This plant, it’s incredibly important.
It’s called coca and it mainly grows here.
I’m right in the middle of it right now.
Right down here, in southern Colombia,
spending the day with the anti-narcotic police, who are looking for coca plants to destroy.
Coca is harvested by local farmers,
shredded, soaked in chemicals,
and then cooked down into a paste.
This paste is sold to cartels that use a series of chemical processes
to turn it into the white powder we call cocaine,
which is then shipped around the globe,
the biggest portion ending up in the United States.
But this isn’t a story about cartels or drug trafficking.
It’s not even a story about cocaine, really.
This is a story about this leaf and the families who grow it, out here deep in the jungle.
It’s these families who are most affected by the cocaine economy and
it's these families who are caught in the middle of Colombia's war on drugs.
It’s a Friday evening and I’m at a police base that’s right at the cusp of Colombia’s vast Amazon rainforest.
This is Colombia at some of its most rural.
And this region has historically been a top coca producer in the country.
The intelligence unit just got done briefing us on
a possible location of some fields where coca is being harvested and processed.
We touch down in a couple of spots, but only find abandoned farms, no coca.
But then after a few hours, we spot it, a clearing deep in the jungle
and rows and rows of this light green coca leaf.
We land at this coca farm and find that it’s run by a family.
There are kids here, no guns, no resistance.
Just beside their house is a shed where they’ve been shredding the leaves,
which are now soaking in chemicals, the step before they get sold off the the cartels.
And the police aren’t here to arrest them, but rather destroy their operation.
Around 6 months of work and very likely, this family’s only income prospects right now.
The troops are clearly aware that they’ve derailed this family’s year.
Coca farms like these fuel an incredibly dangerous cocaine industry,
which hurts tens of thousands of people every year.
So are these coca farmers the bad guys?
If not, why are we burning their shed?
And if they’re farmers, why don’t they just grow another crop that isn’t illegal,
like pineapple or potato?
To find this out, I needed to go back into the jungle,
but not in helicopters surrounded by police
but on my own.
Look at this chart.
This line shows coca production over time.
And look what's happened since 2013.
Coca production has hit an all-time high.
And the largest portion of the resulting cocaine is ending up in the United States,
which is the biggest cocaine market in the world.
Far away in Colombia’s capital, Bogota, the government has been trying for decades to curb this problem.
Over the years, they’ve tried two main tactics for eradicating coca cultivation:
The first entails flying over these fields and blanketing the whole area with this plant killing chemical,
which is the same as the roundup chemical that you use to kill weeds in your yard.
The other strategy is the one that I was a part of:
Sending out troops to manual destroy the crops by uprooting it
or burning the sheds where the harvest is being processed.
But there are some major problems with these tactics.
First, spraying entire areas with this plant killing chemical doesn’t just affect the coca fields,
it affects anything else it touches.
Killing food crops and the whole rainforest that surrounds these fields,
which is some of the most biodiverse forest on Earth.
The UN and the WHO also found that these chemicals are
potentially a cause of cancer for the residents in these areas.
So in 2015, the Colombian government suspended the chemical dumping strategy.
So now they’re looking for new solutions.
And last year they implemented something called the crop substitution program,
where the government is going to pay one million pesos per month, which is like $327,
to any farmer who eradicates their coca crop on their own and starts growing a legal crop,
like oranges or pineapple or yuca.
After a very bumpy ride, I made it to a community that used to be an epicenter for coca production.
But last year, they signed up for this crop substitution program.
All the farmers in the community signed a pact that they would willingly transition to a legal crop.
During my conversations, the farmers kept throwing math problems my way.
These farmers live and die by prices.
Prices of farm supplies, prices of seeds, prices of transportation
and of course, the price that they can sell their crop for.
Keep in mind that where I am is a place that is almost completely absent of any central government presence.
There aren’t good roads, security, reliable markets.
And so when you start to do the math of all the costs associated with growing something else,
it just doesn’t add up, which is why coca thrives out here.
As this farming community tries to survive outside the cocaine economy,
they’re experiencing what it feels like to be just another rural community,
cut off from Colombia’s mainstream economies.
The government might may be able to pay these farmers to get rid of their coca,
but without roads, markets, banks, and connections to the rest of the country
these new economies will not take root.
So now think back to that family whose shed the police burned down earlier.
They live an hour’s helicopter ride from any town.
So they don’t really have any other economic options beyond coca,
which is really the only commodity they can transport to a market.
Though I did find one family that represents a success story for the crop substitution program.
They mainly grow passion fruit.
But they also grow corn, yuca, tomatoes, peppers, and raise animals.
Passion fruit juice, incredible.
They switched from coca last year after an entire lifetime of growing it.
And it’s gone really well for them.
But you’ll notice that this family has a huge plot of land.
Most of the farmers out here don’t have that big plot of land.
And they don’t have the ability to cultivate so many crops to replace their coca.
So as of now, all of these solutions continue to be bandaids.
Dumping roundup on these fields, manually eradicating, even the crop substitution.
The only lasting solution will come when the government
invests in connecting these communities to the rest of the country,
so that legal economies can actually take root here.
That’s going to take time and money, but until the government does this long, slow work,
farmers will continue to find a way to participate in the only economy that pays.
Alright, that's it.
Borders: Colombia is over. Thank you for watching,
I learned so much about this country reporting these videos and I hope you did too.
Everything from the border, up to the hippos, and then learning about this new style of music.
And I even got to go eat some fruit in Bogota, which was really fun.
Next step for me is I'm going to start looking into the next location for Borders,
so stay tuned for that.
And also I should tell you that Vox just started a membership program.
For $5 a month you can get access to
a bunch of behind the scenes stuff.
I did this extended interview with this drummer that I met reporting episode 3 of Borders.
And you can see that whole thing if you become a member.
So you can go check that out on the YouTube channel and thanks for watching Borders.