Issue #4: Andean-Amazonian Indigenous Peoples see promise and peril in lifting coca ban
The possibility of changing the coca leaf’s classification in the UN drug control treaty system has sparked controversy among native communities in the three main coca producing and consuming countries of Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. Proponents of the ongoing WHO coca review see an opportunity to vindicate the rights and traditions of Indigenous people by ending coca’s classification as a Schedule I narcotic drug under the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. But based on their own experiences of the conflicts and hardship that coca’s spread has meant in parts of the Andean-Amazonian region, many native communities are wary of the coca review effort, and skeptical that they will indeed benefit from such a change. Some even perceive the coca review process as likely to further undermine Indigenous peoples’ rights and autonomy.
Illustration by Anđela Janković
In this issue of Coca Chronicles we will discuss the roots of these diverging views on coca and why some see peril rather than promise as the WHO coca review proceeds. Understanding the variety of historical and contemporary experiences with coca across the Andean-Amazonian region is crucial for appreciating these diverging views. Addressing Indigenous people’s concerns over the review is also crucial for ensuring that any eventual success in changing coca’s classification under the UN drug treaties can indeed prove beneficial for as many of the region’s Indigenous communities as possible.
Bolivia, Colombia and Peru all have in place (limited) legal frameworks and mechanisms to protect coca cultivation and commercialization inside their territories, to meet local demand for traditional coca use—in defiance of the obligations to ban coca’s use under the international drug treaty system. These frameworks vary by country, but in part intend to recognize the cultural value that coca holds for many of their citizens. Yet some of the fiercest criticisms of the existing systems come from Indigenous communities themselves, many of whom feel deprived of the benefits these limited frameworks are supposed to confer. They also point out the sometimes blurred boundaries between the licit and illicit domestic markets and complain that they are left largely unprotected against the risks to their communities entailed in the spread of coca cultivation intended for the illicit production of cocaine for export. The shortcomings of the current systems help explain why many communities are skeptical that their national governments are prepared to actually take the steps necessary to fulfil the promise of coca’s liberation and prevent the perils that they fear may result.
Importantly, not all native inhabitants or Indigenous Peoples of the Andean-Amazon basin use coca or culturally identify with the plant. However, at the time the UN took its decision to ban traditional uses of coca, there was ample evidence on its widespread beneficial use and spiritual importance among ‘Indians’, at the time the term commonly used to refer to all the native ethnicities the colonial powers encountered at their conquest. But the UN chose to ignore this evidence, sealing coca’s fate by classifying it as a narcotic drug, side by side with cocaine. Today, however, Indigenous Peoples’ rights have become an important issue recognized in UN working groups and declarations, as recently evidenced by the speech of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Francisco Cali Tzay:‘International drug control policies such as the 1961 Single Convention have negatively impacted the rights, culture, science and practices of Indigenous Peoples. A key example is the coca leaf, a sacred plant for many Indigenous Peoples that has been banned using its classification in Schedule I in the Single Convention. These international drug control policies contradict the rights of Indigenous Peoples to self-determination, to the use of their natural resources, to their culture, agriculture and medicines.’ 1
The unwarranted and unjust decision to classify coca as a narcotic drug is long overdue for repair, a process that the coca review may help achieve. Ending the UN treaty ban on coca and the condemnation of millennia-old Andean-Amazonian cultural practices, has been a long-standing demand from Indigenous Peoples and cocalero movements, especially in Peru and Bolivia. This struggle has now culminated in the formal review procedure spearheaded by Bolivian Vice-President David Choquehuanca, with the support of Colombia. At the same time, progress will require appreciating how the dynamics set in motion by the criminalization of coca have meant that for many Andean-Amazonian Indigenous Peoples and native communities, coca has also become a harbinger of insecurity and conflict.
Land invasions and control over licit and illicit coca markets
Despite coca’s sacred status for several Indigenous Peoples, and its significance as part of the political identity of others, the expansion of illicit coca cultivation into Indigenous territories is forming a serious threat to security and autonomy of the communities living there. Albeit not new, the advance of the coca frontier into Indigenous lands has increased around the region over the past decades, causing conflicts and violence in and among its inhabitants.
