Eradication in the time of Covid: The case of Colombia

Abstract

As usually happens in times of crisis and extreme situations, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to ongoing conflicts related to the cultivation of illicit crops in Colombia are a complex mix of change and continuity. In November 2016, the country's government, headed by then President Santos, and the main guerrilla, the FARC, arrived at a peace agreement including an explicit commitment to developing a national crop substitution program. Accordingly, the government set it up– –the PNIS, or National Plan of Comprehensive Illicit Crop Substitution, —and allowed national and regional organizations of growers of coca, marihuana and poppy to operate legally, as long as they were committed to crop substitution. Both the government and the judicial system also came together to support the suspension of aerial fumigations. Aerial fumigation of coca crops has a long history in drug eradication campaigns in Colombia, and its implementation has almost always triggered waves of resistance (see for example Ramirez, 2001) due to its traumatic impacts on peasant livelihoods. However, a right-wing political party overtly hostile to the Peace Agreement won the 2018 elections. The new president, Ivan Duque, has repeatedly equivocated regarding his overall support for the agreement. On the other hand, he has crucially undermined some of its key arrangements, especially the PNIS, which became one of the main targets of his government (Acero et al., 2019). Thus, when the Covid pandemic arrived in the country three interrelated processes were already unfolding. First, the Colombian government was backtracking from the peace-related commitments and policies regarding illicit crops, and replacing them for a hard-nosed ‘war on drugs’ orientation. This involved the announcement of the creation of “future zones”; territories which would concentrate comprehensive state efforts to rapidly knock-out the drugs economy (Presidencia de la Republica, 2019). It also implied an effort to reinstate aerial fumigation, which was partially successful. In effect, the Constitutional Court ruled in July 2019 that aerial fumigation could resume, but only after consulting the population of the territories where the fumigation would take place through public hearings. It was related as well to a major offensive of manual eradication, which increasingly took the form of military operations (see the Guayabero case for example (El Tiempo, 2020b)). The eradicators went into the respective area under the protection of the Army, the anti-narcotics police or the anti-riots police (ESMAD). Second, and due to this, coca growers increasingly had to resort to physically defending their plots (and livelihoods) from the attacks from the state security agencies. According to peasants organizations, during these confrontations four protesters have lost their lives (Colombia 2020, 2020a, 2020c; El Tiempo, 2020a; La Opinion, 2020). Third, the social mobilization by coca growing peasants was accompanied by generalized resistance and disquiet, leading to protests, with trust in the president falling below 30% throughout 2019 (EFE,2019). In November 2019, hundreds of thousands of Colombians took the streets to vent their anger and frustration against several governmental policies. Pushing forward a set of policies to defend Colombian families and children from drugs seemed to Duque and his team an ideal path to claw back elusive support of the electorate and legitimacy for his government. Paradoxically, however, his main trump card, aerial fumigation, was almost the only anti-drug policy rebuked by the vast majority of Colombians, with more than 75% of respondents supporting the suspension of aerial fumigations according to a survey implemented by the Ministry of Justice during Santos’ presidency (Ministerio de Justicia, 2016). But when geopolitical considerations are taken into account, it becomes clear that the paradox is only apparent.