With drug crops booming, Colombia’s police are busily testing whether drones carrying defoliants can efficiently kill the leaf used to make cocaine and win the support of Trump administration officials concerned about this country’s growing capacity to supply drugs to American consumers.
Antidrug officials here say that in recent weeks they have deployed 10 drones, each weighing 50 pounds when loaded with herbicide, in southwest Nariño province. The small, remotely guided aircraft destroyed hundreds of acres of coca in a first round of tests, said police and the company contracted by the government to supply the drones.
Colombia’s new president, Iván Duque, said that he wants some kind of aerial fumigation of coca fields, which expanded 160% to 516,000 acres from 2012 to 2017, the White House reported in June. But he prefers drones over planes to drop the herbicide, which would mitigate damage to legal crops growing adjacent to coca fields. And he has been unenthusiastic about using glyphosate, the herbicide that for years was delivered by aircraft to kill coca.
Drones “permit total precision at low altitude above the plants and additionally minimize the damage and implications for third parties,” said Mr. Duque in an interview with Caracol Radio before winning office in June.
Colombian President Iván Duque, center, and Defense Minister Guillermo Botero, left, during the first official inspection of the troops at the Jose Maria Cordova Military School in Bogotá on Aug. 14 2018
U.S. and Colombian officials said that the growth in coca cultivation came as Colombia’s government in recent years wound down and eventually ended a program relying on crop dusters to coat coca fields with glyphosate.
Mr. Duque’s predecessor, Juan Manuel Santos, had halted the use of the 14 aircraft following lawsuits from farmers groups over health concerns and a ruling from the Constitutional Court ordering a prohibition after a World Health Organization agency said that glyphosate could be cancerous. Opponents of fumigation here are also pointing to a California jury that on Aug. 10 ruled in favor of a school groundskeeper who said the glyphosate-based weedkillers he used caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The jury ordered the maker of the chemical, Monsanto Co., to pay him $289 million in damages.
U.S. officials contend that glyphosate presents no danger to people or animals here, noting that the Environmental Protection Agency last year concluded the chemical is unlikely to cause cancer. Under one of Washington’s signature foreign-aid packages—Plan Colombia, which went into effect in 2000 and cost more than $10 billion—planes spraying glyphosate reduced Colombia’s coca fields from 470,000 acres in 2001 to 193,000 in 2012, according to U.S. figures.
With coca surging back, those gains have now been lost. In the U.S., 14,000 overdose deaths from cocaine were reported for 2017, up from fewer than 5,500 in 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. All this is prompting U.S. and counterdrug officials to push for an aggressive policy of aerial spraying.
“There needs to be a serious and effective eradication program,” said U.S. Ambassador Kevin Whitaker. “Should it be manual? It should. Should it include aerial? Sure. Again our view has always been that it was safe and effective and it is a very useful tool in addressing the problem overall.”
Though common in agriculture, drones have never before been used to attack illegal crops, according to Colombian and U.S. officials.
U.S. officials say they are open to using drones but need to learn more about their capabilities once Colombia’s police complete tests, which could run until January. There are clear benefits: Drones can fly just feet above drug crops, making them more accurate than an airplane. They also end the inherent danger for pilots who carried out dicey missions in crop dusters; rebels and drug traffickers shot down several over the years.
“Traditional aerial spraying is expensive, and it’s particularly dangerous for those who fly the missions,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary Rich Glenn of the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. “So if there is a way to do this in an unmanned fashion that’s closer to the ground, that limits the amount of spraying that goes on to crops that are not meant to be sprayed, then all the better.”
In Nariño province, a company called Fumi Drone SAS is providing the drones and the operators who are training the police. Standing no more than a third of a mile from the drones, they use remote controls to navigate them less than two feet above the skinny coca bushes before unloading the glyphosate.
The low concentrations of glyphosate the drones carry in Nariño are eliminating about 90% of the coca on each acre that is targeted, said German Huertas, director of operations at Fumi Drone, which sells drones used to drop herbicides on rice, orange and avocado farms.
But there are drawbacks to large-scale use in Colombia’s lawless drug zones: Soldiers need to be deployed to cordon off swaths of coca-producing land from angry farmers or drug traffickers seeking to damage the devices. The drones can also only drop so much herbicide; a typical crop duster can carry 80 times more. Land mines laid during Colombia’s long rebel conflict also pose a danger to drone operators.
Fumigating coca—especially from aircraft—is controversial in Colombia, where farmers have long complained that glyphosate hit their legal crops during antidrug operations.
“This isn’t going to solve any of our problems but will instead increase them,” said Leider Valencia, a spokesman for an organization representing coca farmers across much of Colombia. “If they come with forced fumigation, there will be confrontations with the police. I can promise that.”
Mr. Valencia, 36 years old, said farming coca has given him enough of a living to educate and feed his children. Other farmers in the remote south, he said, have tried growing legal crops but failed to make a go of it.
“I’m not planting coca because I’m a drug trafficker or because I’m a terrorist,” Mr. Valencia said.
The Santos government had taken a two-pronged approach to fighting coca: weaning farmers off coca with cash bonuses and technical assistance for them to grow legal crops or face forced manual eradication. Thousands of farmers have taken the government up on the offer, eradicating their own coca in exchange for government help.
But in many regions, other coca farmers simply doubled down on coca.
“There is no doubt that Colombia has a huge task ahead of itself,” said Bo Mathiasen, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Colombia. “It is a lot of illicit crops.”
For now, U.S. officials will await whatever decision Mr. Duque makes. Seven or eight of the crop dusters that had worked the coca fields here remain in Colombia. In a few months, U.S. officials say, they could become operational again.
“I told embassy personnel and the Colombians the same thing: We need to be ready for a restart,” said the U.S. ambassador, Mr. Whitaker.
PHOTO: MAURICIO DUENAS CASTANEDA/EFE/ZUMA PRESS
Sources: BBC; Wall Street Journal