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  • This plant, it's incredibly important.

  • It's called coca and it mainly grows here.

  • I'm right in the middle of it right now.

  • Right down here, in southern Colombia,

  • spending the day with the anti-narcotic police, who are looking for coca plants to destroy.

  • Coca is harvested by local farmers,

  • shredded, soaked in chemicals,

  • and then cooked down into a paste.

  • This paste is sold to cartels that use a series of chemical processes

  • to turn it into the white powder we call cocaine,

  • which is then shipped around the globe,

  • the biggest portion ending up in the United States.

  • But this isn't a story about cartels or drug trafficking.

  • It's not even a story about cocaine, really.

  • This is a story about this leaf and the families who grow it, out here deep in the jungle.

  • It's these families who are most affected by the cocaine economy and

  • it's these families who are caught in the middle of Colombia's war on drugs.

  • It's a Friday evening and I'm at a police base that's right at the cusp of Colombia's vast Amazon rainforest.

  • This is Colombia at some of its most rural.

  • And this region has historically been a top coca producer in the country.

  • The intelligence unit just got done briefing us on

  • a possible location of some fields where coca is being harvested and processed.

  • We touch down in a couple of spots, but only find abandoned farms, no coca.

  • But then after a few hours, we spot it, a clearing deep in the jungle

  • and rows and rows of this light green coca leaf.

  • We land at this coca farm and find that it's run by a family.

  • There are kids here, no guns, no resistance.

  • Just beside their house is a shed where they've been shredding the leaves,

  • which are now soaking in chemicals, the step before they get sold off the the cartels.

  • And the police aren't here to arrest them, but rather destroy their operation.

  • Around 6 months of work and very likely, this family's only income prospects right now.

  • The troops are clearly aware that they've derailed this family's year.

  • Coca farms like these fuel an incredibly dangerous cocaine industry,

  • which hurts tens of thousands of people every year.

  • So are these coca farmers the bad guys?

  • If not, why are we burning their shed?

  • And if they're farmers, why don't they just grow another crop that isn't illegal,

  • like pineapple or potato?

  • To find this out, I needed to go back into the jungle,

  • but not in helicopters surrounded by police

  • but on my own.

  • Look at this chart.

  • This line shows coca production over time.

  • And look what's happened since 2013.

  • Coca production has hit an all-time high.

  • And the largest portion of the resulting cocaine is ending up in the United States,

  • which is the biggest cocaine market in the world.

  • Far away in Colombia's capital, Bogota, the government has been trying for decades to curb this problem.

  • Over the years, they've tried two main tactics for eradicating coca cultivation:

  • The first entails flying over these fields and blanketing the whole area with this plant killing chemical,

  • which is the same as the roundup chemical that you use to kill weeds in your yard.

  • The other strategy is the one that I was a part of:

  • Sending out troops to manual destroy the crops by uprooting it

  • or burning the sheds where the harvest is being processed.

  • But there are some major problems with these tactics.

  • First, spraying entire areas with this plant killing chemical doesn't just affect the coca fields,

  • it affects anything else it touches.

  • Killing food crops and the whole rainforest that surrounds these fields,

  • which is some of the most biodiverse forest on Earth.

  • The UN and the WHO also found that these chemicals are

  • potentially a cause of cancer for the residents in these areas.

  • So in 2015, the Colombian government suspended the chemical dumping strategy.

  • So now they're looking for new solutions.

  • And last year they implemented something called the crop substitution program,

  • where the government is going to pay one million pesos per month, which is like $327,

  • to any farmer who eradicates their coca crop on their own and starts growing a legal crop,

  • like oranges or pineapple or yuca.

  • After a very bumpy ride, I made it to a community that used to be an epicenter for coca production.

  • But last year, they signed up for this crop substitution program.

  • All the farmers in the community signed a pact that they would willingly transition to a legal crop.

  • During my conversations, the farmers kept throwing math problems my way.

  • These farmers live and die by prices.

  • Prices of farm supplies, prices of seeds, prices of transportation

  • and of course, the price that they can sell their crop for.

  • Keep in mind that where I am is a place that is almost completely absent of any central government presence.

  • There aren't good roads, security, reliable markets.

  • And so when you start to do the math of all the costs associated with growing something else,

  • it just doesn't add up, which is why coca thrives out here.

  • As this farming community tries to survive outside the cocaine economy,

  • they're experiencing what it feels like to be just another rural community,

  • cut off from Colombia's mainstream economies.

  • The government might may be able to pay these farmers to get rid of their coca,

  • but without roads, markets, banks, and connections to the rest of the country

  • these new economies will not take root.

  • So now think back to that family whose shed the police burned down earlier.

  • They live an hour's helicopter ride from any town.

  • So they don't really have any other economic options beyond coca,

  • which is really the only commodity they can transport to a market.

  • Though I did find one family that represents a success story for the crop substitution program.

  • They mainly grow passion fruit.

  • But they also grow corn, yuca, tomatoes, peppers, and raise animals.

  • Passion fruit juice, incredible.

  • They switched from coca last year after an entire lifetime of growing it.

  • And it's gone really well for them.

  • But you'll notice that this family has a huge plot of land.

  • Most of the farmers out here don't have that big plot of land.

  • And they don't have the ability to cultivate so many crops to replace their coca.

  • So as of now, all of these solutions continue to be bandaids.

  • Dumping roundup on these fields, manually eradicating, even the crop substitution.

  • The only lasting solution will come when the government

  • invests in connecting these communities to the rest of the country,

  • so that legal economies can actually take root here.

  • That's going to take time and money, but until the government does this long, slow work,

  • farmers will continue to find a way to participate in the only economy that pays.

  • Alright, that's it.

  • Borders: Colombia is over. Thank you for watching,

  • I learned so much about this country reporting these videos and I hope you did too.

  • Everything from the border, up to the hippos, and then learning about this new style of music.

  • And I even got to go eat some fruit in Bogota, which was really fun.

  • Next step for me is I'm going to start looking into the next location for Borders,

  • so stay tuned for that.

  • And also I should tell you that Vox just started a membership program.

  • For $5 a month you can get access to

  • a bunch of behind the scenes stuff.

  • I did this extended interview with this drummer that I met reporting episode 3 of Borders.

  • And you can see that whole thing if you become a member.

  • So you can go check that out on the YouTube channel and thanks for watching Borders.

This plant, it's incredibly important.

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哥倫比亞為何在可卡因戰爭中失利 (Why Colombia is losing the cocaine war)

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    55005511 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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