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The FARC and the Illicit Drug Trade
Peasants began colonizing the Colombian Amazon in the 1950s following
the violent displacement of peasants by large landholders. Completely neglected
by the government, peasant settlers attempted to establish agricultural
production in inhospitable jungle ecosystems. However, they soon found
coca to be the only product that was both profitable and easy to market.
The potential profit of coca cultivation, the relative ease of transport
and marketing, and its comparative advantages relative to legal crops fueled
a wave of immigration to the region. From then on, the Amazon was faced
with unsustainable population growth, leading to environmental degradation.
Since the 1990s, Colombian coca plantations have covered an expanse
that, according to residents of the affected areas, could be as large as
150,000 hectares. An estimated 300,000 people are directly dependent on
the coca economy. These zones are, at the same time, controlled by guerrillas
who derive significant revenues by levying taxes on medium- and large-scale
farmers, intermediate coca products (base, further refined into cocaine),
merchants, and, most importantly, processing laboratories and clandestine
air strips for cocaine shipments. These funds are employed to strengthen
the guerrillas' logistical and communications capacity for the war effort.
The army, therefore, perceives the settler-coca farmer as a direct guerrilla
collaborator. The army's decision to engage in counternarcotics operations
targeting illicit crop cultivation, justified by the "narco- guerrilla"
theory, has led to the repression of peasants in those areas.
This set the stage for massive protests, beginning in 1996, of over
200,000 settlers and peasant farmers. These protests were organized in
response to the mistreatment of rural workers and the lack of economically
viable alternatives to coca.
In 1997, the Amazon region where the protests took place witnessed increases
in massacres, violent deaths of agrarian leaders, and the formation of
private paramilitary groups. As armed groups struggled for control, conflict
escalated at a tremendous cost in terms of human life and the basic rights
of the population.
The government's failure to adequately address illicit crop cultivation
contributes to civilian support of the guerrillas. Settlers in the area
view the guerrillas as the only response to the attack on their lives and
livelihood through aerial fumigation of coca and poppy fields and judicial
proceedings. The government's perception of illicit cultivation as solely
a source of funding for the guerrillas, and not also as the only means
of support for large sectors of the peasant population, contributes to
social conflict and polarization....
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