Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro said that the Constitutional Court should reconsider its decision to ban aerial fumigation in order to counter new “mafia tactics.”
Petro said so in a post on social media platform X in response to the retention of 45 soldiers by locals from a coca-rich region in the southwestern Cauca province.
According to the Defense Ministry, the locals from the Micay Canyon were being employed by FARC dissident group EMC to protect the guerrilla-controlled coca cultivations in the region.
“Considering the mafia tactic of pitting civilians against the army, the Constitutional Court should reconsider its sentence” and allow that “there will be aerial fumigation where citizens attack the army,” said the president.
The comment marks a major break with Petro’s promise to maintain the ban on the use of the controversial chemical glyphosate in the government’s attempts to reduce cocaine production in the South American country.
The government’s strategy to prioritize intercept cocaine shipments and persecute alleged drug lords has had little effect in regions where illegal armed groups finance themselves through the cultivation of coca and the production of cocaine.
This has been particularly dramatic in the Micay Valley region where the entire local economy revolves around the international drug trade.
In an attempt to resume control over this region, the army expelled alleged guerrillas from the region in a major offensive in October last year.
Since then, attempts to build up the region’s infrastructure, which would allow the locals to take part in Colombia’s legal economy, have been violently opposed by the guerrillas, who embarked on a terrorism campaign to diminish State authority.
Colombia’s government struggling to control former guerrilla colony
The Cauca province around the Micay Valley has seen a major increase in guerrilla violence after the demobilization of the now-defunct FARC in 2017.
With the alleged help of Mexican drug trafficking organizations, dissident groups have violently taken control over much of the territories that used to fall under FARC control.
