How the peace deal in Colombia has affected its cocaine industry

But two years ago, the villagers said, something alarming happened: The drug traffickers who buy the coca paste and turn it into cocaine stopped showing up. Suddenly, people who were already poor had no income. Food became scarce. An exodus to other parts of Colombia in search of jobs followed. The town of 200 people shrunk to 40.

The same pattern was repeated again and again in communities across the country where coca is the only source of income.

Colombia, the global nexus of the cocaine industry, where Pablo Escobar became the world’s best known criminal, and which still produces more of the drug than any other nation, is facing tectonic shifts as a result of domestic and global forces that are reshaping the drug industry.

Fallout of peace deal

The upending of the cocaine industry is, in part, an unintended consequence of a landmark peace deal eight years ago with the country’s largest armed group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, that ended one phase of a conflict that has lasted decades.

The leftist group financed its war largely through cocaine and relied on thousands of farmers to provide the bright green coca plant — the drug’s main ingredient.

But once the FARC exited the cocaine industry, it was replaced by smaller criminal groups pursuing a new economic model, said Leonardo Correa of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: buying large quantities of coca from a smaller number of farmers and limiting their operations to border regions where it is easier to move drugs out of the country.

That means towns like Cano Cabra, deep in the country’s interior, about 165 miles southeast of Bogota, the capital, have seen their sole business largely vanish.

At the same time, other countries have become important competitors and have contributed to changes in Colombia’s drug market. Ecuador has emerged as a top cocaine exporter, while cultivation of coca leaf has increased in Peru and Central America.

That has helped push global cocaine production higher than it has ever been. And while cocaine consumption has flattened in the United States, it is growing in Europe and Latin America and emerging in other regions, like Asia.

Record production of drug

While some experts say the transformation of the cocaine industry could lead coca plant growers to transition to legal ways of making a living, many worry that farmers could instead switch to other illicit activities.

Jefferson Parrado, 39, the president of the local council that presides over the region that includes Cano Cabra, said many might switch to raising cattle — one of the world’s biggest drivers of deforestation. Other residents said that they might join armed groups out of economic desperation.

“Several regions have achieved economic development thanks to the coca and cocaine market,” said Diego Garcia-Devis, who manages the drug policy program at the Open Society Foundations. “What income will replace coca income? Another illegal income? Mining, trafficking of humans, wildlife, timber? Extortion?”

In many remote areas of Colombia, it is not economically viable to sell other crops because of high transportation costs. By the time produce arrived at market, it would rot, residents said. For many Colombians, the cocaine industry has been their only option.

“It does harm to humanity, and we are aware of that,” Parrado said. “But for us, it means health, it means education, it means the sustenance of the families in the regions.”