Colombia's Price for Peace: Cocaine and the Environment

Jul 19, 2018 | Simeon Tegel
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Sometimes winning the peace can be more complicated than winning the war. At least that seems to be the hard lesson that Colombia is learning as deforestation and cocaine production skyrocket following an end to its 52-year internal conflict. The reason is that the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (or FARC by their Spanish acronym) once controlled or influenced vast stretches of land in the Colombian Amazon, one of the world's largest swaths of tropical rainforest and a huge carbon sink. In those areas the rebels' presence precluded competitors from producing cocaine, a drug the FARC itself trafficked in, while also preventing the loss of forest cover that provided the perfect natural habitat for the group's brand of guerrilla warfare.