Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos meets with The Globe and Mail’s editorial board in Toronto on Monday. During the discussion, Mr. Santos advocated for a more health-based approach to his country’s efforts to rein in drugs, including the production of cocaine.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said the country must reimagine the "war on drugs" and take a new, health-based approach to addressing the production and trade in narcotics and other drugs.
"We're like a static bicycle – pedalling, pedalling and you're left in the same position – so something is wrong with this war on drugs: It's not working," he said in an interview at The Globe and Mail on Tuesday. "We need a less punitive, more health[-based] approach."
And he said the United States, which has spent billions of dollars attempting to eradicate cocaine production in Colombia, endorses the policy shift.
In September, the White House said it "seriously considered" adding Colombia to its blacklist of countries failing to crack down on the global drug trade. Mr. Santos's office responded angrily.
"Colombia is the country that has made the largest sacrifice in the last 40 years [in the 'war on drugs']: We lost our best journalists, best judges, best policemen, it was a very high cost," Mr. Santos said on Monday.
However, he said that just five days ago, U.S. President Donald Trump sent him a letter that acknowledged his country's efforts and its new approach.
"I trust that your efforts will help improve the problem," Mr. Trump wrote in a copy of that letter released by Mr. Santos's office. In Colombia, many saw the letter as a backpedal on the original threat to "de-certify," which jeopardized the U.S. government's strongest alliance in Latin America.
Colombia remains a major focus of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, as the source of 90 per cent of the cocaine consumed by Americans – whose cocaine use is growing even as opioid use surges. The United States says cocaine production in Colombia has grown by 133 per cent in the past three years.
The Santos government has abandoned aerial spraying of coca crops and forced eradication, and instead is engaging former coca growers in a crop-substitution project. As part of the peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC in its Spanish acronym, signed just more than a year ago, the ex-guerrillas have renounced all participation in illegal activity. But many Colombians question whether they have indeed truly abandoned the drug trade while, at the same time, other criminal actors – ranging from former right-wing paramilitaries to Mexican cartels – have moved in to the territories and businesses vacated by FARC.
FARC fighters have moved into demobilization camps and handed over their weapons, but other tangible signs of the peace process are few and far between – leading to frustration in many quarters in Colombia. The President said he understands that feeling, but people have unrealistic expectations.
"People get a bit exasperated – they need results faster – and the realities make this very difficult," he said. "Constructing peace is like constructing a cathedral. You go brick by brick and you have to lay the foundations in a solid way, otherwise the cathedral will not work – so that's what we're doing now."
More than 80 community leaders – from Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and rural farmer communities – have been assassinated in Colombia since the deal was signed, more than double the number killed in the previous year. Many of those who have been killed warned, in the days before the deal was signed, that they would be targets for violence at the hands of new actors who sought to move into their areas, and said they feared the government lacked the motivation or the ability to protect them.
Mr. Santos said his government is "concerned" about the killings. "We have specific plans with the armed forces, with police, with the Attorney-General, with the justice department – and we are being quite successful in getting to these areas and trying to calm the people and tell them, 'Listen, the state will come here and we will be present, we are going to defend you.'"
He said that investigation by the Attorney-General has not identified any systematic pattern to the killings – an assertion that civil-society organizations in Colombia angrily dispute.
"What we have discovered is that a big percentage of these are [motivated by] personal reasons because these are areas that have been very violent for many, many years – the other sources are criminal bands that are involved with drug trafficking that don't want them to support the substitution," the President said.
Some of the murders have been carried out by the National Liberation Army (ELN), another rebel organization in peace talks with the government, and who are seeking to maintain control over a chunk of territory, and "a small percentage" have been the armed forces, he said.
"But in a nutshell: We are working on that, we are concerned and we will guarantee the control of the territory in these areas," he said. The question from Colombians, of course, is, "When?" "This is a process," the President said.
Mr. Santos said much of the criticism originates with his political enemies, who are more invested in spin than in facts.
"There are a lot of people interested in showing that this has not worked or is not working – these are the same people who always said that the FARC will never disarm, the same people who said that we were going to expropriate every landowner, the same people who said that we are going to become a communist country and now they are saying this is not working because we are not moving as fast as many people would expect."
Colombia's former president, Alvaro Uribe, for whom Mr. Santos once served as minister of defence, has emerged as an intractable political enemy, bitterly opposed to negotiating with the FARC. He led the successful No side in the referendum on the deal a year ago and has kept up his criticism of the deal even after an amended version was adopted in Congress.
Mr. Santos said peace makers must be prepared to stake their political popularity on the deal, and his has suffered – although a series of corruption scandals have also contributed to his low public approval, currently about 23 per cent. Polling suggests that the next election could be won by an opposition candidate; even Mr. Santos's former vice-president, German Vargas Lleras, currently running second, has been publicly critical of aspects of the deal recently.
But Mr. Santos said the process will not be jeopardized if a critic wins the presidency.
"We have advanced enough to make this process irreversible no matter who succeeds me," he said. "Because by the time the next president comes in to power, things will have advanced enough for this to become irreversible." The firm international backing for the deal also serves to entrench it, he said.
"No president will dare to go against what everyone in their right mind sees as the correct way out."