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The Colombian government hopes to exceed the 130,000 hectares of coca eradicated this year, a goal for which 111,131 hectares of illicit crops have been manually uprooted, Defense Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo reported on Monday.
“The public force has intensified its offensive against all links of drug trafficking,” said the minister at a press conference.
He also pointed out that 4,840 “infrastructures that were at the service of the drug trafficking business” have been destroyed, as well as 456 tons of cocaine and 480 of marijuana have been seized.
The annual report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), presented in Bogotá on June 17, assured that coca cultivation in Colombia was reduced by 9% last year, going from 169,000 hectares sown in 2018 to 154,000.
In this sense, Minister Trujillo pointed out that the enemy is drug trafficking and not the fumigation of illicit crops with glyphosate, which has been suspended for five years.
For this reason, he called on the powers of the State and the citizens so that there is “a scenario of harmonious collaboration and the sprinkling can be restarted and eradication is prevented from being hindered.”
The fumigations of the coca plantations were suspended in 2015, during the Presidency of Juan Manuel Santos, following a ruling of the Constitutional Court based on the argument that the herbicide glyphosate can be carcinogenic and cause damage to the environment.
The high court left open the possibility of reauthorizing glyphosate in the fight against drugs if the Government meets six environmental health requirements.
The first is that aerial spraying must be regulated by a different body from the one that will execute the program. The second point is in charge of the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of the Environment, who should be in charge of studying the impacts on the communities that glyphosate fumigation could generate and according to the results of these studies, the third condition appears. An alert system.
The fourth point required by the Court for the return of spraying shows that there must be rigor, quality and impartiality or that there is scientific evidence for making decisions taking into account conditions one and two.
The fifth condition is the existence of a complaints procedure that must be received by an entity other than the one that executes it and finally, the sixth condition, related to the “objective and conclusive evidence that demonstrates the absence of harm to health and the environment. environment”.
Conditions that, currently, none have been carried out.
On October 26, the Government assured that the public force has eradicated more than 98,000 hectares of coca, which has already exceeded the total achieved last year, which was 94,670 hectares, and also highlighted that cocaine seizures have increased by a 13%.
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