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In an upscale northern neighborhood of Bogotá with numerous car dealerships, fancy gyms, and expensive cafés, stands the Rodrigo Lara Bonilla building. It is named after Colombia's former justice minister, who was killed by the Medellin cartel as part of its campaign of terror. The building is home to around 100 staff of the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), its largest office outside Afghanistan.
Inside the UNODC's offices, project coordinator Leonardo Correa oversees the United Nation's illicit crop monitoring program. Correa explains how the United Nations is working with the Colombian government to eradicate coca production: He draws diagrams, points to maps, and speaks of hectares under cultivation and the lifecycle of a coca bush. He points out how coca cultivation is down and the government is working with coca leaf growers to find alternative livelihoods.
But if all this progress is being made, why have the presidents of Mexico and Colombia called for a reexamination of drug policies, while Uruguay is moving towards legal regulated drug markets?
"Because it is necessary," says Correa. He may be a drug warrior, but Correa is still a Colombian. "Here in Colombia, we suffered a lot of the problems associated with the production and drug traffic. So really it's a painful situation for Colombians that after 30 years fighting with and dealing with this problem, we are still in the same situation."
You hear the same thing from Colombian officials in charge of drug eradication. Ricardo Guerrero, an advisor on international affairs and cooperation for the National Territorial Consolidation Plan, notes with frustration that every time Colombia takes out the head of a drug trafficking organization, someone else takes his place.
"We are against narco-trafficking, we are against consuming," says Guerrero. "That's not the issue, the issue is how do you get over the problem ... we have been doing some things that maybe doesn't bring the results we want to get, and there is a need to reevaluate."
Colombia has paid a high price for the U.S. appetite for cocaine and its global, militarized response to this demand. The standard units used to measure the drug war -- hectares fumigated, tons of cocaine seized -- don't capture the full picture.
Drug traffickers have amassed large tracts of land and diversified into other sectors, from illegal mining to selling oil on the black market. "The problem in Colombia today is not drugs, it's entrenched organized crime. The issue is not to legalize drugs but to legalize Colombia," says Francisco Thoumi, a leading Colombian economist and member of the International Narcotics Control Board.
Claudia Lopez has done more than any other journalist to uncover the penetration of the state by paramilitary drug trafficking organizations. Her reporting has led to the criminal investigation of a third of Colombia's Congress, as well as scores of mayors and governors, concerning their ties to paramilitaries. But for Lopez, this corruption is an inevitable result of policies that create criminal markets. "The relationship is causal -- it's not Colombian," says Lopez.
"A mafia that needs to launder money and has been globally declared illegal... if they don't have political power to prevent being punished and prosecuted, they have huge risks," says Lopez. "[T]he most effective way to reduce that risk is to achieve political power."
One way or another, the state has to begin regulating the drug market, says Lopez, or criminals will continue to do so, holding sway over the country's most vulnerable communities.
Meanwhile, the corrosive effect of these criminal interests is spreading across the region.
The high levels of drug-related violence once seen in Colombia have, in recent years, migrated to Mexico, and are now moving down into Central America. Homicide rates have increased in five out of the region's eight countries -- Honduras and El Salvador now have the world's highest and second highest murder rates. It's no secret where the blame lies: According to the UNODC, "drug trafficking [is] the root cause of the surge in homicides."
If the root cause of this problem isn't solved, the war on drugs is only going to get bloodier, say experts.
"We worry about Bolivia, we worry about Venezuela, we worry about Paraguay. In Central America and Mexico, the squeeze is now being pushed downwards," says McDermott of Insight Crime. "We are seeing Honduras in an extremely vulnerable state. And we worry about Belize. We worry about things being pushed back into the Caribbean."
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