An anti-narcotic police officer guards packages of cocaine in San Jose del Guaviare, Colombia. AP Photo/Fernando Vergara. All rights reserved.
The war on drugs has been the way the Colombian state has related to extensive marginal areas of the country; and its counternarcotics policies, the language the central government has used to meet the challenges of the periphery. In these places, communities have become visible because they appear on the maps of illicit crops. There do not carry enough votes, and there are no incentives for the state to assume its most basic functions there.
Changing this reality requires understanding that the solution to drug trafficking is to be found in the adoption of a broader rural development perspective that overcomes responses based on subsidies and fragmented projects. What is needed is a rethinking of the relationship between the state and the territories and for the former to get over its historical inability to provide public goods and services.
