found 27% more coca. How will it react now? The answer should be with a profound change in strategy. Forced eradication must give way to governance and economic opportunity in coca-growing zones.

Share This