A report published by a Spanish morning newspaper maintains a very disturbing reality: in 2017, cocaine production was the highest in the entire history of humanity: close to a million tons. By 2018, the European Union broke all known records in seizures: 110 thousand tons of cocaine in a single year and, according to the European Observatory for Drugs, 18 million Europeans between 15 and 64 years old are addicted to the drug.
But, in addition, the consumer market is expanding towards Southeast Asia and Australia demands cocaine with greater assiduity as well as the capital cities of Latin America, with a greater focus on the impoverished classes of developing cities.
The drug traffickers seem to have used business school manuals to make their illicit actions true global consortia where no business line is saved. Only in Mexico out of every three Mexican pesos, two come from drug trafficking: an absolute contamination of the economy and politics.
Between 2005 and 2018, the cultivation of coca leaves doubled in Colombia – according to the Monitoring of territories affected by illicit crops 2018, by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) -, and they have also increased by Peru and Bolivia.
Another fact: technology and advances in agribusiness would be greatly favoring the drug trafficking industry. The productive modernization achieved efficient agricultural techniques for pruning, fertilization, weed and pest control and, above all, it allowed the introduction of varieties with higher productivity, more resistant to the weather and pathogens, all of which improve the alkaloid harvest.
So the outlook is grim. Only in 2019 and early 2020, the smallest country in the Southern Cone (Uruguay) was intercepted more kilos of cocaine than in its entire history. Yes, you read that right: !!! Uruguay !!! There were 12 tons that were going to leave its territory in different shipments to international markets. Everything was discovered and seized. The drug had Bolivian origin. I endorse the data just in case you have any questions.
How is this explained? Experts argue that unlike the fearsome Mexican and Colombian cartels of the days of Pablo Escobar and Chapo Guzmán, at the beginning of the new millennium the monopolies began to erode and, specifically, to fragment.
The drug business was literally “outsourced” to peasants, small manufacturers (MSEs and SMEs), transporters, customs officers, pilots, social leaders, police officers, communist guerrillas (they are all drug traffickers), regional, district and departmental politicians, retail vendors where everyone weaves a gigantic illegal web of trucks, barges, light aircraft, airplanes, minibuses, rural and peri-urban transporters that arrive and contaminate all cities, countries in the region and the world with their merchandise.
Faced with this scenario, it is worth asking if the Chapare, the private domicile of drug trafficking, is the Colombia of the eighties and nineties and if this fragmentation of the business is made up not by one or two or three cartels, but by family businesses dedicated to the manufacture of the drug. Be that as it may, this is extremely serious and it is a challenge for the State to control, monitor and fight head-on against this scourge: the question is whether it will be a politically correct decision or the coca growers will continue to be the dominant scourge of this country.
EYE IN INK
JAVIER MEDRANO
Communicator and expert in Strategic Management
[email protected]
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