Colombian police officers at the traffic checkpoint sensed something fishy about an ambulance en route to Santa Marta, a city along the Caribbean Sea.
The driver appeared jittery.
Given the coronavirus-related mandatory national shutdown and ban on nonessential domestic travel, the officers figured they’d better inspect the emergency vehicle.
They found about 240 pounds of cocaine hydrochloride worth millions of dollars, apparently being transported illegally, along with a man they suspected was pretending to be ill. The officers confiscated the drugs and arrested him, his companion, a nurse and the driver.
A coalition of left-wing legislators who’ve grown weary of Colombia’s whack-a-mole anti-narcotics efforts recently included the details of the arrests in June in a proposal to stop the elaborate and often violent trafficking of cocaine that has plagued the South American country for decades.
The plan favored by the legislators is one that virtually everyone acknowledges would be highly difficult to integrate or enforce. It calls for the national government to take control of the drug market by purchasing coca leaf harvests and regulating cocaine sales. The challenges include cost, pushback from an international community that wants to maintain the status quo with regard to drug policy, and the potential reaction of an illegal drug empire that does not hesitate to use violence to get its way.
Nevertheless, the legislators who authored the bill, which is scheduled for congressional debate in October, insist the approach could reduce the waste of public funds, help protect Colombia’s environment and generate a better public health approach to the issue of drug consumption. Colombian adults already are allowed to carry up to a gram of cocaine for “personal use.”
Sens. Iván Marulanda and Feliciano Valencia, the authors, say change is needed as soon as possible because, although the national government signed a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016, conflict persists among other guerrilla groups, FARC dissidents, ex-combatants, paramilitaries, drug traffickers, police and the military.
On top of more than 24,000 coronavirus-related deaths and 758,000 cases of infection as of Sunday, Colombia has suffered a slew of massacres this year, many of them linked to the ongoing conflicts.
Authorities and public officials say some deaths are tied to such problems as turf wars over coca fields and trafficking routes. This includes two high school students in the Nariño department of Colombia who were killed in August after visiting their school to submit their homework in person due to the pandemic and lack of internet connectivity.
“We do not wish to exploit the massacres that have been taking place for political gain,” said Sen. Gustavo Bolívar, who supports the coca regulation bill. “But they have a lot to do with the prohibition of drugs.”