The grizzled farmers had come on motorcycles and in pickups from jungle homesteads to a soccer field hours from the nearest town of any consequence.
They sat patiently in white plastic chairs in the sweltering heat as government representatives gave their pitch: Plant legal crops like sugar cane and pineapple — or turn to livestock — and abandon coca leaf, the raw ingredient in cocaine.
Cash subsidies await those who sign up, the speakers vowed. We will help you market your new products, build new roads. There were few takers. The cocaleros, as the growers are known, had heard it all before.
“We tried this already, and the government never complied with its promises,” explained one of the men, a 44-year-old father of three who offered only his first name, Elver.
“We tore up our plants, but we never got the help we needed,” he said. “So now we are back to planting coca. It is the only way to make a living here.”
That is something that Colombia’s first leftist president is vowing to change, even as acreage sown with coca leaf soars to new heights and the Biden administration watches warily.
Exactly how Gustavo Petro plans to proceed remains a major question for a leader who took office in August and is also endeavoring to guide his country out of more than five decades of civil war and fix a reeling economy. The odds are stacked against him.
