President Gustavo Petro announced Thursday that his government will stop using the United Nations’ methodology for drug production monitoring in Colombia, placing a 27-year-old relationship with the international body on the brink of collapse.
The contract with the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which expired in December, is now in danger following months of disputes over how the organization measures illicit crops.
Petro declared war on the methodology via social media, stating that the “dark statistical method” used by the agency would no longer be utilized by his administration. “The indicator of potential cocaine production has been badly constructed by UNODC for decades,” Petro wrote on X.
Petro says the UN’s drug monitoring methodology does not reflect Colombia’s reality
President Petro says that the U.N. drug monitoring figures in Colombia do not reflect the reality of the country and have damaged the country’s diplomatic standing. Local media reports that government sources believe these data points, which depict a country flooded with cocaine, were key to President Donald Trump building a negative narrative against Petro and his anti-drug efforts.
The methodological dispute centers on UNODC’s data collection process. The agency divides Colombia into four regions and visits only one each year for rural surveys, extrapolating those results to the rest of the country. Critics argue that if a particularly productive region is evaluated in a single year, the national calculation can be artificially inflated.
las Naciones. Unidas reconocen públicamente el error de sus conclusiones sobre potencial de producción de cocaína de Colombia cometido en su propio informe del año 2024 dónde públicó el mapa satelital de cultivos diferenciado en colores por su nivel de uso
Algún investigador…
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) October 21, 2025
Petro instead defends the reliability of the National Police’s Integrated Information and Monitoring System, which uses permanent satellite monitoring. Reports say police data indicated that as of last August, Colombia had 262,179 hectares of coca planted, a figure 15% lower than the data provided by UNODC.
Petro believes the US government has attacked him over faulty figures
The friction over these figures has already had significant political consequences. Petro attributes Washington’s decision to decertify Colombia’s anti-drug compliance and include the country in the so-called Clinton List last October to the U.N. statistics. Spanish outlet El Pais revealed in November that the U.N. data showed a record of 3,001 potential tons of cocaine, a 12.6% increase from the previous year.
If the contract with the U.N. is definitively broken, the Colombian president plans for the police to assume the monitoring duties directly. Petro stated that he has already delivered studies to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration showing that the growth rate of coca leaf crops has been reduced to zero.
The shift in strategy comes just days before Petro is scheduled to visit the White House on Feb. 3. The documents the Colombian government presents at that meeting will test Petro’s ability to redefine the bilateral anti-drug strategy without the endorsement of the U.N. figures that have served as an international reference for decades.