Colombia’s cocaine conflicts, 2023

Forced coca farming that feeds a booming drugs trade is bringing misery to villages on the Pacific Coast.

An update from the front line communities where a cruel war between armed groups headed by former FARC guerrillas is trapping Afrocolombian communities in new cycles of violence.

“We don’t have the option not to grow coca,” a campesino tells me in the ruins of a village close to Colombia’s western coast. Tulio is afro-descendant and part of a small close-knit community like thousands of similar settlements that dot the tropical lowlands where muddy brown rivers rush down from the Andean slopes carrying their mineral-laden waters to the Pacific Ocean.

His complaint is a common one: he is forced to grow and process coca leaves that supply the all-consuming candy machine, and it’s a dangerous business. He has already lost two sons, he tells me, as tears well in his eyes.

“They went downriver. They never came home.”

His sorrow underlines a country where killing isn’t enough: armed gangs disappear bodies to leave the living in eternal despair.

None of this is new in Colombia. What is surprising though, as I travel downriver, is that much of this violence is unleashed by armed groups formed by ex FARC guerrillas. Comrades-in-arms once famed for their discipline and purpose (no matter how much you agreed – or not – with their Marxist Leninist philosophy) have now fractured into factions squabbling over drugs and dollars.

I can’t tell you exactly which river I was travelling. Or the real names of my hosts. But what I recount here is a scenario all too common in areas of Colombia where coca is grown and armed groups reign.

Down by the Pacific coast the stories come thick and fast: “They came into my house and shot my husband. We begged them to spare him. He died in my arms,” a woman tells me, between swigs of aguardiente.

The neighbour recounts how the group collected all the cell phones in the village and smashed them with a hammer. “They said we were spies,” he explains. This community is ramshackle with a half-built school now abandoned after its roof blew off, and the small health post a concrete shell consumed by tropical vines.

“We sold our coca crop to one armed group, then another group came along, these guys wanted us to sell to them. So they fined us instead.”

Drunk, stoned and paranoid

The local guerrillas I met are frequently drunk, stoned and paranoid. And that´s before lunchtime. At night, fuelled by yet more beers and cheap hooch, they crank up an old generator to play vallenato music on giant speakers until the cascading accordion rhythms penetrate every nook of the bullet-holed wooden and tin-roof houses. Then, in the small hours, when the generator fuel runs out, they shout random insults into the jungle air and fire guns. There is no escape from the noise, just like there is no escape from the conflict.

Next morning beer cans litter a small concrete cancha which forms the village hub, shaded by a wall where banners hang with faded photos of illustrious FARC leaders from days gone by.

In a house nearby a community leader pleads for help: “Get me and my family out of here”.  Diego is effectively a prisoner in his own community. Sure, he can travel downriver in his canoe to the town to buy supplies. But his wife and young child must stay behind.

In public, Diego puts on a good act of being confident, moving with casual ease among the guerrillas as they shoulder their Uzis and pack 45 pistols in their rubber boots. In private his eyes are wide with fear. The nearby football pitch has been mined during recent combat, and just beyond the line of jungle lie bodies still unrecovered because of fear of explosive traps.

Along the river other leaders face house arrest, banned from communicating or traveling having lost the confidence of the current armed group.

Several times I hear how a leader has stepped in to defend the community from the gunslingers, sometime physically putting themselves between an angry commander and a local youth hauled into the bush for execution for some perceived transgression.  It doesn’t always end well.

Pawns in a pitiless war

Other leaders campaign against coca and suggest alternative crops like cacao, with high market value in a world equally hooked on chocolate. Their voices are usually silenced, sometimes for ever.

It dawns on me why so many community leaders get killed in Colombia: they are pawns in a pitiless drug war pitching endless economic power – a sizeable chunk of the global economy – against poor farmers clinging to their ancestral lands. All for the love of cocaine.

Of course, in its early days, coca cropping seemed like a good idea. The miracle plant offered a financial lifeline for remote communities long abandoned by the state. And the afro communities were steeped in agricultural knowledge from generations of tending plantain and other tropical crops, which along with fishing formed their main form of livelihoods.

