Coca prices have collapsed in parts of Colombia amid record hectares of cultivation. Could oversupply do what years of eradication have failed to achieve, prompting coca farmers to switch to legal crops?
This is wishful thinking, as world cocaine prices remain stable even as new markets in Asia are developed by traffickers, with European mafias assuming a growing role in the global trade. 2024 will be the year when the cocaine supply chain catches up with record levels of coca cultivation.
The reasons behind the decline in coca prices in parts of Colombia obey three different dynamics: conflict in areas of cultivation, which creates uncertainty and keeps buyers away; the saturation of drug smuggling routes out of Colombia amid high seizures; and the extraordinarily rapid growth in coca cultivation, with which supply chains have struggled to keep pace. But we believe that during 2024 this gap will be closed, and global organized crime, especially in Colombia and Peru, will enjoy bloated profits.
“There is not much evidence that this is a problem of oversupply, but rather a problem of confidence because the rules of the game are not well-defined,” Candice Welsch, the Andean and Southern Cone representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told InSight Crime. “There are no hegemonic market controls, which generates uncertainty among producers who do not want to risk reprisals for selling their products to the wrong groups.”
A new round of fighting for Colombia’s cocaine trade was detonated after a 2016 peace agreement led to the demobilization of the country’s biggest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armada Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC). The FARC had controlled over half of Colombia’s coca crops and the production of coca base, which is later crystallized into cocaine. They also provided a one-stop shop for traffickers, not only securing access to the raw material, but protecting drug laboratories, internal movement corridors, and departure points.
Now traffickers have to deal with multiple warring factions in areas the FARC once dominated: the eastern plains, the southern jungles, and much of the Pacific coastline.
Today, multiple criminal actors are slugging it out for control, including FARC dissident groups, the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN), and the Gaitanista Self Defense Forces (Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia – AGC), who can trace their roots back to the Medellín Cartel of Pablo Escobar. This contest is playing out at exactly the same time as the government of President Gustavo Petro is trying to negotiate an end to the country’s six-decade old civil conflict.
So long as a kilogram of cocaine in Colombia sells for $2,000 and fetches up to $25,000 in the United States, $35,000 in Europe, $50,000 in Asia, and up to $100,000 in Australia, the drug trade is going to remain vibrant and adapt to changes in supply, transport, and demand conditions. And it will adapt fast.
Potential cocaine production in Colombia alone has increased since 2018 by 600 tons. UNODC figures had possible cocaine production at 1,120 tons in 2018, and at 1,738 tons in 2022. This increase over just five years is worth $1.2 billion at source prices in Colombia, and at least $20 billion on international wholesale markets. This is a huge potential windfall for transnational organized crime and already Mexican and European traffickers are queuing up to get their share of the Colombian cocaine bonanza.
With the growing volume of cocaine shipments, seizures are up. The Petro administration says it seized 697 tons of cocaine in 2023, a 13% increase from the previous year.
Yet the seizure rate is barely keeping up with the increase in production, while the government policy to reduce eradication of drug crops means that potential cocaine production is still rising, even if, as the UNODC suggested to InSight Crime, coca cultivation is leveling off.
“Even if they are currently not harvesting the coca in some part of the country, the coca bushes continue to grow,” said Sergio Uribe, a drug expert who has worked with the US Embassy in Bogota as well as the European Union. “As soon as the market is ready, the coca will be harvested. There is currently cocaine stacked up in the supply chain, waiting for export. This is a non-perishable product that has a shelf life, if vacuum-packed, of at least five years.”
The US market for cocaine has remained relatively stable for years. The European market is still growing. Of the 10 largest seizures of cocaine in European history, five were recorded during 2023, according to an InSight Crime database. The largest single seizure this year in Europe was 10 tons discovered in the port of Hamburg in July, worth an estimated $3.5 billion at wholesale prices. European criminals are increasingly being arrested upstream in Latin America as they negotiate to secure cocaine at its source and seek to maximize their earnings per kilogram by arranging their own transport. The InSight Crime database also revealed that 38 senior European drug traffickers have been arrested across Latin America and the Caribbean since 2019, more than the previous 10 years combined, with Italians leading the tally, followed by the Dutch, and then traffickers from the Balkans.
Drug trafficking sources in Medellín, InSight Crime’s home base, have talked about concerted efforts to develop cocaine markets in Asia. Here there are strong middle classes with significant incomes, virgin markets ripe for exploitation. The traffickers consulted expressed no worries of international prices falling. They were focused on diversifying markets beyond the traditional destinations of the United States and Western Europe.
