Inside the hopeless effort to quash cocaine by force

THE BLACK Hawks whirr over the hills of southern Colombia. The forest is pockmarked with charred patches, clearings burned away to sow illicit coca, the leaves of which are used to make cocaine. In Villagarzón, Colombian drug-trafficking groups use the Putumayo River to ship their product into neighbouring Ecuador, and then onto the rest of the world.

One helicopter buzzes around, acting as a decoy, while the other touches down, buffeting surrounding coca bushes. A dozen Comandos Jungla (Jungle Commandos), an elite unit of Colombia’s anti-narcotics police, leap out. Clutching assault rifles, they stalk towards their target: a wooden shack, concealed by banana trees. They are destroying gang-run laboratories in the border regions, where almost 70% of the world’s cocaine is made. Gangsters coerce some farmers into making coca paste, threatening them with murder and recruiting their children as fighters. Other cocaleros simply work the crop because it is profitable.

This raid is part of a three-pronged strategy that Colombia’s left-wing government, led by President Gustavo Petro, is using to fight drug-trafficking. It focuses on cracking down on cocaine shipments at ports; catching and extraditing bad guys; and destroying drug-making facilities like this one. The result has been an uptick in cocaine seizures, which the government claims as a victory. Between Mr Petro taking office in August 2022 and the end of 2025, Colombian authorities claim to have intercepted 2,840 tonnes of cocaine, 61% more than the previous right-wing government managed over a comparable time period.

Yet this number simply reveals the vast scale of production, which has expanded along with Colombia’s coca fields. Cocaine production in Colombia hit a record 3,001 tonnes in 2024, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which monitors coca. That is 13% more than in the previous year, and more than double their figure for 2021, the year before Mr Petro took office. Critics point to rising production as proof that Mr Petro is failing.

Few are more outspoken than Donald Trump. The volumes of cocaine leaving Colombia have enraged the American president, for whom a crusade against drugs is one of the purported reasons for asserting the dominance of the United States over Latin America. The day after bombing Venezuela and snatching its leader Nicolás Maduro, Mr Trump warned that Colombia’s “cocaine mills” could be next. Last year, the White House stripped Colombia of its status as an ally in the war on drugs, although security co-operation continues for now. A fragile truce reigns since a phone call between the two leaders on January 7th. But that could well break when Mr Trump meets Mr Petro in the White House on February 3rd.

In the coca-paste laboratory, the atmosphere is uneasy. Three cocaleros watch hopelessly as the commandos prepare to set it all alight. “If you burn this right now, you will take away the only support we have,” says one, Esperanza, gesturing to plastic tubs in which leaves are soaking in fuel to extract the coca alkaloid. She has three children to look after, she says, and gets nothing from the state. When the state goes after gangsters, coca farmers end up as collateral damage.

This is partly because persuading Esperanza and her fellow farmers to uproot coca is a slow process. It requires building roads and a marketplace for bulky crops such as cacao and papaya. By contrast, coca-paste buyers come to their door. Nor does crop substitution work if rebel groups are at war nearby. By March, the government will have succeeded in substituting 30,500 hectares of coca, according to their data, equivalent to just 12% of Colombia’s coca fields.

The commandos have raided more than 18,000 such labs in the past three years. But their efforts only knock out production for as long as it takes criminals to haul another batch of expensive chemicals into the jungle. It’s ​​a Sisyphean task: more labs spring up as more coca is sown across swathes of Colombia.

Rather than tackling the root of the problem, Mr Petro prefers to pick a fight with the messenger. He disputes the UNODC’s “opaque” methodology (in place since 1999) and has blocked the agency’s publication of its latest report because its contents make him look bad. On January 22nd, he threatened to sideline the UNODC (to which the Colombian government contributes) saying that Colombia’s police would take over monitoring instead. That risks damaging international co-operation on security and anti-narcotics that Colombia desperately needs.

Mr Trump seems to despise Mr Petro. He has called Colombia’s president “an illegal-drug leader” and slapped sanctions on him for alleged ties to drug gangs. In their meeting, Mr Trump will probably try to strong-arm Mr Petro into renewing the UNODC contract and ending his peace negotiations with drug-trafficking groups that, according to the US State Department, “embolden narco-terrorists”. Ecuador’s right-wing leader, Daniel Noboa, is similarly trying to pressure Mr Petro into taking “firm action” on crime. On January 21st, Mr Noboa announced a 30% “security tariff” on Colombian imports, sparking a trade war.

Whatever path they take, the authorities will probably remain one step behind traffickers. All policies are “treading water”, says Elizabeth Dickinson of the International Crisis Group, a think-tank in Brussels. “We don’t have any ideas that will actually fix this problem.” As long as cocaine is illegal to produce and consume, and the external demand for the drug remains insatiable, Colombia’s laboratories will stay in business and drug wars will continue.

For now, there is one less cocaine lab in the jungle. The Comandos Jungla throw C4 explosives into the shack. The Black Hawk lifts off minutes later, leaving a tower of black smoke billowing above the lime-green coca fields. ■