Colombia’s new cocaine war

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Colombia produced a record 1.5 million kilograms of cocaine last year - about 70% of the world’s supply. In the regions where coca is grown, gangs fight for control of territory and smuggling routes, killing anyone who stands in their way. These are some of the most dangerous places in South America. A peace deal signed in 2016 with the FARC rebel group was meant to reduce coca growing by offering farmers alternatives. But instead, cocaine production has rocketed, flooding markets in the US and Europe.

In this Assignment, Michael Buchanan investigates what’s behind Colombia’s booming cocaine trade. He gains rare access to smugglers and producers, as well as meeting the indigenous people who are standing up to the traffickers, and often paying with their lives.

Producers: Josephine Casserly and Almudena Garcia Parrado Editor: Bridget Harney

(Image: Farmer picking coca leaves. Credit: BBC)

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you do the math, I've earned a lot of money, but you don't even realize because you see so much money that you spend and spend and think it's never going to finish.
0:15.0	I'm sitting in a hotel room in a part of the dole in Northern Colombia.
0:22.0	It's dark outside and the blinds are drawn. The man I'm talking to, I'm going to call him Alejandro, is wearing a baseball cap and as a scarf tied over his his face as we speak only his eyes are visible.
0:36.0	Well the most recent party I hosted it in a country house and well there were women
0:41.9	over here women over there sometimes there is ladies that
0:46.0	charge you a million pesos two million pesos.
0:50.3	Alejandro is a drug smuggler the lyn linchpin in Colombia's vast cocaine production, ensuring
0:56.6	that what's grown in the hills gets sold in Europe.
1:00.0	His words are spoken by a producer.
1:02.8	I'm Michael Buchanan and this is assignment on the BBC World Service.
1:08.6	Alejandro was 29 and agreed to speak to me as is proud of how good he is at his job.
1:14.0	He started smuggling almost six years ago and now leads a team of 18 people who move
1:21.0	around six tons of cocaine across the Atlantic each year.
1:27.0	25,000 or 30,000 US dollars, that is more or less what a kilo is worth, just one kilo place in Europe.
1:35.0	Cocaine consumption is at record levels in Europe,
1:38.0	which may partly be explained by the fact that in Colombia, the world's largest producer of the drug more cocaine is being made than ever before.
1:47.0	A peace tool signed in 2016 between the Colombian government and the FARC rebel group was meant to cut cocaine production.
1:55.2	It hasn't.
1:56.2	The FARC used cocaine to finance their operations and promote their Marxist political
2:01.4	ideology.
2:02.4	With them gone, that territory has been
2:04.7	taken over by criminal gangs shorn of any political beliefs simply out to make money.
	...

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