Cocaine production in Colombia, the world’s leading cocaine exporter, has increased “five-fold” following the 2016 peace agreement the State Department helped broker between President Juan Manuel Santos’s government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, according to a senior Department of Homeland Security official.
“The peace agreement in Colombia set the stage for a new era in that political dynamic, but it also meant we’ve seen a five-fold increase in cocaine production in the Andes [Mountains]. That’s a huge challenge, not only for the U.S., which is still the main destination, but for our European partners and others around the world,” the DHS official said at the International Summit on Borders in Washington this week. The event organizer did not allow reporters to identify speakers.
Through early to mid-2016, the State Department assisted the South American country’s FARC group and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos in Havana, Cuba, as they worked to conclude four years of negotiations and strike a deal to end the 50-year guerrilla war.
The war left more than 220,000 people dead and displaced 5 million others from their homes.
A deal was signed in September 2016, and the Colombian Congress approved it in late November of that year.
The DHS official did not pinpoint the politics of the peace deal that prompted the massive uptick in cocaine production.
The Drug Enforcement Agency, classified under the Justice Department, told the Washington Examiner information about the amount of the drug being produced was not available for public release.
However, the DEA confirmed the amount of land dedicated to growing coca in Colombia increased 52 percent from 2015 to 2016, which was the most recent year with data available for public dissemination.
The senior DHS official said the spike in cocaine production was not the only narcotic that has seen “substantial” growth and production in recent years.
CBP has faced “tremendous” challenges in its attempt to prevent drug trafficking in the case of opioids like fentanyl, which is 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin and 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.
China is the world’s largest exporter of fentanyl and can easily ship it in envelopes because so little is needed to get high compared to marijuana or heroin.
“Our mail shipments have increased four-fold in five years — our international mail parcels. Our express consignment growth is up 70 percent in that same time frame,” the DHS official said. “There seems to be no end in sight to that growth.”
Last year, CBP processed 1.2 million shipments a day, but that figure is up to 1.7 million items in 2018.
Foreign drug cartels trying to move product into the U.S. are widely known for their use of the southern border, and, in recent years, Mexico has reported more violence, which the official said was not a coincidence.
“Here on our southwest border, some of the most violent criminal organizations in the world are competing over access to our borders, just south of the Rio Grand Valley in Texas,” the official added. “It’s really threatening the stability of those cities right on the border. It’s putting these families and children that our immigration system has invited to take this journey at tremendous risk throughout that journey.”
The Homeland Security official pointed to the murder rate in Mexico, which hit its highest level ever last year: 29,168 murders. That number is higher than the peak of the Mexican drug cartel war in 2011.
[Also read: Puerto Rico a growing hub for cocaine, heroin shipments to the US]