Without exception, these lands are being encroached upon to be used to grow coca destined for the production of cocaine. Each situation arises from a complex array of factors: land hunger and the search for economic subsistence by landless peasants and migrants, combined with the pressures of coca eradication measures, which push farmers to cultivate in ever more remote areas, out of sight from the authorities. Not uncommonly, drug trafficking organizations are involved in organizing such territorial invasions for purposes of cocaine production. These organizations are often acting with the protection or local law enforcement officers or other armed actors. Murders, disappearances, forced displacement, threats of violence, rape, land grabbing, deforestation and illegal mining: native communities are confronting all these depredations, carried out with virtual impunity.
Indeed, Indigenous territories face many threats to their sustainability and even existence, driven by the insatiable appetites of the prevailing extractivist economic development model, based on exploiting resources in the Global South, including precious metals, oil and minerals, timber, beef and cocaine. The dynamics set in motion by each of these extractivist industries often overlap but are not always directly linked. For example, it is common to hear of coca growing invasions in relation to the threats posed by illegal mining, which occur in many of the same areas of the Andean-Amazon basin. These phenomena have major environmental impacts, but are not always directly linked to coca cultivation, nor are its main cause. 2
These dynamics also suggest why many Indigenous communities in the Andean-Amazonian region perceive coca more as a threat to their livelihoods and security than as a symbol of their identity and culture worth defending. Under conditions of prohibition, the role of coca as the raw material for cocaine extraction has unleashed terrible consequences for Indigenous Peoples whose territories become key production areas in the illicit cocaine economy, subjecting communities to violence and coercion on the part of drug traffickers, other armed groups, and state security forces themselves. At the same time, within the limited existing frameworks allowing coca cultivation for legal local markets, struggles for political and economic control of these markets and the role of state agencies regularly result in conflict and turbulence as well.
These difficult, often brutal, realities of what coca signifies today for many Indigenous Peoples—as well as for many Afro-descendants and other coca growing farmers—must be recognized if the potential benefits of removing the coca leaf from the UN list of narcotic drugs are to be realized. Understanding these realities—and how they relate to the broader dynamics of the illicit cocaine economy that has flourished under conditions of prohibition—can help appreciate what descheduling coca would and would not do, and how the situation after descheduling takes effect would compare to the situation today.
Misconceptions about coca descheduling
A recent statement by Peru’s drug control agency, DEVIDA, opposing coca’s possible descheduling provides a useful illustration of misconceptions about the review process and its potential outcomes. It is worth examining DEVIDA’s stance, because it mischaracterises what descheduling would actually entail while ignoring the role of the underlying prohibitionist policy framework in creating and continually nourishing the global illicit cocaine economy. At the October 2024 public hearing of the WHO’s Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD), DEVIDA argued that:
‘The removal of the coca leaf from the list of controlled substances could become a perverse incentive to increase its diversion to the production of cocaine, strengthening the dynamics of drug trafficking and transnational organized crime, resulting in harms to vulnerable populations and their territories, greater deforestation and consequences for food security, especially among Indigenous Peoples.’3
DEVIDA’s argument, however, misunderstands what coca’s removal from the schedules of the 1961 Single Convention would actually mean with respect to UN treaty requirements. Descheduling the coca leaf would mean that coca itself would no longer be classified as a narcotic drug and could be produced legally to supply domestic and international markets for natural coca products, such as coca tea, mambe, coca energy drinks and food supplements. Despite being removed from the treaty schedules, however, coca would remain subject to provisions spelled out in the specific treaty articles. Coca being grown to supply legal markets in natural coca products would remain subject to provisions of the Single Convention (Article 26) that require licenses for cultivators and controls by government agencies over wholesale trade, import and export. Coca cultivation or trade in coca leaf destined for cocaine production, or any diversion from the legal coca market to the illegal market, would remain as illegal as it is today. In addition, Article 3.1. of the 1988 UN Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances requires Parties to establish as criminal offences, ‘The cultivation of opium poppy, coca bush or cannabis plant for the purpose of the production of narcotic drugs contrary to the provisions of the 1961 Convention’. While this provision would no longer apply to cultivation for the purpose of natural coca leaf products—because those would no longer be ‘narcotic drugs’ in this scenario—it would remain in force for cultivation destined for cocaine production.
