Last Wednesday (July 25) the UN Office on Drugs and Crime issued a report with its latest findings about coca, the plant used to make cocaine, in Colombia.

The 112-page report explains that, from 2010 to 2011:

• the area cultivated with coca in Colombia increased, from 62,000 to 64,000 hectares (1 hectare = 2 1/2 acres).
• because traffickers were able to extract a bit less cocaine per hectare of coca, the country’s production of cocaine dropped slightly, from 350 to 345 metric tons.

The UN agency has not yet produced estimates for the world’s two other coca-growing countries, Bolivia and Peru. Its report got a lot of press in Colombia, though, because for the first time since 2007, it did not show a decrease in coca cultivation. Despite over 100,000 hectares sprayed with herbicides and 34,000 hectares of coca bushes physically uprooted by eradicators, the amount of coca left over actually increased last year.

Estimates of coca and cocaine production are only produced by two sources: the UNODC and the U.S. government. Washington had not issued any estimates for 2011 cocaine production when the UNODC released its report. However, five days later, Monday July 30, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy produced a press release.

This 600-word document explains that, from 2010 to 2011:

• the amount of cocaine produced in Colombia fell by 25 percent, from 270 to 195 metric tons.

The press release doesn’t say how much coca was grown in Colombia last year, or even whether the land area increased or decreased. Nor does it say whether growers were extracting less cocaine from the coca they harvested, and if so why or how much less. The document did tell us that Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer since the mid-1990s, has now fallen behind Peru (325 metric tons) and Bolivia (265 metric tons).

This is mysterious because in 2010, the last year for which the U.S. government and UNODC have coca-crop estimates for all three countries, Colombia and Peru show nearly the same amount of coca, and Bolivia shows about half as much as the other two. For Bolivia to be producing more cocaine than Colombia from half as much coca is difficult to fathom.

(All available coca and cocaine data from the U.S. and UN since 1999 is at the bottom of this post.)

The Bolivia result is especially surprising because the country’s coca cultivation, in both U.S. and UN estimates, had stayed about the same in 2008-2010. Why would cocaine producers be getting so much more of the drug from the same land area planted with coca?

Asked that very question by a Bolivian interviewer in mid-July, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires John Creamer explained that Bolivian cocaine producers are using “Colombian methods.” These methods, however, are apparently not at work in Colombia.

Here, using the data below, is a chart of how much cocaine the U.S. government believes that producers are deriving from each hectare of coca. It shows producers in Colombia getting less than half as much of the drug out of coca bushes than their counterparts in Bolivia and Peru. A hectare of coca in Peru produced 6.1 kilograms of cocaine in 2010. In Bolivia, it produced 5.7 kilograms of cocaine. In Colombia, it produced only 2.7 kilograms. (The difference may be even greater in the 2011 estimates, but since the U.S. government has not issued coca cultivation land-area estimates for 2011, we can’t calculate it.)

This discrepancy may be a result of frequent eradication in Colombia, which may force growers to replant more often and thus harvest from smaller bushes. However, the UNODC doesn’t reach the same conclusion. The UN estimate of how much cocaine Colombian producers extracted from coca in 2011 (5.4 kilograms per hectare) is closer to the Bolivia and Peru estimates, and more than twice the U.S. figure. (The UNODC, meanwhile, has not even ventured a guess for Peru’s and Bolivia’s cocaine tonnage since 2008.)

Since the U.S. government is not at all transparent about how it gets its cocaine production numbers, this kilograms-per-hectare discrepancy leaves a strong impression that a political agenda is involved. Washington has a strong incentive to reward close ally Colombia and to show that the billions spent on forced coca eradication since 2000 are “working.” It has a strong incentive to prod Peru, whose center-left government may be tempted to take a nationalistic, independent course, to toe the line of the current strategy. And it has a strong incentive to punish Bolivia which, though controlling illicit coca cultivation far better than neighboring Peru, has a government that sharply (and sometimes unfairly) criticizes the United States and is perceived as opposing other U.S. interests.

