The chief consumers of Colombian marijuana were still North American citizens, and the dealers continued to design new clandestine mechanisms for exporting their product. Marijuana crops occupied an area of between 10,000 and 12,000 hectares between 1988 and 1989, and there was certainly nodecrease in exports. The government had had some success in 1986, but the phenomenon persisted, so much so that by 1988 Colombia had become, once more, the world’s major marijuana producer — followed by Mexico and the United States itself. Sixth, in the second half of the Barco administration it became urgent to establish priorities in actions designed to counter the ever-expanding drug trade. On the one hand, the country’s budget limitations imposed a rational use of the meager resources available. Besides, aid from the United States had been reduced from US$11,553,000 in 1987 to US$9,767,000 in 1988. On the other hand, it became important to decide on priorities, given the dimensions of the problem. Priority had to be given to those tasks which were both feasible and most urgent. The Liberal Party government continued to insist that eradication was the prime tactical mechanism to be used against the production and exportation of illegal drugs. Nonetheless spraying was reduced, despite urgings from Washington. In 1990, seeing that the policy of manual and aerial fumigation offered no practical results, eradication began to occupy a less important place in Colombian anti-drug policy. Emphasis was placed more and more on “the drug war”; that is to say, on military action and extradition. Between August 1989 and August 1990, President Barco’s government extradited a number of Colombian citizens to the United States, and for this paid a huge price in terms of violent upheaval within Colombia.

Perhaps this explains why Washington did not put greater pressure on the Colombian government to implement a more aggressive eradication policy. In any case,flood table reduced pressure from the United States again gave the authorities in Bogotá a margin of maneuverability in which to define certain internal aspects of their anti-drug strategy. This margin was due, also, to the fact that the efforts being made by Colombia to counteract the drug trade had been acknowledged internationally — and in particular by Europe. The administration of President César Gaviria inherited from its predecessors very poor results as far as the policy of eradication was concerned: experimental fumigation during the Turbay regime, massive fumigation in the period of Belisario Betancur and sporadic fumigation by the Barco government — all of them ineffective, clumsy and deplorable. Colombia had tried paraquat and then glyphosate in an attempt to stay the advance of marijuana, and garlon-4 against the coca plantations. The merchandise was different in each case, the legal herbicides used were different also, but the results were very similar: organized drug traffickers in Colombia had efficiently diversified the production and the processing of illegal drugs, while successive governments were combating them with actions that did not seriously affect the illegal trade itself nor the increasing power of Colombia’s drug lords. It seemed difficult to overlook these antecedents; yet President Gaviria and his team did not appear to have learnt any lessons from the experience of previous administrations. In the final months of the Barco administration, chemical fumigation had ceased, and yet this fact did not seem to have an adverse effect on relations between Bogotá and Washington. In a routine manner, those US officials in charge of international anti-narcotic policy would suggest a return to fumigation, but they did not do so peremptorily, nor were these suggestion accompanied by any strong threats.

Manual eradication of coca was being carried on, and the number of hectares dedicated to marijuana crops had decreased; so it seemed unnecessary to give pride of place to fumigation in the narco-diplomacy between Colombia and the United States. What altered this situation dramatically was the discovery that Colombia was becoming — albeit incipiently — an important zone for the growing of poppies.In 1984, small plantations were destroyed in Tolima and Meta. In 1986, invasions and confiscations were carried out by government officials, but they were relatively insignificant. The first 2,297 grams of heroin were seized in that same year; and in 1988 two laboratories for processing heroin and morphine were discovered, one in Bogotá and the other in Barranquilla.18 In September 1991 the weekly magazine Semana published a long report on the sudden appearance of poppies on the national scene, quoting official sources that claimed to have discovered 2,000 hectares of what was called “the curséd flower.”At the end of that same year, the National Security Agency spoke of some 2,500 hectares where poppies were being grown,and the Anti-narcotics Police pointed out that the year had seen an unprecedented increase in the number of poppy plantations in the main Colombian mountain ranges within the jurisdiction of a number of departments such as Huila, Tolima, Cauca, Boyacá, Cundinamarca, Caquetá, Antioquia, Caldas, Meta, Nariño, Risaralda and Santander, to name only the most important ones.”The government responded to these alarming facts by reporting the manual eradication of 1,406 hectares of poppies, the seizure of 17 kilograms of morphine and 30 kilograms of opium, and the destruction of five laboratories for morphine-processing in Neiva.It is worth mentioning, also, that as from May 1991, Colombian heroin began to be identified and seized in the United States.It was hoped that having eradicated 56 percent of the plantations reported in 1991, the question of poppy crops would not acquire alarming proportions. Nonetheless, in March of that year, the director of the Anti-narcotic Police, General Rosso José Serrano, stated that poppy production might very well soon expand to occupy 10,000 hectares of Colombia’s soil.A month later, press reports spoke of a possible 20,000 hectares already in existence.