DEVIDA’s contention that descheduling coca threatens to create a “perverse incentive” to increase coca cultivation destined for illicit cocaine production ignores the other possibility, which is that as a more robust legal market for natural coca takes shape, the incentives increase for farmers to produce legally and thereby avoid, or at least limit their exposure to, the vicissitudes and conflicts of the illicit cocaine economy. As legal markets for natural coca products expand, they could afford coca growers the opportunity to enhance their incomes and well-being legally, a possibility that today exists on only a very small scale. With legal markets for natural coca products emerging on dimensions orders of magnitude larger and more reliable than exist currently, legal coca-based income could help reduce coca growers’ reliance on production for illicit markets. Bringing such markets to fruition at a new, larger scale would require a more comprehensive state regulation, with the increasing value of such markets providing both government and growers with the incentives to improve and strengthen administrative control measures.
Rather than being viewed, per DEVIDA’s warnings, as a likely impetus for increased cocaine production, coca descheduling’s potential for generating important, largely new, legal sources of income for Indigenous People and other coca growing communities in the region should be taken seriously. Doing so will require, for example, ensuring that mechanisms are in place to protect a nascent international trade in natural coca products from being captured by corporate elites disconnected from the traditions and realities of Andean-Amazonian Indigenous Peoples. As the global experience thus far with legally regulated cannabis illustrates, such protections cannot be taken for granted and must be intentionally created and implemented. The challenge of doing so should not be underestimated, but the potential benefits of a legally regulated and duly protected international trade in natural coca products should provide the incentives to governments, growers, and international agencies to take best advantage of the opportunity that descheduling can create.
DEVIDA’s opposition to coca descheduling also ignores another sizeable potential benefit of a more robust legal coca market with regard to cocaine use. Allowing a milder natural stimulant on the international market could attract some users away from the more hazardous concentrated products that characterize contemporary illegal cocaine markets.
Finally, the fears expressed by DEVIDA ignore the obvious fact that illegal markets for cocaine have been vibrant, resilient and lucrative for decades, despite the fact that cocaine is itself listed in Schedule I of the 1961 Single Convention. The recent global expansion of illegal cocaine markets has occurred fully within the framework enshrined in the UN drug treaty regime, a fact that points to systemic flaws in the prohibitionist approach itself. This fact does not alter the rationale for descheduling the coca leaf but underscores why the fears that descheduling coca will lead to a runaway cocaine economy are fundamentally misplaced. Under the artificially lucrative conditions created by the prohibitionist UN drug treaty regime, cocaine markets have already grown exponentially. A well-regulated market for legal coca products may be unlikely to put a very big dent in the global cocaine market, but nor should it be seen as likely to add to it—to the contrary.
Ironically then, what DEVIDA frames as fears over what might result from coca’s descheduling are in fact the realities of “business as usual”—today’s status quo already creates the dire situation facing many Indigenous Peoples because of the scope of the global cocaine trade nourished by the prohibitionist treaty framework. While descheduling coca will not, in and of itself, alter the fundamental dynamics that sustain the illicit cocaine industry, changing coca’s status in the drug treaty schedules could create significant new sources of legal livelihoods that are built on the recognition of the coca leaf’s many beneficial uses, which have for too long been obscured and denied in a context on unjust criminalization and stigmatization.
Coca and cocaine markets
The UN’s belated review of the coca leaf’s status in the drug treaty regime comes at a time of surging coca cultivation to supply a booming global cocaine market and to compensate for the exponential increase of global cocaine seizures (see graph). The increased coca cultivation has coincided with falling farm gate prices, diminishing the already meager subsistence incomes of families that rely on coca as a cash crop. As cocaine traffickers respond to enforcement pressures by increasing production and developing new routes and asserting control over strategic territory, coca is being cultivated beyond the usual Andean-Amazonian lands, and is now no longer uncommon in Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.4 Colombia remains the country with by far the most coca cultivation and the most cocaine production—as well as record amounts of cocaine seizures—while coca growing is also spilling over the Colombian borders into Venezuela and Ecuador.
Lower farm gate prices may eventually contribute to slowing and halting coca’s further expansion. But severe adverse impacts are already keenly felt in many Indigenous territories, particularly in the lowlands of the Amazon Basin regions of Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. Most of these coca “invasions” are part of an ongoing extension of the agricultural frontier, while some have appeared deep in the rain forests. Some occur in indigenous territories where coca is very much a part of daily life, but some happen in places where the indigenous inhabitants are not coca users.