We want to think that these numbers are not pulled from the U.S. anti-drug bureaucracy’s nether regions, and are based on a considered, reasoned process. But with no transparency at all over how these tonnage estimates are derived, the U.S. cocaine-production numbers are wide open to charges of politicization.

UN and U.S. coca and cocaine estimates (if not visible, refresh this page)

US Data: State Department International Narcotics Control Strategy Reports
UN Data: UNODC Crop Monitoring Reports

UN Office on Drugs and Crime, last Wednesday:

“[P]otential cocaine production in 2011 remained stable at 345 tons, down 1 per cent from 350 tons in 2010.”

White House Office of National Drug Policy, today:

“[T]here has been a 72 percent drop in cocaine pure production capacity in Colombia since 2001… to 195 metric tons in 2011. The latest estimate is a 25 percent reduction from the previous year.”

The UN (working with Colombia’s National Police) and the U.S. government are the only two bodies that attempt to estimate cocaine production in the Andes. And their estimates of Colombia’s production potential, publicized within five days of each other, diverge by 77 percent.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime today released its estimate of how much coca, the plant used to make cocaine, was cultivated in Colombia last year. The report is making headlines in Colombia because, for the first time since 2007, the estimate for 2011 shows an increase in coca-growing — to 64,000 hectares from 62,000 in 2010.

The data would indicate that, twelve years after the beginning of “Plan Colombia,” the country’s rural coca economy has hit a third plateau. This graphic of UNODC coca estimates since 1999 illustrates the point. (Clicking on this or any other image in this post will enlarge it in a new window.)

The first, and highest, plateau was the period before 2002. In that year, the FARC lost control of a zone in southern Colombia from which government security forces had withdrawn to allow failed peace talks to take place. Much coca had been planted in that zone. By that year, the United States had delivered, and was using, a much larger fleet of aerial herbicide spray planes funded by “Plan Colombia” in 2000.

This pushed coca-growing down to a second plateau in the 2003-2008 period. Near the end of this period, coca growers had begun adjusting to the hercibide fumigation strategy, which was only rarely accompanied by a permanent government presence on the ground. Plots were smaller, more scattered, better hidden and quickly replanted after eradication.

Starting in 2006 and peaking in 2008, the Colombian government responded by massively increasing manual eradication: sending teams of people to coca-growing areas to pull up the crops by hand. The increase in manual eradication — which, while dangerous for the eradicators, kills the plant and requires more government presence on the ground — was accompanied by a sharp drop in herbicide fumigation. This caused coca cultivation to drop to a new plateau starting in 2009.

Despite a further drop from 2009 to 2010, the 2011 results make apparent that momentum toward reduced coca-growing has once again stalled. Colombia continues to have vast ungoverned spaces in which farmers have few choices as profitable as coca, and in which the likelihood of running afoul of an absent government is very small. Also, due to the danger of manual eradication missions — guerrillas routinely lay mines and IEDs in coca fields — and cuts to Colombia’s budget, the Colombian government manually eradicated 64 percent less coca in 2011 than it did in 2008.

The UN data show more than half of Colombia’s 2011 coca grown in three departments (provinces) in the country’s southwest: Nariño, Putumayo and Cauca. U.S. officials interviewed by WOLA in May expressed concern about a doubling of coca-growing in Putumayo between 2010 and 2011. This violent, impoverished department along the Ecuador border is where Plan Colombia’s first eradication offensive began, in 2000.

Officials blamed the increase on an agreement between Colombia and Ecuador that prohibits aerial herbicide fumigation within 10 kilometers of the Ecuadorian border. A very likely explanation for Putumayo’s increase, though, is the late 2008 collapse of DMG, a money-laundering pyramid scheme in which a significant portion of Putumayo’s population had invested. During the heyday of this criminal enterprise, participants in DMG were making so much money that they abandoned coca-growing. Its collapse, which wiped out the assets of many Putumayans, probably underlies much of their return to the coca trade.

