Narcotics Affairs Section
Good morning. I’m here to talk to you today about one of the more important bilateral programs that the U.S. government has been doing with the government of Colombia, under what many people know as Plan Colombia, and that’s the Aerial Eradication of Coca. The aerial eradication of coca is one of the larger programs. We’ve been doing it, working with the Colombians, and specifically the Colombian National Police, to destroy coca in Colombia. Why do we want to destroy coca in Colombia and how do we do it? I’m going to talk about both of those issues and I’m also going to talk a little bit about some of the myths and realities of the coca industry and its production, how it’s turned it into cocaine.
Why do we do it? Colombia is the provider of 90% of the cocaine in the U.S., 80% of the world’s cocaine. It is something that is important not only to Colombia or the U.S., but the whole world because tens of thousands of people die throughout the world due to cocaine use, or the violence associated with the trafficking of cocaine.
How do we do it in Colombia? The Colombian National Police use airplanes provided by the U.S. government and they release a chemical on top of the coca. That chemical is called glyphosate. Glyphosate is the generic term for the chemical. It is the most widely used herbicide in the whole world. Colombia uses it for illicit agricultural uses. The U.S. does. Every country in Europe does. There is essentially no country in the world that does not use glyphosate in some stage in their agricultural industry. Glyphosate is non-carcinogenic. That means it doesn’t cause cancer. It’s non-mutogenic, which means it does not cause birth defects. It has very little residuality in the soil. That means once it’s sprayed on the coca crops, it kills the crops. Then it disappears very quickly in a matter of days and certainly after a couple of weeks it is broken down into essentially a natural ingredient, like nitrogen primarily. It does not stay in the soil.
One of the myths out there is that we are destroying the environment. The people destroying the environment are the coca growers and those who process the coca leaf into cocaine. Why do I say that? You don’t grow coca in the jungle. You don’t grow it in the forest. You have to first destroy the forest or the jungle. They use fire. They use chemicals. They use axes, chain saws, whatever they can get. They first have to clear the field off, and then they plant the coca. When the Colombians spray it, they only are spraying the coca that has replaced, unfortunately, the jungle or the forest. They are not spraying forest or jungle. The aircraft the Colombians use under this program are equipped with a very precise system. It is essentially like a black box on a commercial airliner combined with a GPS. So when the pilot expends the glyphosate out of the airplane, it is registered in this black box. When the pilot comes back to the base, another employee pulls out the tape from the black box and sends it to another location where it’s analyzed. What I’m trying to say with this is with great certainty, almost down to a meter or a couple of meters, the Colombians and the U.S. government can say where they sprayed, when they sprayed, and how much they sprayed.
Why is that important? One of the reasons is that the Colombian government has a very well developed bilateral, multiagency claims process to deal with coca. When someone says, “You sprayed my corn,” or “You sprayed my grapes,” whatever the case may be, there is a process where Ministry of Health, Ministry of Environment, the police and others, including representatives of the U.S. government, investigate these claims. The first step is checking to see if they sprayed there and on those dates, and that’s using the black box GPS system that I referred to. In many cases someone says, “You sprayed my corn,” and there was no spray there for one year from the date they said. Those are pretty easy to rule out. But, we are human beings, and it’s human beings who are doing this program and on the rare occasion where it appears that we were spraying there, we go see if there’s corn or there’s coca. The Colombian government will go out, with some assistance from the U.S. government, and if they indeed did spray someone’s corn, and there was only corn there, that person will be compensated at the going market rate for the product that was destroyed. That happens very rarely. Since the program began about nine years ago, there’s only been a little over 1,000 claims paid out. Sounds like a lot, but the percentage of land or cultivation that that corresponds to compared to the total amount sprayed, meaning coca primarily, is much less than one percent. It’s even less than half of one percent. So, while mistakes are made, when mistakes are made, they are recognized and people are compensated. But, the vast majority of what is destroyed is coca, it is not jungle. It is not forest as well.
One of the other myths we often hear about is the myth of super coca. There are people who claim that coca has been genetically modified or has evolved on its own to become some glyphosate-resistant coca. The people in the field in Colombia, every time this comes up, they investigate, the scientists look at it. We have never found the case that would lead us to believe there is any sort of super coca. While the Colombian government, with our assistance, made great strides in destroying coca, it is still somewhat easy, although not as easy as it was, to grow the natural coca. There is really no need for a super coca at this point and time.
As I said, the Colombians have greatly reduced the coca industry. The peak year of cocaine production in Colombia was 2001. I’m focusing on cocaine production because that’s really the end product and the product that most should concern the U.S. because that’s what the kids are consuming. It’s been reduced from 2001 to 2008 by 24%, mainly due to manual and aerial eradication. What I’m saying is that Colombia is not able to produce the bad guys, about a quarter less cocaine, than they have in the past. That’s the good news story. There’s still a lot of cocaine out there, but Colombians are working incredibly hard in destroying it.
I want to close by assuring you and leaving you with a message that the U.S. government is constantly working with the government of Colombia to improve the program, to make sure it’s doing what it was designed to do and looking for synergy with many other wonderful programs that the government of Colombia and the U.S. government are doing in Colombia. Our real goal with the project in Colombia is to ensure that the coca industry is destroyed and that one day Colombia will be free of coca and the U.S. will not have cocaine.