All three countries have a historical relation with coca that long precedes the birth of the international cocaine trade. As described above, even if the review now underway does lead to coca’s descheduling, cocaine production and trafficking will remain illicit activities. But understanding how the current linkages between coca and cocaine generate conflict and hardships for many Indigenous communities is critical for appreciating why some are wary of the coca review and the possible change of coca’s status under the UN drug treaties. At the same time, many Indigenous Peoples place coca at the center of their spirituality and ways of life and do not necessarily consider the commodification of the coca leaf that descheduling would portend to be a positive step. These concerns relate to the importance, as noted previously, of ensuring that mechanisms are in place to protect commerce in natural coca products from being captured by corporations or elites disconnected from the traditions and realities of Andean-Amazonian Indigenous Peoples. More broadly, these concerns underscore that the coca review must proceed in accordance with the right of Indigenous Peoples to free, prior and informed consent before any legislative or administrative measures are adopted that may affect them. As the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Francisco Cali Tzay, said: ‘It is crucial that international drug control policies evolve to be in compliance with the international rights of Indigenous Peoples such as those set out in the UN Declaration. It is also necessary to ensure the active participation and consultation of Indigenous Peoples’ representatives in these processes. This implies prior consultation and respect for their right to use the coca leaf in accordance with their world view.’5
Conclusions
Revising the coca leaf’s classification in the UN drug treaty system through the WHO critical review process now underway will not affect the status of coca that is cultivated to produce illicit cocaine, which countries will remain obligated to control. Still, several Indigenous Peoples in the Andean-Amazon regions are concerned that removing coca from the UN list of “narcotic drugs” will risk further increasing the troublesome expansion of coca into their territories, undermining their autonomy and fueling conflict. Detailed examples of illegal coca invasions into Indigenous territories can be found in the annexed article.6 Combined with the shortcomings of the domestic legal frameworks and conflicts over the control of the existing local markets, these concerns demonstrate the lack of confidence of Indigenous and traditional coca growing communities in their governments’ commitment and capacity to ensure the protection of their lands, cultures and livelihoods.
The promises and perils in the coca review process were discussed at length in a series of community consultations in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru convened by TNI in collaboration with local partners over the past six months. They were also an important topic of debate at a recent event in Peru on the ‘Wisdom of the Leaf’(external link) organised by McKenna Academy. All those conversations have informed this episode of the Coca Chronicles, and several important lessons can be drawn from them. First, there is high interest and need for more information about the WHO review process and its potential outcomes and consequences, and many emphasized the importance of an inclusive review process with opportunities for Indigenous Peoples and other coca growing communities to express their views. Second, there are legitimate concerns related to illegal coca invasions into Indigenous territories and to conflicts over the control of domestic coca markets that must be clearly understood and taken into account. And third, there is a common interest and urgency to explore protective mechanisms to counter the risks of a corporate capture and to ensure that Andean-Amazonian Indigenous Peoples will be the principal beneficiaries of a potential future legal international coca market.
Without any doubt, restoring coca’s good name and making it accessible as a global commodity needs to benefit those that secured the plants survival over the past centuries and have tirelessly defended coca’s immaterial value to the culture and identity of many people in the region. A new reality that may occur as a result of the ongoing review process requires governments to revise if their existing protection mechanisms for the local market and for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and territories are sufficiently robust given the potential opening of a legal international market for natural coca products. Enhancing national legal protections around cultural patrimony and Indigenous knowledge, as well as proactive use of international mechanisms such as the Nagoya Protocol of the Convention on Biodiversity or geographical indications, will be essential to ensure optimal outcomes and equitable benefit sharing. Only if adequate protective mechanisms are in place, the opening of international markets can serve as a promising development tool and income generator for Andean-Amazonian Indigenous Peoples and other coca growing communities in the region.
Annex: Conflicted about coca
Coca invasions into Indigenous territories
The areas where coca leaf cultivation has been expanding most in recent years are those located along the borders of the three main Andean coca-cultivating countries. At the so-called triple frontier of Peru with Colombia and Brazil, coca is being grown in the basins of the Putumayo and Yavari rivers, and to the south, on Peru’s border with the state of Acre (Brazil). Coca cultivation is also occurring on Bolivia’s borders with Peru and Brazil, and in the border regions of Colombia with Ecuador and Venezuela. One obvious explanation lies in the need and the capacity of cocaine trafficking organizations to expand their territorial control and protect their operations from enforcement and from rivals. The threats posed to these territories arise from more than the coca growers’ invasions alone, but from pressure for extending agricultural lands, mining and cattle ranching. Governments have been unable to prevent or take actions to protect these territories, and state agents sometimes bear a degree of responsibility for the phenomena.
