Colombia Wants to Spray Illicit Crops Again. The ’80s Offer a Warning

Colombia is once again looking to the skies to combat drugs. In his first speech as president, far-right leader Abelardo de la Espriella announced that his government will resume spraying illicit crops—one of the most controversial tools in the country’s long war on drugs.

“Coca cannot be combated with doctored statistics or manipulated maps,” the president said on August 7, before assuring that he will use “state-of-the-art herbicides,” which, he claimed, will not harm human health or the environment and will comply with the conditions established by the Constitutional Court.

This promise comes at a time when Colombia still sits at the top of the global cocaine production map. According to Infobae, the country had approximately 261,000 hectares under coca cultivation in 2024, a 3.5% increase from the previous year.

But discussing aerial spraying in Colombia means discussing much more than just hectares and herbicides. The country has already been through massive eradication campaigns as part of the War on Drugs, and some of their consequences turned out to be very different from what their proponents had imagined.

To understand why, we have to go back nearly half a century, to a time when the crop Washington wanted to eradicate in Colombia was not primarily coca, but cannabis.

Before Cocaine, There Was ‘la Bonanza Marimbera’

Long before Pablo Escobar and the Medellín and Cali cartels, Colombia experienced another drug boom.

From the late 1960s through the 1970s, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and La Guajira became major centers of cannabis production for the U.S. market. The so-called “Bonanza Marimbera” transformed the region’s economy: farmers, transporters, merchants, and smugglers all participated in a market fueled by huge demand from the U.S. counterculture.

That region was also the birthplace of one of the most famous strains of that era: Santa Marta Gold, which achieved an almost mythical reputation in the United States.

Colombian historian Lina Britto reconstructed that period in Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s First Drug Paradise. Her research describes how a marginalized rural region became integrated into a transnational marijuana trade and how, by the late 1970s, the relationship between Colombia and the United States had become increasingly dominated by the logic of the War on Drugs.

The U.S. government increased pressure on Colombia, and in 1979, Operation Fulminante was launched. As Rolando García recently recounted for High Times, the campaign seized some 3,500 metric tons of cannabis and destroyed nearly 25,000 acres of crops. In the years that followed, chemical eradication became an increasingly central part of the drug-war strategy. 

And that’s where the paradoxical part of the story begins. Destroying the marijuana economy did not mean destroying the networks that had made it possible. The routes were already in place. The contacts were already in place. There were transporters, smugglers, money, logistical expertise, and massive demand from the United States. As Colombian weed lost ground, a far more profitable commodity began to take its place: cocaine.

Britto describes this process as a transition in the history of Colombia’s illicit economies—from products like coffee and marijuana to cocaine. Her work does not argue that spraying alone “created” the cartels, but rather that the crackdown on the cannabis market and the militarization of drug policy transformed an economy that already had the infrastructure, capital, and smuggling networks that allowed it to shift toward another product. 

By the mid-1980s, Colombia was already entering a much more violent era.

Spraying Doesn’t Always Make the Problem Go Away

Almost half a century later, the debate is back.

De la Espriella’s current focus is on illicit crops—and coca in particular—in a country whose drug landscape is very different from that of the “Bonanza Marimbera.” We still do not know exactly which substances his administration will use when it speaks of “state-of-the-art herbicides.” At the same time, the return of spraying brings back a question Colombia has been trying to answer for decades: What happens after the crops are destroyed?

The problem with policies based exclusively on eradication is that a crop does not exist in isolation from the surrounding economy. Behind it are families, local economies, buyers, armed groups, trade routes, and, in many cases, rural communities with few economic alternatives. That debate has even made its way into Colombian case law.

The Constitutional Court has ruled that voluntary crop substitution must take priority over forced eradication. According to Ruling T-146 of 2024, the State must refrain from carrying out forced eradication operations wherever verifiable substitution agreements exist.

For years, the Court has also applied the precautionary principle to aerial spraying with glyphosate due to its potential impacts on health and the environment, in addition to requiring safeguards such as community participation and prior consultation when indigenous and ethnic communities may be affected.

That is why it is no coincidence that, from his very first announcement, De la Espriella stressed that the strategy would comply with the Court’s rulings.

During Gustavo Petro’s administration, Colombia drastically reduced forced eradication and maintained the suspension of the large-scale aerial glyphosate spraying that had defined previous decades, prioritizing voluntary crop substitution. However, toward the end of his term, that stance began to soften: the government moved forward with a program of ground-based glyphosate spraying using drones to eradicate coca and received U.S. support for that strategy. In other words, spraying did not disappear entirely, but it no longer occupied the central role it had historically played in anti-drug policy.

Now, the new government’s strategy seems to be bringing chemical eradication back to the center of drug policy.

Colombia Returns to an Old Question

Nothing forces history to repeat itself in exactly the same way, and, of course, the Colombia of 2026 is not the same as that of 1979. Coca is also very different from the marijuana of the Bonanza Marimbera; legal restrictions have changed, and modern spraying methods may use different technologies from those used in previous decades. 

But historical experience offers a warning that is hard to ignore: eliminating a plant does not necessarily eliminate the economy that revolves around it. That is precisely what happened after the collapse of Colombia’s major cannabis market.

The infrastructure of the “Bonanza” didn’t disappear overnight. Some of its routes, expertise, and players were repurposed for a smaller, more expensive, and far more profitable commodity.  And the country that had been known in the United States for its marijuana ended up becoming a global synonym for cocaine during the 1980s.

Now Colombia is once again betting on spraying and eradication while attempting to reduce more than 260,000 hectares still planted with coca. The question is what happens next, because if the history of the “Bonanza Marimbera” has shown anything, it’s that burning, uprooting, or spraying a crop can be much easier (but less effective) than eliminating the conditions that made it profitable to plant it in the first place.

Cover photos via Wikimedia Commons.

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