"As an anti-drug policy," Mejía says, "I don't think Plan Colombia has had a huge deal of an effect."
Simply put, Colombia's cocaine is still reaching U.S. shores. While cocaine use is down in the United States, it remains the world's biggest consumer -- and according to U.S. government statistics, Colombia continues to supply 95 percent of the American market. Nor have Washington's eradication and interdiction policies driven the price of cocaine beyond the reach of American consumers: While the street price of cocaine has increased since 2007, it remains a fraction of what it was when the United States began ramping up efforts to reduce supply in the 1980s.
It's true that the area devoted to coca cultivation in Colombia has shrunk by 60 percent since President Bill Clinton signed Plan Colombia into law in 2000, but some of that reduction has been offset by increases in the size of Peru's and Bolivia's coca crop. It's a process known as the balloon effect. It's simply economics: Robust demand and the chance for high profits ensures that the cultivation of illicit crops continues elsewhere.
While U.S. officials say the yield of Colombian coca bushes is decreasing, the most recent U.N. figures tell a different story, showing that reductions have leveled off at around 60,000 hectares of coca being grown. Production has also been pushed into parts of the country where the state is weakest, particularly the southwest.
The department of Cauca is one of those weak areas. It has become an important base for the FARC, which also profits from the drug trade. In 2011, coca cultivation increased 23 percent across Cauca and its neighboring departments. Together these areas are home to more than half the country's coca fields.
On the main highway into Cauca, amid sugarcane fields that stretch for miles, a large billboard festooned with images of soldiers trumpets the triumphs of the Colombian armed forces over the insurgency. But the area remains heavily militarized -- there were over 150 armed actions in the first half of 2012 alone. Boyish conscripts in combat gear control security checkpoints along the highway, where they board buses to check each passenger's identification card.
The U.S.-backed program that followed Plan Colombia is called the National Territorial Consolidation Plan. As its name suggests, its goal is to help the Colombian state establish basic services, infrastructure, and economic development, as it pushes back guerrilla and paramilitary forces. Bogotá hopes to create alternatives to coca production, and U.S. counter-narcotic aid has shifted to reflect this focus. More money now goes to support state building and alternative livelihoods, and a smaller share goes for military activities.
German Chamorro, who oversees the implementation of the National Territorial Consolidation Plan, says community input is a key part of the process. Eradication efforts are centered "on restoring the rights of those growing [coca] through alternative projects," says Chamorro. Following eradication, the idea is that coca growers would be offered technical assistance and support to switch to legal crops.
But for many Colombians who depend on coca cultivation to eke out a living, that help has yet to arrive. The Committee for the Integration of the Colombian Massif (CIMA) represents small-scale farming communities in Cauca. The organization's agro-environmental coordinator, Alexander Fernández, says agricultural support has favored the cultivation of capital-intensive bio-fuels and export crops. Large-scale landowners have been the chief beneficiaries of these projects, leaving small-scale farmers behind. "What's needed," he says, "is agrarian reform."
Small-scale farmers struggling to earn a livelihood in the heart of Colombia's coca growing regions say they find themselves caught between the Colombian military on one side, and paramilitaries and guerillas on the other.
In the neighboring department of Valle del Cauca, 35 families of the Nonam indigenous people raise animals, grow corn and yucca, and fish along the Calima River. But the river is also used by paramilitaries to bring chemicals to process the coca leaf in jungle laboratories, and ship out processed cocaine.
In 2010, drug traffickers killed several people in a neighboring settlement. Then they entered onto the Nonam's land and imposed new rules. "They prohibited fishing, prohibited work hours," says the community's leader, William Garcia Chocho. Fearing for their safety and their economic security, the community was forced to abandon their land and livestock -- joining some of the nearly 4 million internally displaced people in Colombia. They returned a year later to rebuild their lives.
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