The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, stated in a televised address that the country will not return to the forced eradication of illicit coca crops after President Trump revoked the country’s U.S. Drug Certification.
Petro defended his administration’s handling of the process and said that the Trump administration’s decision was “unfair and rude,” calling it an “ideological attack.”
It is worth recalling that in its decision, the U.S. argued that Colombia had “notably failed” over the past year in its obligations to fight drug trafficking, directly blaming the Petro amdinistration, which led to the non-renewal of certification for the South American country in this struggle.
President Petro says Colombia won’t resume forced coca eradication after US decertification
After the news was confirmed that Washington would not renew Colombia’s U.S. Drug Certification, the Colombian president addressed the nation on television. In his message, Gustavo Petro criticized what he called the Trump administration’s “political” decision and presented figures that he said supported the results of his government’s fight against drug trafficking.
In his speech, he recalled that Colombia has suffered the most from drug trafficking over the past decades, defending his personal commitment to the battle against it throughout his political career.
“I am referring, basically, to what I consider an injustice: a profound rudeness against the country that has shed the most blood so that the societies of the United States and Europe do not consume so much cocaine. It is also, obviously, an insult to my personal life, because if any political leader after Luis Carlos Galan [the presidential candidate assassinated in 1989] has fought against drug trafficking, it has been me, at the cost of the permanent insecurity in which I have lived,” President Petro said during his address.
Later, Petro strongly defended his anti-drug policy, providing figures that he said demonstrated the success of his program in this field. He concluded that under his administration, the increase in illegally cultivated coca hectares fell from 43% in 2022 to 9% in 2023, with a projection for last year of about 3%, according to him.
Strong defense of voluntary crop substitution in Colombia
In addition to criticizing the United States for not renewing anti-drug certification, Petro rejected the results of forced eradication of illicit coca crops, which he called “the old model,” defending his government’s decision to promote voluntary substitution with incentives for farmers.
With this, the Colombian president announced that the process had allowed substitution of 22,433 hectares of illicit crops by 2025, which for Petro represents a success that makes a return to forced eradication unnecessary.
In a numbers-driven argument aimed at highlighting his government’s achievements in this field, Petro compared the elimination of hectares of illicit coca crops with the years immediately preceding his presidency, noting the increase in these crops that began under the administration of Ivan Duque.
In this regard, he added that in 2016, under the presidency of Juan Manuel Santos (2014–2018), 18,000 hectares of crops were eradicated; while in 2017 the figure was 52,000 and in 2018, 59,000. This increase continued in the following years, under the presidency of Iván Duque (2018–2022). Thus, in 2019, 94,000 hectares were eradicated, and in 2020 the maximum was reached: 130,000 hectares forcibly eradicated, “many with planes spraying a component called glyphosate, which was banned by the Constitutional Court, not by me. But if I had been a justice of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, I also would have voted for its prohibition, because it was a well-taken measure.”
However, he said, in contrast to this increase in eradication, in 2021 coca leaf crops grew by 103,257 hectares, equivalent to a 43% increase, according to the president.
With this, Gustavo Petro contradicted statements he himself had made just days before the U.S. decision, when he announced that Colombia would resume aerial fumigation — despite the Constitutional ban — in those areas where there are riots against the security forces.