But, like the drug itself it eventually turns into, Erythroxylum coca is a false friend. Colombia’s insatiable need to export cocaine – in turn fed by global high street demand – means community leaders like Diego and farmers like Tulio have no choice but to deploy every day to their coca fields, often hacked out of pristine jungle.

Now, every morning soon after daybreak, every able adult arrives at the river beach soon after sunrise to form teams that set to the coca fields up or down river. Each farmer is carefully dressed with a long-sleeved shirt, long trousers and rubber boots, and carries a small pack with water and a lunchbox. Some carry sacks of coca seedlings. Others backpack sprayers and cans of chemicals. Everyone carries a machete.

Total control

The first time I witnessed this I rather stupidly asked a woman her plans for the day.

“The same as everyone else. Cosechando,” she mutters in reply. Harvesting.  Here, I notice, farming vernacular is now shorthand for everything coca. Sembrando, sowing the young shrubs with their innocent green leaves. Raspachando, stripping the darker mature leaves from the white stems.  Triturando, making a mulch of the coca leaves. Procesando; mixing the mulch with chemicals like petrol which forms the coca base, a white cake sold on to the armed groups for processing into cocaine.

In the old days – pre the 2016 peace accord – the FARC claimed that it simply taxed coca crops, a sleight-of-hand to neutralize the “narco-terrorist” tag that impeded negotiations.  In 2023, the whole production line appears to be under the control of the former guerrillas.

Sure, campesinos are paid for the coca they harvest, or a daily wage to work the fields. But it’s not really a choice. “We’re fined a week’s wages if we don’t show up for one day’s work,” Tulio explains. He’s been sick but can’t afford to skip coca cropping. The story seems the same in many parts of the river: the armed groups are labour gangmasters running their business with an iron fist.

As I watch from the beach a senior commander arrives with his entourage. They came just before dawn in a long fibreglass canoe indistinguishable from the others already laid up. Their uniforms are low key consisting of a black T-shirt over dark coloured shorts.

But two things give them away: their attitude, which compared to the farmers (who seem a bit cowed) can best be described as cocky. And their guns. Just after arriving they pull back a plastic sheet covering their canoe to reveal some machine guns which they are now draping around their shoulders.  They give me a cheery “buenos días” as they pass me on the beach.

This guerrilla group still superficially steeped in the ideology of their FARC-EP forbears, literally flying their flags with photos of founders Manuel Marulanda, Raul Reyes, Mono Jojoy. FARC stands for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. And “EP” means Ejercito del Pueblo, the people’s army.

A divided former FARC

Ironically though, and perhaps disappointingly, this guerrilla group are currently involved in a coca war with another bunch of ex FARC guerrillas, similarly dressed, similarly armed, also calling themselves FARC-EP, also name-checking the same former leaders.

I wonder if these former leaders are now spinning in their graves knowing that their names –  once synonymous with a disciplined guerrilla army which over six decades brought a US-backed state militarily to a stalemate – are now claimed by armed mobsters enslaving vulnerable communities in their drive for cocaine profits all the while proclaiming themselves “the people’s army”.

And this is no theoretical struggle. Local farmers were forced to bury “more than 40 bodies” following a recent clash in the hills behind the river. Not to mention five civilians injured, including a 10-year-old girl with a bullet still lodged in her brain.

The youngster pulls back her braided hair to show me the entry wound at the back of her head. The lost bullet somehow entered her skull without killing her and is now embedded where no brain surgeon dares to go.

“We took her to the city, and they sent us to the children’s hospital, but the doctors said it is too dangerous to take it out,” her mother explains. So they sent her back to the village. The kid is fine physically, for now, but desperately wants the alien object removed.

These kind of stories hardly make the news in Colombia where there is a concerted effort to keep the lid on anything happening in these backwaters all better to ensure the cocaine keeps flowing. It’s a conspiracy of silence abetted by the fact that no-one works with local state authorities without a nod from the local armed group.

