Alcohol, drugs, play ... teenagers addictions
- In the poorest and most forgotten areas of Colombia, thousands of women dedicate themselves to the cultivation of coca, in the forefront of an illegal business that moves millions. Their relationship with the plant from which cocaine is extracted is ambivalent: it allows them to push their children forward, but they know it brings destruction. If they could, they would all change their livelihood.
"The people who grow coca are not bad people or grow it for harming anyone. I plant it because from it I get a better livelihood for my children," says Cristina Meza , a woman who has been engaged in this activity for 15 years. Colombia and that does not do it by the desire to fill the pockets, but by necessity . Sowing coca is better than dedicating yourself to bananas or wood because it generates more income . Cristina is 36 years old, an Afro-descendant and a single mother of three children whom she has held alone, with a broken heart and in a place surrounded by violence, deprivation and difficulties. He lives in a hamlet called El Playón , two hours from Tumaco , a municipality on the Pacific coast, bordering Ecuador and the place with more coca leaf crops in the world: more than 19,000 hectares planted.
In Colombia, between 130,000 and 180,000 families are dedicated to growing coca . 46% of its coca population is female and of these, 29% are heads of household. However, they are usually limited to the role of sowing, fertilizer, harvesting and cooking for day laborers. Few are those that have their own cultivation or those that risk working in the chemistry laboratories, as the process of transforming the coca leaf into base paste is called, which will then be converted into cocaine in a laboratory outside the peasants, known as a crystallizer
In any of these jobs, women earn a maximum of 50,000 Colombian pesos per day, about 13 euros in a day of up to 11 hours . It is little, but enough to survive . In any case, the first production line of a business that moves millions and millions of dollars in the world lives in poverty.
Antonia Payán is also a single mother and has been a coca grower for 15 years. It is from Vallaneto, another hamlet of Tumaco near the Playón. He started earning just over two euros a day of raspachina , as people who scrape or collect the coca leaf are known there. Then, spraying the plants, he won six and a half euros. Today he continues to collect as a day laborer and has his own one-hectare crop. "Scraping for others I earn between 30,000 and 40,000 pesos (8-11 euros) daily and then already from my land, every three months, I harvest about 60 arrobas (690 kilos) and we get a million and a half pesos (405 euros) for the sale of the leaf. Hence we have to deduct fertilizers, chemicals to fumigate, pay workers and their food. It is very little what remains. We return rich to those outside. We have the scrape, never better said, "explains Antonia.
It is not much money, but it guarantees them some independence that they would not have if they did not engage in coca . There are not many more opportunities in these places, almost jungle, where there is no access to education or health, or even basic services such as electricity or drinking water. According to Luz Piedad Caicedo , deputy director of the Humanas Corporation, a center for feminist studies and activism, coca represents for women who cultivate autonomy , something very difficult to obtain for the rest of Colombian farmers. "They have more possibilities, they tell you themselves, and that autonomy can consist of small and dramatic things at the same time as being able to buy compresses or underwear. They don't have to ask the husband for money, which he often doesn't give. Many of these peasants have children of previous partners and the new spouse does not take care of them. He does not buy them clothes or school supplies. Thanks to the sale of coca leaves or of the base paste, women can pay for those things. "
The life of the cocaleras basically consists of working in the field every day . This is described by one of them, Antonia: "I grab my machete, sharpen it and I am going to cut the banana leaves; to put a stick if the bush is going to fall, or I plant yucca or I feed the chickens already the ducks and there I entertain myself. " He likes country life. And while coca does not give you that much money, at least it says that it is sold more easily and "silver is made faster." Nothing to do with when he was young and climbed into a canoe with two or three bunches of bananas to sell. "He paddled more than 35 minutes to a place on the river called La Playa and sold only one. He returned home and the rest he had to give to the chickens," he recalls.
Coca women and their families are permanently exposed to their source of livelihoods being forcibly eradicated by the army . Cristina and Antonia know that the kill, as they call it colloquially, brings destruction, and if they could, they would change their work for another that was legal. The collectors maintain an ambivalent relationship with coca : thanks to it they have been able to feed their families and give their children an education, but it is also the plant that has brought war, violence and pain to their territories .
For Cristina Meza , "Coca means everything. We don't live here from anything other than her." Or as Laura Puente , a 19-year-old coca grower says: "Without coca, nobody achieves anything." At age 14 he arrived at Catatumbo, in the far north of Colombia, the second place with more coca in the country after Tumaco. He wanted to earn money and help his family, because working in restaurants or selling fruit did not raise enough.
Despite her youth and not having finished high school, Laura has managed to build a house with her partner, saving every penny that both have earned with coca. Now his dream is to study and leave this place so as not to live in fear anymore.
After the signing of the peace between the Colombian Government and the 2016 FARC guerrillas, coca growers saw an open door to their dream of changing their lives. But today, three years later, that hope has vanished. The Government of former President Juan Manuel Santos launched the National Integral Program for the Substitution of Crops for Illicit Use (PNIS). The peasants' commitment was to start, replace and not re-sow. That of the Government, offer them all the conditions so that they could leave the coca and improve their lives. A total of 130,000 families signed the replacement agreement , but government breaches are putting the program at risk.
The saddest thing of all is that the culture of violence and abuse that coca pepper in society, especially against women, is far from disappearing. After the demobilization of the guerrillas and their abandonment of arms, a new conflict around the drug arose with new armed groups that filled the space left by the insurgency .
Coca in Colombia is a social problem that has its roots in inequality and neglect of the State and that is directly related to the presence of armed groups that subject the population to its rules. Anny del Castillo knows firsthand all this reality as a personera of Tumaco, an institutional position that promotes the defense of human rights: "In all this circle that revolves around drug trafficking groups outside the law exercise sexual violence to intimidate and show power or as sanction mechanisms to show that it is they who have control of the territory, and of women. "
They are mothers, daughters, sisters and friends who must overcome - most of the cases in solitude - the armed conflict of which they are spoils of war. They do it to forced displacement, diseases and violence, to support their families. There are hundreds of thousands of women who make heart guts to stay alive without any protection to their rights and who must choose to do something illegal to survive .
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