Colombian coca farmers say they have little choice
Bloomberg News Service
CAGUAN, Colombia — Emptying a bag of dirty-white powder into a baking tray, Esteban Esquivel starts to weigh his unrefined cocaine. "It smells horrible," jokes his wife, Maria, holding her nose in disgust.
Esquivel, 32, says growing coca leaves and turning them into coca paste, which is used to make cocaine, is the only way he can support Maria and their three children.
"I'm not a criminal," said Esquivel as he walked from his shack to a makeshift laboratory 15 yards away. "I'm a farmer trying to make a living."
Esquivel, who farms two acres of land in a guerrilla-controlled area of Colombia the size of Switzerland, is on the bottom rung of an industry the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention estimated moved an annual $92 billion in the late 1990s. Esquivel earns about $58 a week.
The Colombian and U.S. governments have embarked on a $7.5 billion plan to eradicate the country's 400,000 acres of coca plantations. If they are successful, Esquivel says he and 90,000 other coca farmers will be without a livelihood.
Esquivel doesn't believe in government promises to help grow other crops. "The government has never done anything for us down here," he says.
Esquivel said farmers who have tried growing other crops gave up because their prices were both lower and less stable than coca paste.
Esquivel and his family live in a makeshift wooden hut on the edge of his plantation. A bucket catches drips of water that leak through the roof during the regular tropical downpours of rain. His laboratory is made of four wooden poles supporting a plastic sheet that shelters a sink and five blue, plastic barrels.
Esquivel's bushes produce enough leaves to prepare 2 kilos of coca paste every 45 days. He sells this for $870, of which he spends $435 to buy gasoline, herbicides and other materials needed to process the leaves. Esquivel said neither he nor his family would ever consider trying cocaine.
As flies swarm round his head, Esquivel stuffs bundles of leaves into one of the barrels and then adds lime, urea and gasoline.
Every eight days, men pass by his farm to purchase the paste. Esquivel says he knows nothing about the men, only that they come from outside the guerrilla-controlled zone and that they're not members of any rebel group. He says he doesn't know how much the traffickers sell the paste for.
"All I know is what I'm paid," he says as he pours water and sulphuric acid into the barrel. "But I think they sell it for a lot more."
The U.S.-Colombian campaign aims to destroy the narcotics industry and cut off financing to Colombia's ultra-rightist paramilitary groups, leftist guerrillas and drug cartels. For four decades, Colombia has been locked in a civil war in which 35,000 people died in the past 10 years alone. The United States, which imports 52 percent of world cocaine output, has pledged more than $1 billion to the program.