Peru’s Ashaninka
According to the 2017 population census, about six million people in Peru self-identified as belonging to an Indigenous or native people, slightly more than a quarter of the total population. The vast majority consider themselves to be Quechua (5.2 million) or Aymara (550,000); the rest (250,000) are native inhabitants of the Amazon, between Ashaninka, Awajún, Shipibo and several others. The departments of the central Amazon of Peru, mostly in Loreto, Ucayali, Pasco, Huánuco, and Madre de Dios, are regions where large areas of coca cultivation have recently appeared within Indigenous communities.
Protection of these lands under Peruvian law requires first that the population needs to be recognized either as ‘native communities’ under Decree N° 22175 of 1978 (primarily Amazonian Indigenous Peoples but also mestizo and riverine communities) or as ‘peasant communities’ under Decree N° 24656 of 1987 (mostly Quechua and Aymara communities) and consequently be assigned communal land titles or marked territory. According to a Mongabay Latam study, there are many such communities without a title or recognition, making effective protection measures more complicated: Loreto alone has 417 self-identified Indigenous communities that do not have the recognition of regional authorities to certify their existence. The same issue occurs in other Peruvian regions: Ucayali has 122, Pasco has 85, Huánuco has 13, and Madre de Dios has 10 communities that are not officially recognized. This makes a total of 647 unrecognized Indigenous communities in five regions of the Peruvian Amazon.7
DEVIDA, Peru’s national drug control agency, dedicated a special report on the issue of coca expansion in (recognized) Indigenous territory and native communities in the year 2020, indicating that almost 10,000 hectares—16 percent of the country’s total coca cultivation—was situated in these areas, a 25 percent increase compared to 2018.8 The DEVIDA report does not distinguish between coca consuming and non-consuming Indigenous groups but shows that the Ashaninka is by far the most affected Amazonian Indigenous People in Peru, with 2,602 hectares of coca in 2020. According to DEVIDA’s latest coca crop monitoring report, this tendency continues, with Ashaninka territory counting an estimated 5,629 hectares of coca in 2023, more than doubling since 2020.9
Ashaninka people occupy a large share of the central Amazon region known as the VRAEM (Valle de los Ríos Apurímac, Ene y Mantaro), where they grow coca for their own use in small parcels, together with other agricultural subsistence crops. Ashaninka territories were already severely affected by the armed conflict with Sendero Luminoso in the 1980 and 1990s, and especially from 2015 onward have become hot spots for colonizers in search of an income from coca, pushing the agricultural frontier further eastwards into the Amazon basin. Ashaninkas’ calls for government help to prevent the further expansion of coca growing by migrating farmers went unheeded for years. In 2019, the government undertook forced eradication operations, which laid bare internal divisions within the community, as some Ashaninkas generated income for their families by renting their lands to farmers arriving from the Andean highlands. Alternative Development projects failed to deliver results, and the latest figures show a steady continuation of coca’s expansion.10
Another case of increased coca invasion in Indigenous territory that has appeared lately is on Kakataibo lands, spread over both Huánuco and the Ucayali departments, in the Amazon frontier between Peru and Brazil. Several leaders have been killed in confrontations with illegal newcomers, and many communities live in constant fear. Often it starts with illegal logging and is then followed by planting coca, the building of cocaine elaboration facilities and landing strips. The first invasions already started in 2000 but have accelerated since 2017. Local authorities are accused of facilitating the colonization inside Kakataibo territory, and also here, some of the leaders have allowed outsiders to come in and exploit other local resources, such as banana plantations.11
Bolivia’s Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS)
Bolivia’s vast Amazon regions—covering more than 40 percent of the country, spanning parts of the departments of Pando, Beni, Cochabamba, La Paz, and Santa Cruz—are inhabited by more than thirty different Indigenous Peoples.6 In contrast to the Aymara and Quechua Indigenous Peoples of the highlands—together representing about 90 percent of Bolivia’s Indigenous population—many of the Indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon lowlands do not share a history of traditional coca practices.