To my surprise, the army are present, and some well-armed troops wave to me from a high riverbank. Turns out they are clearing land mines planted by armed gangs on jungle tracks that form short-cuts between the river systems. These form a much larger labyrinth of conflict trails linking a vast network of illegal installations – cocaine labs, hidden camps, home-made submarines, weapon caches – dotting the tablelands between the Andes and the sea.

I talk to a woman whose father was killed by a mine a month before, he was walking to his plantain plantation when the hidden explosive blew both his legs off. He bled out. She has had support from NGOs, and given psychosocial support, but the underlying problem is harder to fix. The groups are still there, and mines are still being sown.

During my visit I walk some of the tracks (making sure to stick to the trodden path) and am quite surprised to see concrete bridges and rusty car hulks along the way: these were proper roads in their time, though never appearing on official maps.

Also missing from the maps are the lines of control between opposed armed groups. These barriers are visible enough on the river, though: once abundant communities are now half-abandoned ghost towns. People still do live there, quiet families camped in the ruins of their houses scared to walk the river banks for fear of mines and constantly alert for the sound of gunfire.

Sudden attacks

Both armed gangs  – and sometimes the national army too – push up and down the river feeling for readiness and resistance from their enemies, ready to spring a  surprise attack. It’s a war about territory, gaining coca plantations along the long river, or controlling trafficking routes. It ebbs and flows with the cycles of coca production, with fragile truces being hammered out at vital moments to ensure the product can get to market. Once again, coca is king.

Such realpolitik further underlines the futility of the fight. Everyone’s making money, right? So why go to war? Tulio has a theory on that: “Conflict keeps the prices high. If it was too easy, they would charge less.”

It occurs to me that humans, as well as coca, feed the all-consuming candy machine.

Fighting, when it does happen is sudden and intense, fought out with small arms, grenade launchers, landmines and trip wire explosives. It shifts along the river from village to village, but also plays out in far hills and hidden camps.

“We hear the sound of gunfire and we move with our families,” a campesino explains in one community close to the current demarcation between two groups. “We flee into the bush and survive on plantain and fish.”

These local displacements are typical of upriver communities with no easy route to a local town. These crises are rarely reported to the outside world. Families must fend for themselves until they think it is safe to return, to whatever state their homes are left in.  

Sometimes it’s OK. Not always. In one case an armed group left the dismembered bodies of their slain enemies scattered among the houses. “They turned our village into a graveyard,” a local told me at the time.

Communities closer to larger towns along the river can generally flee there, living with friends or relatives, or in shelters provided by local authorities. Some families were displaced by combat several times in the last year, causing a new phenomena whereby people have shifted permanently to houses they have built in the cabeceras, headquarter town of the rural area they live in.

The towns are by no means free of violence. Armed gangs also control the access routes and kidnapping and extortion is common. But there is some army presence and state scrutiny. People feel safer.

“People live in town and travel to and from their villages for the day. There they can visit their fields and collect their crops and get home before dark,” explains a leader in one of these areas. “If it looks like trouble, we don’t go.”  

Crossing paths

It’s the coca profits – and partly from artisanal gold mining too – that makes that this viable. Farmers can afford to buy canoes, outboards and fuel to make the daily journey.  It also brings the money in the buy the house in town in the first place. The gold-and-coca boom has seen hundreds of new houses – some quite luxurious – being thrown up, turning many an unexpected backwater into a mini-Miami.

But at a high social cost. Urban drift has always been a feature of Colombia, like most of Latin America, but conflict accelerates the process hollowing out formerly thriving rural communities. Migration has left behind a vulnerable caste of the old, the infirm, and the excluded or those simply too stubborn to leave their old territory.

Empty houses in half-empty villages also gives free reign to armed groups to set up house within the communities. You can sometimes feel their presence behind shuttered windows as you walk by. If not, someone will whisper it to you: “Green house, balcony, broken fence. Don’t stop there.”

