This farmer wanted to leave the cocaine industry – he couldn’t

During the boom of the 1990s, Elena Hernandez moved to Guaviare, a coca-growing town, attracted by better pay.

“There was a lot of money back then – you could see it everywhere,” she says. “I was able to save and buy a small house.”

But the coca industry brought violence and unrest. As armed groups battled for control, the government tried to suppress the production by hand extinguishing, suffocating the air and arresting them.

Although these efforts stopped the family’s income, they did not stop the farm.

So when a nationwide replacement program was introduced in 2017 by the government at the time, Hernandez was eager to sign up, joining the roughly 100,000 families who had been given financial assistance after leaving Coca.

Each family was to receive 36 million Colombian pesos (11,000; £8,000) spread over two years.

“The way it was presented to us seemed very promising for the development of our region,” Hernandez said.

The program, known as the National Comprehensive Program for the Substitution of Illegal Crops (PNIS), was born in It follows a 2016 peace deal between the government and Colombia’s largest guerrilla group, FARC.

Farmers will receive technical assistance from agronomists, including advice on soil management, to uproot coca plants.

Although replacement programs have existed in the past, they have been limited in scope. PNIS was the most ambitious experiment to date – and it seems to be working at first.

In some areas of South Meta and Guaviar, coca fields have been replaced by lemon trees, banana crops and small livestock farming. Many farmers like Hernandez have moved away from coca.

But that doesn’t mean they consider it a success.

“The government was not very committed to us farmers. We were treated badly,” Hernandez explained, pointing to earlier problems.

Payments are late, and technical support is often unavailable. Due to weak government presence in rural areas and poor coordination between agencies, support often does not reach the community.

As political priorities shifted, the force behind the program weakened. In the year In 2018, Colombia’s president, Ivan Duque, focused on demobilization and security strategies.

In the year By the time current President Gustavo Petro took office in 2022, PNIS was behind schedule and struggling to reach communities.

But some farmers have reported improvements. For Doralba Bejarano, from Puerto Rico in South Meta, her situation improved as support began to arrive.

“We were very nervous before the program,” she says. “We had to hide the coca paste because the police, the military would put us in jail.” Coca paste is a type of coca used to make cocaine, and it allows growers to earn more money than selling raw leaves.

Now she says that she has peace of mind: “I go where I want, I have no reason to hide.”

She says many members of her community are receiving government support in promoting and selling non-coca crops and other food commodities.