Invasions of the native lands of the Chimané, Yuracaré, and Mojeño-Trinitario peoples date as far back as the 1970s, prior to the formal designation in 1990 as Native Community Land (Tierras Comunitarias de Origen, TCO). In 2009 the TIPNIS territory, consisting of over a million hectares and home to some 14,000 native inhabitants, was awarded to the Indigenous authorities, while some 124,000 hectares were allocated to agrarian colonists, mostly in the southern ‘Polygon 7’ section of the park. These decisions marked the beginning of increased tensions and conflicts over land and land use, Indigenous rights and extractivism. The territory is situated next to the Chapare, the coca growing region that emerged in the 1970s during the cocaine boom, and the birthplace of a new political force, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), under the leadership of Evo Morales, who served as the country’s president between 2006 and 2019. Many of the Polygon 7 newer inhabitants are coca growers who migrated from the Chapare.
In 2011 tensions around plans to build a road through the lowland Indigenous reserve on the borders between Beni and Cochabamba departments, sparked controversy and resistance to the MAS government’s extractivist agenda. A broad coalition of environmentalists, Indigenous organizations and others managed to derail the plans for the road for a while, but in 2017 the government approved a law allowing for its construction. The road is meant to open access to the forests for logging and mining and to connect with relatively untouched lowland regions bordering Brazil. Plans for the road also fractured the alliance between the low- and highlands Indigenous Peoples, since they compete access to the same lands.12 The construction of the road has advanced, some bridges have been built, and the project remains a source of conflict with the Indigenous communities.
Meanwhile the taking of Indigenous lands for timber and slash- and burn agriculture, followed by the occupation of organized coca farmers planting coca, known as interculturales, continues. The most recent year that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) crop monitoring project measured coca specifically in the Polygon 7 area of TIPNIS was 2016. At that time, the UNODC estimated a 43 percent surge in the land under coca cultivation compared to 2015, an increase three times greater than the national average. Neither Morales nor subsequent governments have attempted to curb these expansions. In 2023, Indigenous authorities denounced the existence in more than 10 communities of ‘constant encroachments and atrocities’ by colonizers from Polygon 7.13 In 2024, Hernán Suárez Parada from the Indigenous Council of the South (Consejo Indígena del Sur, or Conisur, the local council in the Cochabamba part of TIPNIS), explained in an interview: “The (government) projects do not directly benefit the Indigenous Peoples, but mainly the coca growers who are going beyond the red line of the TIPNIS to extend their coca crops.” He reported that recently there was a confrontation between coca growers and eradicators who had to enter the Isiboro Securé National Park. Suárez indicated that “coca production should not only be reduced in the parks, but also within the Conisur TIPNIS, where coca growers want more land and the real Indigenous People are hired as day laborers.”14
The conflict over the TIPNIS road created divisions among Indigenous Peoples with regard to the MAS governments. The TIPNIS dispute has also highlighted different concepts of what indigeneity means, with clashes of interests between farmers with individual land titles (interculturales who have migrated from their ancestral lands to other parts of the country) and those for whom land is still owned and managed collectively as a key to Indigenous identity. Members of both groups self-identify as “Indigenous”, but their attitudes toward the land and its meaning differ.15 For Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia’s highlands regions, of Aymara and Quechua origin, coca holds enormous cultural significance, while for many lowlands Indigenous Peoples, coca has come to signify a potential threat to their lands and autonomy. In areas where they are competing for the same land, this has created conflicts that are not easily resolved.
Indigenous Peoples Territories and Coca in Colombia
Colombia’s Indigenous Peoples include 115 recognized communities that comprise close to 2 million persons, according to the country’s 2018 census, a small 4 percent fraction of the total population.16 Coca is being cultivated in 88 of the 320 officially recognized Indigenous reserves.17 The presence of illegal armed groups, connected to different illicit activities, including cocaine trafficking, is causing tremendous insecurity and undermines Indigenous self-governance. In addition to struggles to defend their lands from encroachments by rebel groups and criminal gangs, Indigenous communities face government-sponsored programs for mining and oil or gas extraction. With hundreds of concessions granted in ancestral territories, Indigenous Peoples have frequently found themselves on the front line of violence and land rights violations, with activists regularly subjected to harassment, intimidation and killings.18
Colombia has the highest incidence of coca incursions into Indigenous lands and a long history of human rights violations against Indigenous leaders. Colombia is also the world’s leading producer of cocaine, and the plant’s link to the illegal cocaine trade has cast a long-standing stigma overshadowing its cultural and historical significance, which has only recently started to change.19 As a result of the stigma, only a relatively small number of Indigenous communities in Colombia venerate coca and use it on a daily basis for ceremonial or medicinal purposes to sustain the physical and mental health of their communities.
