On 25 April, a bomb shattered the Pan-American Highway in Cauca, southwest Colombia. 21 were killed in the deadliest attack on civilians in decades. President Gustavo Petro denounced the perpetrators – a breakaway faction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which signed a peace treaty with the state a decade ago – as “terrorists, fascists and drug traffickers.”
The bombing was another blow to the outgoing President Petro, who is set to leave office in August. Petro, an ex-guerrilla himself, was elected in 2022 with a vision to bring peace to Colombia and end the war on drugs. His term expires in August, and he is constitutionally barred from seeking another. As Colombia heads into a second round of the heated presidential election on 21 June, Petro’s drug policy legacy is up for debate.
To his credit, he has probably done more to move the Overton window on drug policy reform than any serving world leader, past or present. The actual results, however, have been less than extraordinary.
Colombia’s long-running civil wars began in 1948 with the assassination of presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, kicking off a period of bloodshed known as La Violencia. By the early sixties, things had seemingly calmed down, with a few armed stragglers left roaming the countryside as bandits. But in 1964, inspired by the Cuban revolution, the remaining peasant militias united into the FARC and smaller rebel outfits.
Colombia’s original drug barons smuggled pot from the hills of the Santa Marta region on the Caribbean coast to the prized market of the United States. But then cocaine gained popularity in the 1970s, not coincidentally around the time of disco music. A brick of white powder could be produced for pennies by peasant farmers in Bolivia or Peru, where chewing coca leaves is part of indigenous customs, then sold for tens of thousands of dollars on the streets of New York.
The vast profits attracted the interest of crime syndicates such as the ruthless Medellín Cartel led by the gangster Pablo Escobar. At first, Colombia was mainly a layover for cocaine smuggled northbound, but it wasn’t long before coca began to be grown on an industrial scale within Colombia itself. Coca cultivation became the most viable livelihood in many underdeveloped rural areas.
The emergence of narcotraffickers, or narcos for short, added another dimension to Colombia’s conflict. In 1981, the sister of Escobar’s business partners was kidnapped and held for ransom by M-19, a militant student underground of which Petro was once a member. In response, the drug lord bankrolled a vigilante death squad, Muerte a Secuestradores (MAS), or “Death to Kidnappers”. MAS and other paramilitaries evolved from private militias hired by wealthy businessmen and cocaine barons to protect their families and property from the guerrillas, who considered them a fair (and lucrative) target for kidnapping.
Since then, the cocaine industry has not only financed the civil war but become a reason for it, with gangsters and guerrillas trading gunfire over business as much as political disagreements, sometimes forcing farmers to grow coca at gunpoint. The authorities responded by spraying coca fields with poisonous herbicides, a practice that was abandoned in 2015 after the WHO ruled the chemicals carcinogenic.
But even after decades, Colombia’s war on drugs has not worked: in 2024, Bloomberg reported that cocaine was only behind oil as the country’s most-valued export.
In the early 2000s, Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, discussed drug policy with Petro, then an up-and-coming senator exposing the pact between violent paramilitary gangs and certain politicians.
“I think he understands the dynamic at play here, which is that forced eradication [of coca plants] does not work,” Tree explained to TalkingDrugs.
“We keep hammering the farmers, [but] if you want your adversary to stop doing something it’s important to understand why they’re doing it to begin with… This is what US policymakers never really took seriously: that we could simply coerce people into doing what we wanted them to do when in fact they didn’t have any other options. So it’s easy to say we’re going to force them through spray planes to stop growing coca and then grow fruits and vegetables instead… you could spray and forcibly eradicate all you want. But at the end of the day it’s the only livelihood that makes any sense to them at that moment in time… Plus when you have armed conflicts at the same time it’s very difficult to do alternative development in that context.”
So when Petro was elected as Colombia’s first leftist president in June 2022, hopes were high that his presidency could signal new approaches to the war on drugs.
Rhetorically, at least.
“The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you wage war and play with it,” Petro told delegates at his first speech before the UN.
“What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal or oil? The opinion of power has ordered that cocaine is poison and must be persecuted, while it only causes minimal deaths from overdoses…but instead, coal and oil must be protected, even when it can extinguish all humanity.”
“Cocaine is illegal because it is made in Latin America, not because it is worse than whisky,” he later claimed during a televised meeting last year. “[The drug cartels] could easily be dismantled if they legalise cocaine in the world. It would be sold like wine,” he continued.
Meanwhile, while other world leaders such as Barack Obama have admitted indulging in cocaine and marijuana, Petro told a journalist that as a guerrilla he twice drank ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew from the Amazon rainforest, making him the only statesman so far to acknowledge partaking in psychedelics.
“The fact that he is the only world leader to publicly acknowledge this kind of experience suggests a certain honesty, or at the very least a willingness to be seen as vulnerable,” observed ayahuasca researcher Simon Ruffell.
“Whether or not that translates into consistent political decisions is another matter, but symbolically it opens the door to a different kind of leadership. One shaped not just by ideology but by experience.”
Later, as president, Petro personally intervened to help release a Colombian shaman from custody in Mexico, where ayahuasca is illegal.
Petro’s not the first statesman sceptical of prohibition – Colombia’s ex-presidents Juan Manuel Santos and César Gaviria are, too – but he’s the only one currently serving to openly call for the legalisation of cocaine.
But despite his provocative rhetoric, actually legalising cocaine is a politically-fraught manoeuvre that wouldn’t make it past lawmakers and ministers, at least in the current climate. Petro hasn’t even been able to fully lift the ban on marijuana, a far less controversial drug.
While medical cannabis has been legal in Colombia since 2015, and carrying up to 20 grams is decriminalised, a 2023 proposal by liberal legislators to legalise it for recreational consumption failed to pass the Senate.
Turns out, the realities of running a country get in the way of idealism.
Petro had also tried to negotiate with the belligerent parties in the Colombian conflict – rebels, narcos, paramilitaries – to only minor success, not least because the bandits have proven untrustworthy partners. While Colombia is much safer now than it was in the 1980s-early 2000s, guerrilla attacks (like the roadside bomb in Cauca) are surging, and armed groups still control vast swathes of territory.
Recently, Petro’s government has increasingly emphasised targeting traffickers and export networks. Colombia recorded historic cocaine seizures in 2025 with authorities intercepting 985 tonnes of cocaine. This may be due to increased pressure from the United States, as President Trump has repeatedly accused Petro of doing nothing to stop trafficking, but experts say this also reflects record levels of coca production, which has peaked in recent years.
Still, the Colombian drug debate is picking up pace, and many credit Petro with opening up a conversation that challenges mainstream prohibitionist narratives. In May, a new cannabis legalisation bill was approved by Colombia’s House of Representatives, and will now go to the Senate.
Perhaps Petro’s legacy will be planting the seeds for reform to flourish.
