Perea uprooted the coca bushes on his small farm in the remote Colombian province of Meta, reachable only by river, and vowed never to plant them again. He replaced them with cassava and plantain, joining thousands who signed up to a government-run crop substitution programme aimed at helping farmers abandon the raw material used to make cocaine. But much of the promised assistance never arrived. A lack of roads and recurring floods made it difficult to sell his legal produce. In 2024, disillusioned, he began planting coca again.
"It's a tragedy," says Perea. "But when you have children and no work, what choice do you have? If no help ever arrives, you go back to growing it."
“Colombian coca farmer returns to illegal crop after promised government aid never arrives.”
Colombia supplies an estimated 70% of the global cocaine supply. Lucas Marín Llanes, a Colombian researcher who focuses on the coca economy, says coca has advantages over other crops: quick harvests – three or four a year – easier transport, and a guaranteed price. Research he has worked on shows coca cultivation can boost local economies, increasing municipal GDP by as much as 10% in some areas between 2014 and 2019.
Elena Hernández moved to the coca-growing region of Guaviare during the 1990s boom, lured by better pay. "There was more money back then – you could see it everywhere," she says. "I managed to save and buy a small house." But the coca industry also brought violence and armed groups. Government efforts to curb production through manual eradication, aerial fumigation and arrests cut off families' incomes but failed to stem cultivation. When a nationwide substitution programme was introduced in 2017, Hernández was eager to sign up, joining around 100,000 families promised financial support in return for moving away from coca. Each household was due to get 36m Colombian pesos ($11,000; £8,000). But today, coca planting is at record levels – more than 250,000 hectares – and many in the programme say they have been let down.