It is easy to see why coca is king in Colombia’s rural heartland. Otherwise hard-to-get loans for seeds and fertilizers are readily available for those willing to grow coca, the raw material for cocaine. Payments from the cocaine trade’s rich financiers are delivered on the spot and in cash. And incomes from the illegal trade are many times those of most legal crops. So when the Colombian government began a vast spraying program to eliminate coca in the southern departments of Putumayo and Caquetá three years ago, hundreds of the area’s coca farmers poured into the neighboring department of Cauca to buy new plots for coca cultivation. Seeing a potential bonanza, many of Cauca’s floundering coffee farmers burned down their coffee bushes and... [Log in to read more]