The war on drugs has utterly failed to reduce drug consumption. But it has served to maintain US military and intelligence apparatuses in Latin America.
As cocaine seizures hit record highs in Colombia, production has ramped up proportionally to meet demand, drawing more people and more land into the cocaine economy. In Latin America, prohibition has meant peasant dispossession and state and paramilitary violence.
To understand how the war on drugs has fed violence, dispossession, and US imperial domination, all while failing to reduce drug consumption, Jacobin spoke with Estefanía Ciro, one of Latin America’s leading experts on the economics of drugs, at the Drug Policy, Human Rights, and Global Shared Responsibility conference in Barcelona, Spain, organized by Taula per Colombia. A strong advocate of regulation, Ciro is the director of the ALaOrillaDelRío think tank in the Colombian Amazon, which formulates innovative proposals to reduce the enormous violence of the drug trade in Colombia and beyond.
We spoke with Ciro about the current state of drug markets in the United States, Latin America, and Europe; the geopolitics of drugs; the social and political impacts of prohibition; and what an anti-capitalist drug policy would look like.
It also has much to do with the dismantling of the welfare state and deindustrialization, with the destruction of stable jobs for workers. Fentanyl’s a very dangerous drug, very hard to dose. It’s an opioid; you take it and your heart starts beating so slowly it can stop.
We are in the midst of a multipolar shift, where China is increasing its power. The fentanyl issue is perfect for Donald Trump to exert geopolitical pressure on China.
I attended the Latin American and Caribbean Drug Policy Conference in September 2023, where all the foreign ministers of Latin America spoke. Only two of them were vehement in their stance of regulating all drugs: the Chilean and Uruguayan foreign ministers.
In Colombia, we have several documents. The 2016 Peace Agreement [with the FARC guerrillas] mentions crop substitution and transformative drug-consumption policies. That wasn’t fulfilled. In 2020, the US Congress introduced the “holistic policy” [a guideline for drug policy in Latin America]. Petro relaunched it in 2022, claiming it as his own: alternative development [of crops to replace coca] and substitution [with legal crops].
It’s the same paradigm. We’re at record levels of cocaine production, record hectares [of coca crops], and record seizures. In other words, the result remains the same. We’re in the same place we were with former president Juan Manuel Santos (2010–18).
If Petro truly wants a new drug policy, he must break with the United States. And what better time than now, with Trump, who says he won’t send more USAID funding?
Additionally, then secretary of state Anthony Blinken was at the UN Narcotics Commission, negotiating for China to impose controls on precursor chemicals sent to Mexico for fentanyl production.
One way for the United States to maintain control over Latin America is to sustain the anti-drug military apparatus, keep training police, and retain intelligence access to the region’s police forces. The entire military-industrial apparatus is sustained by prohibition. More than cocaine, what matters to the United States is maintaining a military apparatus in Latin America.
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https://jacobin.com/2025/10/colombia-petro-drug-war-cocaine-prohibition-imperialism