So, of course, does the power of illegal armed groups in Putumayo, where the FARC guerrillas and Rastrojos neo-paramilitary group operate under a nonaggression pact and cooperate on the cocaine trade.

The new coca numbers make plain, once again, that mass eradication in an absence of good governance will not yield permanent, satisfying results against coca cultivation or any other illegal activity. If growers are left without basic government services — from food security to physical security — fumigating them or pulling up their plants will only achieve short-term progress in a specific territorial area.

One final note: these are the UNODC’s estimates of coca growing in Colombia, based on a joint project with Colombia’s National Police. The U.S. government, with CIA in the lead, maintains a separate — and very different — set of coca cultivation estimates. The U.S. government figure for 2011 is not yet available, but here is what its view of the 1999-2010 period looks like.

The story told here shows fewer discernible “plateaus,” and a more constant — and higher — level of coca cultivation in Colombia.

This map comes from testimony [PDF] given today in a House Homeland Security Subcommittee hearing by Coast Guard Rear Adm. Charles Michel, who heads the U.S. Southern Command’s Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-S). Based in Key West, Florida, Adm. Michel’s agency monitors all suspicious air and sea traffic headed toward the United States from the Andes and across Central America and the Caribbean.

The map shows the effect that JIATF-S is measuring from “Operation Martillo” (Martillo = Hammer), a “surge” operation to increase surveillance and patrolling in waters near Central America. Operation Martillo began in January, and Southcom (especially the Navy’s 4th Fleet) and the Coast Guard are coordinating it with several Latin American and European security forces.

The map shows an apparent decrease in cocaine flows in most areas, especially the Caribbean, with one very big exception. In response to Operation Martillo, cocaine trafficking appears to be spiking in the eastern Pacific, with a dense concentration of boats leaving Colombia’s Pacific Coast.

The Colombian Pacific is a flashpoint of the country’s armed conflict right now. Often in cooperation with the FARC guerrillas, paramilitary successor groups, especially the “Rastrojos” and the “Urabeños,” are moving many tons of illegal drugs out of port cities like Buenaventura and Tumaco, and using long-neglected afro-Colombian communities in Chocó, Valle, Cauca and Nariño as staging areas. Nariño continues to be Colombia’s number-one coca-producing department. (See our report about Tumaco, Nariño’s main Pacific port, from last year.)

In his written testimony, meanwhile, Adm. Michel estimates that “go-fast” surface boats carried “490 metric tons of cocaine from South America toward the United States.” Approximately another 330 metric tons per year, he added, come to the United States in semi-submersible craft or crude submarines.

That is a total of 820 tons of cocaine coming to the United States, to which much be added cocaine which comes via aircraft, which according to Michel’s testimony is 20 percent of the total.

From that, we get a JIATF estimate of roughly 1,000 metric tons of cocaine headed each year from South America towed the United States.

(Update as of 4:45PM: There was no need to extrapolate an estimate here. Southcom Commander Gen. Douglas Fraser's March 2012 Posture Statement (PDF), on page 6, already provides an estimate of 1,086 tons of cocaine headed toward the United States in 2011, and an expected 775-930 tons in 2012.)

This figure clashes with the estimate from the State Department, which prefers to extrapolate from the amount of coca-leaf cultivation detected and eradicated. The State Department’s latest International Narcotics Control Strategy Report speaks of “700 metric tons of cocaine shipped annually from Colombia and other producing nations intended for the U.S. markets.”

One agency says 700 tons, another says about 1,000 tons. Estimating cocaine trafficking is admittedly a very inexact science, but this is a 43% discrepancy.

Here, we share our collection of maps, produced by the U.S. Southern Command's Joint Interagency Task Force-South, showing the trajectories of boats and planes suspected of trafficking drugs toward the United States from South America.

Image quality varies here: we take what we can get. The maps we have obtained over the years depict trafficking patterns in 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2011.