The UNODC also believes that the interruption to the cocaine production chain in Colombia will likely be temporary.
“The situation appears to be very temporary in the production enclaves and it is expected that once control of the business is defined, the production rhythm will resume,” Welsch said.
Control of the business will be achieved when one of the warring factions gains hegemonic control over certain coca-growing areas. Ideology now plays little part in the Colombian civil conflict, and different factions have already shown a willingness to work with foes in the interests of maximizing earnings from the drug trade. While conflict between different factions will continue in certain parts of Colombia during 2024, in others it seems likely that new front lines and cooperation agreements will be negotiated, allowing the cocaine business to flourish once again.
While coca cultivation has grown exponentially in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia have also seen increases. What is worrying in these two nations is how political chaos is pushing counternarcotics strategies further and further down the list of government priorities. In Peru, President Pedro Castillo was removed from office and imprisoned in December 2022, while his deputy and successor, Dina Boluarte, has faced widespread civil unrest. In Bolivia, a civil war within the ruling Movement to Socialism Party (Movimiento al Socialismo – MAS), between current President Luis Arce and former President Evo Morales, has hijacked the political agenda. Bolivia is preparing for general elections for the presidency and Congress in 2025. In Colombia, Petro has seen his approval ratings drop to the lowest point of his tenure. All of this means that there will be diminishing resistance to cocaine trafficking during 2024 in the main production nations, while transnational organized crime sorts out its supply chain issues.
A worrying development has been the establishment of industrial plantations of coca outside of the three traditional growers of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. Venezuela, Guatemala, and Honduras have now replicated the cocaine production system established in Colombia, with coca fields alongside laboratories and airstrips or close to other departure points. While still in its infancy in these nations, Colombia has shown that despite billions in US aid aimed at reducing production, once coca takes root it is very difficult to eradicate.
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“Coca can now easily be grown outside of the Andes,” said Uribe, who is also an expert in coca cultivation. “Traffickers have now crossbred different strains that can grow under different conditions, with a much higher alkaloid content for more cocaine per hectare. Central America is now an ideal place to grow coca.”
The damage of the cocaine trade is not restricted to the producer nations. As interdiction in Colombia improves, traffickers need to find new ways of getting the drugs to market. And with there being no land bridge to Europe, maritime trafficking is the norm, meaning that ports with international container shipping are particularly sought after by transnational organized crime.
“We are seeing increasing volumes of cocaine moving by land into neighboring countries,” said a police analyst who was not authorized to speak on the record. “There is little resistance for drug shipments crossing into Venezuela for example, and so more cocaine seems to be moving towards departure points in the Caribbean.”
Perhaps the most sobering story of the dangers for any transit nation has been that of Ecuador during 2023. With the port of Guayaquil one of the principal contamination points for cocaine shipments heading to Europe, the country has seen its murder rate quadruple over the last five years and seen native organized crime, allied with Colombians, Mexicans, and Europeans drug trafficking organizations, undergo unprecedented growth. So much so that criminals did not hesitate, in August 2023, to assassinate a presidential candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, who was campaigning on a tough security platform.
Cocaine has long been the foundation of transnational organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean. While synthetic drug production, illegal gold mining, human smuggling, and human trafficking, as well as environmental crime, earned billions for criminal syndicates in 2023, cocaine remains the principal driver of criminal evolution and earnings.
So, when those cocaine earnings can increase by billions of dollars, the threats to Latin America and the Caribbean are potentially very grave.
How many new cartel members can be recruited with increased cocaine earnings? How many officials can be corrupted, how many communities can be won over, how much more state penetration and criminal governance will we see in a region where democracy is already under siege? And how much more violence will be generated as different criminal groups, with state embedded allies, fight for control of the trade? Latin America and the Caribbean is already the most violent region in the world, with just 8% of the world’s population and some 30% of its murders.
Latin America faces a new challenge in an established criminal economy during 2024. While Europe has awoken to the threats the cocaine trade presents to the Old World, dedicating more resources and home and upstream, to fight the drug flow, the United States, long the dominant regional player in the fight against cocaine, has lost focus.
Fentanyl and migration dominate the political agenda in Washington, even as the country readies for presidential elections, while US influence in Latin America wanes, especially in the two nations key to fighting the cocaine scourge: Colombia and Mexico.
While transnational organized crime will focus during 2024 on the cocaine bonanza, politicians across the region are going to be distracted.