After the peace accord, can the Colombian government incentivize coca planters to cultivate other crops? Not if they don’t address the inequality and land grabbing that prompted them to start growing coca in the first place.
The media casts coca growers in the Chapare region as 'nouveau riche' drug trafficking peasants, but most drug workers are young men without land or hope of decent jobs, not unionized coca growers.
The struggle over the reach of international drug control continues. Having failed in an earlier attempt to amend the primary international drug control treaty to protect traditional uses of the coca leaf by indigenous communities in the Andes, Bolivia has declared it will withdraw from the treaty so that it can rejoin to it with reservations. This attempt to expand the circle of people who can legitimately make use of coca leaves—and the hostile reaction to it—provides insight into the economic and political interests that dictate the terms of drug control.