The first set of maps shows the tracks of boats believed to be carrying drugs or other illegal cargo. A few changes over the years are notable:

• It is increasingly rare to see boats attempting to traverse the Caribbean. Fewer landings occur in Jamaica or the island of Hispaniola than did in the mid-2000s.
• Boats no longer attempt to reach Mexico in a single journey. In 2005, it was common for long-haul vessels to pass by the Galápagos Islands en route to Mexico's Pacific coast, or to go straight from Colombia to the Yucatán Peninsula. Today, few boats try to do that.
• Instead, boats stop overwhelmingly in Central America first. Boats leaving Colombia prefer to make a "short hop" to Panama and Costa Rica before presumably moving on elsewhere up the coast or over land. Some boats exiting Colombia go all the way to Honduras's Caribbean coast as well. Boats leaving Ecuador appear to head to Guatemala's Pacific coast.
• Boats almost entirely originate in Colombia and Ecuador. That has changed little over the years, though more volume today appears to leave Ecuador, and Colombia's Pacific coast, than before.
• Cuba is very rarely used as a destination for trafficking boats.

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The second set of maps shows the tracks of aircraft, which Southern Command estimates are used to carry perhaps 20 percent of drugs entering the United States. Here, the change in patterns is stark:

• Flights no longer originate in Colombia, an indication that "air bridge denial" efforts have brought results.
• Instead, since at least 2007, the vast majority of flights have originated in Venezuela's state of Apure, across the border from Arauca, Colombia.
• Landings in Haiti and the Dominican Republic have shrunk significantly. Now, most flights from South America appear to be landing in Honduras's Mosquitia region. The map for the first half of 2011 shows a virtual "air highway" between Apure, Venezuela and Colón/Gracias a Dios/Olancho, Honduras.

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2005 maps are from a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff report (PDF). 2007 maps are from a presentation by the White House "Drug Czar." 2010 slides are from a Southern Command presentation available online (PDF). 2011 slides are photos taken by Noel Maurer, a blogger covering Latin America.

If you have other, better maps like these and you're able to share them, let us know at info@justf.org.

Every year, at least until 2013, the Defense Department must report to Congress about how it uses its rather untransparent counter-narcotics budget to give aid to other countries' militaries and police. We endeavor to obtain those reports, and usually succeed (they are here.)

We recently got a copy of the report covering aid in 2010. One of the types of aid the Defense Department can provide is "The establishment ... and operation of bases of operations or training facilities for the purpose of facilitating counter-drug activities," including facilities "of a foreign law enforcement agency outside the United States." In other words, building military and police bases in other countries.

As in previous years, the report lists the sites where the Defense Department used its counternarcotics budget to build or maintain bases. This map, created with major help from WOLA Intern Carlos Hasbún, shows where these construction sites were in 2009 and 2010.

View Defense Department Counter-Drug Construction Projects in a larger map

This map should not be read as a map of "U.S. bases" in the region. We do not know if U.S. personnel are present at any of these sites, or even whether they regularly get permission to visit them. (However, the fact that they spent significant amounts of money to build facilities at these bases probably confers some privileges on U.S. personnel.)

A few highlights:

• Note the $754,000 spent in 2009 to build an operations center and barracks at the Poptún headquarters of the Guatemalan Army's special forces, the Kaibiles. This is despite a ban on using foreign aid (but not Defense) funds to support the Guatemalan Army because of longstanding human rights concerns. It is also despite the Kaibiles' notorious reputation as the perpetrators of some of the bloodiest massacres in Guatemala's civil war, as well as the widely alleged presence of many ex-Kaibiles among Mexico's Zetas organized crime group.
• Note the large contracts for helicopter facilities and fuel for Colombia. Amid shrinking U.S. assistance and an effort to "Colombianize" U.S.-supported aid programs, the report tells us that fuel support for Colombian Navy riverine operations was to end in 2010.
• Note the profusion of maritime base construction in Central America, an evident attempt to improve local forces' ability to curtail the constant arrival of narcotraffickers' boats to Central American shores.
• Despite their leaders' fiery criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, base construction and maintenance continued in Ecuador and Nicaragua.

