Caribbean & Central America - October 2024

Andean countries (mainly Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia) have long held a global monopoly over coca cultivation. This may be ending. A new report reveals that climate and soil conditions in nearly half of northern Central America are highly suitable for local cultivation.

A research team led by academics at Ohio State University in the US and Colombia’s Universidad de Tolima revealed their findings in an article in Environmental Research Letters, a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal, published on 17 September. The team analysed coca eradication reports from around Central America, collected data on climate, soil, and topography at each site, and used computer models to compare that with known coca cultivation locations in Colombia. Their main conclusion is that 47% of Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize have the right climate and soil for commercial coca growing.

Professor Kendra McSweeney of Ohio State University said: “South America’s long monopoly on coca production for the international cocaine market is over; that’s a very significant development in the dynamics of the cocaine trade”. The full implications may take some time to emerge. Crop eradication and government action against trafficking in the Andean region appears to have increased interest on the part of drug trafficking organisations (DTOs) in alternative sources of supply: recent years have seen the appearance of “experimental” clandestine crops in Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and Costa Rica. Crops have also been detected in Venezuela along the border with Colombia.

While Central America is unlikely to rival the Andean countries in terms of volume, it is closer to the main consumer markets in the US and Europe. That could lead rival DTOs to increase their presence and compete, possibly violently, for market share. The report suggests that for Central American governments, launching immediate eradication campaigns might not be the best policy response, and could be counterproductive. It says eradication efforts in the Andes, by forcing cultivation to move to new areas, have often had the unintended consequence of increasing, rather than reducing, the total cultivated area. Eradication is also less effective and sustainable when it is not complemented with other initiatives such as crop substitution, strengthening the rule of law, provision of basic services, formalisation of land ownership, and anti-poverty efforts.

McSweeney was cited by US human rights lobby group Washington Office on Latin America (Wola) as issuing a rather stark warning, commenting that “if we have learnt anything from supply-side drug control in South America, it’s that eradicating coca crops and trying to shut down trafficking operations, trying to shut down the cartels, and trying to go after the Pablo Escobars and their successors – it generates a lot of Netflix content, but it doesn’t do anything to reduce the amount of drugs that make it into the US and other countries.”

Central America’s role in cocaine supply chain

The article published on 17 September in Environmental Research Letters notes that since the 1980s, Central America’s role in the global cocaine supply chain has largely been to facilitate bulk transhipments from Colombian suppliers to Mexican distributors. However, in the mid-2010s some Honduran trafficking groups began refining coca paste imported from Colombia into powder cocaine. Around the same time, authorities began to report their discovery of well-capitalised and reportedly ‘experimental’ coca-growing operations north of South America: in Mexico in 2014, in Honduras in 2017, and in Guatemala and Costa Rica in 2018.