Colombia’s coca economy helps communities thrive

In the mountains and jungles of southwestern Colombia, peasants, migrants and women carrying babies toil doggedly in the coca fields despite the dangers posed by guerrillas and drug traffickers -- and despite the government's anti-drug campaign.

These plantations are known as "San Coca" -- Saint Coca -- due to the locals' devotion to growing the plant, which provides the active ingredient in cocaine, and their understanding of all it provides to them in the face of the risks.

Colombia is still the world's largest producer of the addictive stimulant, even though successive governments in Bogota have worked to combat the trade.

"Coca (plantations) were born as a response to institutional abandonment... and have allowed everyone in these areas to achieve a minimum of dignity," said Azael Cabrera, the leader of Agropatia, an organization representing 12 rural communities and townships.

"Forget about the state -- it doesn't exist here."

For community leader Reinaldo Bolanos, "we don't see ourselves as belonging to this State, as for the State, either we don't exist or we are a burden."

For decades, the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were effectively in charge in Cauca until the historic 2016 peace agreement between the government and the leftist rebels.

In theory, the fighters left the area under disarmament plans, and the peasants expected the state to step into the void, but they never did. 

So three years later, dissident guerrillas that opted out of the peace deal moved back in -- with new weapons but the same ideology

With no state presence or support, the peasants were left vulnerable and turned to planting coca after suffering losses with other crops including yuca, corn, coffee and sugar cane.

And so the "coca economy" was born: a network of activities around the cultivation and processing of coca leaves which are then used to make cocaine, with rebels serving as the middlemen between the farmers and the traffickers.

The work puts food on the tables of locals, but there is a problem -- the government does not distinguish between the coca growers and the drug traffickers.