President Juan Manuel Santos says Colombia has a "golden opportunity" to uproot the drug trade in this world hub of cocaine production, once a 50-year conflict with leftist insurgents is put to rest. Lasting change, however, also requires a new international consensus on how to deal with the problem, he warned in an interview late Monday with AFP, adding that it makes more sense to treat addicts than to put them behind bars.
"I am not proposing legalisation," he said. "I am proposing that we change the focus, the priorities. Because we've been in this war against drugs for more than 40 years and we haven't won it." Santos will lay out his ideas for a "more effective, enduring and human" strategy this week at a special session of the UN General Assembly on the global drug problem.
The reappraisal comes as the Santos government and the leftist FARC guerrilla group are the closest they've ever been to a peace accord that would end Latin America's longest armed conflict. In Santos's view, that has opened up new possibilities for shutting down the drug trade, which helped fuel the violence and grew to make Colombia the world's top producer of cocaine, one beset by powerful drug cartels that at times have threatened the state itself.
Right-wing paramilitary groups and leftist guerrillas also fed off the illegal trade, prolonging the conflict. "The great paradox is that there are crops that are much more profitable for the campesinos, because it's the intermediaries who pocket the profits," Santos said. "Since the areas where coca is grown are conflict zones, the state has had great difficulties in substituting crops," he said. "When we succeed in signing the peace with the FARC, we will have a golden opportunity to reach those areas and we will then be much more effective in substituting illicit crops," he said.