The Northern highland peoples of the Sierra Nevada (Arhauco, Wiwa, Kogi) are well known for their ancestral use of coca. The Nasa people are by far the most numerous Indigenous group in Colombia with a deep coca heritage. Coca remains fundamental to the Nasa cosmovision, even as coca cultivated for the cocaine trade has proliferated in their territory. Despite Colombia’s peace accords, the Nasa still suffer from ongoing violence, particularly in the Cauca department, home to most Nasa.
Relatively less is known about the coca traditions and practices of Colombia’s Amazonian Indigenous groups, which have for decades been contending with the expansion of coca fields into their territories.20 Several Indigenous Peoples with long relations with coca have barely managed to survive, such as the Nukak-Makú, Guyabero, Sikuani and Tukano peoples. Caught up in violence related to land and resource grabs and displaced by conflicts over territorial control, these ancestral defenders of coca have lost almost all their lands and community to the ravages of internal armed conflicts and cocaine trafficking and drug enforcement operations. The Amazonian Huitoto and Bora people, living in the Putumayo department bordering Peru, have faced waves of exploitation since the rubber plantation boom in the early 20th century but have maintained their ancestral tradition of using mambe, ground coca leaves, at their gatherings and meetings.
Notes and Sources
Human Rights Council, 57th session, side event of the permanent missions of Bolivia and Colombia, co-sponsored by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, ‘Drug control policies and respect for the rights, needs and cultural characteristics of Indigenous Peoples, including their traditional medicine, science and ancestral practices: the case of the critical review of the coca leaf’, Palais des Nations, Geneva, 25 September 2024.
See: Sylvia Kay, Prohibited Plants, Environmental Justice in Drug Policy, Transnational Institute, June 2022. https://www.tni.org/en/publication/prohibited-plants
Statement made by DEVIDA at ECDD public information session, October 14, 2024.
Paulo J. Murillo-Sandoval et all, 2024, Environ.Res.Lett. 19 104068, DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/ad7276
Idem footnote 1.
Link to separate article ‘Coca invasions into Indigenous territories’
https://news.mongabay.com/2021/11/in-perus-amazon-deforestation-and-cri…(external link)
https://www.gob.pe/institucion/devida/informes-publicaciones/2599817-mo…
https://cdn.www.gob.pe/uploads/document/file/6447242/5639121-superficie…(external link)
See latest Crop Monitoring Report from the UNODC on Peru:https://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Peru/Peru_monitoreo_202…
https://ojo-publico.com/3025/kakataibo-el-pueblo-los-mejores-hombres-co…
Las 36 etnias de Bolivia y sus características,https://www.eabolivia.com/36-etnias-de-bolivia-y-sus-caracteristicas.html(external link); The Indigenous World 2024, pp. 309-318. https://iwgia.org/es/bolivia/3736-mi-2020-bolivia.html(external link) and https://insightcrime.org/investigations/bolivian-amazon-faces-threats-from-all-sides/(external link)
https://es.mongabay.com/2024/01/una-coalicion-que-se-une-y-se-fractura-…
Los Tiempos, August 28, 2023, https://www.lostiempos.com/actualidad/cochabamba/20230825/diez-comunida…
Interview with Hernán Suárez by Somos Sur, Maria Luisa Mercado, Cochabamba, 23 de octubre de 2024.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/latin-american-research-review/…
https://minorityrights.org/country/colombia/
https://news.mongabay.com/2024/02/from-murder-to-mining-threats-abound-…(external link)
https://minorityrights.org/country/colombia/
https://latinamericanpost.com/americas/environment-en/colombias-effort-…(external link)
Available (only in Spanish) here: https://www.tni.org/es/art%C3%ADculo/sobre-el-uso-tradicional-de-la-coc…