(Note as of October 6: This post has been updated to reflect a U.S. estimate of 34,500 hectares of coca cultivation in 2010 in Bolivia, revealed in President Obama's September 15 determination (PDF) "decertifying" Bolivia for failure to cooperate in counter-drug efforts. Production in Bolivia remains flat, or slightly down, according to both the U.S. and UN estimates.)

With the mid-September release of its report on Bolivia, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has now completed its estimates of how much coca -- the plant used to make cocaine -- was under cultivation in South America in 2010.

Here are the last 12 years of UNODC coca-growing estimates, measured in hectares (1 hectare is about 2 1/2 acres):

The UN figures show a drop in coca-growing after 2002, then eight years of stasis: regional cultivation has remained within the range of 150,000-170,000 hectares per year. During this period, cultivation decreased in Colombia, while it increased in Peru and, to a lesser extent, Bolivia. According to the UN, Peru may have eclipsed Colombia last year as the world's largest coca-growing nation.

The U.S. government maintains a separate, and quite different, set of coca-growing estimates. These are published in the State Department's annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Reports. The U.S. government has not yet finalized its coca-growing estimates for 2010, though a June White House press release noted that "Between 2009 and 2010, the change in coca cultivation was not statistically significant" in Colombia.

With 2010 incomplete, here are the last 12 years of U.S. coca-growing estimates:

The U.S. government finds far more coca under cultivation in Colombia, and significantly less in Peru, than the UNODC does. The U.S. data show a 66,000-hectare gap between Colombia and Peru in 2009; it is unlikely that the 2010 U.S. estimates, when they become available, will join the UN in showing Peru as the region's number-one coca-growing country.

The U.S. chart appears to show a jump in 2005; this is the result of a readjustment made after officials determined that they had been under-estimating the area of coca in Colombia.

As it stands, though, the U.S. chart shows little fundamental change in coca cultivation amounts over the past decade. The 2009 estimates bear a striking resemblance to the estimates for 1999, the year before Plan Colombia began.

The following chart combines the previous two, juxtaposing the U.S. and UN estimates.

Plainly, the U.S. and UN estimates often fail to correspond -- a reminder that these coca statistics are, in the end, merely educated guesses. Both, though, seem to show some decrease in cultivation -- principally in Colombia -- after 2007, which was an unusually high year. 2007 was also the year in which the U.S. government funded the most aerial coca fumigation in Colombia. This herbicide-spraying program has since been reduced -- yet coca cultivation in Colombia has not increased at all.

The two charts are also notable for their Bolivia estimates. Neither shows an explosion of coca cultivation after the 2005 election of coca federation leader Evo Morales to the Bolivian presidency. Coca has increased slowly under Morales -- continuing a trend that began several years earlier -- and the UN figures actually show Bolivian cultivation to be flat between 2008 and 2010.

Finally, here are the U.S. and UN estimates of how much cocaine, in tons, was produced from all of this coca. Both charts are notable for the steadiness of supply. Also note how much lower the recent U.S. estimates of Colombian cocaine production are compared to the UN estimates. The recent U.S. estimates of Bolivian production, meanwhile, are much higher than the UN estimates.

(click to expand)

For the first time in a couple of years, the U.S. government has come up with new estimates of the average price and purity of a gram of cocaine sold on U.S. streets.

Since 2007, Bush and Obama administration officials had been hailing a spike in U.S. cocaine prices. According to the law of supply and demand, a price increase, or purity decrease, means that the illegal drug has become scarcer. Officials attributed this scarcity to Plan Colombia and the Mexican government’s U.S.-supported campaign against drug cartels.

Unfortunately, though, the new data show that the progress of three years ago has stalled, or even reversed slightly. The average price of $164.91 per gram recorded in July-September 2010 was the lowest recorded since the spike began in mid-2008.

