The relationship between Colombian coffee and cocaine
- Unfiltered
- Mar 6, 2019
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 7, 2019
The role of coffee in the ‘War of Drugs’
By Maria Gomez de Sicart
Colombia, in the northwest of South America, is one of the few countries that can claim to have two of the best and worst products in the world: coffee and cocaine. The country’s coffee production is the third total highest in the world, and 68 per cent of the world’s coca crops are located there. Both industries move billions of dollars and are more connected than what it is initially thought.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) estimates that the amount of cocaine imported annually into the UK is between 25-30 tonnes, and it mostly comes from Colombia or the border areas of neighbouring Venezuela and Ecuador.
Traditionally, most of the cocaine that entered Europe, including the UK, came via Spain.
Algeciras, the port across the bay from Gibraltar, and Galicia, the north-western region, became the main entry points for the narcotic. Since Spanish law and seizure procedures toughened, drug-traffickers have found new methods to smuggle drugs.
An anonymous Spanish narcotics officer explains that there are two main routes for drug trafficking nowadays. Cocaine travels by plane from Colombia to either Morocco, where it can reach Spain by boat, or to Saint- Martin, a Dutch territory in the Atlantic Ocean that makes the entry to The Netherlands and the drug movement through port cities easier. Although, shipments can pass through other South American countries, such as Venezuela and Peru, as well as Central American, Caribbean and Eastern African countries before reaching Europe.
“When cocaine comes in large quantities, traffickers often send the bags to legitimate businesses, and once the narcotics arrive, bands known as rescuers pick up the delivery. The only possible way to seize the drugs is if the enterprise that the parcel is addressed to reports an unordered delivery,” the officer says. Small quantities are easier to identify, but traffickers are continually introducing new smuggling methods, such as hiding cocaine in shoe heels, pineapples, pistachios, nun head-clothes, jacket buttons, toys, books and coffee beans.
They are often disguised so customs officers cannot find them. Drug traffickers make a copy of the beans’ shape and paint the cocaine to hide its colour. The strong scent of coffee makes it hard for customs officers to identify the drug, as well as for police dogs as they need to be trained with cocaine impregnated toys and make a routine out of tracing the smell.
Bernardino Lorite Moreno, a former customs officer in Madrid-Barajas airport, says that tracking down the cocaine requires a lot of patience. “Sometimes the police see people selling on the street, but instead of arresting them they wiretap their phones and go for the big fish,” he says. “Drug traffickers are constantly finding new methods to smuggle drugs, and it takes time to identify where they hide them. They can be in the most unexpected place. Out of all the cocaine that arrived in Europe through Barajas [Madrid], we only seized 10 per cent of it every month”, he recognises.
The Colombian coffee and cocaine industries have been strictly related for more than four decades. In the 1980s, the United States invested in coffee and cacao programs to discourage the growth of coca and provide people with better living opportunities. During most of the Colombian conflict (1964 – present), coffee regions remained peaceful because both political parties were represented and needed to keep their businesses. Many cartels, such as the ones in Medellin and Cali, started up fake Colombian coffee businesses to hide their drug-dealing operations.
Nowadays, some claim that coffee could become a source of stability as it could help rural areas affected by the country’s conflict increase their productivity. Nonetheless, others fear that cocaine is taking over coffee as the most exported product in the country and it is becoming one of the main economic engines.
The United Kingdom is indirectly affected by that cocaine business. England and Wales rank fourth as one of the biggest cocaine consuming countries with 2.5 per cent of the population using it, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2018 report.
In 2018, Bristol took over London as the UK’s cocaine capital and ranked fifth as the European city with the most cocaine use in relation to their population after Barcelona, Zurich, Antwerp and Geneva.
Figures released by the Home Office from the Crime Survey of England and Wales for 2017/18 show that 8.4 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds used Class A drugs (cocaine included) in 2017, compared to seven per cent in 2016/17, the Telegraph reports.
According to the Office for National Statistics, cocaine poisoning deaths are up – from 139 in 2012 to 371 in 2016 – and more Britons are checking into drug-abuse recovery centres.
Graham Foster, the director at Addiction Recovery Centre, a drug and alcohol rehab centre, raises the question over the legality of drugs. “If you don’t want cocaine addicts, don’t make it illegal so they don’t have to commit a crime to get it. The availability of drugs won’t necessarily reduce addicts, but recovery would be easier because there wouldn’t be any criminal record,” he says.
The reality is that addiction is severe among salaried people. Unlike in Colombia, cocaine’s possession, sale, transport and cultivation in the UK remains illegal, but consumption is not going down.
Despite that, British authorities are adopting a stricter zero-tolerance policy on drugs. Fabric’s case made it to the front page of the news after two young people died during the summer after taking drugs and Islington Council revoked its license, stating that there was an unmanageable culture of drugs. The club re-opened in January 2017 under strict licensing and entry conditions, such as the over-19s policy and use of ID scanners.
Moreover, the private arrests concerning drug-dealing are on the rise. In 2014, a 33-year-old Colombian Starbucks manager who used a coffee shop in Bath to smuggle drugs was prosecuted and jailed for three years.
There is an existing vicious circle in the cocaine industry, and innovation is key to keep the market afloat. The National Crime Agency warned that web drug dealers are branding products “vegan” and “ethically friendly" to target young adults, according to a piece of information published by The Telegraph.
David Raynes, a former UK Customs and Excise officer and a campaigner for the National Drug Prevention Alliance and the International Task Force on Strategic Drug Policy, says: “One of the curious things about young people is that they are socially aware of pollution, green issues and looking after the planet. They’re much more alert than my generation ever was, and yet they are consuming more drugs than my generation ever did, and they don’t connect the fact that jungles in Colombia are cut down to make cocaine plantations or in Colorado, cannabis users won’t think of the pollution that is going on where the cannabis is being given artificial fertilisers. They won’t connect that with them having a joint or using cocaine.”
He discusses that society has undergone through a cultural change, and has replaced alcohol and tobacco consumption with drugs’, but there is no social awareness of their impact on the environment.
In 2008, Francisco Santos, the then vice-president of Colombia, said that 300,000 hectares of rainforest were destroyed each year in Colombia to cultivate coca plants and were mainly controlled by criminal groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Ten years later, the number of coca plantations is still going up. In a 2018 release, the Office of National Drug Control Policy said that the cultivation of coca in Colombia went up 11 per cent in 2017, rising from 188,000 hectares in 2016 to 209,000 hectares in 2017. In the meantime, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) revealed that Colombian coffee production decreased after five years of growth. This is the paradox that often raises concerns on where both industries stand and where they are going.
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