But whether you like it or not, you’ll cross the combatant’s paths. Mostly they’ll ignore you, having first established who you are and why you are there. Which reminds me to say: I was there for a reason, and they knew I was coming. Don’t go into conflict areas unannounced.  

Perhaps as an aside, I’ve been working in these regions for decades. And in the old days the FARC commanders were usually straight talking. This generation is a bit harder, often drunk or stoned or both and seemingly muddled in their own heads what they are actually up to.

Nacho is a good example, a village level commander who pulls me aside to tell me “I’m a wanted person. I have an order for capture by the state.”  I’m not sure if he wants respect, sympathy, or advice, though I make sure not to pull out my cell-phone when he’s around.

He seems loose and dangerous: a man-child with guns, stumbling around between shots of liquor and yelling out, then sitting on the village stoop where he exudes both menace and vulnerability.

He gets to his feet quick enough, though, when an unexpected canoe arrives from upriver. A child has fallen from a mango tree and fractured his arm. He comes ashore and sits on a stool crying as the limb swells. His father is absent, his mother is away working in the fields, so the local teacher brought him in.  Nacho, Diego, Tulio and few village elders gather round for a conflab. Should the boy go further downriver by canoe to town and the health clinic, or shall they call the local bone-setter, the sobandero?

The discussion fixes on the fact that the state clinic is far away, often charges patients excess fees, and sometimes doesn’t treat people at all. Another fear – one not clearly spoken – is that the clinic is in a town dominated by the enemy group, who will be on the lookout for any canoes travelling downriver. They have armed checkpoints along the river route. 

That’s a common problems in Colombia, both in urban and rural conflict zones: how to safely cross lines between armed groups. The general assumption is you support your local gang, so if you are on someone else’s patch, it could be for bad intent.  

Everyone’s a target

To make it worse, the armed groups on this river have marked their territories with large cloth banners announcing their presence at the entrance to each village. That makes everyone a target. The former FARC would know better. The new generation hasn’t thought it through. Or just doesn’t care.

“Any chance of getting those signs taken down?” I ask one local leader. “No, and we wouldn’t ask,” he replies. Upriver communities are particularly vulnerable since they have pass through opposition territory to reach any town for supplies or health needs.

Several people share their fears of these canoe journeys downstream: they can be harassed, their supplies or motor stolen, their canoe overturned. Or worse. I think back to Tulio and his tale of the two sons who went downriver and never came back.

Regarding the boy, the decision is made, and the villagers call for the local sobandero, the traditional healer found in many rural communities who treats fractures, broken bones, dislocations, and a variety of physical ailments The local one is a large fellow and multi-tasking too, since he also runs a small shop, the local bar, and repairs outboard motors.

To fix the boy’s arm he takes a bamboo pole, a machete and some palm leaves and carefully prepares a cast of foot-long wooden slithers meshed together with tough green fibres. Then, after some pulling of the boy’s arm, amid much yelling and encouragement from Nacho et al, the cast fitted, and the patient sent back upriver.

For a brief moment the community has worked as one; strong, independent, resilient, the characteristics that help these afro-descendant communities thrive for so long in the margins of Colombia.

Just as quickly the conflict cloud is back. Another canoe arrives, this time with a senior commander and his entourage. Their guns are to the ready. I see some serious faces. Then I see Nacho walk down from the village to meet them, swinging his own Uzi, but looking very scared.  There’s a short stand-off. Seems like he’s getting his ass kicked for some misdemeanour. I get myself away behind the houses as fast as possible. Others do the same.

The storm is in a teacup, and Nacho and his boss agree their differences. A tense calm settles back on the village. Later that afternoon, the liquor bottles come out and the guerrillas are yelling and whooping to the vallenato strains. No-one sleeps easy after dark.

This is the heart of the coca conflict in rural Colombia. A waking nightmare of fear, sorrow, paranoia, and longing for better times.  Families torn between their ancestral lands, and escape to a cruel city. A small girl crying with a bullet in her head. A young guerrillero drinking to forget past horrors – and to numb himself for those to come. A father dreaming of his two sons, and where their bodies might lie.

And it’s happening now.