Colombia is once again looking to the skies to combat drugs. In his first speech as president, far-right leader Abelardo de la Espriella announced that his government will resume spraying illicit crops—one of the most controversial tools in the country’s long war on drugs.
“Coca cannot be combated with doctored statistics or manipulated maps,” the president said on August 7, before assuring that he will use “state-of-the-art herbicides,” which, he claimed, will not harm human health or the environment and will comply with the conditions established by the Constitutional Court.
This promise comes at a time when Colombia still sits at the top of the global cocaine production map. According to Infobae, the country had approximately 261,000 hectares under coca cultivation in 2024, a 3.5% increase from the previous year.
But discussing aerial spraying in Colombia means discussing much more than just hectares and herbicides. The country has already been through massive eradication campaigns as part of the War on Drugs, and some of their consequences turned out to be very different from what their proponents had imagined.
To understand why, we have to go back nearly half a century, to a time when the crop Washington wanted to eradicate in Colombia was not primarily coca, but cannabis.
Before Cocaine, There Was ‘la Bonanza Marimbera’
Long before Pablo Escobar and the Medellín and Cali cartels, Colombia experienced another drug boom.
From the late 1960s through the 1970s, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and La Guajira became major centers of cannabis production for the U.S. market. The so-called “Bonanza Marimbera” transformed the region’s economy: farmers, transporters, merchants, and smugglers all participated in a market fueled by huge demand from the U.S. counterculture.
That region was also the birthplace of one of the most famous strains of that era: Santa …
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Author: Camila Berriex / High Times