It is not clear what caused prices to shoot up between the second and third quarters of 2008, nor is it clear what has caused prices since then to settle more or less at their current levels.

This chart comes from the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center, which just released its latest annual report (PDF).

In the News

• In a move that took the United States by surprise, Peru's new government under President Ollanta Humala announced the temporary suspension of coca eradication in the Upper Huallaga Valley until the government can "evaluate the policies". While the eradication program has only been in place since January and the government has said the suspension is only temporary, the decision seems to demonstrate President Humala's willingness to "shake up" Peru's drug policy.
• Hugo Chávez returned to Venezuela after receiving his second round of chemotherapy in Cuba. He assured his followers that while the treatment has weakened him, his cancer has not spread.
• Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner trounced competitors in the primary election, putting her on track to win re-election in October.
• 11 people were killed in clashes over land in northeastern Honduras, leading the government to deploy additional police and soldiers to the region.
• Former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe testified in front of the House of Representatives' Accusations Commission regarding his alleged involvement in the DAS wiretapping scandal. Uribe denied both his involvement in the wiretapping and his alleged links to paramilitaries, claiming that he is a "victim of criminal vengeance."
• The Honduran government proposed establishing a no-fly zone over Honduras' northeastern departments of Colón and Yoro, in an attempt to stop drug traffickers from flying "narcoavionetas" across Honduran airspace while transporting drugs from South America.
• The Colombian offshoot of hacker group Anonymous attacked multiple Colombian government websites in protest of Colombia's education policies. The websites of the presidency, the Senate, and the Ministries of Education and Defense were all hit in the cyber attack.
• Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos traveled to Chile and to Argentina to improve bilateral economic ties between Colombia and both countries. This was the first official visit of a Colombian president to Argentina in over a decade, and represents an attempt by Santos to improve a relationship that grew strained under his predecessor, Álvaro Uribe.
• Brazil's agriculture minister, Wagner Rossi, resigned this week amid a corruption scandal, making him the fourth official in President Dilma Rousseff's cabinet to step down this year.
• After taking criticism for deporting a record number of undocumented immigrants, the Obama administration postponed the deportation of illegal immigrants without criminal records in order to shift resources to high priority cases. Human rights groups praised the decision to stop "clogging the system" with low priority cases.
• Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced his plans to nationalize Venezuela's gold industry and take its gold reserves out of Western countries.
• Three oil contractors were kidnapped in the Santander province of Colombia. Colombian armed forces have indicated that they believe common criminals, rather than rebels, are behind the kidnapping.

Recommended Articles

• Damien Cave of the New York Times reports on the "feminization" of Mexico's drug war.
• The International Crisis Group released a report on politics and violence in Venezuela, warning that the 2012 elections may bring violent social conflict regardless of whether current President Hugo Chávez stays on or a transition of power occurs.
• On the Just the Facts Blog, Abigail Poe has a new piece on the U.S. Department of Defense's extension of a five-year $15 billion global counternarcotics program that includes Colombia and Mexico.
• The Council on Hemispheric Affairs released a report titled "Drug Trafficking: Central America’s Dark Shadow."
• Nathan Jones of InSight Crime investigates why the United States does not have large Mexico-style drug cartels.
• Also at InSight Crime, Steven Dudley questions the strategy of using the armed forces to fight organized crime.

U.S. Southern Command Updates

• Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Comfort departed Costa Rica after providing medical care and technical support as part of U.S. Southern Command's Continuing Promise 2011 humanitarian tour.
• The PANAMAX joint military exercises began this week in Panama. This large-scale U.S. Southern Command- and U.S. Army South-sponsored "Fuerzas Aliadas" event will allow forces from 17 countries to participate in exercises emphasizing the defense of the Panama Canal. Members of the maritime task force began training on Monday. Before the commencement of the exercises, soldiers from Multi-National Forces South provided assistance to a local school.

This blog was written by CIP Intern Claire O'Neill McCleskey