A study made under the auspices of the National Council for Defense and National Security claimed that approximately 20,000 hectares of poppy plantations did indeed exist and were located in seventeen different departments within Colombia.In January 1992 the CNE had authorized both manual and aerial fumigation,macetas redondas with glyphosate, of another 2,900 hectares of poppies.It seems that this decision was not the result of any special pressure from Washington, even though there did exist a powerful incentive to avoid negative reactions in Washington after the Colombian government had refused to accept US$2.8 million in official US aid to set up an anti-narcotics unit in the army similar to that which already existed in the Police Force.Washington could hardly justify an unusually strong protest against Bogotá’s behavior regarding the control of poppy fields, since Colombia was not even a medium-sized producer of heroin.Officials from DEA and the US Embassy in Bogotá urged the Colombian government to spray the poppy fields, and they were pleased to see that their wishes were carried out. They also helped legitimize the use of glyphosate by circulating scientific papers and opinions by United States experts in favor of the substance.Nevertheless, the decision to spray the poppy fields with that particular chemical seems to have been taken by President Gaviria’s government on discovering, to its surprise, the proportions of the Colombian poppy/heroin phenomenon, rather than because of any imposition from Washington. From 1992 onwards little effort was made to eradicate coca and marijuana plantations. 944 hectares of coca were destroyed in 1992, and 100 of marijuana; and in 1993, 846 hectares of coca were destroyed, and 138 hectares of marijuana.31 This reduction in efforts to eradicate was due, in part, to two notions which predominated among bureaucrats and experts since the Betancur regime. On the one hand, that Colombia was not an important coca producer, but rather was the main scenario for the processing of cocaine and of its exportation to the principal markets for consumption abroad. And secondly, that the United States was effectively replacing imports thanks to the development of its own national variety of marijuana which was satisfying the home market and causing a considerable decline in the number of Colombian marijuana planters. Such reasoning was only partially correct. In the nineties, for example, Colombia coca growing not only increased, but the quality of the leaf improved considerably. On top of that, severe frosts in the United States occasionally affected marijuana crops there, and that, together with repressive measures against marijuana-growing in Mexico, tended to explain why, from time to time, there was a resurgence of the marijuana business in Colombia. Colombia’s infrastructure made it easy to plant more coca and marijuana whenever attractive market conditions justified doing so.

It was unrealistic, therefore, to think that Colombia had to overcome serious problems in order to produce illegal substances. In February 1994, on being informed by US sources that coca plantations covered an area of 39,700 hectares,the Colombian government ordered aerial spraying. At the same time, marijuana crops had increased from 2,000 hectares in 1991 to 5,000 hectares in 1993.33 The poppy boom kept growing throughout 1993. A new report from the National Council for Defense and National Security showed that the poppy business was flourishing in eighteen departments.12,864 hectares of poppies had been destroyed in 1992 . In 1993, 9,821 hectares were eradicated, but in 1994 poppy fields were still proliferating. During the year 1994, 5.314 hectares were eradicated .However, according to US estimates, poppy fields that year did not fall below 20,000 hectares, an estimate that was never denied by the Colombian authorities.The illegal heroin trade of the eighties and nineties appeared to follow a similar pattern to that of the marijuana business in the sixties and seventies. In the case of marijuana, the production triangle in this hemisphere had been made up of Mexico, Jamaica and Colombia. When repression took its toll in one country, especially due to the use of herbicides, the business moved to another, although it always returned to the spot where initially larger amounts had been planted. Something similar occurred with poppies between Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia. The original problem of illegal crops was never overcome, nor were the authorities able to dismount the equipment and infrastructure which enabled such plantations and laboratories to stay in business in the above-mentioned countries. By attacking temporarily, and in an isolated fashion an illegal crop, public anti-drug policy automatically attacks the weakest and least decisive link in the vast and complex chain of illegal drug dealing, and at the same time has the worst possible negative effect from a social viewpoint on small farmers and Indian populations, while affecting hardly at all the area of organized crime financed by the drug traffickers. The Gaviria administration had decided to deal with the drug problem by placing its emphasis on a policy of submission and making clear that it differentiated between drug trafficking and narco-terrorism. President Gaviria stated that “while narco-terrorism is our problem, drug trafficking is an international phenomenon.” Nonetheless, in the case of poppy growing, Gaviria did what former governments had done in their attacks on coca and marijuana fields. The results of his efforts were insignificant and ephemeral, as were those of his predecessors. When a government acts on the basis of punishment alone and without offering incentives, believing that it is indulging in a technically-approved and non-harmful type of fumigation, it finishes up contributing to environmental damage and to a greater social breakdown in the zones where the plantations are grown. Occasional voices were raised to criticize chemical fumigation. But discussions on the subject assumed an elitist, moral tone: on one side were the “good, hard-line, intelligent people” uncontaminated by drug traffic, and on the other “the softies, the badies, the dumb idiots” who were either mouthpieces of the traffickers or were unconsciously letting themselves be used by them. In February 1992, Colombia’s Justice Minister made a comment which illustrates this point: he claimed that “a cloak of complicity has been thrown over things by those who object to herbicide fumigation for environmental reasons, while all the time playing into the hands of the drug traffickers.”At no time was there a lobby sufficiently coherent, serious and affirmative to combat the government’s determination to keep on fumigating. The executive did not receive substantial criticism nor impediments to the actions it carried out through legislation and the judiciary.