Colombia’s drug industry is the most complete and diversified in the world: Colombia is the world’s only important producer of all three of the top non-synthetic illicit drugs; it provides an estimated 75% of the world’s cocaine supply, 2% of the world’s heroin supply, and a large amount of marijuana, including perhaps 40% of the pot imported into the United States.[1] Colombians play a major role in every stage of the industry up to the final retail level, from production of raw material, through refining, international transport and wholesale distribution.
- Colombia’s National Association of Financial Institutions (ANIF) estimated the nation’s total 1999 income from the illegal drug trade to be $3.5 billion. The ANIF estimate was based on an assumption that somewhat less than 10% of total earnings from illicit drug sales are repatriated to Colombia each year, and on reported total world retail-level sales of Colombian cocaine, heroin and marijuana of $46 billion. Colombia drug trade expert Bruce Bagley notes that this calculation put Colombian drug earnings “close to the $3.75 billion made from oil—the country’s top export—and more than two and one half times the earnings from coffee exports in 1999.”[2]
- As much as 3% of Colombia’s work force—some 300 thousand people—are directly employed in the drug industry, according to estimates cited by Colombian economists Roberto Steiner and Alejandra Corchuelo. They cite other estimates that drug crop cultivation accounts for about 6.7% of Colombia’s agricultural employment—compared to 12% for coffee farming—and they say that: “On the regional level, in centers of drug crop production like Guaviare, Putumayo and Caquetá, this percentage could reach levels close to 50%. It can be stated that—directly or indirectly—the majority of the labor force in these regions is involved” in the drug industry.[3]
The Colombian drug industry’s main development has occurred within the last three decades: In the 1970s, Colombia’s only large-scale illicit drug product was marijuana. In 1978, according to Juan Tokatlian, another expert on the Colombian drug industry, some 25-30,000 hectares of marijuana were being cultivated in Colombia, and 60-65% of the marijuana used in the United States was Colombian. (There was little domestic U.S. production at that time.)[4]
It was not until the late1970s that Colombia began to play an important role in the cocaine business; Colombians then set up an efficient system for transporting cocaine in bulk to the United States, by using a network of small planes. Partly as a result, they were able to take over a large part of the wholesale trade. Groups of cocaine entrepreneurs based in the Colombian cities of Medellín and Cali became known for their efficient, if ruthlessly violent, control of the international cocaine industry. These goups were known as “cartels,” though economists have debated whether the industry leaders actually coordinated their activities closely enough to merit the term.
At the time, Colombia produced almost no coca leaves; instead Colombian cocaine entrepreneurs bought finished cocaine and coca paste—semi-refined cocaine—from Peruvian and Bolivian producers. They established refining labs in Colombia to process the paste. In the mid-1990s, however, as the U.S.-funded enforcement programs began to target the so-called “air bridge” used to bring coca paste into Colombia from Peru and to eradicate significant portions of the Peruvian and Bolivian coca crop, the Colombians began to encourage coca production inside Colombian borders. Bagley notes that “by 1999 Colombia had become the premier coca-cultivating country in the world, producing more coca leaf than both Peru and Bolivia combined.” In that single year Colombian coca production more than doubled. Bagley stresses that “this explosive expansion occurred in spite of a [continous eradication] program that sprayed a record 65,000 hectares of coca” the previous year.
In the 1990s Colombia further diversified its drug industry, moving for the first time into opium poppy production. According to Bagley, Colombian poppy production “skyrocketed from zero in 1989 to 61 metric tons in 1998.” This was less than 2% of world production, but Colombia soon became an important heroin supplier to the United States. In 2000, according to the U.S. State Department, about 59% of the heroin seized by federal authorities in the United States was of Colombian origin.5 The death or jailing of many top Medellín and Cali leaders led to the near demise of these “cartels” in the 1990s. They have since been replaced by dozens of smaller organizations that observers describe as more flexible and able to respond to new law enforcement tactics by changing their own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JoAnn Kawell is the editor of the NACLA Report
NOTES
1. Cocaine and marijuana, U.S. Dept. of State, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) 2001 http://www.state.gov/g/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2001/rpt/ Marijuana figures for 1998-99, Bruce Bagley, “Drug Trafficking, Political Violence and U.S. Policy in Colombia in the 1990s,” paper presented at “Colombia in Context,” conference, University at California/Berkeley, February 7, 2001;
http://istsocrates.berkeley.edu:7001/colombia/workingpapers/working_pape…
2. Bagley cites the ANIF study in “Drug Trafficking.”
3. Roberto Steiner and Alejandra Corchuelo, “Repercussiones económicas e institucionales del narcotráfico en Colombia,” CEDE: Universidad de los Andes, December, 1999. Available at http://www.mamacoca.org/ They stress the negative economic and political effects of the trade.
4. Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, “Estados Unidos y los cultivos ilícitos en Colombia: Los trágicos equívocos de una fumigación futil,” paper presented at University of California/Berkeley, March 2001. http://istsocrates.berkeley.edu:7001/colombia/workingpapers/working_pape… Unlike Mexico, which began using paraquat in its marijuana eradication program in the 1970s, Colombia resisted U.S. demands for herbicide use until 1984.
5. INCSR 2001 (See footnote #1, Colombia.)
