EL ESPECTADOR, July 2, 2025
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
The most recent message that the Gustavo Petro administration sent to Washington was to halt the extradition of one of the Capos of the Dissidents. This country has until September 15 to speed up its strategies for eradication and substitution of coca leaf crops.
The Gustavo Petro administration is looking at two key weeks to demonstrate significant progress in the war on drugs. With orders from the Head of State, who issued a directive so that his legacy would not be marked by a decertification by the administration of Donald Trump. The plan he released includes pushing the efforts at eradication and substitution of coca crops and involving the Ministers of Defense, Environment, and Foreign Relations. However, in the midst of these moves, some noise persists, like the one that came out this Tuesday on his halt to the extradition of Capo Willinton Henao Gutiérrez, alias “Mocho Olmedo”, who is tied to the Dissidents known as the 33rd Front.
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Gustavo Petro
@petrogustavo Follow
The law permits me to hold up an extradition if there is an advanced peace process, and advancing the process consists in removing the causes of violence: the illegal economy. Whether thousands of hectares of illegal crops are substituted or not depends on the extradition of Sr. Olmedo.
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Semana Magazine @RevistaSemana
#Politics—Petro “rewarded” Mocho Olmedo, boss of the FARC Dissidents and halted his extradition to the U.S. That was the surprising argument. semana.com/politica/artic. . . .
Only a little more than two months remain until the White House issues its verdict on whether, in their opinion, Colombia has done enough on the issue of the war on drug trafficking, and the President is on a deadline to make sure of an affirmative response. In that direction, the President’s Department of Administration (DAPRE in Spanish) has been putting together meetings with high officials to discuss the possible economic, political, and diplomatic problems that would be caused by a negative decision that Washington could take in September.
In these meetings, the administration identified a number of risks: Decertification could delegitimize the focus on “total peace”. (Total peace is the reason the extradition of “Mocho Olmedo” was stopped.) Decertification could generate questioning of crop substitution policies and weaken governability in the regions. Officials also warned about the social impacts, like increases in rural conflict, strengthening of the illegal groups, and increasing forced displacement.
Faced with this scenario, they have traced some lines of action that would try to mitigate the blow that decertification would signify to the bilateral relationship with the United States, just at a moment when the numbers don’t really favor Colombia. According to the worldwide report on narcotics just issued by the United Nations Office in Opposition to Drugs and Crime (UNODC) as recently as 2023, this country produced 2,600 tons of cocaine and has 253,000 hectares planted in coca, which represents 67% of all the hectares planted in coca on the planet.
The Minister of Defense is certain that it’s possible to make progress in substitution processes in departments like Nariño and Putumayo where agreements are in effect with communities that are committed to productive transition. The Directors at the Substitution of Crops for Illegal Use agency indicate that the ELN Dissidents known as Communeros of the South—this militia is headed by Gabriel Yepes Mejía, alias HH, another Capo whose extradition was halted by Petro last May—has expressed its readiness to substitute 5,000 hectares of coca, even though he warned that the main barrier continues to be the slowness of the disbursements.
Added to this strategy are the commitments derived from the dialogs between the administration and the Dissidents commanded by Walter Mendoza. In fact, last weekend the delegations agreed to spend 8 billion pesos (roughly USD $2,010,610 at current exchange rates) to substitute 1,000 hectares of coca for plantings of cacao in 2025 in the Municipalities of Tumaco and Roberto Payán (Nariño Department) as part of a total of 7,500 hectares prioritized in that area.
But they’ve also lined up some activities in areas where “armed groups that have no desire to negotiate” are operating: that would mean forced eradication. This strategy, led by the Armed Forces accompanied by the Ministry of Environment and the Department of Social Prosperity, has a goal of eradicating 15,000 hectares of coca in the next two months. Although they have not yet decided on all the territories that would be prioritized in this effort, one of them would be Catatumbo, exactly the same place where they had just now decreed a zone of temporary location where the combatants of the 33rd Front are concentrated.
The Foreign Ministry, headed by Laura Sarabia,[1] has warned that decertification would mean the loss of financial and military cooperation resources, and would affect sensitive commercial sectors like bananas, coffee, flowers, textiles, and commercial products. Besides that, Colombia would face more demanding conditions for obtaining credit from multilateral agencies like the World Bank, the Industrial Development Bank (BID in Spanish), and the International Monetary Fund (FMI in Spanish).
Paralleled with eradication and substitution activities to improve the statistics—as EL ESPECTADOR reported in April—part of the strategy to achieve Washington’s inclination to certify is centered on maintaining constant dialog with United States legislators, even away from North American soil. This Sunday, in Cartagena, the self-proclaimed “government of change” sat down face to face with seven Members of the United States Congress—Republicans and Democrats—to talk about drugs and migration.
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The Trump administration’s chargé d’affaires, John McNamara, Vice Minister Mauricio Jaramillo, and Ambassador Daniel García Peña attended the meeting. Also attending were Historic Pact Party Members of Congress like Senator Gloria Flórez and Representatives Cha Dorina Hernández and Alejandro Toro, along with officials from the Interior and Defense Ministries.
Meanwhile, in Colombia’s Congress some voices from the opposition are criticizing the profound switch of strengthening the military and judicial presence in coca planting areas and returning mainly to forced eradication. The outgoing Vice President of the Chamber, Lina Garrida (Radical Change Party), called it a “knee-jerk reaction” when temporary locations were authorized in areas where there are oceans of coca crops. ”They’re ceding space and legitimacy to criminal organizations instead of fighting them,” she said. She also criticized the fact that, in the midst of the risk of decertification, President Petro is prioritizing a different international agenda “as if he were challenging Donald Trump.”
Anyway, Petro directly questioned the focus of the U.N. report. The Oval Office also analyzed the report to make its decisions on which countries to certify in the war on drugs. In an event on agro-industry and marketing in Catatumbo, he criticized the fact that the report didn’t mention the increase in drug consumption in Europe. “Why doesn’t the report say that the increase in the production of coca in Colombia is because the Europeans doubled and tripled their consumption of cocaine? They didn’t put it in the report because the gringos put a stop to that.”
Other voices in the administration have insisted that the failure of the antidrug policy has to be understood as a global problem. Laura Gil, the outgoing Itinerant Ambassador on Global Drug Policy, in her last speech in Vienna, criticized the fact that international measurements continue to be centered on cocaine in spite of the fact that other substances—such as opioids or amphetamines—have greater consumption and represent more serious risks. “I have to point out the colonialist approximation the UNODC has in its report,” she said. As also Ambassador to Austria until next July 11, she said that Latin American countries are not being treated equally as compared with the producers of synthetic drugs.
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The truth is that the decision by the United States on certification will arrive at a time at which not only the coca crops and also the cocaine have gained ground. The coca crop increased by 6% between 2022 and 2023, achieving 376,748 hectares in the world, and global production of cocaine increased by 34% in that same period, producing 3,708 tons. The Petro administration now has two months to counterbalance the critical talk with diplomacy and improved statistics in a race against the clock to get Trump to decide that, yes, Colombia continues to be a reliable partner in the global war on drugs.
[1] Sarabia resigned as Foreign Minister on July 3.